Thursday, September 3, 2020

Another self-defeating logo from the Democrats

Remember Hillary Clinton's unintentionally prophetic logo from 2016?

The design immediately called to mind the toppling of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Later, on September 11, 2016, Clinton would physically fall down at a 9/11 memorial service, and in the early hours of the other 9/11 -- 9 November -- Donald J. Trump would be announced the winner of the election.

Red and blue symbolize the right and the left, respectively, in U.S. politics, and Clinton's logo inexplicably showed a red arrow pointing to the right, slashing through two blue towers. The two towers represent the two mainstream parties (one a bit to the right of the other, but both basically "blue" or leftist), and the red arrow is Trump.

This is just one of several examples of self-defeating symbolism used by the Clinton campaign in 2016. Another was the incredibly stupid choice to adopt a playing-card metaphor (the "woman card") in a fight against someone named Trump.

Whoever designs these logos appears to have learned nothing. Here's the logo for this year's Democratic National Convention.

You may have heard that the semi-legendary creatures known as white supremacists supposedly use the number 88 as one of their symbols -- said to represent "Heil Hitler" because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. A longer version is 1488, with 14 representing some 14-word slogan these baddies are supposed to use. (If, in the spirit of 88, we replace letters with numbers, D.J. = 4 + 10 = 14, and Trump = 20 + 18 + 21 + 13 + 16 = 88, so the president's very name proves he's Literally Hitler.)

Where am I going with this? Well, the 20th letter of the alphabet is T -- so D20 = DT = Donald Trump.

Just as in 2016, the logo features an arrow pointing to the right, though this time they at least had the sense to make it blue rather than red. What's the arrow pointing to? A red two and a blue zero -- two terms for red Trump, and zero for blue Biden.

6 comments:

Sean G. said...

Hillary logo also looked like a hospital road sign and her Twitter account constantly tweeted "imagine a President Donald Trump..." where you had to click a link to presumably find out why that was a bad thing—meanwhile no one clicked and instead pictured a President Trump in the Oval Office.

https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/78115432/CFG-Hillary-Hospital-Logo

Bruce Charlton said...

It took me a while to recognise the white shape in the 0 of the D20 logo - at first I thought it was a cartoon silhouette of Trump, with a great sweep of hair. Or else his profile facing left and emerging from a flowerpot. Only later it came into focus as 48 of the states detached from the continent... Don't know what the Dems have against the other two...

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The version I show here has the silhouette of Wisconsin, but they’ve also used a version with the 48 contiguous states.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Wm - Oh, it's Wisconsin - my mistake. I suppose the locals would recognise it, so fair enough.

When you get rubbish graphics, at what was almost certainly immense cost - it reminds me of the evil wrongness of committees and voting; since the choice was almost certainly made by some kind of committee vote.

The problem is general to all public art and architecture - the quality can be no better than the wisdom of a (usually unexamined) mathematical process administered by bureaucrats.

David Earle said...

I've also seen people make the connection that this just looks like "Death To America"

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Or, in this case, Death to Wisconsin!

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