The Uniform Uglification of American Life

If walls could talk, they would tell stories about historical turmoil, beauty, wealth, and the uglification of architecture. Trends come and go but people forget the history behind such trends, whether they were long or short-lived.

The evidence is out in the open, for all to see. People are busy and overlook the ugliness surrounding them, an ugliness which is meant to be depressing and demoralizing.

Beautiful architecture is happy and exalting. That is why we visit art museums, palaces, European churches, and art galleries. For a few minutes of our lives, we want to experience beauty, creativity, and unimaginable opulence.

In 1960s America, many beautiful and historical buildings were torn down, replaced by ugly concrete and steel towers, utilitarian and easy to maintain. A quick search reveals that historic buildings were demolished across the United States because of “economic pressures, urban renewal policies, shifting architectural tastes, and limited preservation awareness.”

About the same time, the Soviet-controlled Iron Curtain countries also destroyed historical buildings and replaced them with ugly concrete blocks of utilitarian communist Bauhaus architecture, a resilient, simple, ugly, grey concrete and steel buildings, monuments to the Bolshevik communist revolution, no elements of former bourgeois society despised by uneducated communist agitators and rulers.

Bauhaus architecture was the child of Walter Gropius in Weimar and the German Bauhaus school founded by him in 1919. Depressing and plain, made of glass, steel, and concrete, it was Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) which became part of the modernist architecture exported all over the world.

Bauhaus existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Then there is former President Obama’s library, a modernist form of ugliness, a cross between a high security prison and a Star Wars movie set.

Significant and beautiful buildings from various monarchies in Europe were destroyed by Bolsheviks to make room for their hideous communist-style architecture which was depressing and demoralizing to look at. The destruction was called systematization of society, testing how much the population was willing to accept the communist oppression before they snapped.

After the Covid lockdowns I noticed the emergence of a dispiriting trend of change of all the formerly happy buildings of fast-food restaurants. The building remodeling was the same, shades of grey, light grey, dark grey, black, and brown, all dispirited and depressive colors. It was a twenty-first century form of minimalism and sophistication, I told myself. But mood is mood and I could not argue in a positive way about the blanket of grey.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color grey because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and more grey. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was grey.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were grey, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all grey. There was so much grey to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color grey was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our happy and colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry. I recognized the bothersome uniformity from my previous twenty years of life under communism.

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, light grey, medium grey, with barely lit stores as if to conceal the stains of grey misery.

After the lockdowns public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to various shades of grey, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in grey and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that homes and cars painted in less showy colors sell much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” Rich Americans call those who like bright colors, Lilly Pulitzer people. The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store, which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the uniform uglification of architecture is just one way to do so.

 

 

 

The Drab Colors Squashing the Spirit

As a teenager, shopping with my mom one day, I saw a bolt of material with a beautiful splash of color among the sea of drab greys, dark browns, black, ink blue, and very dark olive. Wondering how that escaped the eyes of the communist censorship, I begged my poor mom to buy me 2 meters of it so I could have a new dress, a special treat for me since my parents were very poor and could not afford such things often. They were honest blue-collar workers, the proletariat that the regime talked about all the time and kept oppressed and hungry. I wanted my aunt Stela to make me a short sleeve dress out of the cheap polyester material sprinkled with red roses against a green and black background. I knew I would stick out like a sore thumb in a sea of drab colors, but it made me happy just looking at it.

I would often say to myself that, if I would ever afford beautiful and bright colors, my clothes would be happy hues, something the communist economy never offered to their trapped and impoverished “customers.”

Our school and work uniforms were dark grey, navy, black, ink blue, various shades of brown, and white shirts. Nothing fancy, just basic. Shoes were black, white, and brown with thick brown or black hose. Pants were discouraged in women unless they were working in factories. I wore black pants in winter as a child, to keep warm. Photographs show high waters when the same pair was worn two years in a row.

Finally I came to America and my eyes were overwhelmed with beautiful colors. Even though I could not afford anything, the fact that such beautiful fabrics, clothes, and colors existed, it made my heart dance with joy.

Years later, I discovered Lilly Pulitzer with its array of greens, blues, pinks, beiges, and white. It had not yet morphed into the mixture of designs and dazzling colors of today - they stand out at airports among the sea of black clothes as if everyone is going to a funeral.

Strangely, in the last four years, since the forced Covid lockdowns, everything around us began to change in the direction of the drab life we lived under communism. Everything became utilitarian, small, crowded, plain, and uniform.

It started with the selection of clothes, towels, in department store offerings and in car colors. They all looked the same as if they had used the same designers and manufacturers – a lot of greys, blacks, beiges, browns, navy, olive greens, and white. A few colors here and there but nothing like it had been.

Cars became indistinguishable on the road, the same shades of grey, silver, black, beige, and white. I had a hard time finding a new car in red or a beautiful blue. It took me a year and a half to find my red SUV.

Then I noticed that all fast food restaurants started changing their outdoor appearance as if a Bauhaus conference had taken place and all have decided that they would go with the same drab and depressing interior and exterior décor – shades of grey, brown, black, and beige.

The big arches were gone, the big windows were gone, and so were the playgrounds which my children loved even though the food was never great. It was a part of Americana that disappeared and was replaced by Bauhaus drabness. Colors that made the buildings look happy and inviting, disappeared. Some even looked like a prison from the exterior. The only holdouts were the Mexican food restaurants which remained the same colorful and happy places.

The fast food and regular restaurants now look inside and out like the utilitarian Bauhaus architecture, not inviting, cozy places where you go not just for the food but for an atmosphere and a pleasant experience that pleases the visual senses.

Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius became a movement in early 20^th century Germany, featuring “straightforward and functional designs with simple geometric shapes, clean lines, and minimal embellishment, using basic materials like steel, concrete, and glass.”

This type of architecture was the basis of our lives in communism – simple and utilitarian, nothing fancy for the proletarian masses. Reinforced concrete high-rise apartments withstood a strong earthquake of 7.2 on Richter scale. It did not demolish such ugly buildings but broke pieces of it, dangling them like loose teeth.

Next time you go out to a fast-food restaurant, notice the simplicity and drabness of color, the smaller windows, or the windows that had been taken out and replaced by grey walls. And they all look alike, drab, ugly, uninviting, and prison-like. Who wants to eat in such an unhappy place? Perhaps that is the idea, driving the masses back to their own homes, ordering food and staying indoors, better controlled.

The Magical Energy of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal proposed by radicals in Congress brought back best-forgotten memories of my life under the “paradise of socialism.” 

I am too old to live under socialism because I like simple luxuries like soap, detergent, toilet paper, electricity, food, clean water, and comfortable shoes, and being able to express my opinion in public without severe retribution.

It sums up in a simplistic way the dreary daily life of surviving under a socialist economy where the means of production were owned by the incompetent state and each citizen was at the mercy of the government centralized planners who would not know what supply and demand was if it hit them in the face.

People brought these elementary-middle school trained incompetents to power because all they’ve heard was free stuff, equality, and fleece the rich, which they were. Those who were lucky, escaped with their lives and lost everything they’ve worked hard to earn including ancestral lands and private property. You see, the massive and forced confiscation was sold to the useful idiots as “for the common good.”

I am also too old to live in stack-n-pack prefab reinforced concrete apartments, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with other families in a space no larger than the average hotel room.

Russians are demolishing many of the Soviet era grey concrete high-rise buildings, admitting that the experiment to offer “affordable housing” has failed miserably. But we are going full steam ahead with it because the Wunderkind AOC of the U.S. House of Representatives told us to – if we don’t, the planet will perish in 12 years.

I like my stellar healthcare, I do not desire Medicare for all, meaning healthcare for none, once rationing ensues. Most people don’t understand basic economics, including AOC, who is shouting in microphones every chance she gets, promoting her global communism environmental deal.

Sustainable Developers of the Green New Deal, the Agenda 2030 imposed on Americans, promises all sorts of amenities to the population at large if we are just willing to cram into high-rises and to adopt a walkability/bike life style, living like sardines in a small can, assembling and disassembling modular Bauhaus-style furniture, giving up our independence and mobility, cars, and everything that makes life fun and worth living, all because it is not deemed sustainable by U.N. planners and it is endangering the planet with global warming.

In my experience, the socialist utopia radicals in this country are promoting, was made worse in the socialist republic run by the Communist Party, by ardent apparatchiks with no formal education but the gift of gab, loquacious enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator who brought them to power in the first place (think Venezuela, Cuba, Soviet Union, North Korea, and all the Iron Curtain Soviet satellite dictatorships).

A cartoon from the Soviet Union with the following caption under one solitary brown boot in an otherwise empty display case read, “we have received a new shipment, come see the boot,” aptly describes our shopping reality and the existence of the black market and bartering in order to survive.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortes wants America to dispose of cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes.  In twelve years, her “magic energy” will replace all the dirty fossil fuel energy that is destroying the planet we inhabit.

The Green New Deal is placing solar panels on our roofs, which is a good move in the long run if taxpayers’ subsidies are paying for the installation and the panels. When the sun is out, good ole fossil fuels must supply the energy.

Let’s not mention wind turbines which are so expensive and inefficient to operate and run that they seldom provide enough energy in their lifetime to offset the cost of producing and maintaining them. When the wind dies down, the turbines move but precious little energy is produced.

How is the rest of the largest economy on the planet going to be supplied with energy? How will trucks transport our food, medicine, parts, cars, mail, and other necessities we take for granted daily? Who is going to move people when cars are gone? Buses? Trains? What is going to replace millions and millions of jobs lost? How are these people going to make a living? What is going to replace the ships and recreational boats? How are we going to cross rivers and oceans? By fast train and buses? Perhaps that IS the idea, keeping the population immobile in one large and crowded area, under the control of our all-knowing government.

How is energy going to be produced? AEI's Mark Perry explained,

“Despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016), that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the electric power generated in the U.S. last year. And that’s a lot of solar workers: about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford and P&G. 

https://www.aei.org/publication/inconvenient-energy-fact-it-takes-79-solar-workers-to-produce-same-amount-of-electric-power-as-one-coal-worker/print/

In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas), that sector produced nearly one-third (almost as much as gas) of U.S. electricity last year. 

In 2016, the coal sector generated an average of 7,745 megawatt hours of electric power per worker, more than twice the 3,812 megawatt hours of electricity generated per natural gas worker, and 79 times more electric power per worker than the solar industry, which produced only 98 megawatt hours of electricity per worker. Therefore, to produce the same amount of electric power as just one coal worker would require two natural gas workers and an amazingly-high 79 solar workers.” It does not seem that AOC thought this out before she read her TelePrompTer about the Green New Deal. 

In Virginia, Spotsylvania, Chesterfield, Accomack and now Culpeper, solar providers have set up shop with help from generous subsidies. The proposed solar facility in Culpeper, operated by Cricket Solar of California, will install panels on 800 acres of agricultural land and provide 80 megawatts of power. Who will produce our food each time agricultural land is taken out of commission for solar panels and wind turbines? Socialist co-operatives here or China? https://freebeacon.com/issues/virginias-push-for-solar-panels-offers-few-rays-of-hope/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=0af9d2d776-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_05_08_19_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-0af9d2d776-45619005

There is no other country in the world where I can seek the best health care right now, go to a hospital and be treated the same day, have medical tests relatively quickly, buy what I want to eat right now, cooked or uncooked, find a pharmacy open that would fill the prescription I need, walk into an abundant grocery store at all hours of the day and night and find what I want to buy without standing in line and fighting other shoppers for the last potato. There are myriads of choices provided by capitalist supply and demand, by freedom, by mobility, by entrepreneurship, and by the much-maligned fossil fuels which brought us out of the dark ages of poverty, want, and disease and into a successful western civilization that everyone envies and risks life and limb to get here.

But we should not let reality and truth stand in the way of corrupt politics. Every time AOC opens her mouth to speak, more pearls of communist wisdom roll out onto the floor. They spread in all corners of the country and disappear, never to be found again. Her socialist ardent supporters just hear “free, free, free for all.”