Posted by
Angelina Sciolla on Friday, April 11, 2008 4:21:43 PM
Strategically dotted throughout the downtown Philadelphia landscape are political posters. These posters, I concede, bear more than just the typical stale photo, patriotic overlay, and slogan we are accustomed to seeing in this country's particular brand of propaganda. It is an image that suggests more than its creators might want to....
At bus stops, on shop windows and in a few of the offices I pass each time I fill my coffee mug, I've been seeing a poster of Barak Obama that is either tagged with the word HOPE or PROGRESS, two meaningful words that, somehow when attached to agitprop, become sophmoric slogans better suited for the entry level political science students to whom they appear to pander.
What strikes me as odd and, frankly, quite disturbing, is the style of this image. It is a graphic image of Obama, his face turned upward to the heavens, like that of a saint. The artwork is similar to the modernist style that was pervasive in communist propaganda of the 1930s. The color palette hints towards red, white and blue but doesn't quite make it, missing it almost on purpose. (Oh how those colors fade when the government and its leaders stray from true justice and democracy!) The blue/gray tone could easily have been well suited as a nice matte for Mao and reminds me of some kind of horrid proletariat uniform.
In addition to the style, I wonder also about the use of Obama's face as the angelic focal point of this poster. There is no name, "Barak Obama," just an aspirational noun associating itself with the face. The effort to make him iconic is obvious. It is as if the creators of this piece are saying he is above the mere political process. His status as presumptive savior is captured in this image.
But the image is not something we are used to seeing in American political advertising. Surely we have turned our leaders of the past into iconic figures. (Mount Rushmore?) But this is not the same. Mount Rushmore and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials all commemorated men who had already achieved iconic status in the culture by virtue of their work and deeds. This image of Obama suggests a complete paradigm shift in philosophy and ethos. It suggests that we first pick the icon instead of giving the ordinary man a chance to become one, the latter of which seems, to me, to be the more American trajectory.
Posters like this are more commonly seen on the streets of Moscow, Beijing or in Latin America where the Castro's and Chavez's of the world have become secular saints. The man supersedes the system. This is a tendency towards authoritarianism - certainly not an argument against the growth of executive power under the current administration. The moment I saw the poster I thought of Orwell's "1984." This was an all-knowing individual extolling immeasurable virtue and knowledge. He wasn't just a name on a placard associated with a political platform or set of ideas. He was the saint to whom I would light my candle and surrender my hopes and dreams.
The only problem is, despite efforts by many on the left to pull the country in that direction, this is not a country that canonizes its leaders in kind of socialist-populist way. We are better at tearing them apart. To achieve political beatification, they usually have to die first or at least do something extraordinary while still living. We do not erect secular altars because we've been given the gift of religious pluralism. We've never had to turn against a state-sanctioned church and therefore, never had to substitute one kind of worship for another. We can have our saints and politicians too.
Separately.