ABSTRACT
Writing about an event that is ongoing challenges the most confident cultural observer; but writing about an event that has, and may well again, claimed lives challenges both one’s confidence and one’s ethics. The BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) “crisis” in Britain is just such an event. Calling it an event may even sound odd to the reader’s ears, but it is a first step back in a process of observing the events of our time from a more remote position. Calling the ongoing spectacle over BSE a “crisis”, which is a more familiar way of talking about it, is itself taking a quite different position on BSE, invoking the language of “health scares” and a discourse of control and containment. Each type of discourse comes from a position of thinking and action about the BSE issue in Great Britain. This chapter is about just that: the myriad positions that are available to those who want to talk about the BSE event. Each of these positions, including the one in this chapter, however, is not neutral and carries with it certain cultural assumptions and structuring metaphors. Like the classical Greek figure Procrustes, each metaphor limits or extends the ways that certain evidence can fit into an argument.1 This chapter will look at the way that Procrustean practices are at work in the rhetoric of the BSE event. Some metaphors extend evidence too far to cover areas where the evidence may, in actuality, be too short. Other metaphors lop off evidence that may be applicable because it does not fit the structure of the metaphor.
