Who Is in the War Room?

Who is in the War Room?

Imagine, in a hypothetical world, that you are a worker in an assembly line that produces fortune cookies. You have a goal, a drive to be the best, to get promoted, to have a higher pay rate than the snobby short woman bustling away next to you. You look beside you and see that she is working as fast as you are. Obviously, if she is working as fast as you then you won’t be receiving a promotion. You have a decision to make: what are you going to do? There’s no way you can work faster. The only solution is to sabotage her, knock her cookies off the conveyor belt, steal her supplies, bump her as she works.

This is clearly an unreasonable conclusion to draw from the situation, and is similar to the point that Rachel Carson makes in Silent Spring. Carson presents her readers with the issue of “eradication of competition” in the agriculture industry, the route many farmers are taking to rid themselves of any threats to their crop. The most pressing issue of eradication, according to her argument, is aerial poisoning. Carson argues this point in the entire text with a very driven allusion, a comparison of war.

In this elaborate illusion, farmers are generals, poison is a soldier, birds are the enemy, and the entire world is the innocent civilian caught in the crossfire. The comparison is clear through Carsen’s diction, she chooses to refer to birds as “direct target[s]” as opposed to the “pesks”. She chooses to use say that the farmers “engage a spray plane” as opposed saying they spray a field. Almost every term she uses to describe the farmers can also be used as a term to describe war.