Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, on running for president, confessed: "This is something very strange and painful for me, this stereotype language you must use. You don't communicate ideas when politicking, you produce slogan-signals that are emotional".

Two legs bad, four legs good, is probably one of the brightest examples of slogan, shouted (or better bleated) by the overwhelming sheeps in Orwell's Animal Farm. No possibility of discussing, not even of thinking: the deafening fool creatures' bleating at 100 decibel simply breaks down your brains, with great delight of the ruling pigs.

"America's poor are too busy striving to have time for envy" is so obvious a wishful thinking slogan that it's no worth poking fun at. But listen to the following:

Le capitalism c'est la merde. This was written on the main entrance of Renault at Billancourt, where as a young engineer I had a stint some forty-five years ago. That's a good example of slogan, for the purpose of our analysis. Apart from the fact that la Regie Renault had been nationalized ten years before, thus those words were addressed against the French government who owned the company, this slogan allows us to do a little exercise in semantic. One of my Harvard ISMP colleagues (you can tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much) once stated that the four-letter-word is a typical resource in desperate cases. Well this case doesn't seem desperate, but we can accept in principle the definition: capitalism is shit. Probably the creator of the slogan had in mind the well-known shortcomings of capitalism: unemployment and hardship for the working class while the businessmen hoard profits and so on.
Well, let's agree. Capitalism (or free-market in its most recent global gear) is shit. But if you stop just there, shouting "shit", you are a fool. First because when you brand something as bad, you ought to explain which reasonable alternative you propose (The Reds again? the surviving die-hard Big Brother's orphans here west of Minsk - with their record of empty shelves and the thousands of people furiously trying to escape far from their paradise - look like the Jacobites in England after 1688). Second, shit is a very important matter and must be conscientiously studied and cared for.

Any wise person must care for his/her bowels as well as for heart and brain: I dare say that guts, with their fecal content, are perhaps more vital than your curled hair and you must care for them quite a lot. Intellectuals often talk about ideologies and abstract intricacies, but this is frivolous, like many others of their intellect's pensive products [a ferocious book advised by me: Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson, published by Harper & Collins, along withThe Birth of the Modern, by the same author].
It's a pity that most intellectuals show so little interest in practical things, such as bowels' functions, macroeconomics and microeconomics. Many literati are perfectly charming, as Oscar Wilde would put it: it's the shallowness of analysis in many of their works that is so often disappointing... and Anthony Blond might add: that trees should have been cut down to provide paper for their cosmetic superficiality is an ecological affront.
Apparently Martin Luther, and Oliver Cromwell as well, exhibited in many an occasion bursts of bad temper probably connected with intestine constipation, and this might have somewhat affected the Course of History. I am sure Beethoven could not have succeeded so well in composing his inspiring symphonies, had he not enjoyed a very sound condition of his guts. Why to paste on anything - even on fecal matter - a label "shit" and then forget it?

So why not to seriously study fecal capitalism, or any other matter? Why to be content with slogans?

(16.To be continued)