Announcing BPNC’s Countdown Calendar to the 2021 Presidential Inauguration. We’re launching a few days late. Read on for background on how this calendar came to be and context in light of recent events. To skip and go directly to the calendar, scroll to the bottom of the post and click on the link.
Last November, post-election, several people posted on Facebook asking if anyone had seen an advent calendar counting down to the 2021 Presidential Inauguration. A few Google searches came up empty, so I decided BPNC would create one (or, at minimum, the content for one). I asked our graphic designers to start illustrating a list of political notables from the 2020 election cycle. In the afterglow of the election, we chose a caricature style, thinking that the outgoing administration would give us ample opportunity to satirize their antics on their way out.
At its November 2020 inception, BPNC’s Countdown Calendar to the 2021 Presidential Inauguration was intended as a light-hearted way to engage and grow brand recognition via social media. It is intended that each caricature appear “unfinished”: I asked for caricatures, not cartoons, in the hopes that these digital assets might find their way to other, non-digital formats. (Coloring books are still a thing, right?) The whole thing was thoughtfully conceived and loosely tied to our Inauguration Capsule Collection – Face Masks.
We anticipated the need to walk the fine line between:
- producing playful caricatures based on real-world events; and
- exaggerated graphics, divorced from context, that could easily offend.
We anticipated that the outgoing President would bully and boisterously oppose the election results, and there would be some outliers within his administration that would support his unsuccessful attempts to challenge the election. We did more than anticipate; we counted on it, and poked fun at his and Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to overturn the election in early versions of graphics that featured each individual in caricature.
What we did not anticipate was that the majority of the Republican Party would advocate for the overthrow of an American election. It weighs heavy on my soul that there exists a “sedition caucus” – which includes at least 140 members of the House and at least 10 members of the Senate. That these individuals cling to debunked positions that the 2020 election was rigged, plagued by fraud, subverted by foreign powers – while a pandemic rages and Americans die – is, as stated by a recent opinion piece for The Atlantic “worse than treason.”
I paused our 12/31 Countdown Calendar release date to evaluate whether our light-hearted take on the milestones leading up to the 2021 Presidential Inauguration still struck the right chord. Then, yesterday, the Washington Post released the bombshell recording of the sitting president demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find" the votes needed for him to win the elections in his state. Despite being given the perfect excuse to distance themselves from the actions of a sociopathic autocrat, the “sedition caucus” doubled-down on their attempted overthrow of the American election. Why anyone – let alone elected representatives sworn to uphold the Constitution – would rush to defend the outgoing president’s illegal and unconstitutional behavior is beyond my intellectual grasp. It disturbs and saddens me in a way that mimics the feeling I get when I see people refusing to wear a mask: Both are acts that can only happen if people actively choose not to accept fact-based data.
This post accompanies BPNC’s release of its 2021 Inauguration Countdown Calendar to make clear that our organization actively opposes the current attempts to undermine the 2020 Election, as well as any efforts to attempt to dissuade or suppress votes in Georgia’s run off election. The choice to release the Calendar rests on a desire to share the collaborative, creative endeavor of several teams of individuals over the past month and a half. In no way should my choice to green light the Calendar be perceived as an attempt to downplay or trivialize the events of the present day.
A link to BPNC’s Countdown Calendar to the 2021 Countdown Calendar to the Presidential Inauguration is posted below. We’ll also be posting updates to our social media accounts: @butlersantry_nc. Make sure to like and follow us to receive updates!
Space + Grace,
Meredith
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