The Women’s March: The look of a movement matters

Liza Donovan, “Hear Our Voice.” Courtesy of Amplifier Foundation.

Artists sent 5000 poster designs when the Women’s March on Washington organizers put out a public call for submissions. The Amplifier Foundation announced they will print more than 30,000 posters and banners, and five of the posters can be downloaded from their website. You can find local artists at work for protest actions in cities all over the US, and you can probably find their images in your social media feeds.

The look of a movement matters — everything from the color of the activists to the clothes they wear, the signs they carry and the street theater they perform. When protesters carry their own signs, with creative slogans and artwork, they inspire and raise the spirits of the marchers in a way that the printed signs of the organizations can’t. The individual creativity can itself become serious rule-breaking, a disruption of conformity and a subversion of obedience to even progressive authority. The autonomy and commitment raises the threat level to the authorities and teaches the participants to make their movement a celebration of  their aspirations, identity and solidarity.

The great mass movements, of course, have always had signs at their actions and posters announcing them. I’ve looked at photos of their demonstrations through years of teaching social movement history, but I haven’t seen the colorful printed and hand-drawn work that characterizes demonstrations from the sixties on.

What explains the changes? One thing that changed is the centrality of young people in the movements. The traditional left was succeeded and eclipsed by radicalized students, in movements shaped by minority rebellions, a youth counterculture and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Add to these the demographic and cultural changes, the technologies that made cheap, professional-level design and printing accessible, and then the easy proliferation of art on the web and in social media.

I look forward to the signs, the pastels and paintings, the paper mache effigies, and to the photos spreading through social media the morning after the inauguration.

Here’s an example of protest art from the rally of thousands that forced Trump to cancel his appearance at University of Illinois-Chicago, and alongside it a spectacle produced in another women’s march on Washington.

Infographic for the Apocalypse: What if all the ice melted?

With news that 2016 is the warmest year yet, this old infographic is again appearing in feeds: National Geographic‘s “What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melted.” Forget the Atlantic seabord, Florida, the Gulf Coast. And on and on. But the news is good — this won’t all come in our lifetimes. It will take 5,000 years for all the ice to melt, according to these 2013 images.

But then, this article was written before the 2016 election.

North America, say goodbye to Florida, and not enough of Texas. National Geographic.

NASA’s slide show here.

Obamacare, Russian sex tape — chaos coming? or just routine Apocalypse?

Trump is worrying Congressional Republicans with his promises to Repeal and Replace Obamacare. Speculation 1. Trump either will or will not seriously insist on replacing Obamacare (ACA) at the same time it is repealed, with a plan featuring “insurance for everybody,” care for people who can’t pay, and bargaining with Big Pharma on drug prices. He either will or will not seriously fight with Republicans in Congress, who won’t want any of this.

Not speculative: His tweets frame the debate around what the people want: They want a plan much better than Obamacare, not much worse. The ACA may have failed in many ways, but it raised people’s expectations: There is now a consensus in the voting public (outside right wing elites) that government must pay for broad if not universal coverage, no rescission or exclusions for preexisting conditions, and lower premiums and drug prices. Trump cares what these voters think, and the presidential campaign showed there is little support for Congressional Republicans’ beloved “small government” (spending cuts for health care, cutting or privatizing Social Security in particular, and blocking a trillion-dollar infrastructure program for job creation!).

Speculation 2. Either there really is or there really is not Russian kompromat tapes showing Trump in a “pee-pee party,” and Putin either really can or really cannot blackmail our president (just in case the bribes stop working). Bill Moyers is the latest admirable wise man calling for a genuine investigation of the intelligence. He adds a dollop of skepticism to his worries about national security and undermining of our democracy; just a dollop. Everyone who is worried, should remember the politicized intelligence about the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.  Patrick Cockburn reminds us of the details, that the sources the US relied on were as flaky as the anonymous sources claimed by the former MI-6 agent who hasn’t been to Russia in 20 years.

Another theory: Is it equally or even more plausible to think that the scandal is manufactured here in the US for domestic political purposes? The cold warriors in the national security apparatus (including Clinton) want to frustrate Trump’s pro-Russia tendencies (such as recognizing the annexation of Crimea and joining with Russia in Syria). Many liberals and even anti-war progressives are curiously allying with the anti-Russia militarists because they love seeing Trump vulnerable and under attack.

Liberals, be careful what you wish for. If Trump is impeached, Pence will become president. We can also speculate here — the Republicans also benefit from the threat of scandal. Their message to Trump is,We like Pence; behave or we’ll impeach you.

My preferred speculation. Is it just as plausible to think that the real blackmailers are the intelligence community Trump has attacked, which wants to teach him obedience? “Donald, look at what we can do, and imagine what we haven’t done to you yet! Behave, Donald! Oh, and maybe remember how Kennedy tried to control the CIA …  and then … ” See the clever interpretation of Gaius Publius and the more worrying account of Glenn Greenwald.

Is all this Trump scandal good or bad for us? (Aside from being good for satirists.)  When scandal dominates the media, it pushes out into the margins the Republican agenda. Hating and ridiculing Trump is also forgetting the Republican program:  not only the military spending and war-mongering, but also destruction of the social safety net and intensified repression of minorities and women. The scandals may delight and console us, but they don’t really build a movement; for the most part, the electorate doesn’t care that much about national security issues, so long as there is no terrorist attack and so long as our leaders don’t lead us into a ground war.

Two tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. from F Newsmagazine

Amber Huff, “January 16, 2017.” F Newsmagazine. CC BY-NC 2.0. 

Ryan Blocker, “The Ahistorical Martin Luther King Teddy Bear.” F Newsmagazine. CC BY-NC 2.0

The illustration on the left is by Amber Huff, F Newsmagazine‘s comics editor; the one on the right by F Newsmagazine’s former managing editor, Ryan Blocker (click to enlarge the images).  In their different ways, they both show how Dr King can no longer be celebrated as if he is not still a danger to the America which “has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism.”

Amber and Ryan sent me back to Dr King’s 1967 speech at Riverside church, “Why I Am Opposed to the Vietnam War.” I hadn’t read or listened to it for years, and I was too shallow and “ultra” to appreciate it in 1967. I only remembered that ominous naming of America as “the greatest purveyor of hate in the world today.”

But if I was still teaching US political history, I might have assigned the speech as a student introduction to understanding the Vietnam War. In just a few paragraphs, Dr King tells the students what they never learned about how the US goes to war. We see history here that can’t be taught with a history lesson, that isn’t a narrative about another time; it is a dangerous prophetic vision that shows us our pride as a concentration camp, our preaching as charred bodies and maimed children, and exposes the lie of freedom in the cruel link between Vietnam and the ghetto. It demands that we justify our silence and acquiescence and calls us to action.

Read it now and ask if this story is the past or the present. Yet the way King joins racism in the US with Vietnam and with US imperialism generally is only a small and easily missed  part of our activism today, because, unlike in 1967, there is no mass protest against our new US wars.

Two passages from the speech:

“God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name.”

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.”

Classic data viz, now kitschified: From Napoleon to Luke Skywalker

A little more about war, this note for my designer friends.

Perhaps the most celebrated infographic is the brilliant engineer Charles Joseph Minard‘s data-map of the French army’s invasion of Russia and disastrous retreat, 1812-1813.

Charles Joseph Minard, “Figurative Map of the successive losses in men of the French Army in the Russian campaign 1812-1813. Wikimedia.

Figurative map of Imperial Navy troop losses in the Galactic Civil War, 0 BBY-5ABY. Fivethirtyeight.

Minard turns a complex history into a picture, showing the losses of the French army marching across the page in a thick band as it crosses into Poland, becoming thinner as the army moves toward Moscow, then beginning retreat to become finally a thin line as it reaches its end, 422,000 men reduced to 10,000. The image gives up its essential meaning at a glance, the gradual reduction of a massive force to a pitiful residue; but a closer look shows he has delineated the army’s size, direction, locations, dates and temperatures, each with precise measurement. He joined this data map to a companion piece describing Hannibal’s invasion of Spain, Gaul and Roman Italy, beginning with 96,000 men and ending with 26,000 and Rome’s decisive defeat of Carthage.  This was Minard’s last work, “an anti-war poster,” says Edward Tufte, who called Minard’s poster “War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy.” Maybe not too Tolstoy:  Minard, perhaps in his loathing of war, does not even mention Napoleon. For Minard the tragedy belonged not to the Emperor, but to the soldiers.

The strange data visualizers at FiveThirtyEight were inspired by Minard … and maybe more by Princess Leia … to narrate the fate of “one of the most sophisticated fighting forces in history,” the Imperial Navy pitted against the “ragtag Rebel Alliance”: “Star Wars, In One Chart.”

This is clever fun. Data visualization is all about comparisons, so they compare Minard and George Lucas. Clever too because it has become too easy to disregard the difference between the blockbuster CGI-battles in which millions of look-alike action figures are “killed,” and Minard’s vision of a real war. If we think seriously about Minard’s poster, we can imagine the data maps that could e drawn for Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, millions lost there too.

(There is a penetrating description and analysis of Minard’s maps by Edward Tufte in “Beautiful Evidence,” pp. 122-39. With attractive illustrations, he uses Minard’s maps to illustrate the principles of data visualization.)