"When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!"
About this Quote
A deadpan ladder of human institutions collapses into a punchline, and that’s exactly Laurie Anderson’s move: take the big abstract nouns we use to dignify our lives and run them through the circuitry of performance until they short out. “Love,” “justice,” “force” read like a civic progression - intimacy, law, violence - the supposed sequence a society follows as it loses its soul. Then she yanks the camera back to something awkwardly intimate: “Mom.” The joke lands because it’s not only funny; it’s embarrassingly plausible. When the big systems fail, people don’t become philosophers. They revert.
Anderson’s intent isn’t to mock love or justice so much as to expose how quickly our moral language turns into a cover story. We like to imagine justice as love institutionalized, force as justice’s last resort. She flips it: each term is a downgrade, a concession, a coping mechanism. “There’s always” repeats like a lullaby you tell yourself when the lights go out. It’s comfort phrased as inevitability.
“Mom” carries the subtext of origin and surveillance: the first authority, the first audience, the person you can’t quite stop performing for. “Hi, Mom!” is the vaudeville tag, the kid-on-TV wave, the reflex of seeking approval even while describing a world that’s fallen from tenderness into coercion. In the context of Anderson’s broader work - part art-pop, part social critique - the line plays like a glitch in the national anthem: family as the last refuge, and the last form of control, when every public ideal has been exhausted.
Anderson’s intent isn’t to mock love or justice so much as to expose how quickly our moral language turns into a cover story. We like to imagine justice as love institutionalized, force as justice’s last resort. She flips it: each term is a downgrade, a concession, a coping mechanism. “There’s always” repeats like a lullaby you tell yourself when the lights go out. It’s comfort phrased as inevitability.
“Mom” carries the subtext of origin and surveillance: the first authority, the first audience, the person you can’t quite stop performing for. “Hi, Mom!” is the vaudeville tag, the kid-on-TV wave, the reflex of seeking approval even while describing a world that’s fallen from tenderness into coercion. In the context of Anderson’s broader work - part art-pop, part social critique - the line plays like a glitch in the national anthem: family as the last refuge, and the last form of control, when every public ideal has been exhausted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|---|
| Source | Lyrics from the song "O Superman" , Laurie Anderson (single 1981; on the album Big Science). Line: "When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!" |
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