When the United States Senate votes unanimously for what President Trump calls the largest spending bill in the history of the planet, I take it as read that it’s just the usual bazillion-dollar boondoggle that will merely lead to “North Troy Syndrome” on steroids.
By the way, the $25 million for the Kennedy Center remained in the bill. On the telly, critics of Kennedy Center greasing in a coronavirus emergency bill tend to preface their remarks with “I’m all in favor of the arts but…”
Just for the record, the Kennedy Center is nothing to do with “the arts”. It produces bland undemanding over-funded pap for DC lobbyists to take their clients to for a night of pseudo-culture. Had it never existed, we would have lost …what? Leonard Bernstein’s Mass? He’d have written it anyway, and would have benefited from a real and less indulgent producer. To hell with the Kennedy Center.
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story:
The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel.
Well, the mansion’s pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
(1) The Real Pandemic Is Globalism
(3) As Trump’s Poll Numbers Rise, Media Begin Censoring Press Conferences
(5) Why are doomsaying experts, who always get it wrong, still the media’s favorites?
