Obama, Successories, and Despair.com

From Greg Beato in Reason, an article combining Obama and Despair.com... (If you're not familiar with the latter, you need to check them out!)

On that historic evening in November, as Barack Obama definitively made passé the notion that we cannot, the president-elect’s acceptance speech signified a triumph not just for his campaign but for motivational wall décor. Like a Successories catalog made flesh, Obama invoked burning beacons, long roads, steep climbs, and new dawns. He was lofty, he was declamatory, he was as aesthetically challenging as a majestic golf course on a crisp autumn morning. And yet his well-worn rhetoric managed to move multitudes. Could it be that all those corny corporate psalms to Character and Service, the ones hanging in regional sales offices and telemarketing call centers across the nation, have touched us more deeply than we realized?...

The wall-decorations first appeared in 1988, the brainchild of Chicago-area entrepreneur Mac Anderson....

By 1996 Anderson’s company was generating $55 million a year in sales and shipping 3,000 framed prints a day. But while the posters were popular, they were far from beloved. Part of the problem was that many of the companies displaying them didn’t always abide by the virtues they espoused. But it was more than that. Even in the most functional workplaces, the posters were obtrusive, didactic, a touch Orwellian. Who really wants to be told how to do his job by a picturesque tree stump, or even a noble eagle?...

It was only a matter of time before someone spoofed the suddenly ubiquitous posters. In the mid-1990s, E.L. Kersten and twin brothers Jef and Justin Sewell, all of whom worked at a Dallas Internet service provider, decided that there were no prints in the Successories collection that reflected their employer’s real values. Where were the posters championing mediocrity, failure, and procrastination?

At first they made their parodies for simple self-amusement...Then, when their co-workers began requesting posters of their own, they realized they could turn such discontent into a business. In 1998, they pooled their savings and started Despair Inc....

For most of the last two decades, of course, pretty much everyone has wanted to speak in that voice....“alternative”...cultural revolutionaries...rebels...disenfranchised outsiders...mavericks.

At the same time, virtually no one has wanted to speak in the sincere, unhip, pious voice of Successories. Until the 2008 elections, that is....