Waves (Metaphor)
Snyder writes about how we are seduced by spectacle, by drama. The media knows this and pummels us with story after story, often those without substance or substantiation. He uses this metaphor—"Each story on televised news is 'breaking' until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean" (60)—to show how our desire for drama keeps us from seeing the real state of things.
Mental Armory (Metaphor)
Snyder is critical of the internet, as the news on there is often two-dimensional and we don't engage with "real" people in a real way. He says "Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else" (62). This mental armory would be books, long-form articles, documentaries, etc. By using the term "armory," Snyder suggests we are accumulating weapons for war.
Rhinoceri (Metaphor)
In this metaphor of "The rhinoceri are roaming through our neurological savannahs" (70), Snyder is referencing Eugene Ionesco's play The Rhinoceros, which is about propaganda and how insidious it is. This metaphor makes it clear that propaganda and fake news and spectacle are in our heads, distracting us from the truth of things.
Diary (Metaphor)
Snyder quotes Victor Klemperer, who said "My diary was my balancing pole, without which I would have fallen down a thousand times" (78). This metaphor establishes how important Klemperer's private thoughts expressed in his diary are, for they keep him tethered to the real world, sane, and assured.
History (Simile)
At the end of the text, Snyder writes about two different ways of viewing history, the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. He writes, "If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis" (124). This simile compares the former to a coma because it makes us unable to see things in any nuanced way, and the latter to hypnosis because we fall into a trance and then do what is asked of us. Both of these are dangerous, and Snyder counsels us to look more closely at history in order not to repeat it.
