The following has been quite the effort to get: it was in the NY Times and I didn't asked anybody permission to use. Why? Well, who would object, it is furthering a view. So...but it is more than that, as one who stands by and hopes, we realize that the anger is often palpable in every direction. This is war, make no mistake about it. Take no prisoners. I scanned, everything and had to resort to retype, it's that important.

OPINION

BY DANIEL
MENAKER
Editor at Random House

EVERY day in obituaries, you will find combat metaphors about people who have died of cancer: "After a heroic battle against cancer--valiant fight
against melanoma.” And so on. News stories routinely refer to “weapons" against the illness, the “arsenal” of drugs, ‘victories.' ” Following on Susan Sontag’s crusade against the metaphorization of illness in general and Barbara Ehrenretch’s denunciation of some aspects of the militant (and also cutesy) "culture” of breast cancer, especially over the last decade, many psychologists, doctors and cancer patients have raised objections to the military trope for the disease. They say that putting the experience into martial terms means that those who die are by definition, at least figuratively, losers. Not just of their lives as if their lives weren’t enough — but of personal wars. That they gave up. Dr. Andrew Weil says that “it’s not the best way” to think of cancer. Cancer patients writing online and "naggets" have also deplored this linguistic habit. “Does it mean that if I croak it’s my fault," one asks.

For those reasons, as a recurrent cancer patient, I’m all for the demilitarization of cancer talk. Because especially when I’m conferring with the army — I mean, the large number of doctors I’ve been seeing recently--it seems more calming, less victimizing, to think of the disease as a problem, not an enemy. A problem to be worked on. Considered from this angle and that, and solved. Or, if it is not more likely, not solved. But in either case not a malevolent foe who is going to vanquish or surrender. Not me. There’s no “violent” involved, after all.

But I also endorse militarization of cancer talk. At least for some patients, or at least when they talk to themselves or those close to them about their situation. Because all of us are — by part of our nature — combative creatures, and it can be emotionally useful to view camcer as an enemy, even when you know it's not. It can motivate us to follow the often cornplex treatment (regimens!) involved. It can help us feel less frightened and when facing surgery. It can strengthen our resolve to stay in the best shape possible and to deal with pain when it comes. It may be a kind of self-delusion, but it may also assist self preservation. And it may help others to face their illness with less fear than they would have had otherwise. There is nothing wrong with being emulable.

There’s a strong reason that cancer in particular tends to elicit warfare language: it is so radically territorial in its actions. That is, it’s usually trying to lake over the physical space that is one’s body, just as foreign army tries to take over one’s country. Also, try as we may, we cannot scour the language of metaphor. “Cancer” itself is a personification--well, a crustaceanification. A malignancy doesn’t know or care if it’s “mal," it’s not evil. It just is.

So why not both attitudes toward the disease: a greater reliance on the rational, problem-solving approach in public discourse, and, if it works, the perhaps irrational but nevertheless utilitarian martial one in more private, even interior, contexts? At least to ourselves, maybe late at night and maybe feeling a little like idiots — surely some of us may gather strength from saying of those murderous invaders, in best Churchillian cadences, “We shall fight them in the mediastinum, we shall fight them in the lymph nodes, shall fight them in the trachea, we shall fight ihein in the
pleura...."