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i dunno, all those sound kind of generic to me so far.
i think your idea for a literary reference [like the heart of darkness idea example] is interesting though.
obviously there's so much to chose from in this area, but if you're stuck on heart of darkness and colonial africa, ones you might consider could be like:
stanley and the caps [heh, get it? henry morton stanley and the stanley caps? ah nevermind guess it's not that good after all]
or [and this one seems really interesting to me now that i've thought it through a bit]
the beaten generation --
actually this one has a double meaning for me. it's the name of an excellent song by the the. but more importantly it's the first thing that came to mind when i thought of the 8 million dead congolese in leopold's empire along with all those enslaved and the various tribes that even stopped copulating during the horrors of the peak rubber frenzy [which is what conrad's heart of darkness was about after all] -- the song isnt about that at all but i think it's much more fitting than the actual subject matter of the song, a people so miserable and so downtroden that they actually gave up on the future of their societies. yeah, i actually really like this one when put into that context.
it can also be made to apply cynically to a number of things going on at the time, most notably the millions and millions of africans being massacred, maimed, starved, and enslaved by greed, particularly on behalf of the various western empires [not to let the turks off the hook] of the time. but also it can be carried ove rather cynically to the general failure of the human rights movement [even after noble individuals such as rev. william sheppard and e.d. morel worked tirelessly and sacrificed much for over a decade to build a humanitarian coalition against the belgian empire], and ultimately to the "great forgetting" of this chunk of history, when european powers destroyed documentation of their empires en masse. also interesting is the fact that even 'heart of darkness' now is viewed mostly in an abstract literary sense of metaphor and psychology -- this book was actually a first hand account of conrad's disgust at his time spent as a steamer captain on the congo, during which he very probably did see examples of human excess such as human heads on stakes, lining gardens and so forth. maybe the fact that it's been so far removed from its real world context can be viewed as another blow to this "beaten generation"?
shoot, if you want to carry it all the way it could even possibly refer to the eventuality of the oncoming world wars in europe, the sort of feeling at the time of inevitability and necessity of total attrition exacerbated and perhaps even stemming directly from rise of nationalism as a dominant organizing social force and the rising tensions and competitions between nations and empires throughout the imperialist period leading up to the first world war.
eh, just a thought about the interesting literary reference that maybe digressed into various other miscellania as i put it down. you should probably figure it out on your own, but i think it'd be a good idea to think of a name that actually means something, rather than just some zippy generic "band-sounding name", and literary references might not be a bad start at that.
gah, that was really long and all over the place. sorry, hope that was some help [or that someone at least found it interesting].
Last edited by linespalsy; 09-22-03 at 11:23 PM.
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(damn, that's my sarcky-smiley for the day then. Hah, resisted there. Doh nearly gave in there tho......must...not..get..deadeye 
... too bad Piddzilla isn't in your band... I always thought his user name would make an awesome name for a band... 
