A Daily Caller columnist recently argued that the government should force food stamp recipients to buy low-grade food in drab packaging, in order to teach these soi-disant "poor people" a tough lesson about freedom and responsibility and taxation and so forth.
I seem to be suffering from outrage fatigue, because instead of fantasizing about the guillotine, I found myself pondering the logistics of setting official specifications for poor-quality, revenge-oriented food, and of creating a style guide for socially stigmatizing package design.
With these interesting issues in mind, I've taken a stab at designing some product labels for a new taxpayer-funded line of shameful, marginally nutritious foodstuffs. While I can't pretend that they'll deliver the stern dose of humiliation hungry poor people and their hapless children deserve — only the withering patrician scorn of a God-appointed billionaire can do that — I do hope they'll inspire crueler people to produce uglier work.
(Image at top: "The Rich Man and Lazarus the Beggar" by Gustave Doré.)
Friday, March 02, 2012
Design for the One Percent
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9 comments:
Nice designs, but the ingredients lists seem off-- needs more aborted fetuses like they use in Pepsi.
I'm maybe not the one to say, as I pretend to no expertise in the degree of scorn that our national poors deserve, but I would hope these food packages would be wired to trip the anti-shoplifting inventory tags on the way out the door (no matter what the checkout clerk does) so as to draw more attention to the disgrace. It's the only way they'll learn to finally buckle down and get rich! (Or so I'm told.)
That first one had me LMAO. nice work, now back to read the rest
Daily Caller scumbag is investing labor where none is needed. People are are already adequately shamed by dependence. My brother-in-law refused to use a state debit card to buy groceries because, I guess, he worried the self-checkout would stigmatize him. Are people failures because they are addicts or are people addicts because of their failure? I'd be interested to see how prosperous these conservative bloggers would be without wing-nut welfare. Or is that the disgrace they have to wear in order to eat?
Brilliant!
(excuse me while i prove i'm "not" a robot...)
Thanks for the laugh. Unfortunately, my libertarian friend thinks this is exactly what is needed, and is not joking.
the labels would actually fit much of the stuff in the middle part of any grocery store.
"Kiss up and kick down" has been the Conservative Creed ever since there was an up and a down. Having more to kick just stimulates them.
Interesting nobody has noticed the connection between this and the Dore engraving.
"Who sinned, this man, or his parents....?" The question, and the attitude behind it, predate the 1st century C.E.
The idea that those who have money are worthy, and those who don't have money are not, is very, very old, indeed.
And thanks to the intertubes, we get to see, in the comfort of our own living rooms, just how ugly expressions of this attitude can be.
Progress!
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