Archive for Myth and Symbol
Hillary Clinton as Annie Oakley?
One of the many interesting aspects of American politics are the ways popular cultural narratives are manifested, especially as deliberate campaign constructions.
This post explores the current brouhaha over Barack Obama’s alleged “elitist” remarks through the lens of the cowboy cultural narrative, both as campaign rhetoric and visual media representation.
In The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, R.W.B. Lewis coined the term “American Adam” in reference to the cowboy and noted, “It is the birth of an archetypal, still finely individualized character, which [D.H.] Lawrence identifies as ‘the essential American soul…an isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man’” (104). Lewis claimed that the archetype – the American Adam – was “birth[ed] on American soil” and in the American imagination the late nineteenth/turn of the century cowboy came to be perceived as a uniquely American creation. Hence, the mythological construction of the cowboy, built on the foundation of the medieval English knight, was a crucial element in the creation of nationalist sentiment in post-Civil War America. (
The Politics of Gotham
While researching examples for my last post, Postmodern Presidential Branding, I stumbled across some typesetting blogs discussing the Obama campaign’s font, or typeset; Gotham.
So I was naturally interested in the typography as a visual political narrative. What does Obama’s choice of Gotham say about his campaign, about his political philosophy? I imagine that Obama had nothing personally to do with choosing the font but his design team saw Gotham perhaps as a reflection of the candidate. Here’s what Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, the designers of Gotham have to say;