Two Political Pieces

1.
The 2019 volume of Maintenant, the visually delightful Manhattan neo-Dada journal from Three Rooms Press, offers work on the theme of AI – that is, artificial ignorance. My contribution follows.


Interim Report from Corporate Control Center

     The Corporation Control Center’s campaign to foster Artificial Ignorance to the point that it substantially supplants evidence-based thought is well ahead of schedule. We have emerged a world leader in leveraging the fact that algorithms are by far the most cost-effective method of effectively yoking the human consciousness.
     Operating in the clean medium of symbols alone, reprogramming has succeeded to the point that virtually the whole population is addicted to painless credit-card fueled consumer spending. Power and prestige addictions claim the few who demonstrate a partial immunity. Mass hypnotism can now determine the outcome of “democratic” elections. Diminution of vision has progressed to hitherto unexpected levels.
     The program to compromise physical and cognitive resistance by expanding the use of chemical additives to food, air, and water has provided a solid basis of physical support for the psychological innovations, making the subject organism more comfortable and accepting of the modern world. The objection that such substances equally afflict functionaries of the Center has been found to be immaterial as it has no effect on the digital coding.
     The project to replace quotidian reality with virtual reality proceeds apace. In fact, preliminary goals have been so rapidly achieved that we have already reached the point of blurring of real and artificial, and we have moved the date for the total reversal of these categories from 2030 to 2025.



2.

The most architecturally significant if unlikely structure in the largely Victorian exurb of Goshen, New York was once the Paul Rudolph government center looking something like an overturned box of a giant child’s blocks with its complex shape and bristling Brutalist projections. I was not present when the unlikely choice was made in this conservative community to commission the design, but I was present when the Republican politicians acted the part of philistine vandals and destroyed the building with remodeling as expensive as it was tasteless. Local artists objected, as did others around the world. The following appeared in For Paul Rudolph, published by CO(P)E.


Goshen Must Be Brutalized!

     Goshen must be brutalized since the presence of the Government Building has been proven to cause scales to fall from the eyes of passing motorists, and the community must be grateful for any bit of cleansing of the doors of perception.
     Goshen must be brutalized or the population will run the risk of thinking that quaint is the only aesthetic category imaginable, thus irretrievably compromising the human potential of the local population with regrettable consequences extending down the generations.
     Goshen must be brutalized for should it happen that a county executive might think himself a generalissimo, he would find that he cannot be comfortable within Rudolph’s unsimplifiable spaces, and architecture would thus prove an aid to good government just as home décor civilizes each domestic space and makes it human.
     Goshen must be brutalized for every concrete groove that these walls boast speaks of a contradiction, complication, tension, or ambivalence, reminding the viewer of his own fingertips with their extraordinary and suggestive patterns.
     Goshen must be brutalized as these rough assertive boxes remind each viewer of difficult patches and suggest that poise may be possible at last even if a final rest remains elusive this side of dissolution.
And, in that ever-brighter future that approaches, though at times, admittedly, only to recede again, when we will live a cooperative commonwealth, all members of One Big Union, and political administration will be a relic of the barbaric past, the indoor areas of the Government Building may be abandoned to rodents and their partners in dance, the owls, while myriad smaller creepers with many legs make their secret ways through the collapsing corridors. The courtyards and roofs will then be given to neo-pagan practices and penny socials until the hazards become too great at which point the territory will be ceded to the youth who have always no fear. Plants will twine green and hopeful on every side as they have on Meso-American Mayan temples. Thereafter let citizens gather about the massive pile annually to recite elegies to the ruins, to dance and eat and drink and remember that the artist is a friend to all, even when grumpy, aloof, cruel to his lover, even Brutalist, and that art alone makes life livable in these latter days.