I'm currently having to move a person from a small apartment, into which I moved her three months ago, because her "art business" collapsed. She paints faces and tattoos, and paints small plaster masks as refrigerator magnets. She isn't doing this as a hobby or side business; she refuses to hold down a job as a salesperson or burger flipper, because she believes her "artistic gift" places her above menial work; she is an "ar-TEEST" who should be worshipped for her gift.

She is the low end of the art scam. She was told she has a great talent (admittedly greater than anything I can do, okay?) and that she can live a successful and emotionally rewarding life just with her art. She has been lied to, by everyone from grade school art teachers to on-line art schools, and her delusions are so firm that not even eviction and starvation changes her mind.

Art is just like writing. Writing is no longer a paid profession. No one makes a living from writing, because no one buys books they can download for free from the Internet, or read on sites like Salon. You weren't paid for your writing, Dawdler, and neither was I. Why should Havrilesky? Why should Stephen King? Why should anyone?

And in a world where we are all about to be evicted, and will have to move into cardboard boxes, what the hell good is art? Do you think you would have bought one of my friend's Spider-Man masks to decorate the inside of your refrigerator crate? Would you buy it with your last five dollars rather than a bowl of gruel to keep your children alive?

Which is why Man Shops Globe is such a prime example of the hypocrisy of the entire concept of art.

But I compliment Ms. Havrilesky in approaching the proper level. And I'm glad that she, not I, pointed out the gay creative personnel involved in this World of Wonder production outfit.

The only thing I have against some gays - and certainly not all, but some prominent and wealthy gays - is their conceit and contempt for ordinary humanity. Who also have a lot of non-gay admirers, or their programming wouldn't dominate cable channels like Sundance and The Travel Channel. Of course they don't see value in crafts and goods made in NYC, or Bithlo, Florida, or San Luis Obispo, California - or Detroit. Quality, to them, means exotic, expensive, pretentious and storied.

These people establish "value" for these items. As a result, rich right-wing bastards who destroy people's lives, who want them to avoid getting sick or want them to die as fast as possible, buy crap chandeliers made of Barbie legs that the gay elite have appointed as "art." Which would be irony, if the obscene prices they pay for this crap wound up in the hands of the poor. But it just goes to bolster the wealth of the middlemen. Again, no trickle-down.

For centuries, art has been promoted as the highest aspiration of the human soul and something to be admired, something for cities and countries and foundations to support with our taxes and obscene worship. Havrilesky approached but didn't openly admit the truth; art is a god-damned Ponzi scheme, like housing finance and megacorporate media control and Big Pharma and Big Medicine. Art is just another lie that makes us slaves.

Is it that the construction was already paid for? Of course not. Driving around Orlando, I see lots of new retail spaces; mini-malls with office space on the second floor, big malls, all sorts of ridiculous things.

Who is going to fill these businesses? Who can compete with Wal-Mart? Mom and Pop stores no longer exist. The only small business entrepreneurs that exist in Sam Walton's bloated shadow are drug dealers, and they don't buy storefronts.

American businessmen are not sheep. They are gerbils. Get them running towards a cliff and they will gladly plunge over.

Hell, we deserve to be taken over by the Chinese, as Rush and Glenn want; at least the Chinese, especially those that run restaurants, understand that they must have no life outside of work, laboring all their lives to pay off debt. Those family restaurants are laboring so the son can eventually incur debt all his own. Like it or not, that is the future for anyone pretending to be a businessman, in this new age of the megacorporation.

After all, in your other posts you show the same dictatorial, megalomaniac concerns as your buddies Rush, Glenn and Schafly. Perhaps not following their philosophy in lockstep, but definitely with the same certitude and lack of concern for other human beings. Why should you protest a project that was made for people just like you?

But where are the posts from the paid Republican trolls Elephantman and Zorkna? (They're likely the same person, or if not they're working in adjacent cubicles of the RNC - with a waist-high hole in the divider.) C'mon, guys, you're not earning your payment for propaganda.