Land of Coca Cola

from "When I Paint My Masterpiece" by Bob Dylan

Sailin' round the world in a dirty gondola
O, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola...

If there's one thing a globe-trotting American will never miss, it's the sugary bullshit from Atlanta. You can find it in every roadside stop on planet Earth (unfortunately). Maybe this omnipresence is fuel to the narrator's nostalgia, since it is the "land" that he misses, rather than the beverage.

Coke is a completely worthless beverage, hence the never-ending advertising blitz which insists on how necessary it is. Zizek has an interesting gibe on how Coke is the ultimate in "surplus value" enjoyment.

Also, gondolas are not ocean-going vessels, so you couldn't "sail around the world" in one.

Nuclear Energy

from a sculpture on the University of Chicago campus

At 56th Street and South Ellis, Henry Moore's outdoor sculpture commemorates the first controlled nuclear reaction, conducted in 1942 by Enrico Fermi's team, aka the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos and Hiroshima are sites of more famous nuclear events, but doomsday is technically a Chicago export.

Then again, maybe the harnessing of atomic power should not necessarily connote mankind's incipient suicide. After all, nuclear energy provides affordable and environmentally friendly electricity to millions (except when it doesn't). And political brinksmanship has so far not resulted in a mass extinction.

Moore's abstract, sensuous bronze conveys the ambiguity of the highly volatile subject material. Viewers are likely to imagine a mushroom cloud, or a human skull. A less ominous interpretation suggests itself if you climb onto the smooth, two-foot wide flume on the west-facing side. It's steep enough and long enough for a person to slide down, and turn a foreboding symbol of death into a children's playground.

Stones, and a Glass House

from Saved by Sin, dir. Peter Udoche

The aphorism is "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." The narrator of this film, in the fabulously jocular yet intensely moral way the Nigerian film industry has of manipulating English, says "If you have the right to live in a glass house, I reserve the right to throw stones" (at 8:00).

He flips a cautionary phrase into a call for retaliation, and he might be addressing the entire West, grown fat from centuries of exploiting the world's resources. Economic barriers will no longer keep Nigeria in servitude.

Pot Black Kettle

from the popular idiom

The pot calls the kettle black.

Hypocrisy and an aversion to self-criticism are warned against in this familiar phrase. It derives from a poem in "Maxwell's Elementary Grammar" school book (copyright 1904):

"Oho!' said the pot to the kettle;
"You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you're given a crack."

"Not so! not so! kettle said to the pot;
"'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean -without blemish or blot-
That your blackness is mirrored in me."

It is unlikely that the poet/grammarian was familiar with Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who evaded Custer at the Sand Creek Massacre. Black Kettle may or may not have advocated an assimilationist attitude towards the encroaching United States, but as a treaty-signing Indian he has come to represent pragmatism and victimhood.

Black Kettle's people were massacred in the name of progress. The shameful Indian Wars are often explained as a "clash of cultures," where the civilized took the reins and destroyed the unenlightened. The United States' blackness was reflected by the indigenous kettle. Maybe a better name for the chief would be "Clean Kettle."