Noam Chomsky on early American branding and a history of torture in the USA:

“The inspirational phrase ‘city on a hill’ was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation ‘ordained by God.’ One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words ‘Come over and help us.’ The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of ‘the idea of America,’ from its birth.… The Great Seal was an early proclamation of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the ‘humanitarian intervention’ led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described ‘the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union’ by means ‘more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.’”

Shooting off fireworks, firing up the grill, raining fire on Charlie — there’s much collective fire-making in the name of Americanness. But in NYC at least, fire fighting has also taken this on.

It’s fairly common here to see fire houses and fire trucks decorated with Americana: all manner of murals and bas-relief flags, eagles, and slogans honoring our troops, etc. This is particularly keen where fire houses have affixed street-level memorials to the firefighters who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. In graphics and text, these both pay tribute to the fallen and position them at the front-line of American defense.

Of course there are firefighters around the world, but here in the States the idea of a bunch of brawny, self-sacrificing heros swooping in when you need them most has become particularly hyper-American, particularly in the shadow of foreign attack.

But in its messaging, it’s seldom acknowledged that this vanguard of Americanness, these rugged individualists are almost always organized as a socialist or anarchist endeavor, either funded by the city or as volunteer collectives from the communities they serve. Seldom that is, until services are cut.

Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what’s right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.

This list of design manifestos was buried in a previous post but deserves its own permalink. The original list was largely drawn from Mario Piazza’s presentation at the 2009 conference Più Design Può in Florence, though I’ve edited and added to it. I’ve also incorporated links where I was able to find them.