The commodification of dissatisfaction...

I'm a sucker for sticker campaigns... did one myself awhile back and felt good to be ever-so-clever at almost acceptable civil disobedience and culture crime agit-prop.
I was a big fan of Lydia Eccles' "Unabomber for President" campaign from 1996 and still see the decals around the People's Republic of Cambridge... especially the one that reads, "The Situation is Under Control"
UnaPackNYC
Crash the Parties


While in Las Vegas for a conference a few years ago we saw the "Indecline" decals plastered all over a transit bus kiosk, the type where bums lie down to sleep when they are not bum-fighting for booze...
A month later the same devilish business man avec brief case stickers were seen in Central Square Cambridge. Egads! When memes attack! Ideas of course are like viruses, the good and bad spread from mind to mind...
InDecline

I was also on the look out for the avant garde versions and may have happened upon one when I started to see around Harvard Square decals with a likeness of Sir Alec Guinness (Yum! Guinness!) as Obi Wan Kenobi and above that the word TOTAL. Very odd, yet somehow attractive on a reptillian brain level. Was it a band? A Situationalist detournement?
A college radio show? Or something much worse... actual crass commercialism disguised as underground weirdness? Total cereal? Total Petrol?


Fast forward and we are driving to a DJ gig in the South End to benefit an animal rescue group being held in kahoots with the local belly dancing cult. We are near Lechmere and see an Anarchy symbol decal on a nice shiny BMW, the kind a "YUPpie" might drive in a counter-revolutionary act of conspicuous consumption... WTF? Oh great, so that is how kids protest, they put one of these Anarchy symbol decals! on the BMW their affluenza afflicted parents bought them to go to college in. Very nice. A brick through the windshield would have made a much better statement.

It is akin to the irony in the Don Henley song "The Boys of Summer" that goes... 'I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac'.

NEXT!

So I tuned into the Pats vs. Dolphins game (NFL on CBS) and in the montage segue between the commercial and the actual game was the audio from the Marilyn Manson song, "The Beautiful People", which again must be the height of irony and greed. I can only imagine MM and Dita von Teese watching the pigskin antics on the gridiron and laugh as the music plays while cheerleaders jump around and some guy parachutes into the stadium... If only the dumb jocks who worship at the church of pain knew the lyrics...
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/marilynmanson/thebeautifulpeople.html
Blame the record company and feel better by screaming "All Hail Amerika!"
It was Guy Debord who felt part of the Society of the Spectacle included "paltry contests" such as sports and politics as distractions for the masses.