Chapter 21 What did Hou Yi shoot down?

Yunnan Province launched a campaign to clean up slogans, erasing 35,242 slogans scattered across urban and rural areas that were "offensive, unsightly, blunt, outrageous, counterproductive to propaganda, coercive orders, and fake tigers' prestige." These "orders "Formal, compulsory, and threatening" slogans such as: "It is better to raise a pig than to raise a daughter who does not study", "It is better to add a grave than a person", and so on. Shouting slogans to learn to speak, reading slogans to learn to write - that's how I grew up.The last one written by myself

A big-character slogan, which read: "Use the party's newspaper to clear the poison of left-leaning thought from every corner of the campus!", signed "School Student Union Proclamation", and the time was about 1983-1984.Looking at it now, although this slogan is innocuous, it generally conforms to the bad style of "blunt sentences, arrogant attitudes, and coercive orders", especially "a fox pretends to be a tiger".Looking back on the past, I can't express my feelings for slogans.From the perspective of communication studies, slogans and slogans are both low-cost and effective communication tools, which can be used by revolutionary or non-revolutionary ones. In 1934, the British missionary Bosshardt was captured by the Red Army in the southwest mountainous area, and he followed the army on the Long March for more than a year.After his release, he published the book "The Hand of the Gods——Diary of a Christian Captured in China" in London, speaking highly of the propaganda work of the Red Army.He wrote: "Everywhere this army goes, it writes slogans wherever it can be written, recruits the local poor, and divides the landlord's food very skillfully and methodically."The missionary received more technical inspiration from the Red Army than moral inspiration, and he appealed to young missionaries to learn from the Red Army's "concise and effective method."

All the slogans and slogans are concise, arbitrary, and even "outrageous" as the main technical indicators: "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is good, if it is good, it will be good!" "Time is money, efficiency is life! ""Customer is God", "I just like it!"—Although the value orientation is inconsistent, the differences in technical standards, language patterns and attitudes are not as great as in the past.Of course, "it's good" can also be rewritten as "it's good to be a woman", but in my opinion, as far as slogans are concerned, "it's good" has already approached the bottom line of graceful sentences, gentle attitudes, and negotiable ideas.As for "Did you have xx today?" and the like, it can no longer be regarded as a standard slogan, it always feels like a dispensable courtesy greeting, which sounds like "Have you eaten yet?" boring.

More advanced slogans, as well as exquisite phonology and rhetoric, such as "book" and "pig", "grave" and "person" that were recently cleaned up in Yunnan.In the late period of the Cultural Revolution, a group of French leftist literati visited China. After returning home (I can’t remember whether it was Barthes or Lacan), they wrote an article introducing the situation of the Chinese revolution. The ignorance of the content does not hinder the appreciation of double-voice rhyme.In other words, if the political slogan Barthes or Lacan heard in China was not "criticize Lin Piao Confucius" but "Romain Rolland", it would not affect them to write the same report after returning to China.Of course, the pursuit of the rhyme and rhetoric of the slogan should not be deliberate, let alone make the slogan too long, such as "come to work happily, go home safely", excessive pursuit of correctness and neatness , AABB repeating characters, as the target audience of this slogan, if a serious driver reads it carefully on the street, there is a possibility of a traffic accident every minute.

The most advanced form of slogans is manifested in rich intertextuality (transtexualite).North China was hit by a locust plague the year before last. According to a report by Economic Half Hour, the key to combating the locust plague is to kill the locusts before they grow up and fly from the ground.At that time, the TV screen showed the tense scene of locust extermination in the fields, and there was a slogan pasted on the flag with paper that made me amazed: "Sweep the locusts and strike them in the air". Slogans may have been born out of spells in the age of human witchcraft (the "talisman" still used by Taoism today is likely to be the predecessor of slogans).The common purpose of both is to make the recipient completely give up his independent thinking.Anyway, "When humans think, God laughs", it's better than "everyone doesn't think, but shouts slogans together".As long as a slogan is a slogan, it must be mandatory, commanding, and unquestionable.If you don’t want to give up the right to think independently, you should shout a famous French slogan during the “May Boom” period to the slogans: “Forbidden to use and strictly prohibited!” “Forbidden” is actually the basic sentence pattern common to all slogans. It is also their common original intention. "What must not be" and "what must be" are the same thing.

A slogan is a solid slogan, and a slogan is a flowing slogan.Erasing slogans is certainly a necessary means of "disenchanting", but it is the slogans that are difficult to erase from the wall.The power of slogans comes from repetition and ease of repetition.All the efforts in phonology and rhetoric are all for this purpose.A lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth, and the truth is repeated 100 times—to be precise, when the truth is repeated 100 times in the form of slogans, it is estimated that it may also become a lie.There is a verbal word game that is played like this: first repeat the word "moon" 10 times without interruption, and then read it as "bright moon" in reverse, repeat it 10 times without interruption, and then immediately answer such a question. Question: "What did Hou Yi shoot down? Tell me!"

I saw and heard, nine out of ten hit the trick, and the word "moon" blurted out without thinking.Even if you come prepared, the lethality is hard to resist.Friends, I played a similar game before. After repeating "Moon" and "Bright Moon" 10 times each, I calmly said to the interrogator: "Do you think I can say the moon? Bah, there is no way! Hou Yi shot What came down? Tell you, it's Chang'e!"