Art & Infrastructure Mash-up

There is power from keeping ones voice soft and calm during an argument. Being quiet but holding your ground causes the other person to feel a bit ridiculous shouting at you and often they run out of steam. According to this article, Caracas, Venezuela got a similar result when using mimes as traffic cops. Apparently, the silence professionals are making an impact by injecting the unexpected as well as modeling quiet on the busy streets.

So here are some more suggestions on other ways to inject art into our societal infrastructures:

Playgroup meets courthouse: Would our trials go smoother if everyone started the session with some cookies and juice, wore name tags and had the freedom to pull down a nap mat from the wall if they got tired or cranky? All "it's mine" toy disputes are still decided by the judge.

Tax paperwork meets photojournalism: Similar to a nonprofit appeal, tax payers would get vivid and real photographs of the public spaces and families that are going to benefit from their tax money.

Opera meets utilities: Could mournful arias play anytime you used water or electricity in excess as a reminder of the dwindling resources? You could even add some triumphant fanfare when the offending appliance was turned off. The only downside is it could make showers even longer...

Punch & Judy meets political debates: Why no one has thought of this yet I do not know.

Comic strips meet public policy: All new bills and laws must also be rendered in comic strip form and distributed to everyone effected by them.

What, me worry?

Most economists--most people, in fact-- think that one of the roles of government is to provide public goods, such as infrastructure, defense and public health provisioning. So of all the things in the stimulus to criticize, these should have been deemed acceptable to Republicans (via Paul Krugman):

"So Bobby Jindal makes fun of 'volcano monitoring', and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack."

While Europe and East Asia are well equipped to manufacture vaccines in the event of a flu outbreak, the US is behind the curve--there's only one factory in the entire country capable of production. No, government is not always the answer; but sometimes it is.