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OnWords: The ____ Card

 

When Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of “playing the woman card,” he used a metaphor that bears exploring, not the least because of the way Trump reveals its insulting nature. 

Little examined is the metaphor's most obvious aspect: the card metaphor implies a table game in which one card rises above its normal rank, wielding power so great that it immediately changes the rules of play.

Ironically, this is referred to as the trump card. Less ironically, Donald Trump appears to change the rules of political play just by showing up.

The card metaphor was heretofore most often formulated as “the race card” when minority candidates were accused of focusing only on matters of ethnicity instead of more common issues, making an otherwise normal discussion immediately radioactive.

Accusing an opponent of using the race card, then, was itself a way that majority political candidates attempted to play a trump card by implying that minority candidates have nothing but their race to bring up.

The nastier side of this is that the card metaphor further implies that minorities--or in this case women—play on their gender or ethnicity in order to rise above their place in society by claiming that racial or gender issues have more value than they do.

By saying that Clinton is “playing the woman card,” Trump uses the recursive nature of language, the way meanings to fold in on themselves, in order to insult her, and by implication all women as well.

Lael Ewy is a co-founder and editor of EastWesterly Review, a journal of literary satire at www.postmodernvillage.com, and a writer whose work has appeared in such venues as Denver Quarterly and New Orleans Review and has been anthologized in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.