Anti-Capitalist Iconography in the Public Sphere

In Irving Goffman's book Interaction Ritual, he describes one scene that played out in a mental hospital while he was conducting his own personal blend of psychology and sociology. One patient grew tired of the restrictions placed on his personal actions by a member of the nursing staff. When he could no longer tolerate the boundaries forced upon him, and as the nurse walked away after some recrimination, he pulled down his pants with a flourish, defecated on the waxed linoleum floor, scooped up a handful of his own excrement, and in the style of a great Yankee pitcher, wound up his arm and gave a great heave-ho, spraying the back of the white uniform with his feces. Goffman describes the gesture as having all the eloquence (though exactly the opposite effect) of an Elizabethan courtier tossing his velvet cape over a puddle as a lady steps from the curb, so as to prevent her slipper from being sullied by the mud.

Speaking of mud, while scrounging around in the overgrown wetlands of Harbor Regional Park, I came across the poster shown in the top image, and in detail in the images below. Away from the hiking trails are small clearings in the bush, accessible only by scampering over and under the horizontal beams of Cottonwood that choke out the indigenous growth. Mixed in with the mud and detritus that floats in in the rainy season, are condom wrappers and fast food napkins left behind by the men who meet for sexual encounters. Also brought into the mix are items of soiled clothing, and a selection pornographic printed material, there to signify that the visitor has entered a sexual zone (and to eroticize the social space). Considering the paraphilias and fetishes of men who frequent the park, the above poster was not incongruous for its urinating hippie or its capitalist pig, but it was obvious from the poster's age, frame, and iconography that (like the Sears catalog of old) its original function was not to titillate.

Like Katherine and her wheel, or Saint Sebastian and his arrows, the details in the image sign for a capitalist antidisestablishmentarianism; the stone columns and the brass bank signage for the now defunct Security Pacific Bank, the newspaper rack with the Christian Science Monitor, and the cigar-chomping suit with the Wall Street Journal all sign for the capitalist institutions of the late '60's. In the forty or so years from the invention of the Monopoly board to the collage of this photographic image, the cartoon of the banker hasn't changed much at all! Compared to today, this sort of iconography seems as dated as a Medieval painting of a Florentine banker. Imagine the world when this poster was made, and banks were regulated and the rich had to pay 75% of their income in taxes.

In contrast to the bloated lumbering banker, we have the fit and smiling youth, using his body fluids for an institutional critique. In the era this image was made I remember being told that in Communist countries, children were indoctrinated in the schools, and brainwashed to turn in their own parents when they violated the restrictions of the communist state. Though the communists may have lost the cold war, indoctrination has carried the day, and anti-drug use programs teach children to turn in their parents if they find a joint in Dad's sock drawer. Back then, cops were pigs; now the policeman is your friend and your family is suspect.

We convince ourselves that we are a more tolerant and humane society, but in the forty years since this poster was made, we've thrown the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets, caged our food animals in tiny pens, knee deep in their own feces, we spend less per capita on higher education, public schools are more segregated, we have stopped protesting wars of choice that kill inordinate numbers of civilians, and we send many more people to prison--not for rehabilitation--but for retribution. Some would argue that we're more tolerant of sexual difference, but I suspect that if sex wasn't such an effective engine of consumer spending, we'd still have sodomy laws on the books.

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