Holiday angels

I’ve been searching through my collection to find holiday-related images for A Sticker A Day, but aside from the two anti-Christmas stickers I shared last year at this time (Ho, ho, ho!), I can only find a few angels.  These two stickers are from NYC, 2008.  There’s one angel with a gun and another with a human skull.

2008_nyc_metro001  2008_nyc_metro002

A fairly disturbing percentage of stickers I find in the United States appropriate a skull and crossbones motif, gang-style or “bad boy” imagery, and/or other militant references, such as guns, grenades, rifles, men in camouflage, etc.  A Web site called Teaching Media has recently put together a set of resources called the Sports-Media-Military Nexus, and it’s the media-military nexus I find interesting in relation to U.S. stickers.  The Teaching Media call-for-proposals included this:

“Since September 11, 2001 sports has become increasingly ‘complicit’ in an increasing militarization of U.S. society and popular culture. Butterworth and Moskal (2009), for example, argue that American identity is constituted in and by a culture of militarism, ‘wherein Americans are implicated in a structural relationship between government, the military, and entertainment industries to the extent that it has become functionally impossible to live outside the rhetorical production of war’ (p. 413). The ‘seizing’ of the NFL, Major League Baseball, or NASCAR by the military can be witnessed frequently through the spreading of militaristic messages from sponsors, advertisers, and broadcasters who appear eager to use these sporting events to garner support for war, especially during a time of great unpopularity among the American public, and to reassert national identity through excessive displays of patriotism.”

I’ll try to find something a little more upbeat for tomorrow!