.
There used to be a set-up called the International League of Societies for
Persons with Mental Handicap (ILSMH) which after immense cogitation and
artistic debate came up with the "Green Snail" symbol, a sort of inter-
cultural Rorschach blob onto which people could project their imaginings of
the meaning of mental handicap - call it intellectual dis, intellectual
imp, yllanoitacude (the Esperanto for educationally backward), learning
diffs, hey stupid, or whatever).
The snail comprised something like a traffic sign showing that you were a
road-sweeping machine and had just run your brushes through a huge puddle
of green paint, and were now about to enter a roundabout, and you should
drive most of the way round the roundabout and go swishing off in almost
the direction from which you came. (Uh... yeah, it's better to see the
thing than to try to describe it).
One interpretation of the snail was that, from a position facing one way
e.g. "Backward", you could (with a li'l help from yo' frenz) turn your life
around and go whooshing off "Forward". (There were quite a number of other
unlikely interpretations too).
At some point they let the Art College Students loose on the Snail, with
the idea of getting a new, dynamic logo and thereby obviously turning
around the ailing financial sitch of the League, and adding a bit of tzing
to the lives of people with [whatever]. The Art Students came up with the
brilliant ideas of (i) giving the snail a psychedelic shift, by letting it
smoke something interesting; and (ii) rotating it through about 30 degrees
from the horizontal; and (iii) turning over the League to be run by Large
Mutant Reptiles.
The League Council didn't think the first suggestion would be a suitable
role model for its clientele; and without the smokes it would be hard to
imagine the third proposition; but they okayed the second great idea.
That's how it became the Snail Rampant. (I don't honestly remember when
the Snail went Green - whether it just came out that way in the mid-1960s
when the World switched over from Black and White to Colour, or whether it
was some kinda political statement from the '80s, or what).
Anyhow, the next step that was clearly required was Management Consultants,
who duly came in and insisted that the League change its name (and pay for
this invaluable advice). There was a strong push for Integration
International, but nobody knew what that would stand for, and some people
anyway preferred a rainbow effect to an integrated sludge, so while they
dithered for a few years the End of History arrived and the Wonderful World
of Inclusion was born. So the old ILSMH gathered its rags around it and
made a desperate leap and grabbed the name Inclusion International --
which, so far as I know, it still is.
The success of the new image was immediate -- the old name (which went on
for so long that a significant number of people lost interest or simply
died before they got to the punchy bit) has never been heard of since --
and indeed, very few people have heard of the organisation under its new
name, as it moved address a few times across Europe. (You'd sometimes come
across them, somewhere in the back end of a small town, like in one of
those Czech movies, pushing a handcart along with their old filing cabinet,
desk, and couple of tatty office chairs, heading for the next place to set
up shop). But I believe the image lives on, in the hearts and minds of
Green Snail fanciers.
Other people have tried following the pattern of the Ear with a strong
black line through it - No Ear, No Hear -- and depicted a head with a thick
stroke through it - No Brain, No Strain, kinda thing. The problem with
this, apart from being less than exquisitely PC, was that it did not
differentiate people having MR, ID, ESN, or severe Inclusion, from
politicians like Dubya and Tony who got heads and got ears but never got
nothing between the ears.
As one respondent already noted, it's not an easy one to pict or depict.
But that don't ever stop people from thinking they might crack it.
m99m
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