By Matt Taibbi

“Two amputee British actors, sitting in a tree, something, something, C-O-W!” Plus, a contest with prizes!

Esteemed Yale professor Samuel Moyn tweeted this yesterday, cruelly tagging me and forcing a look at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s latest:

Samuel Moyn 🔭 @samuelmoyn

Count of metaphors in one column: a whopping thirteen, *none of which have anything to do with each other*. Putin ends up an amputated ex-boyfriend peasant thug eating Ukraine in a tree, killing cows and threatening marriage between bites. @mtaibbi Opinion | Putin to Ukraine: ‘Marry Me or I’ll Kill You’He’s not particularly concerned, though, with what’s in Ukraine.nytimes.com

January 19th 2022

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I met Friedman once, and he was really nice. Moreover he’s clearly tried to rein in (that’s horse imagery) his use of metaphors over the years. However, he slips sometimes. As Professor Moyn notes, “Putin to Ukraine, ‘Marry Me or I’ll Kill You’” is a bad slip, like Ray Milland’s Lost Weekend bad:

Why is Vladimir Putin threatening to take another bite out of Ukraine, after devouring Crimea in 2014? That is not an easy question to answer because Putin is a one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door.

Let’s see: Putin is a modern-day Peter the Great out to restore the glory of Mother Russia. He’s a retired K.G.B. agent who simply refuses to come in from the cold and still sees the C.I.A. under every rock and behind every opponent. He’s America’s ex-boyfriend-from-hell, who refuses to let us ignore him and date other countries, like China — because he always measures his status in the world in relation to us.

In paragraph one Putin is a biting giant, or giant biter, who stalks the world with a chip on his shoulder so big he only just fits through the huge doors that apparently separate nations (I thought of Richard E. Grant’s talking shoulder-boil in How to Get Ahead in Advertising). In paragraph two Putin starts off as Peter the Great, but a sentence later is Richard Burton (that’s two British actors now), only one who didn’t come in from the cold and “sees the C.I.A. under every rock” (I think the word he’s looking for is “imagines” — see asterisk below).

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