Clear Eyes, Fuld Hearts, Can’t Lose

The conspicuous difficulty with political propaganda is that it’s designed expressly to appeal to the emotions — to condense all of (generally) a political candidate’s thoughts and views into a single image or catchphrase, and, in so doing, to convince its audience to abandon the very important faculty of reason.

This is unfortunate at some level. For while the effects of propaganda are generally hostile to a sober democracy, there’s also no denying that the feelings upon which propaganda preys — i.e. the desire to be a part of something larger, the desire to marvel at something excellent — are not objectively bad.

Thus it is that internet denizen The Common Man (of the SweetSpot Network’s Platoon Advantage) has maybe provided a small gift to the baseball-loving public with the image you see embedded here — a pastiche of Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster. Except instead of asking us to abandon reason in matters political, TCM’s work allows us to enjoy the pleasures of propaganda without any of the usual side effects.