HEREWITH, THE SECOND and last part of our recent visit to the Fremont Solstice Parade and street fair. Today, some of the more overtly “political” statements made there.
Despite this “wall of shame” and other anti-right-wing displays, the Bush-Cheny ’04 campaign bravely staffed a booth at the street fair.
The megaphone guy is calling for John Kerry to show some backbone during the current campaign.
This Statue of Liberty balloon has just been re-inflated, to thunderous crowd applause, after having been deliberately run over by a cardboard replica of a U.S. Army tank.
I’m not sure what this sad, chained penis is meant to represent. The stripped and abused Iraqi prisoners? U.S. society’s repression of Eros? Seattle’s moratorium on new strip clubs? “Alternative” culture’s sexist stereotype of the phallus as the “root” of all evil?
In any other era, a line of belly dancers probably wouldn’t seem all that “political.” This year, it’s a statement. Yes, there are positive cultural contributions from the Arab world; female-empowering contributions, even.
Every year, the parade includes at least one entry based on a big local-news story. This time, it was the big move into the big, beautiful new Seattle library (which, I’ve now decided, is an airport terminal for voyages of the mind). The paucity of objects on the carts these folks are pushing might represent the library’s slashed operations budgets.
You might not think of the Oompa-Loompas from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as political, but I do.
Dahl was one of the wisest and most subversive authors of “children’s” literature. I’ve always thought Charlie was a prescient parable/parody of conservative economics. Willy Wonka, you might recall, is a ruthless capitalist who’s fired his unworthy local workforce, then reopened for business with a crew of happily servile, low-wage immigrants.
Indeed, in the 1964 first edition, the Oompa-Loompas were (in the words of Dahl biographer Jeremy Treglown) “a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong–bong tree.'”
Dahl re-created them as white fantasy creatures for the 1971 Willy Wonka movie and subsequent reissues of the book.
The end of the parade didn’t mean the end of the statements. The art-car display included this minivan decorated by Calif. conceptual artist Emily Duffy. Recalling our recent discussion about the limits of “positive attitudes,” we can ponder what Duffy believes are the deleterious effects of fashion advertising.
Duffy believes the fashion biz thrives parasitically, by bullying women into hating themselves and their bodies. But the industry’s ads, magazines, and in-store displays are exclusively filled with overt “positivity.” In Fashionland, everyone’s happy, confident, full of pep and/or attitude.
But it’s a happy fantasy land populated only by those deemed by the industry’s gatekeepers to meet one ideal of perfection or another.
