{"id":840,"date":"2006-02-10T07:49:51","date_gmt":"2006-02-10T12:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cola-war-on-terror\/"},"modified":"2006-02-10T07:49:51","modified_gmt":"2006-02-10T12:49:51","slug":"cola-war-on-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cola-war-on-terror","title":{"rendered":"Cola War on Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s reading in the Official VM Book Club Of One was The Other Hollywood<\/a>; this week it’s The Substance of Style<\/a>, Virginia Postrel’s book on the value of aesthetic value, as it were. I just finished the third chapter, “Surface and Substance,” which ends with this passage:<\/p>\n

When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 200, Michael Bierut had his own moment of Nazis-to-Pepsi self-doubt. He was in London and returned home to Manhattan a few days after the attack. “As a designer,” he wrote me, “I am still reeling from the images of 9\/11.” The act had been horrifying, but the images it created could not have been better designed: “The timing of the collisions, the angle of the second plane, the colors of the explosions, the slow-motion collapsing of the towers: could the terrorists ever dream how nightmarishly vivid this would be to the vast viewing audience?”<\/p>\n

Amid the trauma of mid-September, this terrible juxtaposition — striking images in the service of death — recalled all the attacks ever made on surface for its own sake, and on the designers who create surface appeal. If an event so awful could look so vivid, even beautiful in a purely formal sense, how could we trust aesthetic pleasure? How could designers like Bierut justify their work, except when surface serves some grander substance? The attack, wrote Bierut, “makes me put meaningless content into beautiful packages. I will not approach my work the same way from now on.”<\/p>\n

He knew better. The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a carefully composed movie scene, designed to around pity and terror within the same frame of fiction. It was the all-too-real muder of thousands. It was entirely substance. The attack was not packaging, not surface, not performance art. It had both meaning and political purpose. The striking images produced led viewers not to praise but to condemn the attackers who created them. Only those who embraced the murderers’ cause rejoiced in those images. Aesthetics did not prove a superweapon, justifying slaughter. To the contrary, the media images that followed were attempts to capture the events — and the horror and grief — of the day. Those images were valuable because they could say more than words. But the images were not the act itself.<\/p>\n

In the horror of the moment, Bierut had forgotten the meaning and value of his work, falling into the puritanical mind-set that denies the value of aesthetic pleasure and seeks always to link it with evil. To wrap meaningless, as opposed to vicious, content in beautiful packaging does no harm. To the contrary, such creativity enriches the world and affirms the worth of the individuals whose pleasure it serves. Colas are not genocide.<\/p>\n

Bierut soon had second thoughts. “One of the signatures of any repressive regime,” he wrote the following day, “is their need to control not just meaningful differences — the voices of dissent, for instance — but ostensibly ‘meaningless’ ones as well, like dress. It will take some time for people to realize that creating the difference between Coke and Pepsi is not just an empty pastime but one of many signs of life in a free society.” The Afghan women who risked the Taliban’s prisons to paint their faces and style their hair in underground beauty shops, and who celebrated the liberation of Kabul by coloring their nails with once-forbidden polish, would agree. Surface may take on meaning, but it has a value all its own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s reading in the Official VM Book Club Of One was The Other Hollywood; this week it’s The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel’s book on the value of aesthetic value, as it were. I just finished the third chapter, “Surface and Substance,” which ends with this passage: When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Cola War on Terror”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-politics-implicit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-dy","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2932,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/my-very-unique-synergistic-solution-is-unstoppable","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":0},"title":"My very unique synergistic solution is unstoppable","author":"Gil","date":"November 19, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I was fortunate not to work in a company that employed idiotic jargon to cover up a lack of substance; my lack of substance is right out in the open. But during the dot-com era, Bullshit Bingo was one of my favorite concepts. In that spirit, I was quite happy\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3831,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/go-wes","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":1},"title":"Go Wes","author":"Gil","date":"April 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It took me some time to get over my rage at Wes Anderson and learn to enjoy the quirky preciosity of his movies. Now I'm good with him. I'm still trying to suss out what I expect from movies, novels and, well, art in general, so I'm not going to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/art"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":195,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/interpreter-of-maladies","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":2},"title":"Interpreter of Maladies","author":"Gil","date":"April 28, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Thanks to Instapundit for linking to this DoD briefing, where Donald Rumsfeld offers a comment on the practice of using mosques as firebases:There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7440,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/podcast-glamour-profession","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":3},"title":"Podcast: Glamour Profession","author":"Gil","date":"November 10, 2013","format":"audio","excerpt":"\u00a0 Virtual Memories \u2013 season 3 episode 26 - Glamour Profession \u201cEveryone is susceptible to some kind of glamour; it\u2019s just a matter of understanding what kind of glamour you\u2019re susceptible to. Is it technological glamour, or glamour of the intellectual life, or something else?\u201d Virginia Postrel joins us this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/power-of-glamour-book-cover.jpg?fit=961%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/power-of-glamour-book-cover.jpg?fit=961%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/power-of-glamour-book-cover.jpg?fit=961%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/power-of-glamour-book-cover.jpg?fit=961%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":584,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/be-creative","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":4},"title":"Be Creative!!!","author":"Gil","date":"July 25, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I read BusinessWeek, the Economist, and some other bizmags and econobloggers a lot (can't say enough about the New York Post's John Crudele). Outside of my own industry (as a Pharma observer), I like to see read interpretations of how industries function, how business works, and why money does what\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1664,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-sep-14-2007","url_meta":{"origin":840,"position":5},"title":"Unrequired Reading: Sep. 14, 2007","author":"Gil","date":"September 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Happy new year, my Jewish readers! Have a good Ramadan, my Muslim readers! I offer up links for all! Agent Zero on the Glove, and Relationships 101. * * * My college had the worst architecture I've ever seen on a campus. Friedrich von Blowhard isn't thrilled with U of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Apes"","block_context":{"text":"Apes","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/apes"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}