snowclone: Today ___, tomorrow the world

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:22 PM -0400 10/25/07, David Bowie wrote:
>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!
>
A variant from Leonard Cohen (the "I'm Your Man" album):

First we take Manhattan,
Then we take Berlin

Refrain of "First we take Manhattan"; full lyrics at
http://www.sing365.com/music/Lyric.nsf/FIRST-WE-TAKE-MANHATTAN-lyrics-Leonard-Cohen/926CCB64249F308848256AF00028CB85.
Also cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFBKV0zVXSE for a very
Cohenian music video with many seagulls.

LH

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