#political-symbolism

#political-symbolism

Under Donald Trump, the nation's capital is getting a face-lift. The president has torn down the White House's decades-old East Wing to make room for a massive ballroom that could end up costing taxpayers $1 billion or more. He ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to be painted blue. He covered the Oval Office with golden tchotchkes, redid the Lincoln bathroom in marble, paved the Kennedy-era Rose Garden into a patio, and resurfaced a White House walkway with black granite sourced from Africa and carved in Italy (so much for America First).

“I am looking for something very specific,” Zayan, the founder of the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, told me. I had spotted him standing near a large abstract painting saying something about lettuce to a booth attendant. Zayan was searching for food. Art and food, to be precise - works that examine their relationship, shared humanity, social tensions - as he curates the second edition of the NAFAS Festival in Tokyo this September. In Arabic, nafas means breath or a sustaining force, and captures the nurturing energy that goes into cooking.

In 2018, Melania Trump traveled to several African countries including Kenya and Egypt to smooth things over after her husband's remarks the previous year. It was rumored that Donald Trump considered them to be in a shithole region. During her visit, the First Lady faced heavy criticism while on safari for wearing a pith helmet, an item inextricably linked to the stereotypical image of an African traveler, but also reminiscent of the clothing worn by European explorers and colonial soldiers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Emerging Liberty dime, created for the U.S. Semiquincentennial, shows a woman who personifies Liberty on the heads side; on the tails side, there's a bald eagle holding arrows in its talons for war, but it's missing olive branches in its other talons for peace.

As a political statement, it is very much A Deliberate Choice and a sign that Spencer is plugged into the taste of the high street and younger voters. A brief moment in popular culture that informs a political campaign? We've been here before. Someone on Kamala Harris's campaign team adopted the Brat aesthetic on social media and she caught the attention of the younger voter by successfully meme-ing a colour into a political symbol.

Sometimes the spark comes from a single moment - as it did when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" triggered a broadcast reckoning. Other times, it arrives through imagery and intent, from Jennifer Lopez's 2020 caged children staging that critiqued U.S. immigration policies to children at the U.S.-Mexico border to Kendrick Lamar's carefully layered Black storytelling, delivered as Donald Trump watched from his seat inside the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.

Most days, I pass through a cool, shaded colonnade my son describes as "the tunnel." A promise to swing by can sometimes convince him to leave the playground, and I plan my own routes around its dependable roof, avoiding the heat and rain that seem to get more extreme as the city turns tropical. There's a string of lights underneath, like the ones over pleasant outdoor markets, which makes it easier to rifle through my purse for my keys or phone in the evenings.

Last week, a Portland protestor named Seth Todd showed up at the ICE protests in the Oregon city dressed up in an inflatable frog costume. Footage of armed soldiers backing up as the protester confidently walked toward them went viral on social media, along with a video of an agent spraying pepper spray into the costume's air filter.

In Indonesia, it was hung outside homes, on motorbikes, cars and trucks, in a sign of discontent with the government that boiled over into deadly protests railing against lavish perks enjoyed by politicians. In Nepal, it was draped on the golden gates of the palace that houses parliament, as young people toppled their government. In the Philippines, it was raised at rallies by protesters furious at alleged government corruption.

The crosses of St George are retailing for about 2.36 on Temu, depending on whether you want them car-window sized, or big enough to write the words GET OFF MY LAND in the white spaces. Keir Starmer has declared that he is a supporter of flags. Alas, at the time of writing the prime minister's position on other items of tactile fabric remains unclear.

T hroughout the culture war flareups of the last fifteen years or so, liberals and conservatives have periodically traded fire over matters that are fundamentally symbolic and often negligible to meaningless at the level of actual political substance. In their own different (and often quite cynical) ways, both factions have been adept at converting cultural issues into the language of political grievance and, in turn, into supposed forms of political engagement-and even activism-that have often amounted to little more than new kinds of shopping

The Bundestag's administration has ordered deputies to immediately remove rainbow flags displayed in and around their parliamentary offices, stating that displaying flags is "fundamentally prohibited, regardless of their symbolism."