Great Graphics!

A little tired of bumper stickers with hackneyed phrases like, "You can have my gun when you take it from my cold, dead fingers" and "Fear the government that fears your guns"? Okay, there's newer ones that work a bit better, like, "Dictators prefer unarmed peasants."

Bumper stickers bother me a bit; it is rare for a single phrase to actually capture the complexity and subtlety of important ideas. At best, bumper stickers convey an emotion, but often they use humor to sell an oversimplified idea. You may recall the bumper sticker "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam." It was cute, it was short--and it wasn't very accurate. The situations were actually quite different.

Over at this website, someone has put together some really astonishingly well produced posters that use a few more words than your average bumper sticker, and some carefully composed photographs--and the net effect is both thought provoking and emotionally powerful.

















I am especially impressed with this subtle touch--the tattoo on the man's arm. I used to get my ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins on Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica from a woman with an Auschwitz number tattooed on her arm, so there's a powerful emotional resonance for me in seeing this detail. The real thing was smaller and less artistic than this, but it would have been hard to recognize in a poster, so I accept it as artistic license.

The real thing, however, when I took economics in college many years later, started a chain of thought. We serial number expensive capital goods. The woman behind the counter was fortunate that her productive value as a "capital good" exceeded her "scrap value" or the Nazis would have "parted her out" for her fillings, her hair, and her skin, just like we do with cars that have reached the end of their useful life. This is the reason for the Second Amendment--to make sure that governments never reach the point where they can treat human beings like machines, to use and destroy as convenient.