Keep calm and carry on
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday March 4, 2010
It's enough to make you want to threaten violence, no?I'm talking, of course, about the phrase that has lately all-but-colonised the worlds of fashion and interior design in the manner of Posh Spice on a Louis Vuitton binge.Take the most cursory glance at, well, the world, and you'll see it: the white, upright letters, the cherry red background and King George VI's crown on everything from posters to T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and tea towels.Like the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" for the new millennium, nothing is safe from the phrase and everyone, it seems, has been taken in. British rockers the Stereophonics used it for their latest album title and even Tipping the Velvet novelist Sarah Waters, usually most original, has it on her wall.The phrase has its own website, for God's sake.Unlike other recent, and annoying, IT-phrases, such as Tyra Banks's "smized" (to smile with your eyes) and Rachel Zoe's "I. Die.", which have been decoded at tonguechic.com - a sartorial Rosetta Stone that translates "Voguespeak" - the irritation factor of KCACO is slightly mysterious.How did a propaganda poster originally commissioned in 1939 by the British Government's Ministry of Information, to be plastered around towns in the event of a German invasion - and therefore never released - become hipster short form in the way old Leica cameras did 10 years ago?It started in 2000, when a couple of booksellers in northern England found an original poster in a box of old books, reproduced it and - bam! - in the words of various social theorists, it became a global visual panacea for feelings of anxiety in the wake of international terrorism attacks and the global financial crisis.(As of last year, keep calmandcarryon.com shifted 300-500 products a week.)I, however, do not feel reassured by the phrase.In fact, quite the opposite.It makes me feel like some omniscient power has been watching my comings and goings - the control-freaky sessions of playdough with my children, those end-of-the-day attempts at recipes involving kale - and has deduced that I am acting just a tad crazy.Just spotting the phrase, for me, is like receiving unwelcome advice from my mother that makes me want to scream in retaliation: "I'm not the one who creates thank you notes for baby gifts as though they've been written by the baby!"Not to mention the fact that, whatever the phrase's connotation of stiff-upper-lip British resilience, being told to "Keep Calm and Carry On" in the face of bankruptcy or murderous attacks seems little more than a high-minded "Whatever!"Thank God there's a far more realistic alternative out there.The slogan on the latest parody T-shirt?"Now Panic and Freak Out."
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