From the WSJ Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web“:

The real purpose of World War IV is to increase property values, according to John Stilgoe, a Harvard professor. ‘The federal government was badly shocked after Sept. 11,’ he tells the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘The elites thought they had to get the American people focused on something else. And so we’re bombing the hell out of Afghanistan. I’m sorry to say this, but I think that’s what this whole war on terrorism is all about: It’s about maintaining urban property values. It is necessary to do whatever they can to keep people willing to pay exorbitant prices for a small apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles.’

Huh? Or better yet, …Huh…? And as long as we’re speaking of “elites”… who else but an Ivy League professor (of “visual and environmental studies”) has the tenured time to think up such utter nonsense? And to get paid for it, no less? Know thyself, Mr. Harvard Prof. Know thyself…

[a protein wisdom extra: A li’l bit o’ Prof. John’s Theory of Education and current projects, from his very own Hahvahd web page:

Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea.

[…] Right now I work on several projects. One involves the growing interfaces among fantasy, advertising, and cyber-space rendering of real and surreal environments: lately I focus on fantasy illustration from the 1885 to 1910 period, the illusions wrought by moonlight on Romantic-era observers north of latitude 45, the fast-changing imaging of powerful, healthy women in challenging environments, and the growing inability of even well-educated people to look acutely at altered images of humans, humanoids, and animals and notice they are altered.

Yup. Clearly, a guy who specializes in representational interfaces must also be an expert on the motives of an “elitist” bombing class, particularly one hell bent on maintaining inflated property values in major centers of cultural elitism, right? Right? Hello…?]

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