"The Charmin corporate Twitter account got in on it with a surprisingly trenchant commentary on the disposability of American currency."

That's the way Slate — displaying the winners of its design-a-$1-trillion-coin contest — refers to the symbolism here:



"Surprisingly trenchant commentary." Come on! I like delicate toilet paper, but why the delicacy talking about toilet paper? What, exactly, is the commentary? I assumed it was: American currency is something you may as well wipe your ass with. But then I thought the idea was: Uh, oh, we just pooped ourselves.

Maybe you're wracking your brain for a way to use the old "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" slogan, but that was the 1960s. The current slogans — if I am to believe the Charmin Wikipedia page — are: "Enjoy the Charmin experience" and "Enjoy The Go." Enjoy the go?! Put that on the coin. Hell, make that the national motto. "In God We Trust" is getting old. It's divisive. And, frankly, it's unfair to God.

"Enjoy the Go"... I looked it up to see how they were playing this slogan in the commercials:



The relief. The calm. The clean. The comfort.

See? That's the way you'll feel after that $1-trillion is deposited in the toilet bank. This image evokes Sigmund Freud:

Freud suggested that children in the anal stage of development regard the release of their feces as a gift to the parent — a gift that can be given or withheld. Children will release the feces if given sufficient love and withhold them if not. In Freudian thought, fecal matter becomes a type of currency in the parent-child relationship, which can be withheld or dispensed, thus giving the child a sense of control. The word currency is appropriate in this context; Freud assumed that the human unconscious makes a symbolic equation between feces and money. In a 1911 paper on dreams in folklore, he noted that according to ancient Eastern mythology, “gold is the excrement of hell” (Freud & Oppenheim, 1911/1958, p. 157).

Hell!

(I'm riffing on the toilet paper topic topic Meade introduced late last night. That was Meade — did you notice? — not me.)

"Obama Polishes His 'Regular Guy' Image With Beer."

NPR chooses a good Saturday to polish Obama's image with a puff piece about the President and beer. 

Polls show President Obama has been winning that likeability contest. And he's been raising a lot of frosty mugs on the campaign trail, hoping to press his advantage over the teetotaling Mitt Romney.

The strategy could come to a head in the swing state of Colorado.

As President Obama was holding an outdoor campaign rally in Golden this past week, the signature smell of beer brewing washed over the audience, a reminder of the nearby Coors brewery.

Did anything else happen this past week? Anything relevant to the election? I mean, more relevant that that Obama drinks beer and the White House has its own homebrew with "a secret recipe [that] was just declassified with a video on the White House website."

The White House beer is flavored with honey from the first lady's beehive....

Speaking of teetotaling Mitt Romney, the beehive is an important symbol to Mormons (and Masons):

Freemasons also used the bee and beehive as symbols of cooperative work, and the images are found in early American art and literature. "Many of the founding fathers were Masons, and America had become the new "promised land" of opportunity," says Staker. Many early Mormons were also Masons, including Joseph Smith.

The Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon tells the story of the Jaredites, a tribe that lived at the time of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament. According to the Book of Mormon, the Jaredites made a miraculous 344-day voyage across the ocean to North America. They brought with them the "deseret" which means "honey bee" in the language of the Book of Mormon.

When Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints arrived in Salt Lake Valley in July of 1847, Young chose the name "Deseret" for their new home, and the beehive as its emblem, symbolizing the kind of cooperative work that would be required to make the desert bloom....

Mark Twain commented on the Utah beehive symbol in his book on the 1860s American West, Roughing It, "The Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious and it fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a Golden Beehive, with all the bees at work."

"He is not Aseem but he is a storm, he is the nation's another Gandhi."

A protest chant, chanted in Mumbai, over the arrest of the cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, charged with sedition.

In one of his cartoons the customary three lions in India's national emblem are replaced with three wolves, their teeth dripping blood, with the message "Long live corruption" written underneath.

Another cartoon depicts the Indian parliament as a giant toilet bowl.

Government officials say that while they are in favour of free speech, there is a thin line between that and insulting national symbols....

"A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sitting there...."

An old song, with new currency after the GOP convention. Here are the lyrics to "A House Is Not a Home," if you'd like to work on an election 2012 parody. And, by the way, Althouse is not a home.

IN THE COMMENTS: I was surprised to read Tyrone Slothrop's comment:

Tell me, Althouse, are you able to manipulate world events in order to provide fodder for your blog? Did Hal David pass away just to give you a segue to this post?

I didn't know Hal David had died the day this post went up. He was 91. I and maybe you thought: Burt Bachrach. But Bachrach wrote the music. "A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sitting there" and many other memorable lyrics were written by Hal David.

I intended a comical reference to the Clint Eastwood incident, not anything mournful about an empty chair symbolizing death.

Remember the "Field Of Empty Chairs"?

"I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much."

"And there weren’t a lot of options — an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense."

The story of @.

"An artist erased the halo over the late Joe Paterno on a mural in State College, Pennsylvania..."

"The artist Michael Pilato had put a halo over Paterno’s image after the coach’s death in January...."

Pilato added a large blue ribbon on Paterno’s lapel symbolizing support for child abuse victims, a cause the artist said Paterno had endorsed.

“When I took the halo off of Joe, it was kind of saying that he’s a human being, put the blue ribbon on him as well, and that was talking about sexual abuse awareness,” Pilato told ABC News Radio.

Then there's the image of former university president Graham Spanier, which people are "throwing stuff at." Pilato's thinking of things like painting a blindfold on him, but "I have no idea right now, you know, I haven’t slept in days because of this whole thing."

Iconography is difficult. Blindfold? But Lady Justice wears a blindfold.

The blindfold represents objectivity, in that justice is or should be meted out objectively, without fear or favour, regardless of identity, money, power, or weakness; blind justice and impartiality.

So get some more sleep, Mr. Pilato. Maybe paint his hands over his eyes, like the "see no evil" monkey. But no:

The three wise monkeys... sometimes called the three mystic apes, are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". ..

The source that popularized this pictorial maxim is a 17th century carving over a door of the famous Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. The carvings at Toshogu Shrine were carved by Hidari Jingoro, and believed to have incorporated Confucius’s Code of Conduct, using the monkey as a way to depict man’s life cycle....

In Chinese, a similar phrase exists in the Analects of Confucius from 2nd to 4th century B.C.: "Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety"....

Though the teaching had nothing to do with monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a simple play on words. The saying in Japanese is "mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru" (見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる, literally "don't see, don't hear, don't speak". However, -zaru, an archaic negative verb conjugation, is pronounced the same as zaru, the vocalized form of saru (猿?), "monkey", so the saying can also be interpreted as the names of three monkeys.

"Obama's Lawyer Chokes Again."

Classic Drudge.



The main link goes here, for a discussion of the argument in the Arizona immigration case, which we're already discussing here and here.

The picture of Obama's hand directly under Verrilli is a devious, devilish Drudge touch. "Economic Suicide Pact"... that goes to the viral video "If I Wanted America to Fail."

What does the extended hand above the Presidential-seal-emblazoned lectern mean? I'm seeing a drowning, swallowed up in the troubled waters of his presidency. Or perhaps a shrinking man, too tiny for the job? Or are you seeing a Hitler salute? That might have more to do with "If I Wanted America to Fail."

Anyway... Drudge being Drudge.

"It's Floyd the barber, not Floyd the beautician."

"Back off, all you beauticians, cosmetologists and stylists. The pole is our thing, just like how we used to fill our shops with girlie magazines."

"During the discussion about the 'propaganda of homosexuality' bill in the St. Petersburg legislature, a city councilor proposed banning the rainbow symbol."

"Russian bloggers started joking that St. Petersburg would next ban the rainbow from nature. I laughed, too, and continued to think that these measures are, above all, ridiculous."

But on Thursday, the day after the St. Petersburg bill was passed and just as Moscow legislators were promising to pass one of their own, my 13-year-old son, who attends a private school with a liberal reputation in Moscow, came home and told me he had removed his new earring after a teacher told him that wearing earrings means you’re gay and is therefore inappropriate.

"[S]he suddenly understood the meaning of the rule that the pillow must not touch the back of the bedstead."

"The pillow, she said, had always been a woman to her and the upright wooden back a man. Thus she wanted—by magic, we must interpolate—to keep the man and woman apart—that is, to separate her parents from each other, not to allow them to have sexual intercourse...."

If a pillow was a woman, then the shaking of the eiderdown till all the feathers were at the bottom and caused a swelling there had a sense as well. It meant making a woman pregnant; but she never failed to smooth away the pregnancy again, for she had for years been afraid that her parents' intercourse would result in another child and so present her with a competitor. On the other hand, if the big pillow was a woman, the mother, then the small top-pillow could only stand for the daughter. Why did this pillow have to be placed diamond-wise and her head precisely along its centre line? It was easy to recall to her that this diamond shape is the inscription scribbled on every wall to represent the open female genitals. If so, she herself was playing the man and replacing the male organ by her head....

Did you know Freud wrote about OCD? As did Locke, Johnson, Kierkegaard, and lots of others.

Do you have a good relationship with your pillows and bedposts?

"And if atheists could put a symbol in the museum, what would it be?"

"Perhaps an atom, Mr. Silverman suggested, 'because we’re all made out of atoms,' or maybe a depiction of a firefighter carrying a victim. 'It would be about helping,” he said. 'It would not be derogatory against any religion or anybody.'"

Or maybe a legal complaint, because they're always filing lawsuits like this.

The Seated Lynching Effigies of Madison, Wisconsin.

A couple days ago, we were talking about the way no one at the anti-Justice Prosser rally "seemed to be bothered by the symbolism of a large balloon representing Justice Prosser hanging in effigy with its neck tied to a lamppost." I linked to this comments thread — featuring our own Meade — over at the Isthmus.

Let's revisit that thread, where you can see that a man named Kenneth Burns is making a big deal out the fact that the Prosser dummy is in the seated position:

Ladies and gentlemen, the world's first seated hanging.

That brought in David Blaska (who is a regular blogger at the Isthmus):

Actually, not. Mary Suratt was given a chair to sit on and an umbrella held over her head before the trap was sprung and she was sent to eternity along with the male co-conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. A touching example of chivalry in a gentler age. But then, she and her co-conspirators did have a trial and were found guilty.

(Fascinating!) Burns returned:

I stand corrected! Nevertheless, seems to me a baseline requirement for a hanging in effigy is that it ought to look like a hanging, as opposed to a guy sitting and leaning against a post.

Hey! Fellow Madisonians! Is your memory so short that you don't remember the Great Spiderman Lynching Controversy of 1 month ago?

The sight of a life-size Spider-Man doll [known as Venom] hanged by its neck from a balcony of a Langdon Street home near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is prompting a stern response from school officials.

Students who live on Langdon Street said the doll that some believe represented a black man had been hanging for two or three days last week before it was taken down. But many said it never should have been put there at all.

You can see in the picture that the doll was seated.

"I see the visualization of imagery that looks powerfully, iconically of the imagery of a lynching," [said Damon Williams, vice provost for diversity]... "It's an incredibly serious and egregious thing that we do condemn at the highest levels, and we don't trivialize it"....

So does the seated position of an effigy eliminate the lynching symbolism? Apparently not! Let's get on the same page about what we can do with our giant blow-up dolls in public.



(Thanks to Chuck66 for connecting the Proszilla with the Venom.)

AND: Let's remember this lovely sign from a few months ago, originally featured in this post on February 16th:



ADDED: Here's video of the Prosser effigy ("Proszilla") getting blown up and tied to the lamppost:



Also, based on discussion and links in the comments, I don't think Mary Suratt was sitting on the chair as the noose was tied around her neck and the trap door sprung. She seems to have been seated before she was called upon to rise and accept her grisly fate.

"Why are Americans so angry about petrol prices?"

BBC tries to explain those strange Americans.

Americans use their cars more, so the pain is greater. They have, on average, a longer daily commute than all Europeans, except Hungarians and Romanians. Public transport is generally poor so many Americans have no alternative but to drive.

But there is also a symbolic significance about gas that goes to the heart of what America is.

It signifies mobility, freedom and personal liberty, says Dan Neil, motoring correspondent on the Wall Street Journal. "Anger is probably more tied up with a wider sense of decline and also a loss of privilege. Cheap gas has been one of the prerogatives of the American Empire so people have become accustomed to it in a way which is somehow associated with our ability to wield our will around the world. We're mad because we've spent a lot of money in the Middle East and made a lot of enemies and defended a lot of tyrants and still gas prices go up."

Europeans pay twice as much, and they don't get angry. Maybe that goes to the heart of what Europe is.

"Food is so complicated!"

"Who knows what judgments we make about people because of the way they are or seem to be about food?"

What's with powerful women and thick bumpers of bangs?

Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:



What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...



... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...



... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!



What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?

Today's Drudgedy... Drudge comedy.

Eyes... bucks... Not sure what Drudge is driving at here. Some strange coded message to Ohio? And why show the front and not the back of the dollar bill?

Cracks patched...

... in a Wisconsin parking lot.

Cindy McCain poses glamorously with duct tape over her mouth to symbolize...

... well, what is that supposed to symbolize? I get that she supports same-sex marriage, but what does that have to do with anybody forcibly silencing her? If you have something to say, lady, just say it and quit blaming others. Especially if you insist on blaming others in gorgeous photography with fabulous makeup and a gentle wind machine puffing out your silky white-blond hair.

"Palin is now where she is ... not because she has fought her way to the top of the national greasy pole."

Andrew Sullivan brings the phallic symbolism to his answer to the question why he hasn't "swooned over the chance of a female vice-president who didn't get there by marriage, like Clinton." Well, that's his (sexualized) paraphrase of what Ross Douthat asked about:

For months and months, all through Hillary Clinton's losing campaign for the Presidency, my colleague Andrew Sullivan insisted over and over again that his furious anti-Hillary partisanship was in fact a defense of authentic feminism, since Hillary's ascension to the White House would represent the worst sort of pre-feminist, second-hand success - a woman marrying her way into power, that is, rather than attaining it on her own. Well, now John McCain has picked as his running mate a woman who embodies all the post-feminist virtues Andrew insisted were absent in Hillary Clinton's ascent - she's risen from working-class obscurity to govern a state dominated by an old boys' network (where the other prominent female politician is a classic legacy pick), while successfully juggling motherhood and her career and never, ever, piggybacking on any of her husband's achievements.... [Y]ou'd think that Andrew would confine his attacks on Palin to critiquing her record and mocking her lack of experience, rather than, say, posting emails accusing her of being a bad mother for accepting the nomination, snickering over her children's names, and razzing her as a bimbo and a "trophy candidate."

In short, it looks sexist. Sullivan's answer is well-composed -- though that "greasy pole" sticks out:

Please. I do admire someone who's risen the way Palin has, and I've said lots of nice things about her. But let's be honest: Palin is now where she is - not as Alaska governor but as vice-presidential nominee - because an old white guy decided to play some identity politics, and felt he had to shake up his campaign, not because she has fought her way to the top of the national greasy pole. It's great that by a combination of a decrepit and degenerate political establishment in Alaska, and her own personality and tenacity, she has just become governor of Alaska. But McCain's choice of her - as is impossible to miss - is a cynical ploy to exploit Democratic divisions over gender. I mean: how many Republican vice-presidential picks have lauded Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro in their acceptance speech? It wasn't even subtle. I find this kind of attitude to be about condescension, not feminism, about tokenism, not post-gender meritocracy.

And, please, there is nothing sexist in being amused by the names of someone's kids; I found the Romney gaggle hilarious. She was a beauty queen, for Pete's sake. She has been presented to the nation like a trophy candidate. And some women do indeed find her running for vice-president with a four-month-old disabled child somewhat incongruous. These are the big leagues. These issues are worth airing.

My sense is that this pick is insulting to voters, especially women voters, and terribly condescending to Palin. It's as much about countering sexism as picking Clarence Thomas was about countering racism.

Is there also some place where Sullivan talks about the whether Obama had to climb the greasy pole or whether there was some "condescension" and "tokenism" there too? Surely, he can't believe that was all "post-[racial] meritocracy." And since Obama was propelled in part by revulsion against Hillary -- did Sullivan himself feel reflexive revulsion? -- there is some reason to view his rise to power to be about condescension, not feminism, about tokenism, not post-gender meritocracy.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage writes:

I really don’t get where Mr. Sullivan is coming from with all this greasy pole stuff.

Maybe he should hang with a better crowd.

All I know is the people I hang with keep their poles bright and shiny clean.

It’s really not so very hard.

ADDED: Yes, I know "greasy pole" is an established expression, not some concoction of Sullivan's.



Now, enough of those disapproving, patriarchal sneers.

"Why do we wear pins? Because our country is under attack!"

Sean Hannity raves. And everyone's talking about the fact that Barack Obama stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin. We're hot for our symbols and we love to talk about what they mean. (It's so much easier than talking about the substantive issues. Can you compare the health care plans of the candidates?)

And speaking of symbols: This Is Your Elephant on Drugs.