People Willing To Be Seen With Me In Public

By no one's request, I have downloaded Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent season 2 so that I can watch it so you don't have to.

This one is bad. Like, I normally like my trash TV but it's possible for a pop culture product to be actively harmful and the season opener, "White Squirrel City," is definitely that. It's also an incredible microcosm of our cultural moment.

Which is to say, a few years ago the cops cleared a tent encampment at Bickford Park. Residents were violently displaced, their possessions confiscated, and either forced to go elsewhere, minus their belongings, or shoved into insufficient temporary shelter. This is a major cause of death for homeless people.* Then, to film the copaganda show, they set up a fake tent encampment in the same place where the city had evicted real ones.

So it's one of those situations where even if it had been Great Art, the price of creation would have been outweighed by the moral violation. That said, it's also bad art.

Here is an article from the excellent Grind magazine about all of the things wrong in this episode. The author says it better than I could, and also points out its most egregious flaws, leaving me to nitpick and mock the minor ones.


( spoilers )

You asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.

But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!



As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.

And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.

Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:

My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."

It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.

So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?

( I promise I'll get to art, I promise )

Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!

P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten: