Cycling Slogans And Quotes

Human efforts are ineffective" (N'atthi purisakare) was the slogan of the Âjîvikä(s).

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . . on you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing--castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of teh mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting--"passengers will now reclaim their seats" and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight...as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity--but there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the Serpent to mean.

The hallmark of backlash conservatism is that it approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogant impositions of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly summarized during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to the New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”1 These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Backlash conservatism, Bauer’s comment reminds us, deals in outrage, not satisfaction; it claims to speak for the voiceless, not the powerful. And in this election cycle it reached its fullest, angriest articulation. The

Maxims Hidden in the Text Try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again. John Maynard Keynes cycled through these steps ceaselessly. 178 An imperfect decision made in time is better than a perfect one made too late. 215-216 Plans are merely a platform for change. Israeli Defense Forces slogan. 222 If we ask many tiny pertinent questions, we can close in on an answer for the big question. 263

In his inaugural address, President Kennedy proclaimed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation, born in this century.” Having campaigned on the slogan “Let’s get this country moving again,” he committed his peers to “bear any burden, pay any price” to bring “vigor” and “prestige” back into civic life.

But there was something humbling about the trip to the orphanage, knowing all the kids who surrounded us had no one but each other and Mama Lupita, the woman who ran the organization. There were about eighty kids of all ages milling around in worn hand-me-down T-shirts with slogans and outdated video game characters. The orphanage had no running water or electricity, and since it was not state-owned, it relied solely on donations and the work of church groups like ours cycling through. Mama Lupita—Guadalupe Carmona was her real name—started the orphanage in 1986 when she took in four kids whose father couldn’t care for them after their mother died. My dad told me Mama Lupita also visited prisons to pray with people, and the women there often asked her to take in their kids, too. It just grew from there. We spent our week doing odd jobs to fix up the place, cooking meals to serve to the kids, and doing lots of babysitting. We all got so attached to the children that we kept walking into town to buy them stuff because we had it to give. There was a new baby who had been found in a dumpster and brought to the orphanage the morning we arrived. I pretty much decided it was my job to hold her. I distinctly remember worrying that I was going to confuse her by speaking English, so I called over to one of the smarter kids in youth group. “How do you say ‘I love you’ in Spanish?” I asked. “Te amo, Jessica,” he said with googly eyes, and laughed. I smiled back and turned my face to the baby. “Te amo,” I said, over and over again, meaning it. I wanted her to know she was loved. I wanted it to be a familiar feeling, so that when unconditional love came into her life, she would recognize it.

We knew there was a version of feminism that was being dumbed down and marketed, sloganized, and diminished. We wanted to draw deeper, more divisive lines. We wanted to separate ourselves from anything benign or pretty. One of my favorite songs that Corin has ever written, “Was It a Lie?”, sounds so prescient now in the age of social media and the voracious news and gossip cycles. The song is about a woman whose videotaped death is replayed for the amusement of others.

That’s the watered-down slogan I feed the kids. Easy to remember, to repeat, to market. They squawk it like parrots, because they’re too young to taste bullshit.