"Beneath the paving stones, the beach!" - Paris, May 1968
Due to the parliamentary elections that were held yesterday (and ended up a total disaster for people with brains), I've been exposed to a a lot of words lately. Most of them quite light. But hey, something that is empty usually lacks weight.
It's been like a solid month of walking around the city and being SURROUNDED by all kinds of slogans and neatly compressed promises of a better tomorrow. And it's all fine and dandy with me, free speech, free election, democracy and all that, but man, those slogans NEVER strike me as nothing more than boring cliches. "Work". Right. "Justice". Yeah. "Prosperity". Woohoo. "Equality". Suits me.
Add a picture of some git smiling when there's no reason to, and you've got a political message as striking as your average commercial advertisement. I honestly don't think people make their voting decisions based on some lousy ad, and those who do deserve their faulty product.
These mindless pieces of mendacity are plastered all over the streets, tv screens, newspapers, busstops, windows, all in the name of profit. At the same time a single statement on a wall, able to convey and evoke a wide range of thoughts, feelings, ideas and opinions, is considered a criminal act and erased from the public eye.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a sucker for a good situationist slogan. The rhetoric of the Situationist International and all the groups associated with or influenced by them is considered obscure jargon by some, but a single writing on the wall can tell me a lot more about life and politics and society than any platform full of empty words.
Less is more. One probably can't base a blueprint for economic and social order on a single batch of words, but maybe those words are supposed to change things on a mental and individual level. After that, let's take a look at that constitution...
A King Mob graffiti, painted along a half-mile section of the wall beside the railway commuter route between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park stations in west London. Mid-70s.
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