Yesterday, I was walking from the British Library to a lovely, affordable, kind of “greasy spoon. (I passed Judd Books …And I Didn’t Buy Anything. Whoop!)
On the corner of Euston Road and Judd Street I saw two workmen beginning to put up two huge (size of the whole windows) posters on the Pret windows. When I came back, they were almost done. One was pink, and the other was, I think, green. (I can check on Friday, perhaps, if I have time).
And then as I was trying to cross Euston road, I saw that someone had done a good job of tearing off the “Marxism, 2024 or five” conference poster that some Trots had put up.(1)
Anyway, the contrast between socially sanctioned and unsanctioned leapt out at me. It made me think about how there is limitless – it seems – money and talent for telling individuals what they can consume and what it will mean for them, about them, to themselves, to others. And there is an acceptance of that form of propaganda, and we’re fish swimming in it.
But if you with a much smaller budget, try to propose that we need to look at the water that we’re in and the bowk that we’re in and think about whether it’s healthy or in any sense sustainable, the poster (deliberate ambiguity there) will literally get torn to pieces.
This is unsurprising, and most people, I think, internalize this (without necessarily articulating it) by them time they’re about, I don’t know, fourteen? Twelve? I managed to skip those modules and not read those memos. So it goes.
Update on Sunday Jan 12th. Yep, got the photos.
Here’s the peeling poster
And here are the two Pret billboards/whatever you want to call them.
Footnotes
(1) As Billy Bragg’s elegiac “The Home Front” puts it – . “Mother sees but does not read the peeling posters and can’t believe that there’s a world to be won.”
marchudson.net 
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