an inadvertant prediction

Someone on Twitter just reminded me of the following passage on page 86 of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything:

“Second, metaphors are non- reciprocal, since one of the two terms is inevitably in the subject position and the other in the object position (in the grammatical sense of subject and object). It is worth stressing the point with a further example. The first page of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea introduces the fisherman Santiago, who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. We read the following mournful description of the sail on the old man’s boat: ‘The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.’ But let’s imagine that we are reading, instead, a dystopian novel that begins with the melancholic scene of Washington, DC sacked and conquered by an ignorant, violent, and philistine horde. The author depicts the tattered banner atop the White House –now a literal sign of permanent defeat– by saying: ‘It was patched with duct tape and, furled, it looked like the flag of a decrepit, elderly fisherman.’ Both metaphors work fairly well, but they are obviously not the same.”

I hope the joking mention of “the doomed city of Los Angeles” (in either Tool-Being or Guerrilla Metaphysics) doesn’t come back to haunt me as well.