Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture.

At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered Le Corbusier, who were we laymen, the mere human backdrop to his buildings, who know nothing of the problems of building construction, to criticize him? Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.

The two ladies mentioned that they lived in a mainly eighteenth-century part of the city whose appearance and social atmosphere had been comprehensively wrecked by two massive concrete towers. The towers confronted them daily with their own impotence to do anything about the situation, making them sad as well as angry. “And who do you suppose was the inspiration for the towers?” I asked. “Yes, I see what you mean,” one of them said, as if the connection were a difficult and even dangerous one to make.

From Karl Marx and the Soviet Union, to the Bauhaus, to National Socialism, to the hippies of the 1960s, the idea of starting from Year Zero, at Dalrymple notes above, has long been one of the central strains of the left in its various forms. And of course, it’s a theme that continues to this day.

Definitely read the whole thing.

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Even before the scandal that broke on Friday involving the Climate-Anti-industrial Complex’s emails, it appeared that the sheer lunacy of the global warming crowd’s rhetoric had recently been ramping up exponentially — eat your dog, shrink your family, go vegetarian, “Urinate on the compost heap to save the planet”, because global warming causes absolutely everything — including terrorism and prostitution. (No word yet from ACORN on that last item.) And we only have ten years, five years, 50 days to do something about it! Look for the new email scandal to heat the blood pressure of the warmists almost to the temperature of the earth’s core.

Update: Found in the comments of Tim Blair’s blog, scientists, circus performers, and astute urban developers are already teaming up to provide innovative solutions to the nation’s plummeting bear market:

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(Further Pinchurian hypocrisy spotted here.)

• Bill Whittle of PJTV.com interviews Charles Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs, now with the Heritage Foundation. They’ll be discussing Attorney General Eric
  Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in New York City.
• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Motion Picture Academy member Lionel Chetwynd make sense of the byzantine process of how a film gets nominated for an Academy Award.
• Dr. Helen Smith interviews Jessica Custer of the Network of Enlightened Women, on their efforts to bring increased intellectual diversity to America’s universities.
• Glenn Reynolds interviews the members of the Smart Set, on how the Internet is changing how music is distributed and opening new opportunities for entrepreneurial musicians.
• Hosted — with a NyQuil chaser — by the Vodkapundit; produced by your humble narrator.

Tune in here to listen!

“Sarah Palin stalked by rogue liberal media madwoman.”

Jim Treacher asks, “You guys saw Single White Female, right?”

Related: I’m sure Andrea — not to mention Andrew Sullivan — will be doing plenty of counter-surveillance espionage from this location.

Here’s the scene: Bullock’s character is waiting in line to speak to someone about her new son Michael’s legal status.

Fed up, she cuts to the front of the line to ask a question:

“We have been sitting around here for over an hour and when I look around all I see are people shooting the bull and drinking coffee … who’s in charge here?”

The bemused woman behind the desk points to the wall, where a picture of Bush is hanging.

We’ve all been in long lines before, be it at the DMV or other governmental offices. And it doesn’t matter which party – or person – is occupying the White House at the moment.

So the joke makes no sense. All it does is deflate a feel-good movie for no good reason. Maybe the filmmakers realized with Bush out of office time is running out to throw spitballs at Hollywood’s favorite target.

Christian asks ponders if this is “The last sucker punch at Bush”, but I somehow doubt it. John Nolte, the film director who doubles as blogger/editor of Big Hollywood explains the dynamic at work:

Hollywood is high school and if you want to sit at the cool kids’ table (i.e. work) you better fit in, and if you’ve been involved in the writing, directing or producing of a film sympathetic towards the most hated demographic (yes, even more hated than terrorists — again, watch the product) in the 9-0 zip code, you had better inoculate yourself.

And that’s what the gratuitous, unnecessary, jarring, take-you-out-of-the-movie shot at Bush is: an inoculation. The filmmakers want to work again; they want to be invited to all the right parties. But if you’re remembered as the perso involved in bringing to life a movie only Glenn Beck could love, no matter how big of a hit, that’s not a good thing on the ole’ resume’.

There are notable exceptions, but working in Hollywood — an industry built on social interaction — means getting along with Leftists, and Leftists are religious, regional and ideological bigots of the worst order. The smart people involved in the making of “The Blind Side” knew the Bush shot was bad storytelling — was what what John Boot described as ”a non-sequitur nonpareil” — they just felt, for whatever reason (their own bigotry or career survival), that it was worth it.

Hollywood is not money or profit-driven. This is an industry engaged in an ideological war with traditional conservative America that doesn’t mind making a profit, but never will at the expense of the cause. Everyone involved in the making of “Blind Side” knew an unnecessary partisan shot at Bush would turn people off. They all knew they were insulting the very audience the film was marketed at for no reason other than to insult them. But there was absolutely no way in hell this thing was going to see the light of day without something for the Hollywood bigots to snicker over.

As John writes, “This is their sandbox, and there’s a ring to kiss if you want to play.”

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.

Palin’s book was rejected by at least one local book chain in the increasingly reprimitivized Bay Area; PJM’s David Steinberg looks at what titles they carry instead. (Hint: Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen should be pleased.) Meanwhile, the legacy media, which goes to 11 when it’s time investigate Plain’s autobiography (unlike Obama’s), has taken to picking on her 17-year old fans.

Update: And stay at home fathers:

After introducing [George] Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, [Joy] Behar played a clip of Lopez’s HBO special in which he said, “There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She’s got all the signs. She works and her husband don’t.”  [sic -- Ed]

Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin’s lack of experience, Lopez stated, “I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums.”

“Uh-huh. They’re still called bums,” agreed Behar.

You stay classy, CNN.

Update: More CNN classiness here.

Don’t interpret passage of the watered-down Kanjorski amendment as the peak of the “break up the banks” movement. It may be about to get some new allies on the right, folks tired of Big Government, Big Money and crony capitalism.

For the moment, though, it was arguably the best that Representative Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, [and Mr. New New Deal himself -- Ed] could have gotten through the House Financial Services Committee. All the committee Republicans and even some of the Democrats voted against it. And even in its much-diminished state, the Kanjorksi amendment would likely be weakened further in the Senate. At the same time, the Obama administration seems little interested in such pre-emptive powers.

Wall Street, however, is hardly getting any more popular with Main Street. The Goldman Sachs Apology Tour is evidence of that. And there are mid-term elections in less than a year. Republican candidates will probably do well as high unemployment continues to drive voter anger at incumbents. As Gallup diplomatically puts it, “Republicans seem well-positioned to win back some of their congressional losses in 2006 and 2008.”  More accurately, fear of losing the House is now running high among congressional Dems.

And all those new Republicans are likely to be infused with the ethos of the Tea Party movement: anti-TARP, anti-Fed (the House GOP is already there on this), anti-bailouts and anti-Wall Street. It could be a group of newcomers, as John McCain recently said, that is populist, protectionist when it comes to China and the yuan and pro-financial regulation.

Sarah Palin could be a harbinger. Although she diligently promotes the wonder-working power of Reaganomics in her autobiography, she also warns about “the return of corporatism – government collusion and co-option of big business.” [More on corporatism here -- Ed]

Nice of Time magazine to unwittingly prime the pump for such a campaign:

(Headline via the cool, objective journalists at AP.)

*Or not.

Related: The president tells the troops, “You guys make a pretty good photo op.” As Tom Blumer writes, “Let’s See How This Obamism Gets Covered.”

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