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big ugly white man head posters




        As an illustration of the level on which poster propaganda
inevitably works, no matter what the initial intent of its creators, I
offer the infamous 1987-88 "Meese is a PIG" poster campaign in Washington,
DC. This was post Iran-Contra and post-Pornography Commission, at a point
at which Ed Meese's idiocy was most blatantly on display. the posters,
which were the same general dimensions as the Jesse posters, simply said
"Meese is a PIG" in big block letters and underneath had a paragraph of
text explaining in very basic terms why this was true. Legitimate public
dissent? Well, no matter how many of them went up, inevitably somebody had
to go out and try and tear them down, and the part that inevitably got
scraped off was the text at the bottom. I only found out what it said from
seeing it reproduced in a fanzine. Later, when the Meese is a PIG T-shirts
arrived, the block of text was deleted entirely, because the t-shirts were
not an alternate means of communicating the message, of course; they were
an indication that the t-shirt owner was hip enough to know something
about the mysterious poster campaign, and agreed with the message, or at
least thought it was funny.
        Moral of the story: posters, no matter how attention-getting
and overloaded with symbolic significance, are usually an ineffective way
of passing along useful political information, but they make the people
who *make them* feel really good, which is why they always keep extra
copies to hang on the walls of their own houses to show off to their
friends.


  Richard Allen                                                  
                         
  augury@email.unc.edu                                       



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