Lick my brick

[supergee]

Back in the 60s, there was a satirical magazine called Horseshit. It was brilliantly funny except when talking about women, whom it hated. (There was a lot of that going around.) They did a brilliant satire called "One of Our Soldiers Is a Killer," in which chaos reigns when a character does what the Army says it's for (learning to kill people) instead of what it really cares about (dress rules and properly made beds). There was a line I still use for companies not trusting their own product: "No matter how sick the pope gets, they never take him to Lourdes." And there was a marvelous idea called the American Nut Growers Foundation, a secret organization that created everything from the Oscars to the UFO menace as practical jokes to test the hypothesis that there is nothing too stupid for the American people to believe.

That image seems applicable to much culture, including anything called post-modern. Since Piero Manzoni sold cans of what he alleged to be his own excrement as works of art, it may be impossible to imagine anything that could not be declared art and sold as such.

Cuisine likewise. P.J. O'Rourke theorized that French cuisine ("cheese that smells like people's feet") was created as a cruel hoax on the pretensions of the newly rich. Nouvelle Cuisine always struck my uneducated eye and palate as artistically designed small portions of what the Third World has to eat. Here is a report from the front.

Thanx to andrewducker