Slogans, badges, T-shirts, signs, masks and post-sixties, counter-cultural politics

*
There is something seriously creepy and repellent about the public display of 'political' slogans; which began in the sixties with badges or 'buttons', expanded to T-shirts, and more recently has settled upon photos or selfies of people holding-up signs with a 'message'.

What is worst about these photos of people holding-up signs, is the typical facial expression; which combines fake-anger, smugness and vacuousness in a way which is, at least, accurate concerning the probable state of mind of the sign-holder.

A singularly repugnant version is when a profession photographer gets a carefully pre-written sign and puts it into the hands of some 'minority' person - poses that person in some suitable fashion, then (presumably) shoots-off a couple of hundred images to find one with exactly the requisite combination of fake-anger, smugness and vacuousness.

Beyond this is the Guy Fawkes face mask; which comes from a shallow reading of a sophomoric graphic novel by a gifted but evil author based on a truly absurd analogy that equates an historical violent revolutionist who risked his life, and lost it, trying to restore the full severity of a Roman Catholic state - and the blank-faced, flaccid, lecture-skiving, weekend self-indulgence characteristic of modern ultra-left 'anarchism'.

Nauseating although this whole phenomenon is; I have to admit that badges, T-shirts, signs and masks are not false to reality; because they constitute a precise and complete account of current politics - which is indeed nothing more than just this: sound-bites and egotistical posturing in service of the mass media.

*