A Choice Between Stupidity and Bullshit

At the top of the stack, Barack Obama is a sociopathic bullshitter and Sarah Palin is even stupider than Dan Quayle, the previous champion of stupidity in national politics.

Get out and vote! It’s your choice! Hurrah for America!

But cultural products like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin don’t just spring into being from the back of your flat-screen TV, and both of those monstrosities evolved out of a long and dismal history of cultural disintegration, desperately opposed on the left and right by…

The Quest for Intelligent Design!

Architecture

Is that a sign of intelligent design in this hideous panorama of Los Angeles?

“Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience,” says the New York Times. “That’s the message behind “Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.”

The show, which looks at 11 projects around the world that have had major social impacts despite modest budgets and sizes, is a rebuttal to the familiar complaint that the profession is too focused on aesthetic experimentation and not enough on the lives of ordinary people.

Brilliant! Apparently the profession of architecture just noticed that downtown Los Angeles is a desert after 6PM, and except for the Hills above Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard, the rest of it isn’t much more than a wasteland of slums and suburbs.

But what about all that “aesthetic experimentation?” Doesn’t it possess some redeeming value apart from whatever afterthought of a species may run in and out of it?  

Downtown2

Behold the triumph of “aesthetic experimentation!” And only a hundred years of aesthetic bullshit can explain why it isn’t just a pile of boxes.

And meanwhile the scientific experimentation of the bullshit science of urban planning produced those glorious projects which adorn the South Sides of Chicago and Los Angeles and almost every other city all over the world.

Chicago

So after the bullshit science of economics bequeathed us a global meltdown that virtually none of those geniuses saw coming, and the only visible product of the bullshit science of political science was “nation-building” in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan that looks more like bedlam than any kind of building…

It isn’t exactly surprising that so many simple people got tired of so much bullshit and adopted the outright stupidity of so-called “intelligent design” and all the rest of the tea-bagger package, because most of the intelligent designs designed by most of the supposedly intelligent people who dominate American culture are nothing but bullshit.  

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