Slogans

Burt Prelutsky
“When I used the Yiddish word ‘schlemiel’ in a recent article, a reader asked me to define it. I suggested it referred to a dummy, a dunderhead, a mental dwarf. I added that to help you identify them, they generally come with a (D) after their name. So it is that in King County, Washington, the schlemiels have now banned those non-tobacco cigarettes that emit vapor because, public officials have decided, kids might see grown-ups puffing air and conclude it is cool to smoke. … Although leftists like to insist that Hitler was a right-winger, he, himself, called his group the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi for short). One of his more perceptive observations in ‘Mein Kampf’ was that ‘All propaganda must be confined to a few slogans, repeated over and over again until the last man understands what they mean.’ Madison Avenue got the message long ago and came up with ‘Where’s the beef?’ to sell Wendy’s burgers, ‘Fast, fast, fast relief!’ to push Anacin and ‘Sometimes you feel like a nut’ to peddle Almond Joy candy bars. More recently, we’ve seen ‘Hope and Change’ used to sell us a left-wing pig in a poke.”
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