Jake Schneider
Editor’s Note The Motto That Wasn’t
The motto is dead – long live the motto. Slogans and hashtags swing elections on baseball caps and buses, propel social movements for and against prejudice, and recently took down dozens of Hollywood’s most formidable harassers and abusers. make the decision to change your life, commands a subway advertisement in “Camila” by Vanessa Bates Ramirez. “You’ve just got to find the right mantra,” counsels Brina in Caroline Beimford’s “Under My Skin.” Do we though? When I contemplated the writing and art we’d picked for our last issue, I saw containers everywhere. And when I decided to label each item in the table of contents with its own example – bathtub, fish tank, exoskeleton – the idea went down well. Containers are hollow. I chose the ones the writers had chosen themselves; they were in no danger of redefining their contents. Then, this winter, I learned that the Latin motto on the US coins of my childhood, e Pluribus unum (“Out of Many, One”) originally came from the title page of Gentleman’s Magazine, the first periodical of its category, back in the 1730s. In the format’s infancy, the magazine consisted of extracts from other publications reprinted without permission. Just as these six syllables had bound together unrelated sections of (copiedand-pasted) text, they later rallied a scattered group of colonizers around a common cause. e Pluribus unum romanticized an invented nation. It also romanticized the systematic theft of the world’s first magazine editor. Before long, my own editorial mind was crowded with mottos and their banner-waving possibilities. What if we sprinkled the next issue with its own slogans?
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