Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W - washingtonpost.com Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory letters and e-mails from people who see similarities between the current U.S. woes in Iraq and Chamberlain's disastrous conduct of the so-called phony war in 1939-40. But I've also gotten fan mail from readers who favorably compare the Tory rebels' courageous fight against Chamberlain to the Bush administration's campaign against those opposing the Iraq war. Among those who've written me in praise of the book are Bush adviser Karl Rove and Howard Wolfson, the communications director of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

This little anecdote by an author of a book used as a justification for source-target mapping shows two things. First, the kinds of mappings made are opportunistic and highly dependent on how both input spaces themselves are structured. This requires a deeper level of understanding of the role 'generic space' plays in blending theory. "The president no doubt has his own Churchill." is a good description of how this phenomenon is reflected in common discourse. Second, in many instances, the negotiation of analogical mappings is necessary, and indeed the only way to arrive at aptness judgments. And the following paragraph is a good example of how some types of this kind of negotiation take place:

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.