From The Daily Telegraph:
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi both met bloody ends as the West and Western-backed rebels took on their brutal regimes.
Their deaths, together with Saturday’s demise of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, showed that 2011 has not been a good year to be a despot.
The year of good over evil began in January when the Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to step down after 23 years in power. His ousting set off a chain of events that would later become known as the “Arab Spring”, in which dictator after dictator was challenged by his own people.
In Egypt, protests led to the overthrow and arrest of President Hosni Mubarak.
And in the middle of the year came the downfall that everybody was waiting for: the death of bin Laden.
Obviously, it’s hyperbolic to label 2011 the year that good triumphed over evil. Things are still pretty bad in Egypt, Tunisia, Afghanistan, North Korea, and elsewhere. But it’s interesting that this year marked the demise or downfall of many corrupt and/or evil political leaders as well as widespread protests against corporate wrongdoing.
I don’t really have anything deep to say about the coincidence, except that I feel certain that “people got fed up with assholes, did something about it” is going to be a theme of much year-end commentary and prognostication about the upcoming decade.
"Not only is America divided between two opposing principles, but a great many individuals are of those two minds at once: progressive on some matters, conservative on others — with all sorts of variations. They are called variously independents, moderates, or the center. They are mostly the population that elections depend on. They have not one fundamental principle, but are split between two. What makes one of these ascendant in the individual brain is the language one hears most. That is why the domination of public discourse is so important. It is why advertising in the media is important, why talk radio and tv and social media matter. Elections are what focus attention on public discourse. That is why the next step for the Occupy Movement should be to occupy elections. The way to begin any discussion should be: Do you care about your fellow citizens? If so, do you take responsibility to act on that care?"
— George Lakoff (via azspot)
(via azspot)
Back in the early 80s, approaching the end of Vendetta’s epic 38-part cycle, Moore was struggling to think of another “V” word with which to title a closing chapter. He’d already used Victims, Vaudeville and Vengeance; the Villain, the Voice, the Vanishing; even Vicissitude and Verwirrung (the German word for confusion). “I was getting pretty desperate,” he says.
He eventually settled on Vox populi. “Voice of the people. And I think that if the mask stands for anything, in the current context, that is what it stands for. This is the people. That mysterious entity that is evoked so often – this is the people.”
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I think Moore nails it when he discusses the Occupy movement’s use of the Guy Fawkes mask as a means of creating spectacle more than anything else. Making fun of the protesters for wearing the ‘face’ of a theocratic terrorist sort of misses the point.
There are more interesting points to make about the mask: how collectivity and anonymity have become a sort of refuge and protest against the corporatization of identity (e.g. social media); how the mask ironically reveals the face of the ‘average’ OWS protester as white and male; the resemblance of the Fawkes mask to commedia dell’arte masks in that it can be “pleasant, breezy, or more sinister”, depending on the context; the interesting choice of leftist protesters to wear these masks rather than the bandanas and hoodies popular among anarchists in the ’90s—perhaps we always find a face more sympathetic, even if it’s not a real one; etc.
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Protesters at Occupy Hong Kong
Camped out at Occupy London
Zuccotti Park, New York, 10 October 2011 (Andrew Burton/Associated Press)
Shepherd Fairey “Occupy Hope”
