Monday, February 28, 2011

Contemporary Connections

CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS

That ‘70s show spoof of Reefer Madness—ACTORS/DESIGNERS/SOUND

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-45GvW7PvIM&feature=fvw

Why are Americans so Angry?—Tea Party Movement

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0308/Why-Americans-are-so-angry/(page)/3

Political satire—

http://www.ask.com/questions-about/Political-Satire

Obama’s State of the Union Address

Glenn Beck

Sarah Palin

FAMILY GUY

Family guy—political humor

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2008/10/20/2008-10-20_family_guy_compares_john_mccain_and_sara.html

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/10/04/rush-limbaugh-family-guy/

Family guy—political cartoon

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/09/family_guy_could_learn_a_thing.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pacdFrzmRx4

Family guy- Top Five Satirical Episodes

http://www.xomba.com/top_five_satirical_family_guy_episodes

Best Bits of political satire from the simpsons to family guy

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/63385/

Family Guy Road to the multiverse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_the_Multiverse

http://smotri.com/video/view/?id=v1157510beb4

Family Guy cutaway gags

Family Guy generally uses the filmmaking method of cutaways, which occur in the majority of Family Guy episodes.[95] Emphasis is often placed on gags which make reference to current events and/or modern cultural icons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy

In interviews and on the DVD commentary of season one, MacFarlane explained that he is a fan of 1930s and 1940s radio programs, particularly the radio thriller anthology "Suspense", which led him to give early episodes ominous titles pertaining to death and murder, like "Death Has a Shadow" and "Mind Over Murder".


Union Voices from Madison: "We Will Be Out Here Marching Until Justice
is Served"
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/25/union_voices_from_madison_we_will_be_out_here_marching_until_justice_is_served

Labor Protests Spread: Thousands Rally Against Anti-Union Bill in Ohio
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/2/thousands_protest_anti_union_bill_in

Idaho Students Stage Walkout to Oppose Teacher Layoffs, Collective
Bargaining Curbs
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/2/idaho_students_stage_walk_out_to

Uprisings: From the Middle East to the Midwest
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/23/uprisings_from_the_middle_east_to_the_midwest

Marijuana Propaganda of the Time

REEFER MADNESS

Jekyll & Hyde effect when smoke

[Marihuana’s] bodily reactions usually include muscular-trembling, increased heartbeat, accelerated pulse and a ringing in the ears. Often the user feels hot in the head, becomes dizzy and has sensations of cold in the hands and feet. Later he experiences muscular contractions, constrictions in the chest and dilation of the eye pupils. These effects lead to either vomiting or stupefaction, followed by restless sleep filled with bizarre kaleidoscopic visions.

THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY - June 29, 1938

Reefer Madness Teaching Museum—Original propaganda comics, original radio shows

http://www.reefermadnessteachingmuseum.org/ReeferMadness/page1.htm

Articles from the time

http://www.reefermadnessteachingmuseum.org/ReeferMadness/sexcraze1937.htm

http://www.reefermadnessteachingmuseum.org/ReeferMadness/religiousdigest1937.htm

http://www.reefermadnessteachingmuseum.org/ReeferMadness/newsweek1937.htm

http://www.reefermadnessteachingmuseum.org/ReeferMadness/readersdigest1938.htm

Original Radio Show—character voices

http://www.onlinepot.org/ReeferMadness/radioshows/wisperer.mp3

Original Radio Show (1930s)—character voices; sound design; curtain speech (sponsored by rio grande oil)

http://www.onlinepot.org/ReeferMadness/radioshows/Calling%20All%20Cars%2036-06-25%20Reefers%20by%20the%20Acre.mp3

QUOTES

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

n Attributed to Abraham Lincoln: Dec 18, 1840.

"The American Medical Association, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs have all stated that marijuana has no medical uses and should be considered a social menace. We don't need any more research to show that. I challenge you to name one doctor who has reported a beneficial medical effect of marijuana, outside of the backward areas of the world and that 19th Century folk medicine you were mentioning." --- Harry Anslinger Playboy Feb 1970 pg 58

Colonel Garland H. Williams, head of the New York office of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau, says that "even sex does not satisfy the abnormal urges induced by marijuana. There is still the necessity for further excitement, more emotional release. That is when the guns are grabbed, the knives waved, and the razors swung. And all that is a marijuana user’s idea of what is normal!” --- COLLIER’S - June 1949

The list of holdups, sex crimes, murders and suicides by marijuana addicts could be multiplied indefinitely. In some districts, inhabited by Latin Americans, Filipinos, Spaniards and Negroes, half the violent crimes are attributed to marijuana craze. Dr. Lee Rice of San Antonio reports that eighty per cent of all the murders committed by Mexicans are done while the killers are drugged by marijuana. ---The CHRISTIAN CENTURY - June 29, 1938

It is impossible to say just what the action of the drug will be on a given individual, of the amount. . . . but all the experts agree that the continued use leads to insanity. There are many cases of insanity. --- Mr. Anslinger 1937 Congressional Testimony

Hearst newspapers nationwide, 1935

"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry J. Anslinger, 1948

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"

Ronald Reagan 1974

"Permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana."

White House Drug Czar Carlton Turner 1986

"Marijuana leads to homosexuality ... and therefore to AIDS."

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton 1992

"Marijuana is ten times more dangerous than twenty years ago."

"Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Easily grown, it has been asserted that it has recently been planted between rows in a California penitentiary garden. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marihuana cigarets to school children. Bills for our quota against Mexico have been blocked mysteriously in every Congress since the 1924 Quota Act. Our nation has more than enough laborers". --- C. M. Goethe, a prominent member of the American Coalition

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman derived the title of their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion

Full text

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/CDFinal/Lippman/contents.html

Excerpts:

“The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.

Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the chapters which follow we shall inquire first into some of the reasons why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives.

The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it proceeds to examine how in the individual person the limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified with his own interests as he feels and conceives them. In the succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.”

“Whether the reasons for privacy are good or bad, the barriers exist. Privacy is insisted upon at all kinds of places in the area of what is called public affairs. It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see? When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say? You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the”

“Millions of those who are watching him can read hardly at all. Millions more can read the words but cannot understand them. Of those who can both read and understand, a good three-quarters we may assume have some part of half an hour a day to spare for the subject. To them the words so acquired are the cue for a whole train of ideas on which ultimately a vote of untold consequences may be based. Necessarily the ideas which we allow the words we read to evoke form the biggest part of the original data of our opinions. The world is vast, the situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.”

“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” [Alice’s comment about how she liked Las Vegas Paris better than the real Paris]\

“This lady might well have been the patron of a pageant which a friend of mine once attended. It was called the Melting Pot, and it was given on the Fourth of July in an automobile town where many foreign-born workers are employed. In the center of the baseball park at second base stood a huge wooden and canvas pot. There were flights of steps up to the rim on two sides. After the audience had settled itself, and the band had played, a procession came through an opening at one side of the field. It was made up of men of all the foreign nationalities employed in the factories. They wore their native costumes, they were singing their national songs; they danced their folk dances, and carried the banners of all Europe. The master of ceremonies was the principal of the grade school dressed as Uncle Sam. He led them to the pot. He directed them up the steps to the rim, and inside. He called them out again on the other side. They came, dressed in derby hats, coats, pants, vest, stiff collar and polka-dot tie, undoubtedly, said my friend, each with an Eversharp pencil in his pocket, and all singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

To the promoters of this pageant, and probably to most of the actors, it seemed as if they had managed to express the most intimate difficulty to friendly association between the older peoples of America and the newer. The contradiction of their stereotypes interfered with the full recognition of their common humanity. The people who change their names know this. They mean to change themselves, and the attitude of strangers toward them.”

“There is, of course, some connection between the scene outside and the mind through which we watch it, just as there are some long-haired men and short-haired women in radical gatherings. But to the hurried observer a slight connection is enough. If there are two bobbed heads and four beards in the audience, it will be a bobbed and bearded audience to the reporter who knows beforehand that such gatherings are composed of people with these tastes in the management of their hair. There is a connection between our vision and the facts, but it is often a strange connection. A man has rarely looked at a landscape, let us say, except to examine its possibilities for division into building lots, but he has seen a number of landscapes hanging in the parlor. And from them he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon. One day he goes to the country, and for hours he does not see a single landscape. Then the sun goes down looking rosy. At once he recognizes a landscape and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later, when he tries to recall what he saw, the odds are that he will remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor.

Unless he has been drunk or dreaming or insane he did see a sunset, but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the oil painting taught him to observe, than what an impressionist painter, for example, or a cultivated Japanese would have seen and taken away with him. And the Japanese and the painter in turn will have seen and remembered more of the form they had learned, unless they happen to be the very rare people who find fresh sight for mankind. In untrained observation we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects.”

“But modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is an agitator. That much we notice, or are told. Well, an agitator is this sort of person, and so he is this sort of person. He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a "South European." He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man. How different from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager: what don't we know about him then, and about her? He is an international banker. He is from Main Street.

The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences ere those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They are aroused by small signs, which may vary from a true index to a vague analogy. Aroused, they flood fresh vision with older images, and project into the world what has been resurrected in memory. Were there no practical uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life.

What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those inclusive patterns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind.

Those who wish to censor art do not at least underestimate this influence. They generally misunderstand it, and almost always they are absurdly bent on preventing other people from discovering anything not sanctioned by them. But at any rate, like Plato in his argument about the poets, they feel vaguely that the types acquired through fiction tend to be imposed on reality. Thus there can be little doubt that the moving picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole experience of the race there has been no aid to visualization comparable to the cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of saints standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects which were pictured was not great. And in the East, where the spirit of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of concrete things was even more meager, and for that reason perhaps the faculty of practical decision was by so much reduced. In the western world, however, during the last few centuries there has been an enormous increase in the volume and scope of secular description, the word picture, the narrative, the illustrated narrative, and finally the moving picture and, perhaps, the talking picture.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture, requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you. Without more trouble than is needed to stay awake the result which your imagination is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen. The shadowy idea becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen.”

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes [Paperback]

Jacques Ellul (Author), Konrad Kellen (Translator), Jean Lerner (Translator)

Public Opinion

PUBLIC OPINION

Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippman, is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially the irrational, and often self-serving, social perceptions that influence individual behavior, and prevent optimal societal cohesion. The descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their socio-political and cultural environments, proposes that people must inevitably apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology.

The second part describes the social, physical, and psychological barriers impeding man’s ability to faithfully interpret the world; “Chapter II: Censorship and Privacy”; “Chapter III: Contact and Opportunity”; “Chapter IV: Time and Attention”; and “Chapter V: Speed, Words, and Clearness” describe how, for a given event, all of the pertinent facts are never provided completely and accurately; how, as a fraction of the whole, they often are arranged to portray a certain, subjective interpretation of an event. Often, those who know the “real” (true) environment construct a favorable, fictitious pseudo-environment in the public mind to suit his or her private needs. Propaganda is inherently impossible without a barrier of censorship — between the event and the public — thus, the mass communication media, by their natures as vehicles for informational transmission, are immutably vulnerable to manipulation.

The blame for this perceptual parallax does not fall upon the mass media technology (print, radio, cinema, television) or logistical concerns, rather, upon certain members of society who attend to life with little intellectual engagement, because “they suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter”, thus:

Public Opinion argues that propaganda’s increased power, and the specialized knowledge required for effective political decisions, have rendered impossible the traditional notion of democracy. Moreover, in Public Opinion Lippman originated the phrase “the manufacture of consent”, from which the public intellectuals

Propaganda

PROPAGANDA

“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.”

–Noam Chomsky

Definition

“Propaganda—I am here deliberately excluding purely religious or commercial propaganda in the form of advertising—is a distinct political activity that can be distinguished from cognate activities like information and education. The distinction between them lies in the purpose of the instigator. Put simply, propaganda is the dissemination of ideas intended to convince people to think and act in a particular way and for a particular persuasive purpose. Although propaganda can be unconscious, I am concerned here with conscious, deliberate attempts to employ the techniques of persuasion to attain specific goals. Propaganda can be defined as the deliberate attempt to influence public opinion through the transmission of ideas and values for a specific persuasive purpose that has been consciously devised to serve the self-interest of the propagandist, either directly or indirectly. Whereas information presents its audience with a straightforward statement of facts, propaganda packages those facts in order to elicit a certain response. Whereas education—at least in what I take to be the liberal notion of education—teaches us how to think in order to enable us to make up our own minds, propaganda dictates what one should think. Information and education are concerned with broadening our perspectives and opening our minds, whereas propaganda strives to narrow them and (preferably) to close our minds. The distinction, in short, lies in the ultimate purpose or goal of each.”

“History has indeed proved to be an invaluable source of propaganda.“

“We need to think of propaganda in much broader terms: wherever public opinion is deemed important, someone will attempt to influence it. Propaganda can therefore manifest itself in the form of a building, a flag, a coin, or even a government-mandated health warning on a pack of cigarettes. Goebbels maintained that “in propaganda, as in love, anything is permissible which is successful” (Welch 2002).”

–Nicholas John Cull Propaganda & Mass Persuasion (2003)

Propaganda Edward Bernays –Full Text

http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

Culture of fear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_fear

Propaganda

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Social control

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control

Why were propaganda films so prevalent during this time?

1930s communism

http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/pinckney.shtml

Rise of Modern Propaganda

http://mason.gmu.edu/~amcdonal/Rise%20of%20Modern%20Propaganda.html

One difference between past and present societies is how we view persuasion and rhetoric. Our modern society is untrained in persuasive techniques. In contrast to earlier cultures that were schooled in the principles of rhetoric, our society knows little about the techniques of persuasion and understanding how they work. Modern media constantly assails us with information. "Everyday we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda" (Pratkanis and Aronson 9).

Modern propaganda is distinguished from other forms of communication by its deliberate and conscious use of false or misleading information to sway public opinion. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century gradually made it possible to reach large numbers of people. But it was not until the nineteenth century that state governments began to employ propaganda for political purposes to any wide degree deliberately aimed at influencing the masses. The invention of radio and television in the twentieth century made it possible to reach even more people. The development of modern media, global warfare, and the rise of extremist political parties provided growing importance to the use of propaganda.

The term propaganda began to be widely used to describe the persuasive tactics used by both sides during the world wars and by later tyrannical political regimes of the twentieth century. Propaganda was used as a psychological weapon against the enemy and to bolster morale at home.

It is not surprising that the word "propaganda" appeared as a separate entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the first in 1922 right after the end of the World War One.

Adolph Hitler bluntly discussed the use of propaganda in his book, Mein Kampf, in which he shared Machiavelli's low regard for his audience's intellectual capabilities:

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be." (qtd. in Smith 38).

Another passage, also from Mein Kampf, repeated Hitler's contempt for the masses:

"Its [propaganda's] effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous." (qtd. in Pratkanis 250).

Joseph Goebbels succeeded Hitler to become the master propagandist for the Nazi regime. With great skill Goebbels began building the myth of Aryan supremacy. He always maintained that some element of truth was necessary in propaganda to provide a means of escape if his statements were questioned. In Propaganda. The Art of War,

Rhodes said: "Goebbels openly admitted that propaganda had little to do with the truth. 'Historical truth may be discovered by a professor of history. We, however, are serving historical necessity. It is not the task of art to be objectively true. The sole aim of propaganda is success" (qtd. in Rhodes 19).

In order to use propaganda effectively, one has to have great command of language and recognize the power of persuasive speech. George Orwell, the author of the postwar novel, 1984, realized the dangers of propaganda and the power of persuasion. In his essay "Politics and the English language," Orwell maintained that fighting propaganda meant fighting mental laziness.

The government [in 1984 novel]used a complicated doublespeak language to convey contradictory meanings in order to obscure the truth. The population was taught the language of Newspeak where every concept was expressed in only one word in order to hide nuances and prevent the people from thinking discriminately. The political party in power rewrote the past in order to control the present. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."


PROPAGANDA MODEL

The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that states how propaganda, including systemic biases, function in mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are propagandized and how consent for various economic, social and political policies are "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

ARCHIVAL PROPAGANDA VIDEOS

Are you a commie or a citizen?—lecturer, use of model to demo ideas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86QhV7whjs&feature=related

He May Be A Communist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWeZ5SKXvj8&feature=related

Old Homosexual Warning video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3S24ofEQj4&feature=related

Girls Beware

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fAKo-i4jpQ&feature=related

Birth of a Nation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBLcKa85rk

Art Deco

ART DECO

"Art Deco is characterized by a linear, hard edge or angular composition, often with a vertical emphasis, and highlighted with stylized decoration" (Blumenson 77). Also, Art Deco, while being decorative, is very simple, in that it doesn't have any complicated shapes. The Art Deco movement is also characterized by clean lines, streamlining, and symmetry (encarta.msn.com). In addition, Art Deco works exhibit abstraction, distortion, and simplification, particularly geometric shapes and highly intense colors (http://www.artlex.com/).

Art Deco celebrates the Machine Age through explicit use of man-made materials (particularly glass, stainless steel and the new plastics),[14] symmetry,[25] and repetition, modified by Asian influences such as the use of silks and Middle Eastern designs. It was strongly adopted in the United States during the Great Depression for its practicality and simplicity, while still portraying a reminder of better times and the "American Dream".[5]

Art Deco Color Schemes

http://www.decopix.com/LR_Color_Schemes_Gallery-Final/index.html



Political Cartoons

[A cartoon unusually illustrative of the insidiousness of the illicit traffic in marihuana appeared in the Washington Herald of April 15, under the title "Another Pied Piper". The cartoon pictured the Pied Piper in the form of a marihuana cigarette, marching down a road described as "The Dope Habit", playing his pipe and being followed by a group of children portrayed as "Our High School Youth".]

The Cartoon by Herb Block

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/cartoon.html

“But I still feel that the political cartoon should have a view to express, that it should have some purpose beyond the chuckle. So what I'm talking about here is the cartoon as an opinion medium.

The political cartoon is not a news story and not an oil portrait. It's essentially a means for poking fun, for puncturing pomposity.

Cartooning is an irreverent form of expression, and one particularly suited to scoffing at the high and the mighty. If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism.

In our line of work, we frequently show our love for our fellow men by kicking big boys who kick underdogs. In opposing corruption, suppression of rights and abuse of government office, the political cartoon has always served as a special prod -- a reminder to public servants that they ARE public servants.

It is hard to say just when a thought turns into a cartoon. In writing or speaking, we all use phrases that lend themselves to visual images. Where you might say that a politician is in trouble up to his neck, a drawing might show him as a plumber in a flooded basement or a boy at the dike with his chin just above the water line. On one occasion when a public figure obviously was not telling the truth, I did a sketch of him speaking, with a tongue that was shaped exactly like a table fork. These are pretty simple examples, but they may provide some clue to how concepts develop into drawings.

Caricature itself is sometimes cited as being unfair because it plays on physical characteristics. But like any form of satire, caricature employs exaggeration -- clearly recognized as such.

http://www.polisource.com/images/cartoons_redscare/