http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/04/04/cupcake-fascism-gentrification-infantilisation-cake/
The constellation of cultural tropes that most paradigmatically manifest in the form of the cupcake are associated in particular with infantilization. Of course, looking back to a perfect past that never existed is nothing if not the pained howl of a child who never wanted to be forced to grow up, and the cupcake and its associates market themselves by catering to these never-never-land adults’ tastes. These products, which treat their audience as children, and more specifically the children of the middle classes — perfect and special, full of wide-eyed wonder and possibility — succeed as expressions of a desire on behalf of consumers to always and forever be children, by telling consumers not only that this is OK, but also that it is, to a real degree, possible.
[...]
“Keep Calm and Carry On”
Something became clear to me in the
aftermath of the London riots in 2011, when I saw thousands of people
take to the streets with brooms at the instigation of a twitter hashtag
(#riotcleanup), and “clean up” the effects of the anger of the rioters,
which was already in the process of being dismissed and demonized in the
media as opportunistic looting long before the police would find a way
to have their murder of Mark Duggan legally declared as its opposite.
This realization was that if you wanted to found a fascist reich in
Britain today, you could never do so on the basis of any sort of
ideology of racial superiority or militaristic imagery or anything of
the like. Fascism is, if nothing else, necessarily majoritarian, and
nowadays racism is very niche-appeal (just look at how laughable every
EDL march is, where the anti-fascists outnumber the alleged fascists by a
ratio of more than two to one). But you could get a huge mass of people
to participate in a reactionary endeavor if you dressed it up in nice,
twee, cupcakey imagery, and persuaded everyone that the brutality of
your ideology was in fact a form of niceness. If a fascist reich was to
be established anywhere today, I believe it would necessarily have to
exchange iron eagles for fluffy kittens, swap jackboots for Converse,
and the epic drama of Wagnerian horns for mumbled ditties on ukuleles.
Fascism is, properly understood, a
certain sort of response to a crisis. It is the reactionary response, as
opposed to the radical one. The radical response is to embrace the new
possibilities thrown up by the crisis; the reactionary one is to shut
these possibilities down. In bourgeois society, thus, fascism will
always mean the assertion of middle-class values in the face of a
crisis. Because this assertion must mean shutting certain other emerging
sets of possibilities down, it will always involve a sort of violence,
although this violence can of course be merely passive-aggressive.
The 2011 riots were a sort of response
to the present global financial crisis, and one more radical than
reactionary. They were directionless, yes, but they were the product of a
summer of simmering tension produced by the austerity measures the
government had imposed as its own reactionary response to the financial
crisis, which threatened and still threatens to eliminate the futures of
every young person in Britain, especially those from poorer backgrounds
— the majority of the rioters. Against the possibilities thrown up by
the riots (if nothing else, the possibility of expressing real anger),
the participants in #riotcleanup passive-aggressively asserted the very
same middle-class values that informed the imposition of austerity.
There is no better expression of all
this than in the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which of course adorns
everything cupcakey (“Keep Calm and Eat a Cupcake” is almost as
prevalent a poster as its ur-meme original). The association is a
profound one on many levels. The “Keep Calm” poster was originally
designed as a propaganda poster during WW2. It plays on similar appeals
to vintage nostalgia that the notion of “having a cupcake” does. It
appeals to an idealized past that was never experienced by the
longer-afterer. It is also a past that never could have been
experienced, since the “Keep Calm” poster was never actually used. It
was rediscovered in 2000 and was quickly found to have a vast appeal
based largely on how much the slogan cohered with an idealized image of
the 1940s. In fact, the poster had never been used because it was
considered by those who saw it at the time to be patronizing.
[...]
All the way to massive, blockbuster instances of the phenomenon such as the recent Coca-Cola #ReasonsToBelieve campaign which was full of such obviously insidious expressions of cupcakey positivity as “For every tank being built . . . there are thousands of cakes being baked,” and “for every red card given . . . there are 12 celebratory hugs.” The advert also features a scene in which a man high fives a cat.
[...]
All the way to massive, blockbuster instances of the phenomenon such as the recent Coca-Cola #ReasonsToBelieve campaign which was full of such obviously insidious expressions of cupcakey positivity as “For every tank being built . . . there are thousands of cakes being baked,” and “for every red card given . . . there are 12 celebratory hugs.” The advert also features a scene in which a man high fives a cat.
