SLOGAN MENTALITY
Robert Meyers

If being fatuous seems as deeply irreligious to you as it does to me, perhaps the following question can be forgiven for taking up space usually reserved for gentle exhortation.

Have you ever found yourself disproportionately annoyed by those simplistic little maxims printed on church signs and bulletin boards? Like: “Lean on Jesus. . . Before He Leans on You” — a kind of coy, cute threat which somehow offends me to the central marrow of my smallest toe.

Or like: “God is ‘DOG’ Spelled Backwards . . . And He Really Is Man’s Best Friend,” a princely piece of theology which I would give a great deal to be able to forget, but which sticks in my memory like an unwelcome burr.

And how about those bromides which are so faithfully posted once a week on the signboards of certain businesses? We have a realtor in our end of town, admirable in just about every way I can think of, who uses his signboard to post little homilies which I try (unsuccessfully) to resist reading as I drive to work each morning.

Things like: “Talk With Your Friends, But Not About Them,” and “Work Will Win, But Wishing Won’t.” Both true enough, perhaps only too true, but at the same time not the whole truth. Too easy to be the whole truth. Too glib, too unctuous.

I always find myself wanting to counter them. It may be true, I mutter to myself as I drive on, that “work will win, but wishing won’t,” but it is also true that if one gets settled down to working too soon, without doing some wishing first, he may spend the rest of his life in a rut he absolutely hates.

If you have read this far, I can safely insert a splendid comment on slogans by George Eliot, that brilliant 19th century English woman who writes so much better and more demandingly than I can or would dare:

“All people of broad, strong sense have instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discover that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.

“The man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgments solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality; without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.”

When something annoys us like this maxim business, but doesn’t seem to bother the more normal citizenry, we always wonder if perhaps we may not have a secret screw loose someplace. So it pleases me that James Thurber also scowled at these faintly pompous little adages, knowing perfectly well that most of them can be reversed without losing an ounce of truth. So he did it by way of illustration: “He Who Hesitates Is Sometimes Saved.”

Thank you, Thurber, for a stout left jab at slogan mentality, than which few things are less useful for understanding the mysteries of a religion with a cross at the heart of it.