WWW.PRESIDENTS"R"US.COM

Kids Explain The Darnedest Things

John Emerson’s Social Design Notes blog studies recent self-explanations by museum and presidential library creators, and sums up the their evil work:

“I keep seeing this trend: stories of monuments and memorials sold on infantilism, using the lens of “childhood” to conjure an air of authenticity and gravitas.“

Emerson quotes the Washington Post on presidential library market maker Ralph Appelbaum’s Nigeria project:

“What does it take to make a Nigerian child?’ It’s an unanswerable question, but it provided the necessary aha moment that made it all come together, a positive theme that finesses some of the philosophical problems of a presidential library in a country riven by corruption, violence, and religious, ethnic, linguistic and economic divisions.”

Stiff Competition

Applebaum’s firm is the American equivilant of Lenin’s embalmers touching down in Angola and Vietnam, loosing upon the world our packaged solutions for immortality.