TIL that the New Wave band DEVO was formed in response to the Kent State shootings.
In 1970, co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis got serious about their idea of the "de-evolution" of the human race after Casale's friends Jeffrey Miller & Allison Krause were killed by OH national guards.
Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.
You see it with the Post-Structuralists after WWII too - the idea that root of the madness lies between the world and how we process it through language.
Oh neat! This was a minor plot point in Fargo S2. [spoilers below] I didn't know that there was historical precedent.
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[spoilers]
There's a scene where a WWII vet reveals he is trying to create a universal human language to help avert future conflict and tragedy
It's also a major plot in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Though Skull Face's plans are the opposite.
Using a virus that will kill anyone who speaks English, he plans to eliminate its strangehold on the world.
Also the virus gives you super powers and he wants everyone to have nukes.
Which wraps back to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities - where the printing press and the act of reading your local and national “values” every day is how we created the modern nation state.
In our heads every day, we make it real.
