On Immunity by Eula Biss

"Stale metaphors reproduce stale thinking. Mixed metaphors confuse...Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, 'Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle'...Our bodies are not war machines that attack everything...but gardens where, under the right conditions, we live in balance with many other organisms."