Defend our type

Things get weirder in Trumpland. According to a report on the Beeb yesterday the US government will ban the use of the typeface Calibri in its documents, possibly because Biden favoured it. This is where cultural wars go, and identity politics to boot. It’s part of a piece with e.g. Trump taking over the Kennedy Centre in Washington, and demanding that federally assisted art galleries remove certain pictures. All very Hitlerite ’degenerate art’ mode, with only one version of culture available. I’m currently reading Solomon Volkov’s excellent book Shostakovich and Stalin, which examines how the great composer survived in the dictator’s time. So far Stalin appears a little less the cultural simpleton one might assume. He knowingly—cynically—used culture as a weapon of the state, even if it meant allowing a certain small degree of dissonance to appear. He wanted Russian culture, even with its coat of socialist realism to compete with the assumed supremacy of western culture (Putin no doubt feels the same way). It should worry us deeply when political leaders start meddling in aesthetics. It’s not really the art, it’s the marketing –not a word used 80 years ago—of an insidious form of persuasion. The Left and Right in politics all resort at one time or another to these tactics, but typically the left tend to be more anarchic (I’m not referring to Stalin as ‘left’ by the way). We are entering the dawn of Trump Realism, and an art form devoid of depth, class, aesthetic richness or any appreciation of subtlety. One only needs to look at the way he has decked out the Oval Office to realise the man can’t even see the aesthetic value of gold. He is as shallow as a medallion man, with a stick-on hairy chest and a cheesy moustache (or rug). There’s so much gold, one wonders whether it’s real. But yes, it’s the real shallow him. And now typefaces are in the firing line!. Defend Calibri! Sign the petition!