 |
| Look its dancing! |
 |
| Maybe its just blowing in the wind |
Sprouting up this Summer all over Mac-Grove have been the oddest things. At first I thought someone had dinged a car into a stop sign pole . . . and then using a Leatherman peeled parts of the metal away from it . . .and then rusted it? No, that can't be. As I sat staring at what was a perfectly good pole, now turned into a rusty scrap heap, I thought two thing, 1) why would someone do that to a Stop sign pole? and 2) when are they going to fix it? I am still asking.
Lo and behold, I find out that these pieces of recyclable matter are actually art. Well, how about that. Of course, what you want people who are approaching a controlled traffic intersection, driving a couple of tons of vehicular heft to do is to see (be distracted by?) art. I am hoping for the Mona Lisa Yield sign. A stop light that changes from Coolidge's Dogs Playing Poker (green go) to Monet's Haystacks (yellow slow) to Edvard Munch's The Scream (red Stop!).
And art I guess it is. Art in the same way my child brings some twisted piece of metal rope and birch bark home from Scout camp that sits on the mantle for a couple of years. Art in the school of Detroit-abandoned-industrial-failed city-Robocop chic. My wife suggests they may have found the metal near some of the canyon-sized potholes we saw this Spring in our fair city. Maybe.
Alas, it is the usual story. While the City Parks department is losing $800,000.00 to a coffee shop because they couldn't find anyone to read a contract and while the City is whining about a 10 million dollar deficit (that's $10,000,000.00 for those who are visual), the City is paying an artist to molest its stop sign poles. Or maybe it's the State, or the Federal government or the UN. The only thing that is certain is it's you. Why does this happen? Well, in a one-party City there is no opposition. No one to complain about the potholes, the plowing, the deficit, the nutshell attorneys or the vandalism in the name of art to stop signs. There is only one thing left to say.
Stop.
