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In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance
There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.
Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.
(Photo: Flickr/star5112)
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has deplored comparisons of President Obama's health care plan logo with Third Reich insignia:
Agreed. But behind the cynical distortion, there's the disturbing fact that strong political graphics are more closely associated with dictatorial regimes than with democracy. That doesn't mean that America has cloned European totalitarian design directly; it does suggest that both New Deal and fascist symbols drew on a common Western modernist heritage. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), with its corporatist controls on American life, was criticized by the Left as well as by many business interests. Its logo does not seem to have been influenced by the Nazis. Its designer was no activist hothead but a respected advertising man, George Coiner of N. W. Ayer & Son, celebrated even now for introducing great artists and photographers into American commercial publicity. He even designed the font.
credit: Wikimedia Commons
Still, this poster, with its grasping statist talons and message of subordination to a national goal, has disturbing overtones to the post-World War Two mind, and the NRA was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and it is even now a prime target of the New Deal's conservative and libertarian critics.
I asked my friend Steven Heller, author of a recent book on art and dictatorship, Iron Fists, about the New Deal. He replied in an e-mail that it was
This heritage might be affecting, subliminally, the reception of the Obama health care logo. And there's another issue that has nothing to do with twentieth century tyrants. It's the staff with two coiled snakes. These (as Louis N. Magner wrote in A History of Medicine) represent not the one-serpent, wingless staff of Asclepius, the healer, but "the magic wand of Mercury, the messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and merchants."
Asclepius, credit: Nina Aldin Thune, via Wikipedia Commons; Merury, credit: Wikimedia Commons
So why not remove the disputed logo from the medical plan and recycle it for the financial ER of the Troubled Asset Relief Program?
StevenHeller interviewed the designer of the original Obama logo immediately after the election, and his blog recently reviewed some 1970s predecessors of the design, not remotely fascist but as reassuringly all-American as Ohio housing developments and California cheese. For more on design, ethics, and public life, see my conversation with Steven Heller in Print Magaine.
Top Photo Credit: Simon Wiesenthal Center release
Results tagged “fascism”
In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance"extreme. . . . That's who we are as human beings. We do shake hands. We do hug each other. We do kiss our friends on the cheek. If we let go of all that, then what do we have left? We're just walking by each other as strangers."Philadelphians' concerns on such questions have deep historic roots. Handshaking was once a common form of greeting in Europe, then displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by hat doffing and bowing, only to re-emerge as an allegedly English innovation. But it was the Quakers, first settlers of Philadelphia, whose founder George Fox promoted the gesture as a symbol of the equality of believers -- at a time when authorities considered refusing to doff a hat to magistrates something between heresy and treason. Philadelphia even has a handshake historian with a classics Ph.D.She still shakes hands, kisses cheeks, and refuses to use hand sanitizer, even though Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where her husband is the rabbi, recently installed dispensers after a member made the request.
There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.
Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.
(Photo: Flickr/star5112)
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has deplored comparisons of President Obama's health care plan logo with Third Reich insignia:
"It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the President's health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"Americans have every right to be critical of the President's health care plan but we demean ourselves and everything that America stands for when we compare either Democrats or Republicans to the Nazi Third Reich. Some of us may be too liberal and others too conservative, but none of us are Nazis," Rabbi Hier concluded.
Agreed. But behind the cynical distortion, there's the disturbing fact that strong political graphics are more closely associated with dictatorial regimes than with democracy. That doesn't mean that America has cloned European totalitarian design directly; it does suggest that both New Deal and fascist symbols drew on a common Western modernist heritage. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), with its corporatist controls on American life, was criticized by the Left as well as by many business interests. Its logo does not seem to have been influenced by the Nazis. Its designer was no activist hothead but a respected advertising man, George Coiner of N. W. Ayer & Son, celebrated even now for introducing great artists and photographers into American commercial publicity. He even designed the font.credit: Wikimedia Commons
Still, this poster, with its grasping statist talons and message of subordination to a national goal, has disturbing overtones to the post-World War Two mind, and the NRA was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and it is even now a prime target of the New Deal's conservative and libertarian critics.
I asked my friend Steven Heller, author of a recent book on art and dictatorship, Iron Fists, about the New Deal. He replied in an e-mail that it was
...certainly rooted in similar aesthetics to the fascists and nazis - strong logos, initials, posters galore. But it was our fascism, which means it was democracy at work.No place reflects this better than the main chamber of the Supreme Court itself. Cass Gilbert, the architect, considered Mussolini a great man. The historian Michael G. Kammen has described their mutual admiration society. Gilbert met personally with the Duce to assure the finest possible columns for the main chamber, according to an article in the 1976 Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook:
Architecturally the U.S. built its early identity on Greece and on Roman monumentalism. Well, that was not dissimilar from the neo-classicism of the Fascists.
As for the marble in the Courtroom itself, Gilbert felt that only the ivory buff and goldenReturning to the Obama health plan logo, the problem isn't authoritarian classicism. It's the adaptation of campaign brand identity to a program intended to cross lines of party and ideology. The dictatorships--communist as well as fascist--did have the habit of sharing symbols among agencies. The Nazis published color illustrated books of official logos as guidelines. The party secretary Achille Starace wrote a Vademecum of Fascist Style. In the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle collectively was such a versatile and ubiquitous theme that the Russian airline Aeroflot is still using it.
marble from the Montarrenti quarries near Siena, Italy, would be beautiful enough for this room. So intent was he upon procuring the best quality marble that in May 1933, he met with Premier Mussolini in Rome to ask his assistance in guaranteeing that the Siena quarries sent nothing inferior to the official sample marble that he had selected and specified for use in the Supreme Courtroom.
This heritage might be affecting, subliminally, the reception of the Obama health care logo. And there's another issue that has nothing to do with twentieth century tyrants. It's the staff with two coiled snakes. These (as Louis N. Magner wrote in A History of Medicine) represent not the one-serpent, wingless staff of Asclepius, the healer, but "the magic wand of Mercury, the messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and merchants."
Asclepius, credit: Nina Aldin Thune, via Wikipedia Commons; Merury, credit: Wikimedia Commons
So why not remove the disputed logo from the medical plan and recycle it for the financial ER of the Troubled Asset Relief Program?
StevenHeller interviewed the designer of the original Obama logo immediately after the election, and his blog recently reviewed some 1970s predecessors of the design, not remotely fascist but as reassuringly all-American as Ohio housing developments and California cheese. For more on design, ethics, and public life, see my conversation with Steven Heller in Print Magaine.
Top Photo Credit: Simon Wiesenthal Center release
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Edward Tenner
