Astroturf is the brand name for plastic grass. Politically, it designates a class of organizing with the appearance of being led by a “grassroots” effort when in fact it is wholly funded and controlled by institutional or corporate interests.
Undesirables should not be mistaken for the unwanted. When something is undesirable, it reverberates with feeling the alien in oneself. Or, put another way, the undesirable is a reminder that what is foreign may in fact be what is missing in the incomplete puzzle of the self. This is why it is so alluring. Or put in yet another way, undesirability is the pleasure principle of art.
For an account of the Wojnarowicz incident, see Frank Rich, “Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian,” The New York Times, December 12, 2010. See →.
From a private conversation with Gregg Bordowitz.
See Nin-Hai Tseng, “Will the Fed be able to survive Ron Paul?,” Fortune magazine online, December 14, 2010.
See Jill Lepore, “Tea and Sympathy,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010.
See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
See online clips from episodes of Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 155.
See Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Origin Is the Goal,” in Things Beyond Resemblence: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–22.
For Rick Santelli’s full commentary, visit →.
See James Moore and Wayne Slater, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
See David Bromwich, “The Fastidious President,” London Review of Books, November 18, 2010.
Ibid.
Karl Kraus, In These Great Times, (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), 71.