snowclone: Today ___, tomorrow the world

[David Bowie]

On 10/14/07, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Today ___, tomorrow the world

> Google reports about 242,000 hits for "tomorrow the world".

> Original: "Today Germany, tomorrow the world!", a translation of the Nazi
> party slogan "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (1, 2)

<snip>

> My first encounter with this snowclone was in (IIRC) William Steig's _The
> Lonely Ones_ (7), the great cartoonist's first book, published 1942: a G.I.
> collecting litter with litter bag, spiked stick, and a bitter expression,
> mutters "Today the area, tomorrow the world!" I was probably younger than 10
> and didn't know the phrase "policing the area", much less the original
> slogan.

My favorite example of this was when i was in high school (so this would
have been between 1983-1987, when a morning DJ was talking about the
then-governor of Maryland (and i'm thinking it was Don Schaefer, which
would have placed this spring-ish of 1987), who had said that he thought
that retrocession of DC to Maryland would be worth entertaining as a way
of dealing with the DC voting rights question. I still remember the
exact way the DJ ended the discussion:

    Hey, this is the way Hitler got started--yesterday Maryland, today
    DC, tomorrow the world!

<snip>

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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