Chris Doss wrote:
>
> >Isn't the slogan "Another World Is Possible" dorky?
> >
> >Yoshie
> >
>
> I've always liked it. But then again, I'm kind of a dork.
>
> Why is it dorky?
>
> Liza
>
> ---
> It sounds like something on a Hallmark Card.
>
In another list I'm engaged in a discussion of the concept of "Decorum," and I think some version of that concept (which can operate in the realm of action as well as the literary domain) may be relevant here. Chris, for example, here argues that the slogan is indecorous, that there is a misfit between verbal formula and subject matter. Something like anti-climax seems involved, and anti-climax, unless clearly intentional, is usually indecorous:
O thou Dalhousie, the great god of war, Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar.
(An example from Pope's _Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry_) I would, in any case, feel a bit quesy about putting it on a leaflet.
Jan just walked in the door for lunch, and without indicating the context of the discussion, I asked what she thought about it as a slogan. Her answer was "seems not to say much," and that it reminded her of that old GE slogan (but then neither of us could remember what that slogan was, but she thought it involved some reference to a "better life"). And now, searching backwards in my memory in sort of free association, the phrase "Morning in America" is the first thing that pops into my mind. And perhaps Jan was thinking of DuPont's "Better Living Through Chemistry." There is I think a Guthrie song with the phrase, "A better world's a coming . . ." but I don't recall what follows. But contrast with that his great song, "End of the Line," with the lines "There ain't no country extra fine / If you ain't on to the power line." (It is one of the Columbia River songs and is the story of a dust-bowl refugee who occupies land just beyond the reach of the electric line.) Those lines could be a political slogan. First of all the link between technological and political power, then the echo of Guthrie's major theme of isolation and namelessness.
THe thing about slogans is that they have to perform a double function.
The first (and actually secondary) function is that of being catchy, i.e. of catching people's attention quickly and positively. The second, and more important, is that they should assist in organizing thought among those who share the slogan. And such a hallmark or dupont slogan as the one in question fails of both tests because it gives no indication whatever of the kind of activity which generates it. Too goody goody perhaps.
Many, perhaps most, slogans which effectively fulfill their primary function of organizing thought will seem inadequate in fulfilling the secondary function of being catchy -- but I think we leave that mostly to DuPont and Reagan's campaign. Nothing in the slogan suggests that the "better world" might not be Bush's better world. Everyone wants a better world, even Mussolini and Cheney. And lots of things are possible -- a suitcase nuclear weapon in a Manhattan basement?
Now "Anti-Globalization." I haven't been following this thread, I think I would agree with that it is an unfortunate slogan, and would of course agree with one sentence of Doug's someone quoted, to the effect that capitalism has always been global. Both David Harvey and Ellen Meiksins Wood (among numerous others) have been clear on that for years.
But. Though it is extremely important theoretically (i.e., for fundamental understanding of contemporary capitalism) to see that "globalism" is merely a euphemism for imperialism (and u.s. imperialism at that), for political and organizing purposes we're caught with it. Seattle established "anti-globalism" as the slogan, and complaining about it is simply spitting in the wind. Rather, for organizing purposes we should be concerned with how we can make those meaningless words meaningful. Our enemies praise "globalism" as though it were something new and wonderful; we expose the reality behind it, and the slogan of "anti-globalism" will come to _mean_ anti-imperialism.
Carrol