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Friday, July 31, 2009

Nice video from the Boston location of a national protest action from last Saturday:

8 Comments

Thank you for posting this. Those photographs of Neda Agha-Soltan are a very moving tribute during a time of great trial for the Iranian people, and a welcome antidote to the poorly researched polemic about Muslim women that Hillel Stavis posted on your site at

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2009/07/the-semiotics-of-a-wall-in-cambridge/

Here's another antidote, a stunning likeness to the Shepard Fairey portrait:

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/gen/photoblog/uploads/2009/06/rbz-local-iran-protest-07.jpg

I'm happy to post it, but what was poorly researched about Hillel Stavis's post?

Wait, did you read his posting? Some simple Google searching would have revealed Fairey's actual inspiration for his pop-art campaigns. For example, his Andre "Obey" campaign is an intentionally tongue-in-cheek mixture of in-jokes about the skater subculture, a sociological experiment in viral marketing, and quotations from a wrestler movie. (Including "Obey" itself.) And yet Stavis manages to turn the whole thing into a subliminal psy-ops Communist campaign against Capitalism from the 1960s, an era that he references more than once in his posting. Reading all these secret messages into things like Fairey's Andre logo (a Soviet sickle?) makes Stavis come across as rather unhinged, to be frank.

Why is he still so angry at 1960s hippies anyway? Nobody under forty cares anymore.

Because he used to be one of those 60's hippies and feels responsible. (As he should!) And those hippies are now in positions of power influencing the under-40's, many of whom are repeating memes originating back then, even if they think they're just being "subversive."

As if on cue, the Globe today has an op-ed by Tom Hayden, demonstrating that the dolts of the past are still with us.

Dude, Tom Hayden? Who the heck is he, and why should anyone care? I'm a bit puzzled that anyone would care so much about some washed-up dolt who managed to get a piece in an insolvent regional paper.

I'm really not surprised about Stavis, actually. I have plenty of personal experience with converts, and I can tell you that nobody is as strident against a cause as an ex-member. I suspect it has something to do with the intrinsic human need for self-justification; changing one's ideological configuration, especially when one was a fervent believer, is not easy, and for some people the result is a lifetime of compulsion to keep convincing oneself that it was necessary and worth it.

I pray that Stavis is able to find some peace. The anger really comes across in his postings, and that makes me feel bad for him. It brings back a lot of personal memories, and memories of friends and family that traveled a similar path. Anger like that, over so many years, is corrosive to the soul, and it's not as though he's eventually going to stop the Communists and Islamofascists if he just keeps it up.

I hope that some day he is able to find a healthier, less angry way to process his unresolved feelings about his past, hopefully before he finds himself posting to a blog about the subliminal Communist messages in Green Eggs and Ham.

Best wishes,

Hillel may go after leftist airheads with the passion of a reformed alcoholic on the Temperance lecture circuit (or an ex-smoker pushing smoking bans), but better that than the clueless, vapid non-comprehension of the young.

Nappy's no stranger to irony, satire, parody or sarcasm but fails to appreciate Fairey's tongue-in-cheek approach, which is not at all obvious even after one of the cognoscenti (Wanu) points it out.

Shepard Fairey's plagiarism is rampant with many examples documented at the link Sally Sweet gave in comment #7. Maybe Fairey thinks everything is in the public domain or that, even without attribution or acknowledgement, people will recognize the references.

Maybe Nappy's just another aging relic of the '60s, but Nappy's all young 'uns were inspired by the imagery. They all fell for the hope and change hype and voted for the Obamessiah. (The baby of the the brood wears T-shirts glorifying Che and with slogans like "No more Bushit.")

Nappy regrets to say they're still suckered in by his grand speeches and don't see how dysfunctional his administration is. Or understand the terrible disservice the Apologist in Chief does our country by bowing and scraping to dictators and tyrants. Or by betraying our strong ally and the only democracy in the M.E. The kids are snarky and cynical;' they say it's all just political BS and doesn't mean anything. The combination of ignorance and youthful naïvete with the certitude and arrogance of the young is a toxic brew.

Nappy understands the tired old argument of "old enough to get drafted and die but not old enough to drink a beer" that lowered the voting age to 18. Looking at how foolishly the youngsters voted, maybe we should raise it so something more reasonable, like 36, or 30.

Wait, let me get this straight. My responder above goes around the Internet under a moniker that's a racial epithet, calls the young people clueless, vapid, uncomprehending and suffering from a toxic brew of ignorance, naivete, certitude, and arrogance, and yet somehow wonders why the kids have decided not to emulate their parent's political attitudes? Is that right?

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