This Sunday's New York Times has Christopher Benfey filing a deft review of Steven Heller's Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State from Phaidon Press. Heller's most recent explores the discipline of "branding" among Hitler's Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy under Mussolini, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union and China under Mao. Benfey's point about Imperial Japan being omitted is irrefutably valid but 223 pages, as Heller would likely agree, hardly provides for an exhaustive study. Besides, word has it that Volume 2 is focused entirely on Bush/Cheney and their cute little magnetic yellow ribbons (promised as Tony Orlando and Dawn patriotic commemoratives, but intended as politically-fueled You're Either With Us or Again' Us! propaganda. Made in China, of course.). Okay, I might be kidding a bit about that second installment.