Playing cards ideologically…

Procrastination strikes again! Rather than finding ways to get rid of 4300 words from an essay I’m working on, I am wandering around the web. I stumbled on an interesting essay in the Guardian (a British newspaper) that points to a number of different versions of ideologically-motivated playing cards. The “craze” seems to have started with a strategy on the part of the US military to help people identify the “most wanted” of the Iraqi regime (story here). You can actually download this set of cards from the US military.
I suppose it was inevitable that other organizations would sense an opportunity to create a similar set of “most wanteds” (note: I am not in any way supporting a strategy of demonization as a way to create organizing energy, I’m simply pointing to several versions of it here). There is a World Trade Organization deck, for instance, and a Greenpeace deck. The Infinite Jest has a particularly bitter set of cards online that are full color and full of sly references, and Enduring Vision offers a set of “religious trading cards.” Actually, now that I think about it, I think Michael Moore worked on something similar, back a few years ago in his book “Downsize this!” where he argued for a set of trading cards of corporate crooks. There is also a fun set of trading cards for postmodern theorists, that you can access at the social theory for pop culture fans site.
I can’t help pondering the role of trading cards in our social imaginations…