I saw this poster the other day in an elevator and I thought it was amazing. I think all public service announcements should be totally abstract. I have no idea how much electricity it uses to microwave a dinner or to leave a PC monitor on all night. Why not compare something else that no one has a frame of reference for? Leaving a window open in the summertime wastes enough energy to watch half an episode of ‘Lost’ on a 13″ television or something.
The UK love their propaganda posters, though, and this is only the most abstract lecture you’re likely to receive while on an escalator at the train station or waiting for a bus. When you spend enough time walking around this city, between the posters and the cameras, you start to figure out what a truly terrifying place London must have been under Thatcher. Even the posters that are fairly innocuous, like the pc monitor one, or another warning you that someone might steal your cell phone, start to feel oppressive under the weight of their own ubiquity… The constant reminders that you’re probably doing something wrong, that you’re in danger, that there’s someone else who took the time to make a poster to let you know the problems with your behavior, after a while it adds up.
And when you think about the way they worked under Thatcher, without even the dressing of good intentions, just a push to get the stupid masses through the miserable lives in as orderly a fashion as possible, it becomes genuinely terrifying instead of just mildly oppressive; the sort of thing that would give Rudolph Giuliani orgasms so fierce, it would make the teeth in his vagina chatter to the rhythm of deutschland uber alles. Because today, of course, they still run the ads, but it’s all a bit slicker than just playing directly off your prejudices, or telling you that anyone who disagrees with the stated policy is probably a radical leftist who wants to sell you to Moscow and take the cars from out your garages…
That was how they did things in the 1980’s, back when Thatcher was running the show and having the temerity to challenge her on anything got you branded a communist. Rate-capping, incidentally, was a Tory attempt to dismantle the power of local government in favor of a mightier national one, stripping the local councils of the ability to raise taxes on the residents so Thatcher’s national party could keep the liberals in Liverpool or wherever else from enacting policies that were opposed to her vision of what the UK should look like. It was all a little bit more serious than these today, even the scariest ones… Now, in England, they still use propaganda posters to tell you what to do with your phone or your iPod, the better choices about what to eat, or abstract advice on how to save energy, but it’s much more benign. There are a couple of harsher one, to be sure- stuff about paying for your TV license gets a little less friendly and a little bit more intimidating, same with the ones warning people that failing to claim certain amounts of income when they’re on the dole makes them a benefit thief, and someone is surely watching… but these are all still coming at you from the point of view that we’re just trying to make you safer, make society a little more fair. There’s no Iron Lady stalking around the corner to steal your milk money just because she thinks it’s ideologically impure for small British children to get free milk, there’s just someone out there looking out for you… It’s like a- well, we wouldn’t call him a big brother, but you get the idea. And when you’re inundated with these things constantly, just walking down the street or going about your day, it can have a fairly disconcerting effect no matter what the message behind it is.
And these are some of the things that make the UK seem entirely like a foreign country when you come over as an American. We tend to prefer our propaganda mixed with a healthy dose of irrelevant entertainment, or bold and outright fearmongering. It would be downright unseemly for the advertising agencies to get too heavily involved in this sort of thing. The propaganda poster is more or less a dead artform in America, has been since televisions became commonplace and World War II stopped giving people the same sort of unifying cause. Now, if you see something pasted up around town with a message to it, it’s a lot more likely to have been thrown up by a kid with green hair and a backpack who came by in the middle of the night with a tub of wheatpaste and some old paintbrushes. But when you look at all of this stuff, especially day-in and day-out for a full year, you start to remember why it was so effective to begin with. And even something as weird and kind of random as telling you that, I dunno, overcharging your iPod at night uses as much electricity as a pair of light-up shoes does during the first quarter of a kids’ basketball game- it stops to feel quite so friendly, and starts to contribute more and more to the narrative- you’re doing something wrong, you’re being watched, and you really need to try to do things the way we tell you.
And after a while, I’ll admit it- it can make a simple boy from Texas feel downright unwelcome.
14 responses so far ↓
1 kat // Aug 8, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Who would even want to eat the spaghetti in that picture?
Have you seen the ones that say, “If your waistline is bigger than this, you may have diabetes!” And it has a measuring tape around a person’s waist with a number marked - I don’t even remember what the measurement is. It fed my already active hypochondria.
dan Reply:
August 9th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
It’s like 32″ for a girl, 38″ for a dude. You’re in the clear.
–d
2 m.s. // Aug 8, 2008 at 11:21 pm
The odd thing about all this is that it is demonstrable that all the CCTV cameras and whatnot are actually not terribly effective at deterring crime (like, for instance, Banksy installing sculptures on said cameras). Nor is London even all that a dangerous a place, honestly.
Is the television news so relentless in it’s depiction of the world as a dire and dangerous place with terrorists and thieves abounding, while, meanwhile, the government is going to CATCH YOU, YOU LITTLE CROOK, so don’t even try to not pay your ‘television tax’?
dan Reply:
August 9th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
London’s dangers are relative; it’s got nothing on Miami or Detroit or Baltimore, no, but it’s worse than Bloomington or Austin. It’s about level with post-Giuliani New York, I think, which means that, relative to the UK, it can be a scary place sometimes.
And yes, the television is absolutely relentless. So are the Evening Standard-style papers, which just throw up their most horrifying headlines every night at every train station and newsagent. They work hard to cast the city as a frightening place (and again, if you’re moving here from the Midlands or something, it can be intense) because sensationalism is even more of a national pastime in the UK than the US.
–d
m.s. Reply:
August 12th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Ah, fearmongers. You have to love them (by love them, of course, I mean ‘desire to light them on fire’) as they go about trying to scare the world into line. If only it didn’t work so well. Though it does make me wonder, what the per capita violent crime rate (which is really the one worth talking about) is of the above mentioned cities. Time to look at the internets!
m.s. Reply:
August 12th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Interesting. A person is more likely to be raped, burglared, or thieved in Bloomington than in NYC, according to the stats. And that’s with B-town consistently undereporting crime, of which the city is massively guilty.
In Austin, meanwhile, your shit is much more likely to get stolen in all forms than either NYC or B-town, and it falls between the two for violence (though much higher than either for rape, oddly, though still below the national average). And, apparently, because I’m morbidly curious about terrible shit, Pontiac, Michigan, was the per capita rape capital of the United States of America, with Flint and Galveston, Texas tied for second.
3 StuporMundi // Aug 9, 2008 at 1:48 am
I think the energy poster would have been more concrete if had depicted six 2-kilo frozen chimichangas.
And do Brits really need full-spectrum lighting in a public toilet just to jerk off? I don’t have any idea what that sign might mean. Do tell!
dan Reply:
August 9th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Honestly, I haven’t really considered engaging in, er, anti-social behavior in a public toilet here (particularly not in a supermarket, which is where the sign was), and I’m kind of at a loss, too. Maybe the mood is all wrong with the lights being so bright? Most public toilets around London have candles burning and Al Green playing, so that’s likely it…
But if I know the English, the “altered lighting” is a red herring; the point is to let people know that they’re taking steps to keep people from jerking off, smoking, or whatever- what those steps actually are is immaterial. It’s all very roundabout, but that is how they tend to express their rules.
–d
4 heather // Aug 9, 2008 at 12:13 pm
very v for vendetta. i should have paid more attention to brit parliamentary history. i knew we loved thatcher. now i guess i know why.
dan Reply:
August 9th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
She and Reagan were something of a dream team. What’s odd about her is that her legacy is such that she’s remembered as a monster and a mark of shame by wide swaths of the population, but she is still the most significant political figure the country’s had since Churchill, and they respect that significance in strange ways. She’ll be the first non-royal to receive a State Funeral since Churchill himself, which has filled the country with a certain angst.
–d
5 Erin P. // Aug 9, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I’m with stupormundi– what’s up with the toilet lights keeping people from “antisociable behaviour”? I don’t really understand. Is there a real issue with these things? Mother Britain wants you to know that she loves you and is watching you potty!
dan Reply:
August 9th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Well, that’s the thing, yeah. The English way is not to say “don’t do this thing”, because that’s impolite. It’s much more polite to say “we’ve taken steps to deter this activity”, because then you’re not calling anyone out. The government posters can be a little less English about it, but the bathroom one is in a supermarket, and they don’t want to make their shoppers uncomfortable.
–d
6 Smackhead // Aug 19, 2008 at 7:37 am
The lights in the toilet are to stop people shooting up drugs. They can’t see their veins under a particular light.
There you have it……….
dan Reply:
August 19th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Of course, that makes perfect sense. Thanks.
–d
Leave a Comment