The cancer battle metaphor — symbolizes American culture's basic denial

© 2017 Peter Free

 

21 July 2017

 

 

If I liked former President Obama more, I might give his conceited hollowness the benefit of the doubt

 

But on this one, regarding Senator McCain's glioblastoma, I won't:

 

 

John McCain is an American hero & one of the bravest fighters I've ever known. Cancer doesn't know what it's up against. Give it hell, John.

 

 

I have seen one admirable person after another die from various varieties of cancer over the decades, among family and friends and during medical training. Battle is a lazily inept metaphor that inadvertently adds to suffering, often in subtle and unnoticed fashion.

 

 

Cancer is not a battle

 

It is a biological condition comprised of a huge variety of out of control cellular proliferations. Calling these disease types "cancer" adds nothing to understanding. The metaphor encourages the public to assume that one person's survival of one type of cancer lends hope to another, whose neoplasm and medical course are completely different.

 

Senator McCain's glioblastoma is almost invariably fatal in the comparatively short term, especially at his age and with his medical history. Brain glios' courses are frequently cruel and dehumanizing. Therefore, Anthony Wilson, writing in the United Kingdom's Independent, critiqued President Obama's battle analogy in sound fashion:

 

 

[O]ur unthinking characterisation of cancer as a “battle” hands responsibility for recovery to the patient.

 

As we have seen, when you are at your lowest ebb, this is a laughable proposition. Further, it creates the notion that only “strong” or “deserving” patients survive cancer, the corollary of which is that those whose treatment is unsuccessful are weak or deficient in willpower. This is dangerous.

 

We don’t talk about “fighting” a hip replacement, or diabetes. Why should we when it comes to cancer?

 

Anthony Wilson, Obama's tweet to John McCain about his diagnosis was the last thing cancer survivors wanted to see, The Independent (20 July 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

My impatience with the battle-fight metaphor comes from its deliberately misleading focus

 

Anyone with life experience, especially someone of the former President's intelligence, knows that what he said is "think positive" nonsense. Yet these people continue to spew this damaging silliness because they are too spiritually lazy to connect with humanity's most basic realties.

 

There are myriad ways to support a person with cancer without adding the subtle burden of expecting them to be "brave" and "battle" gloriously against the "evil" foe. (Simply having to put this should-be-obvious thought into words for the lazily soul-stupid annoys me.)

 

 

The moral? — Obama's McCain tweet demonstrates the man's characteristically aloof moral emptiness — which unfortunately matches our American cultural equivalent of the same thing

 

Maybe that's why he got voted into the presidency twice.

 

In cold truth, this is the same guy who drone murdered hundreds (if not thousands) and heavily contributed to turning the Middle East into Hell's Cauldron. That maiming havoc is a good indicator of where the foolishly used battle metaphor takes us.

 

Culturally, we use those who suffer to fuel our deluded "think positive" metaphors. That's part of Denial's game. Denial is a way of separating ourselves from moral accountability, genuine human connection and Life's terminal mortality.