Off-Campus Happenings

Monday, September 24, 2012

Today I would like to divert your attention to some Post It Politics related things that have been going on away from the University of Maryland--College Park.

First off, I would like to write about what's been happening on the national stage with political imagery in the 2012 Presidential Campaign, focusing today on one of the strangest developments in political imagery that I have ever seen. As a quick heads up, I should let you know that this has been a mostly pro-Obama image, though it has taken an strange turn as of late.

What I am referring to is the Invisible Obama Chair.

If you didn't already know, this image was taken from the Republican National Convention, when Clint Eastwood gave a mostly improvised speech in which he questioned the president, pretending Obama was sitting in the chair next to him, invisible. What had probably been planned to be a show of strength for the Republicans, using a well respected filmmaker and media personality well known for his confidence and integrity, ended up being a twelve minute long show of rambling and incoherence, as Eastwood fumbled over his words while attempting to question Obama about his last four years as president.

Naturally, the internet responded. Memes ensued. #eastwooding

 

These memes generally portrayed Obama and Democrats as the coherent, sane alternative to Romney and the Republicans, or at least attempted to make the Republican media stunt look like a failure. 

However, on September 19th, Eastwooding took a bizarre, racist turn.

This picture was put online by the Burnt Orange Report, a liberal blog out of Austin, Texas. The picture is of chair, representing Obama, that an Austin man hung in his front yard in the style of a lynching to show his dislike of our current president.

Now, as disturbing as I find this image and its motivations, I will not deny that the ideas around its creation are in the same vein as Post It Politics. They're both using an existing political image and putting a spin on it to change its meaning. They're also both in the realm of guerrilla marketing (they're using an unconventional spot and method to grab someones attention and create emotion. See this blog entry for further explanation). 
*I would like to add that as of September 21, the man who originally hung the chair, Bud Johnson, has taken it down after much negative press and pressure from the public. The chair now sits on the man's lawn, though Johnson claims that the act of lynching a chair is not inherently racist. Unfortunately, following this story, others in the anti-Obama camp have taken up chair lynching from Colorado to Virginia. Post It Politics would personally like to give a big thumbs down to this whole chain of events.

On a lighter note, in an attempt to branch out my project a bit, I did some off-campus posting over the weekend! Hoping to find a place where there might be a bit more political discussion, I traversed out of Democrat-leaning Maryland, and took the metro to Alexandria, Virginia, a city that is affected by the liberal biases of the Washington Metro Area, but that is still in a state with a large conservative population.

Stepping off the metro, I was immediately awash in a posting heaven. Everywhere I looked there were yard signs posted in public spaces. Though none of them were for Romney or Obama, I immediately started flipping coins to decide which candidates to post approval and disapproval for, and posted on as many signs as I could. In total, I posted on signs for eleven different candidates running either for mayor of city council, and tweeted a picture of a post for each candidate in case anyone sought to follow up about my project.

I shot to concentrate my postings around sidewalks where people coming off the metro (or at least walking/driving near it) could see my handiwork. So far my efforts have yet to create any new twitter activity (though I did receive an enthusiastic declaration of "Sabotage!" from a girl as she rode past on her bike).

Eventually, my posting led me away from the metro, and I stumbled upon the most yard signs I have ever seen in a single place, be it public or private property. I must say, if I ever needed a reminder about the confused message that political propaganda, specifically yard signs, the grass divide of Commonwealth Ave in Alexandria did just that.

I'm not sure whether or not these signs were put up by the residents who live on either side of Commonwealth Ave or by the campaigns themselves. Regardless, these signs show no indication for which candidates have the most support from this area. It seems as if whenever a sign has been posted here, an opposing campaign has tried to put two signs directly next to it. They go on forever in clumps or in rows, seemingly trying to represent everyone and no one.

I started to post where the divide started, but subsided a ways in because A) it was decided that cars driving past would be hard pressed to see my image and B) I started running out of Post-its.

My hope is that sometime this week I can make a trip down to Alexandria and see how all these local level posts are doing.

Finally, I feel like I should report that after about a week of rain, sun, and wind, the rubber-cemented post I made on campus finally fell from the light pole it had been posted on. Still, not bad by my book!

@Post_It_2012