Titles / Popular Slogans

Following Debord and Wolman's direction on titles in detournement, I looked for advertising slogans that I might be able to use.  Titles, Debord and Wolman state, can "have a determinant importance in several genres" (Evans, Appropriation 38):

All the detective stories in the 'Serie Noir' are extremely similar, yet merely continually changing the titles suffices to hold a considerable audience. In music a title exerts a great influence, yet the choice of one is quite arbitrary. [...] The title contributes strongly to a work, but there is an inevitable counteraction of the work on the title.

I thought that the popular "got milk?" advertisements, with their focus on health using celebrity endorsements, would be a good angle to build a 2nd story from my 1st story (the underlying life as usual, uncaring, attitude portrayed by Breugels painting).  The repetitive "got milk?" slogan, followed by a pithy, light-hearted description of the health effects that the depicted celebrity embodies in the photograph (and in his or her life), and the clever "body by milk" slogan at the end could be manipulated to include a statement about healthcare reform.  I thought I could use aspects of this successful advertising campaign to counteract my "1st story."

When I committed to this decision, I looked for text to create the short story that would "sell" my product.  I first thought of extracting text from W.H. Auden's great poem Musée des Beaux Arts poem on Bruegel's painting (below):

Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I wasn't sure whether to extract text from the first half of the poem, which makes a broad statement about the human condition, or focus on the second half, which abstracts the first half through Breugel's painting.  I decided to use the second half of the poem and reduce it drastically to convey the overall sense of the poem.  I  reduced the poem to the following lines

how everything turns away
the ploughman may / Have heard the splash.
the sun shone / As it had to
the expensive delicate ship
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

before I realized that I was making the whole effort too reflexive.  (It was around this time that I realized I might have to abandon the idea of using the idea of apoptosis as a connector.)  Debord and Wolman warn that "[d]étournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply" (Evans, Appropriation 35).  I turned back to the healthcare debate in search of an angle that might play more with the idea of faulty (moral) logic that Bruegel's painting unabashedly ignores.

I found some articles on House Republican Leader John A. Boehner's statement that the period before President Obama signed the healthcare bill into law was Armageddon. David M. Herszenhorn, in the The New York Times "Prescriptions" blog, describes president Obama "push[ing] back a bit on Republican assertions that the new health care legislation would herald the end of days" (Blog, 1 April 2010). Here's an excerpt from Herszenhorn's blog:

Mr. Obama, speaking to a boisterous crowd in Portland, noted that the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, was among those to predict catastrophic results.

'John Boehner called the passage of this bill Armageddon,' Mr. Obama said, struggling to finish his sentence over boos at the mention of Mr. Boehner’s name.

'You had others who said this is the end of freedom as we know it,' he continued. “So after I signed the bill, I looked around.'

The laughter began to build.

'I looked up at the sky to see if asteroids were coming,' Mr. Obama said. More laughter.

'I looked at the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth,” he continued, echoing remarks he made at a rally in Iowa last week. “You know what, it turned out it was a pretty nice day. Birds were still chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody had lost their doctor. Nobody had pulled the plug on Granny. Nobody was being dragged away to be forced into some government-run health care plan.'

Then, the comedian-in-chief had a few choice remarks for commentators in the media.

'You have to love some of the pundits in Washington,' he said. 'Every single day since I signed the reform law, there’s been another poll or headline that said, ‘Nation still divided on health care reform. Polls haven’t changed yet.’ Well, yeah. It just happened last week. It’s only been a week.

'Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm? You planted some seeds, and they came out the next day, and they looked, and nothing’s happened! There’s no crop! We’re going to starve! Oh, no! It’s a disaster!' (Herszenhorn, "Prescriptions," Blog, 1 April 2010)

I extracted text from this article for the "got milk?" slogan and manipulated Brueghel's painting to try and make the two stories (the painting and the slogan) comment on each other.  I posted the outcome in the next post.