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Behold A Pale House* 

From ArchiTakes via the Dallas News parkcitiesblog comes exciting Bush Library news: we [may] now have an inkling of what the already storied George W. Bush Presidential Consequences Corral will look like.                                                                   

Or maybe not, but in any event Bush architect Robert Stern brings out the saucy at ArchiTakes:

“Stern has just the right attributes to be his fellow Yale alum’s architect: conservativism’s DNA-inscribed commitment to tradition, and an inability to refuse any commission, no matter how unsavory…Characteristically, his new gothic buildings will substitute false antiquity for the real thing… Stern’s dismissal of what is authentic in favor of make-believe meshes nicely with his past service on the Disney Company’s board of directors…While demolition of an older building to make way for a larger new one is business as usual in New York, Stern’s replacement is distinguished by how much it looks like an escapee from one of the postmodern development ghettos just across the Hudson…Stern has proven quite capable of doing harm without tearing anything down.”

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   Your results may vary.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROTUNDA

      When you walk into the Presidential Museum and Leadership Library, the first thing you should see is the rotunda and what is exhibited there.

Odessa Texas’s Presidential Museum threatens to close July 1, despite being on track to attract some 3,650 visitors this year. They have somehow managed to survive for 45 years, given a boost when the semi-local Bushs stumbled to the top.

The museum is an exciting confection of early Bush    home replication, the vaguely presidentialy related, and misinformation.

       “We have some very rare, interesting items for our visitors to see. An example is the registration desk used by President Eisenhower when he was commander of the European forces during WWII. The museum acquired this piece in the 1960’s and it serves to illustrate the unique collection we have, it is not all about buttons and posters.“

The museum’s web page is a melange of odd choices and factual errors.  Their timeline for the 1860s and 1870s finds no space to mention either Lincoln’s election or assassination, but the Chicago Fire gets a mention.

Prize oddity comes when they sound the alarm in the 20th Century:
AREA 7:
DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II

AMERICAN SOCIALISM: WHAT HAPPENED?

  “Not satisfied with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its initial work/relief programs, left-wing politicians Louisiana’s Huey Long and California’s Father Coughlin advocated radical changes to the American system-tax the rich to provide welfare for the poor.”

What ever are they saying here?

  Long is usually viewed as a populist and/or fascist, rarely as a man of the left.

 Father Coughlin was a Detroit based fascist, although the Townsend Movement for old people’s pensions started in California.

Richard Nixon: His Shameful New Roll

Remember when Barack Obama shocked America,  demeaning his high office-to-be by producing a President-Elect logo which traduced the sacred presidential seal?

The feigned outrage was briefly energetic, and then the circus moved on.

Let’s all brace ourselves for new outbursts, as the Nixon Library Foundation has found an exciting new use for the emblem.

Anthony Clark’s dogged explorations of  presidential libraries’ seamy underbellies are documented on his prezlibs blog. Clark reports the Nixon Library Foundation announced White House seal toilet paper, then apparently thought better of it.

” I’d love to link directly to it, but sometime in the last five days the product was removed from the Nixon Foundation’s web site. Here is where the item in question used to appear on the Nixon Library online store. You’ll notice that the main product area is blank.“

We Choose To Sell Out       

Further East, even in whoring for commerce the Kennedy Library as always out-swanks Nixon, signing up the late president to flog watches.

Bridgehead Regained?
A ten-foot bronze Ronald Reagan statue somehow incorporating the Berlin Wall may overcome setbacks which would stop lesser metal, and be erected at America’s London embassy.

The proposed statue was rejected last year on the grounds Reagan had not been dead long enough,  and/or because it was “lacking gravitas.”  One account has the statue’s failings being structural:

“The original sculpture depicts Reagan leaning on a pedestal, but [statue fabricator] Walker said this design was rejected for the British statue because the pose would be seen as weak in that part of the world.“

 Alfred the Leaner 

How these obstacles can be bypassed is unclear, but Westminster reportedly will ponder the question again. This urge to create facts on the ground is endemic in the fabled Westminster Council, where the Tories came to grief in the nineties for selling off public housing as a means of driving out Labour voters.  One Conservative Council Member committed suicide during the “homes for votes” investigation, and another paid 12 million Pounds as punishment.

The statue scheme is another effort to shape the battlefield,  plunking Reagan in front of the US Embassy during its final days in Grovesnor Square, allowing the statue to then land at the new South London Embassy site as a package deal.

Sadly no representation of the proposed statue is available, but let’s take the leaping stallions  at the College Station Bush Library’s Berlin Wall, and in our minds eye substitute a spry, youthful Ronald Reagan. 

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.