Today Digby pointed to an article By Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair that hit on something I’ve been wondering about myself:  why does 2012, in terms of fashion, art, culture and such, look so similar to, say 1992?  The clothes, the cars, the architecture, the hairstyles, even the music haven’t really changed at all.  It’s great for me, because I don’t like to buy new things all the time, but it’s also pretty unprecedented.  As Digby hints, Anderson only gets about halfway to the answer when he seizes on the nationalization of retail chains for the decline of big fashion changes.  What he barely touches upon is how a similar dynamic has played out in every industry we quaintly still call “culture.”

Take architecture, please.  Although the current stagnation and sameness we see in smaller projects is mostly driven by tacit admission of past mistakes from when every architect took modernism as catechism and walked it off a bare-concrete cliff by the 70′s,  it’s the larger projects that mark the real decline of creativity.  As late as the 70′s, most skyscrapers were built as corporate headquarters; a single client wanted a trademark building and hired someone to build it, hoping to make a little money on the side from the excess space and save room for expansion.   Today, that model has been turned on its head.  Something called a “developer” comes up with a “program” for a generic building, and then hires a bunch of marketers to decide what it should be (and even its name) based on whatever tenants they manage to attract.  Architects, and architecture itself, are just a necessary evil in what’s really just a tawdry money scheme of banksters and charlatans.   Creativity, not to mention quality, invariably get lost in mad scramble to take the money and run and the work left behind, at best, seeks only not to offend.

And I think that’s the gist of it; anything really new, daring, and unprecedented is bound to offend somebody, and in our increasingly financialized era, such wanton and potentially costly upheaval is shunned even at the risk of boring everyone to death.  Worse, the ever more concentrated behemoths that dominate our culture can, by virtue of size alone, squash any upsetting new tastes like a bug, before they ever creep into the culture at large.   Fewer and fewer people make the decisions about what we will wear, buy, live in, drive, listen to, and admire, and they make them for all the wrong reasons, which mostly involve money.

Real creativity, whether it be in music, literature, fashion, or architecture, never makes it past the bean counters, leaving us all with our own greyish, semicircular blob of whatever is being served at the corporate cafeteria.  This comes in handy when you pull out a 20-year old suit and not only isn’t it brown and polyester, but it still looks pretty tasteful, if you can still fit into it.  And if you can’t afford a new car, it helps that the ten-year old one you have isn’t too ridiculously dated.  It’s quite a bit less pleasant, though, when you turn on the radio and hear the same eight songs for months on end, or rehashed mid-century modern architecture hailed as something “new.”

As someone who has cringed at seeing pictures myself decked out in a velour shirt and/or a pair of striped bellbottoms, I also feel sorry for 20-somethings today, who listen to the music of my youth for lack of anything better of their own, and are still into Star Wars, which began in 1976.   The commercial above aired in the 1980′s, cockily lambasting those darn commies and their lack of style; would that Wendy’s had known how things would turn out.  In our hyper-capitalist era, we ended up with no more choice than the Russians, and we aren’t supposed to notice.

That’s the inscription on the front of the Supreme Court building.  No, seriously.  The part right beneath it where it says “But Some Are More Equal Than Others” may as well be chiseled in now, under a no-bid contract  by Halliburton.  The court, whose rampantly corporatist wing wouldn’t even exist without its heretofore most ridiculous decision, Bush v. Gore, went ahead and cemented the fascist gains of that revolting and audacious overreach yesterday, providing the money shot for the typically graphic right-wing porno movie we’ve been forced to watch ever since.  Now, certain fictitious “people,” who are just the same as you and me except for the fact that they never die, can never be imprisoned, rake in billions every quarter, and can loot the federal treasury at will, have finally been rescued from their oppressed position in society, unlike, say, lesbian Moms who would like to marry.  Anatole France, who spoke of the “equal” rights of the poor and rich to sleep outside and beg for bread, must be fairly astonished.  The rich he was talking about could at least, in a pinch, be beheaded.  Not so JPMorgan Chase and Exxon.

I remember my annoyance, but certainly not surprise, at the coverage of the Roberts and Alito confirmations, when the media reliably threw up a smokescreen over the proceedings by dwelling on debates about abortion and the Nuclear Option, with their always feigned credulity about what Bush was really up to.  All of them, of course, are but the gaudy creations of undeserved constitutional favoritism and the absurd extensions thereof enacted by the right-wing politicians they so cravenly fawned over, and one could hardly expect them to think, when they are so handsomely paid not to.  But Roberts’ record as a corporate lawyer was rife with arguments in favor of corporate personhood, and revealingly bereft of any of the irrelevant and non-remunerative culture war garbage that the Republicans have pointed at for years as they systematically looted the treasury and silenced normal Americans.  Everyone knew that controversial and scary 5-4 decisions would fall like rain as soon as these Opus Dei lunatics were sworn in, but the media carefully avoided telling anybody what kind they would be.

Well, now we know.  Kiss my ass, Operation Rescue, it’s drill, baby drill.   It’s astonishing, really, but not when you know any of them, that the cultural right ever fell for such a flagrant bait and switch.  They’ve been deceived and duped for so long that they’ve come to like it, and the corporatist wing of their chosen party has cleverly given lip service to their kooky hobby horses to advance an entirely unrelated agenda they are, happily, too dumb to contemplate.  Losing and endless wars are sold as religious crusades, spring training for the muscular Jesus, while the profiteers laugh all the way to the bank.  Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter may never be able to get married, but with the kind of trust fund Papa racked up during the Bush years, who cares?  Probably the most intelligence-insulting part of this abominable decision was the part that equated unions and corporations, as though a party that had spent 100 years hating and attempting, quite successfully, to eliminate unions, considered the vestigial remains of those once-threatening populist organizations any sort of equal to multibillionaire, multinationalist, and world-dominating corporations.

Suppressing laughter, the Court pretended to worry that corporations like Nike were vanishing into obscurity because their pitiful, rights-deprived “voices” were being shouted down.  Citibank, the poor thing, didn’t stand a chance against the unseemly advantages of welfare mothers (what welfare?) and foreclosed homeowners.  Exxon lay prostrate before the arrogant dictates of “eco-terrorists,” and the helpless cries of United Health were drowned out amid the maelstrom of desperate diabetics’ howlings in emergency rooms.  Finally warming to its historic role of defending the powerless against the inevitable depredations of the powerful, the new Supreme Court stepped boldly into the breach yesterday.  Grandma’s $25 donation would no longer be allowed to shout down Goldman Sach’s billions.  ”I have a dream,” Clarence Thomas no doubt thought, as he added in his stupefying concurring opinion that even the scanty disclosure requirements the decision left intact might subject religious bigots to, well, bigotry.

Justice Stevens, whose full-throated and uncharacteristically vocal dissent is probably the last gasp of Democracy as envisioned by the Founders in a debate that was decided for us long ago, and, barring some actuarially unlikely development,  won’t be writing for the Court much longer , had this to say in his conclusion:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.  It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.  While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah, you old hippie, was Justice Kennedy’s reply yesterday morning, albeit worded somewhat differently, of course.

Back in the days of Bush and the now-defunct Air America Radio, now-Senator Al Franken had a song he played, to the tune of “Hang on Sloopy,” called “Hang on Stevens,”  which implored  the aging Justice not to tip over before Bush was gone.  Stevens did his part, by the skin of his octogenarian teeth, and did again today, valiantly.  Sadly, it’s too late.

Karl Rove’s “math” turned out to be right on the, uh, money.

UPDATE: This morning, the  Oregonian applauded the Court’s decision as a victory for “free speech.”  This brought on a massive backlash from KPOJ.  Thom Hartmann’s wife unilaterally cancelled their Oregonian subscription, based on that and the paper’s fanatical (and lucrative) stance against 66 and 67, and a slew of callers did the same.  Thom, who was out of town when Louise made the decision, lauded it later on his show.  The front page wrapper about 66 and 67 sent my brother racing to the post office to get his ballot in.