This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.

No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.


Friday

38. Respect your elders

Watch footage of old Top of the Pops shows from the 1960s. Don't watch the bands: watch the audience. Those kids in black and white, moving and grooving, jiving and jitterbugging, arms akimbo or else wrapped around each other, combing their hair and looking so hard. The young and the restless a generation or two ago, the erstwhile rebels, the one-time dropouts, tuned in and turned on back before you and I were a twinkle in the proverbial. Watch... and weep. Cry for what became of them, despair for all the dreams that faded, all the seemingly limitless ambition that went the way of the songs they danced to. There’s nothing so sad. There’s nothing so awfully, terribly, heartbreakingly tragic as the very ordinary and utterly democratic fact that we all grow old and can no longer shake it on Top of the Pops. Respect your elders: they were once far cooler than you.
Posted by at