Listening to BBC news on KUOW (Seattle's NPR) this evening, I heard a disturbing metaphor. Actually it was more the context than the metaphor that was eerie. They were talking about the upcoming elections in South Africa and the leader of the right wing Afrikaner's party, Freedom Front, said the country needs to be "a fruit salad instead of an omelet." Ok, even though that sounds like the disturbing part, its not. The idea was that the ingredients in an omelet lose their individuality. Each piece of a fruit salad maintains its own shape while still being a part of the whole.

The weird part? That's nearly the exact same metaphor used in most of my American Ethnic Studies' courses. The difference was the omelet was a "melting pot" and the fruit salad was a regular "salad." The really scary thing? Fruit salad is actually a better metaphor for what the AES professors were trying to symbolize. All pieces of fruit are evenly distributed, where as in a salad (as the profs always pointed out), no matter how individual the ingredients are, its still mostly lettuce.

Of course, there's also this little difference: I'm pretty sure the AES vegetables actually interact with each other and the Freedom Front vegetables don't even like each other.