MILTON GLASER ♥ DISSENT

To keep Independence Day from becoming a more empty patriotic ritual than usual, let's celebrate the hearty dissenter Milton Glaser, designer of many famous logos and symbols such as I♥NY.

Here he is interviewed on PBS's "NOW" about the The Design of Dissent Exhibit at the School of Visual Arts in New York and his and Mirko Ilic's new book, "The Design of Dissent," which explores socially and politically driven graphics.

If Ken Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or his amateur PBS monitors, care to read all of Glaser and "NOW" host David Brancaccio's remarks, there's a full transcript of the interview online. It doesn't cost a dime, much less the $14,000 it cost taxpayers for Tomlinson's snoops, and it's professional, too.

The interview included illustrations of especially powerful images of dissent from the exhibit, which closed Saturday. Among them was a 2004 poster, below, by Nenad Cizl and Toni Tomasek, called "Got Oil?" Needless to say, it echoes the "Got Milk?" ad.

Some highlights of Glaser's remarks:

DISSENT PROTECTS DEMOCRACY

I think it's a rather simple-minded idea that if you examine government, those that have the least dissent are those that are most totalitarian. That is, in fact, the manifestation of dissent that defines democracy, 'cuz it means that there are oppositions to power that are freely expressed and that minority opinion is also considered to be worthwhile. Generally speaking, dissent comes out of a sense of fairness that something is wrong. Power is being used unfairly, and there has to be some manifestation or complaint about it.

DISSENT VS. PROPAGANDA

I think there is a difference, which is to say in dissent the dissenters have, it seems to me, the obligation of referring to a central truth and an idea of fairness and a complaint about power.

In propaganda, you have no such obligation. You don't have to tell the truth. You certainly are rarely complaining about power. You're simply expressing ideas that you want to enter into the system in order to persuade people to do something. ...

You wouldn't talk about a government dissenting from anything fundamentally, because they are the power. So there is this inevitable dialectic relationship between power and dissent. And those of us who value dissent see that as a manifestation of democratic health.

... You really see that this is not so much a manifestation of left and right. Or radical and conservative. ... [M]ore than anything else -- what it is, is a response to power.

And that no matter what the source of the power -- whether it's right-wing power or left-wing power, or any other [power], or religious power -- it behaves in the same way. It always attempts to suppress, to subvert, to marginalize opposition. And, for all of us who care about democracy it creates the opportunity to complain. And to try to redress what we perceive as an unequal fight.

STATE OF DISSENT IN AMERICA

The thing that makes you most crazy [is], the idea of this passive acceptance of an authority. We thought we weren't that kind of people. Something else has happened that links to that which is a transformation of a perception I think we had at the end of the war which was that ends did not justify means.

After Nuremberg, that idea became very clear philosophically, right? You cannot do anything you wish, because you have a good end in mind. The way that you accomplish that is very significant, and you can't simply do it because you want to. Well, that idea's vanished. What happened to that idea? It was a very powerful idea, if you remember the end of the war, and after the Nuremberg trials.

Now, there isn't any sense that ends don't justify means. Everything that the government does that is oppressive, the withdrawal of citizens' rights or torture or whatever is justified by the threat. And that idea that we simply you know don't do things because they're immoral has vanished. And I'm always astonished at how short a time it took to transform this country. ...

Once you have a media that is not interested in making trouble, it is also not interested in following the line of dissent. And I think that's one of the complex issues that occur in a media-dominated democracy which is that the choice of what is articulated and raised, the consciousness, finally depends on the courage of the people in charge. And I don't think they're very courageous these days.