Recall the names of the violent radicals of that earlier era from the timeline:
The Weather Underground (1969-1977)
The Black Liberation Army (1970-1981)
The Sybionese Liberation Army (1973-1975)
The FALN (1976-1978)
The Family (1977-1979) (not to be confused with The Family International)
The United Freedom Front (1975-1984)
Confusing and lame, if you ask me. They are either nonsensical or cloying in their obvious sincerity of purpose. Many sound like an attempt at Dada performance art, or something Cubans would invent. They grew stale in the public imagination of Americans almost immediately.
Take it from a Gen-Xer who was alive at the time and paying attention: you were never going to get far in the 1970s with a name like the Symbionese Liberation Army. No wonder you got Reagan at the end of the decade. Thank you!
Somewhere along the way, however, after the 1990s as revolutionary politics took over Academia and even corporate marketing departments, leftists discovered the brilliant principle of giving your organization and its associated movement a name which is also a slogan that you can induce people to say, and their brains will only hear the slogan meaning, and only marginally associate it with your group.
The key to a good slogan/name is that the combination of words, expressed on their own as a statement, must be something benign and even commendable for a good person to say in front of other people. Ideally the name should be a complete sentence---subject and predicate, that when stated as an independent clause is vague enough that innocent individuals can read their own meaning into it. Who could object to asserting its truth? In a crowd, everyone ought to be comfortable chanting it.
If someone balks at saying you name, you call them out on being a bad person. Your followers can become a clone army that will browbeat others to chant your name in public.
It's absolute genius, the perfect evolution of the Postmodern strategy of achieving power by the willful shifting of the meanings of words over time.
That is why they insist that you say the exact three-word phrase, word-for-word. You aren't allowed to improvise it even slightly. It must be the name that refers to them specifically. If you change it, it ceases to be able to give them power, which is what matters to them.
Just imagine if the Weather Underground had tried to get people around the country to get down on one knee and chant their absurd name with their fists raised. Pathetic! Only if Andy Warhol had organized it as a stunt, would it have worked.
As far as the current three-word Slogan-of-the-Day, people focus on variations of the first word.
If you try to replace this word with, say something more inclusive like "all", their partisans will shame you into withdrawing it. They will anticipate this particular attempt at diversion on your part. They know how to make you take it back and apologize for having said it.
Personally I think the most powerful variation in their slogan/name is the least obvious one---the second of the three words. It is the key to taking apart the meaning of the sentence.
Try replacing the second word in the slogan with "people."
I think it's a far superior statement than the one they want us to say, and it more accurately reflects my personal convictions of conscience. I don't think anyone should have any problem with my version, do you?
Their version is vague. Whether a life "matters" is arguably up to the free will and actions of that individual, and to the will of Almighty God. My version is not at all vague. It's something we all should able be to agree upon as a self-evident truth about America.
My version also has the advantage of not also being a proper noun that stands alone as a reference to a terrorist organization.
I invite you to use my version of the phrase, with "people", in situations where the leftists would want you to parrot the slogan/name they want you to say.
Here's what you can do: if someone asks you, "Do you believe that (insert three-word slogan/name du jour here)?", you reply, "Yes, of course, " followed immediately by stating the version with the second word changed.
They will not like this, of course. They will repeat their demand, in which case you can repeat the alternative version back at them, with even stronger conviction of its truth, because you will mean it.
The truly persistent ones might press you, trying to corner you with some version of the demand. If you really wanted to play along, ask them if it is ok to first offer a sincere critique of the organization itself by adding the phrase "is lame" at the end.
If their phrase is merely a subject and a predicate that asserts a universal truth about human lives, then adding the words "is lame" at the end would render the entire sentence ungrammatical, and therefore meaningless.1
Of course one could replace "is lame" here with an infinite number of other things to create a sentence that is both grammatical and has syntactical meaning. All of these sentences could of course refer as well to the entire slogan as a slogan, and have valid syntactic meaning.
In any case, I would let them be the ones to explain why my version is not acceptable as a substitute. I'd love to hear their arguments on this point. It would be a glimpse into the real-time creation of Critical Theory, like listening to jazz improvisation in a nightclub.
One advantage our side has is that we can appreciate the genius on their side when we see it.
1 See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957). One of the greatest intellectual works of the Twentieth Century. It was published the same year as Atlas Shrugged.
The Black Liberation Army (1970-1981)
The Sybionese Liberation Army (1973-1975)
The FALN (1976-1978)
The Family (1977-1979) (not to be confused with The Family International)
The United Freedom Front (1975-1984)
Confusing and lame, if you ask me. They are either nonsensical or cloying in their obvious sincerity of purpose. Many sound like an attempt at Dada performance art, or something Cubans would invent. They grew stale in the public imagination of Americans almost immediately.
Take it from a Gen-Xer who was alive at the time and paying attention: you were never going to get far in the 1970s with a name like the Symbionese Liberation Army. No wonder you got Reagan at the end of the decade. Thank you!
Somewhere along the way, however, after the 1990s as revolutionary politics took over Academia and even corporate marketing departments, leftists discovered the brilliant principle of giving your organization and its associated movement a name which is also a slogan that you can induce people to say, and their brains will only hear the slogan meaning, and only marginally associate it with your group.
The key to a good slogan/name is that the combination of words, expressed on their own as a statement, must be something benign and even commendable for a good person to say in front of other people. Ideally the name should be a complete sentence---subject and predicate, that when stated as an independent clause is vague enough that innocent individuals can read their own meaning into it. Who could object to asserting its truth? In a crowd, everyone ought to be comfortable chanting it.
If someone balks at saying you name, you call them out on being a bad person. Your followers can become a clone army that will browbeat others to chant your name in public.
It's absolute genius, the perfect evolution of the Postmodern strategy of achieving power by the willful shifting of the meanings of words over time.
That is why they insist that you say the exact three-word phrase, word-for-word. You aren't allowed to improvise it even slightly. It must be the name that refers to them specifically. If you change it, it ceases to be able to give them power, which is what matters to them.
Just imagine if the Weather Underground had tried to get people around the country to get down on one knee and chant their absurd name with their fists raised. Pathetic! Only if Andy Warhol had organized it as a stunt, would it have worked.
As far as the current three-word Slogan-of-the-Day, people focus on variations of the first word.
If you try to replace this word with, say something more inclusive like "all", their partisans will shame you into withdrawing it. They will anticipate this particular attempt at diversion on your part. They know how to make you take it back and apologize for having said it.
Personally I think the most powerful variation in their slogan/name is the least obvious one---the second of the three words. It is the key to taking apart the meaning of the sentence.
Try replacing the second word in the slogan with "people."
I think it's a far superior statement than the one they want us to say, and it more accurately reflects my personal convictions of conscience. I don't think anyone should have any problem with my version, do you?
Their version is vague. Whether a life "matters" is arguably up to the free will and actions of that individual, and to the will of Almighty God. My version is not at all vague. It's something we all should able be to agree upon as a self-evident truth about America.
My version also has the advantage of not also being a proper noun that stands alone as a reference to a terrorist organization.
I invite you to use my version of the phrase, with "people", in situations where the leftists would want you to parrot the slogan/name they want you to say.
Here's what you can do: if someone asks you, "Do you believe that (insert three-word slogan/name du jour here)?", you reply, "Yes, of course, " followed immediately by stating the version with the second word changed.
They will not like this, of course. They will repeat their demand, in which case you can repeat the alternative version back at them, with even stronger conviction of its truth, because you will mean it.
The truly persistent ones might press you, trying to corner you with some version of the demand. If you really wanted to play along, ask them if it is ok to first offer a sincere critique of the organization itself by adding the phrase "is lame" at the end.
If their phrase is merely a subject and a predicate that asserts a universal truth about human lives, then adding the words "is lame" at the end would render the entire sentence ungrammatical, and therefore meaningless.1
Of course one could replace "is lame" here with an infinite number of other things to create a sentence that is both grammatical and has syntactical meaning. All of these sentences could of course refer as well to the entire slogan as a slogan, and have valid syntactic meaning.
In any case, I would let them be the ones to explain why my version is not acceptable as a substitute. I'd love to hear their arguments on this point. It would be a glimpse into the real-time creation of Critical Theory, like listening to jazz improvisation in a nightclub.
One advantage our side has is that we can appreciate the genius on their side when we see it.
1 See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957). One of the greatest intellectual works of the Twentieth Century. It was published the same year as Atlas Shrugged.
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