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Print December 2, 2022 32 comments

When the Words Take Over

Jef Costello

2,715 words

Years ago, I watched a much-acclaimed documentary about the artist R. Crumb. What I remember most about it, however, is not Crumb himself, but his older brother Charles. Like most of the rest of the family, Charles was both an artist and a madman. Indeed, three years after the release of the Crumb documentary, a collection of art by the Crumb brothers was published under the title The Whole Family is Crazy! Charles’ insanity was evident in the comics he drew as a child. These were quite artistically accomplished, but in time the text began to overtake the images. Like most comics, Charles’s (which were never published during his lifetime) included boxes with textual exposition, as well as dialogue and thought balloons. As Charles grew, so did his text — until the comics were entirely made up of exposition and dialogue, leaving no room for images.

Now, maybe I am crazy too, but this has always reminded me of Hegel. It was Hegel’s position that at the end of history, art, as a means of conveying truth, would be superseded by philosophy. In other words, discursive language would become the means by which humanity confronted itself, not myths or images. Words would become the mirror modern man holds up to himself. This certainly seems to have taken place, though not exactly in the way Hegel thought it would. Just walk into the homes of most normies and you will find, plastered all over the walls, the words in which they apparently behold themselves.

“Live, Laugh, Love.” “Friends and family gather here.” “Why walk when you can dance?” “This is us: Our life. Our story. Our home.” “Good friends are like stars: You don’t always see them but you know they’re always there.” “The ornament of a house is the guests who frequent it.” “This is our happy place.” “Blessed.” “Thankful.” “Relax.” Signs for the kitchen are also in plentiful supply (all of them, unfortunately, inducing gags just where one least wishes for them). For example: “‘Made with love’ means I licked the spoon and kept using it.” Or consider my personal favorite, “Homemade with lots of love & butter,” which just makes me think of Last Tango in Paris. If this is the end of history, folks, we are definitely in “not with a bang but a whimper” territory. But you knew that, anyway.

If you have guessed that the vast majority of the people purchasing these items are white women, you would be right. You would also be right to assume that they have little or no sense of irony. If I were to hang up one of these things, it would be an expression of postmodern irony, or what the author Paul Fussell called “parody display.” I am also inclined to think that these women have, at most, high school diplomas. But this just dates me. The truth is that these days universities no longer cultivate the tastes of their students, and so for all I know there are doctors and lawyers with “live, laugh, love” crap all over their houses.

A friend of mine has voiced the theory that this trend began with evangelical Christians hanging Biblical quotations in their homes. This seems plausible and, of course, those people fit the profile of white and irony-deficient. What may have occurred is that the Bible verses morphed into the vaguely “spiritual” detritus of “BLESSED,” “THANKFUL,” etc. Then the trend took off from there: “inspirational,” “motivational,” possibly religious, but not necessarily. It’s true that this is a really white thing, but these items are not without black purchasers. The same friend has occasion to enter the homes of black people on a regular basis (primarily to evict them), and he has noticed one item of verbal wall art showing up again and again. Yes, you guessed it: “BLESSED.” As in, “Have a blessed day,” said the black female cashier at PetSmart.

What can explain this strange obsession with using words as decoration — such painfully trite and cringey words? Why are more than 280,000 products bearing the words “live, laugh, love” available from Wayfair? One recent article on this phenomenon attributes it to hard economic times:

In the wake of the 2008 recession, consumers sought inspiration for affordable interior design on image-based inspiration sites like Pinterest and craft-focused e-commerce stores such as Etsy. Prints bearing motivational slogans in cursive type, and wooden cut-out words like “dream”, “family”, “joy” and “blessed” were marketed as an easy way to make a house a home. “Live, Laugh, Love” found its true calling in the form of easy-to-produce and relatively cheap-to-buy word-art decor, attractive for its accessibility in terms of both price and content.

So, hard times have driven people to hang cringey slogans on their walls because they are (a) cheap and (b) “motivational”? Sorry, but I don’t find this convincing. What about attributing this trend to bad taste, pure and simple? “Tacky,” my mother would have said, if she had lived to see this “word-art decor.” None of the articles I have seen that treat this phenomenon — and there are a few — attributed it to a decline in taste. Presumably this is because making any qualitative distinctions between people now calls to mind the sound of jackboots.

However, bad taste is also not a sufficient explanation, for it cannot explain why so many people are now drawn to words rather than images. In the past, people with bad taste filled their homes with bad paintings, like the ones of dogs playing poker, or anything by Thomas Kinkade. Saying that people want something cheap, cheery, and “motivational” also won’t cut it, for similar reasons. Why didn’t people start buying cheap, cheery, motivational pictures? Why not a picture of people actually living, laughing, and loving?

Possibly because this would require interpretation. In case you have not noticed it, most people today are allergic to subtlety. Everything has to be obvious and explicit. When I was teaching school, I noticed that any text whose meaning did not instantly unbosom itself when first glanced upon would cause my students to quickly give up in frustration. Nothing can be left to be inferred; nothing left to the imagination. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been to the movies lately. The same is true even of food. Overseasoned, oversweetened, overcooked, overladen with layers of things that do not belong together — on the principle that since each of these things pleases individually, it would be infinitely better to have them all, together, and now, now, now. Thus, was born the “breakfast pizza” and the three- to four-layer cake of multiple icings, so sickeningly sweet it burns on the way down.

The great advantage of owning a “live, laugh, love” sign rather than a painting of people living, laughing, and loving is that it requires no cogitation at all in order to get the point. There are no depths to be plumbed. Unless the owner has a relative who teaches philosophy someplace, no one is going to ask, “But what is it to live? What is a good life? Mustn’t it involve something more than laughing and loving?” This isn’t the sort of response Karen is after when she hangs up her “live, laugh, love” sign over the fake fireplace. But I do think that she is hanging it to generate some kind of response from others, and that this is an important element in the entire phenomenon.

As with so much else today, the key to understanding the folly lies in seeing what sort of impression people are trying to make by means of it. Karen’s carefully curated Instagram page gives viewers the impression that she is always smiling, baking cookies, petting golden retrievers, enjoying sunsets, having delicious, non-fattening, and highly photogenic desserts, raising children who never create any trouble, and celebrating diversity. All else has been carefully omitted: her drinking problem, her husband’s opioid addiction, her multiple prescriptions for psychiatric drugs, the scars on her arms from self-harm, and her maxed-out credit cards.

But how can she control the impressions people have of her when they walk into her home and see her up close? Answer: hang up signs that signal that Karen, some appearances to the contrary, is one of the good ones. She knows what’s important in life — that it’s all about living, laughing, and loving. This is, of course, a woman’s view of life (and a shallow woman’s at that), but it’s the opinions of other women about which she naturally cares the most. Her kitchen signs announce that her cooking is full of love — and butter. We feel a bit inadequate in this kitchen (“Is my cooking filled with love?”). We feel this way in the den also, where a pillow orders us to “RELAX.” Apparently, Karen is just one of those people who knows how to relax — gee, I wish that were me. We do not realize that Karen’s secret to relaxation is benzodiazepine (how about a pillow that says “BENZO”?).

You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here

Karen flatters you with her sign that says her guests are the ornament of her home. Yet even this sign is calculated to make visitors feel inadequate. After all, they probably don’t feel that way about their guests. Most guests are relatives and, realistically, most relatives are disagreeable moochers we house out of obligation and are glad to be rid of. However, we find it hard to resent Karen for being so “grounded,” so generous, so buttery, and so relaxed, for another sign tells us she considers herself “BLESSED.” This is supposed to mean “I don’t claim any credit for what I have, nor do I take it for granted. I know that it is a gift. I am humble.” Actually, what it means is “look how humble I am.” Virtue is negated when it fills the blank in “look how ______ I am.”

The most obvious and graceless signaling has been relegated to the yard. There we will find a sign that informs us that the people in Karen’s house believe in “science,” and they believe that “black lives matter,” etc. These liberal yard signs are too familiar to my readers to require careful description. There has never been a purer example of signaling. These signs are obviously not intended to persuade or to change minds; they are intended solely to advertise the “virtue” of the smug, wine-drinking shits that own the property. Inevitably, “conservative” yard signs, in designs similar to their liberal equivalents, have popped up, with multi-colored lines of text announcing, “Biden stole the election,” “Fauci can’t be trusted,” “Hillary belongs in prison,” etc. These signs are dumb, but a different kind of dumb. They are intended more to piss off passing Democrats than to signal Trump-voter virtue.

We even have yard signs now for that peculiar breed of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual crank who thinks he’s far superior to either group: the so-called “independent voter.” One such sign reads, “In this house we believe that simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and semantically-overloaded aphorisms are poor substitutes for respectful and rational discussions about complex issues.” The owner who thrusts this sign into his grass takes great delight in the fact that most passersby will not know what a tautology is, let alone a “semantically-overloaded aphorism.” Trouble is, he doesn’t know either.

Am I being uncharitable? Could it be that the indoor signs at least, the ones of the “live, laugh, love” variety, are pitiable attempts by unhappy, unfulfilled people to remind themselves of the brighter side of life? This is the question raised by another recent article:

Are these positive affirmations evidence that we are all just searching for a glimmer of hope amid the desolate wasteland of modern life, modern politics and the aching chasm of human waste that is social media? Is it, perhaps, an attempt to be good when things are so, so bad?

I don’t think it needs to be either-or: either this phenomenon is motivated by despair, by a thirst to be reminded of what ought to matter in life, or it is an expression of narcissistic virtue-signaling. Both motivations can co-exist in the same person, and often do, or one can be present without the other. That these signs function as “reminders” of some sort is supported by one subgroup of “word-art” that I have not so far mentioned. These are the signs that seem just to function as labels: a sign that says “PORCH” in big letters hung on the porch; “KITCHEN” in the kitchen; “VERANDA” on the veranda; “LAKE HOUSE” in the lake house, etc. A few extra words are sometimes permitted, as in “We love our BEACH HOUSE.”

Are these signs intended for the addlepated, who might forget they are on the porch if it weren’t for the sign that says “PORCH”? Should someone get Joe a big sign for the Oval Office that says “OVAL OFFICE”? A more plausible, but still-too-simple explanation is that this is, once more, merely bad taste — the bad taste of people who needed to fill a space on the porch and couldn’t come up with anything better. However, I think it is possible to see this “label” trend as an expression of modern despair as well. A fashionable trend in “spirituality” today speaks of something called “presence” or “mindfulness.” This is what figures like Eckhart Tolle have made millions preaching the gospel of. The idea is that modern people fail to “be present” to others, to their body, to place, and to the moment.

You can buy Jef Costello’s The Importance of James Bond here

What causes this “absence”? The traditional explanation one would get from a Buddhist is that their minds are full of thoughts, especially cares. The “monkey mind” has taken over and now they can no longer enjoy the smile on a child’s face or the feeling of rain on their cheeks because they are “elsewhere,” thinking of a thousand other things. But it seems to do far too much credit to modern people of the most recent vintage to suppose that their minds are too active. What is more likely is that the real is no longer real to them. The place itself — the porch, the veranda, the beach house, etc. — is no longer, for modern people, an immediate reality. Instead, the “virtual” has overtaken the real, like the words overtaking the images in Charles Crumb’s comic. What is valued now is not the real, but how the real is “presented.”

It’s like those tourists you see on your vacations who are so preoccupied with photographing the sites that they seem not even to be seeing them. No matter: we’ll enjoy the sites later when we’ve posted the pictures on Instagram. But then, of course, the moment is gone — as it is always gone for modern people, who live perpetually for some vague idea of “real living” (and, presumably, laughing and loving) that will take place in some indefinite future. Fulfillment is not had through experience, but through the anticipation of experience, or through the visual record of experiences we were never really “there” for. Can we blame people, then, for wanting to remind themselves that they are on the “PORCH”? Or on the “VERANDA”? Or that they are blessed enough to own a “BEACH HOUSE”? This is modern consumerist America’s version of “Be Here Now.”

I know I should pity the white people who put up these signs. And I know I come across as a thorough misanthrope. I know I should feel sorry for people with such bad taste, whose lives are so empty they need to be “motivated” by vacuous slogans staring back at them from the wall. I know I should feel sympathy for anyone whose internal life is so impoverished they feel gladdened by the impression a “BLESSED” sign makes on the neighbors. But I feel so alienated from people today I’m at the point where it is difficult to imagine they have any kind of internal life at all. It is difficult, consequently, not to see these humans merely as humanoid; merely as ciphers or empty vessels with human form.

And all possibility of my feeling any such sympathy evaporated as soon as I ran across the best-selling “lived, laughed, loved” coffin.

*  *  *

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Tags

bad tasteCharles CrumbG. W. F. Hegelhousehold signsJef Costellolive laugh loveR. Crumbsemantically-overloaded aphorismssloganstautologiesthe end of historyyard signs

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« An Open Letter to Kanye West

32 comments

  1. Vauquelin says:
    December 2, 2022 at 3:38 am

    Hilarious piece and very true on many levels. I don’t believe, however, that it’s some major cultural shift to hang text on walls. This white custom dates back to antiquity and in many places in Europe it’s customary to hang phrases on ones walls as paintings. In the Netherlands for example it’s a prominent cultural staple to use ceramic tiles inscribed with aphorisms or proverbs as decorative wall-hangings. This custom goes back to at least the 16th century, and does seem to have a White Christian underpinning. Silly, trite and meaningless though the “Live Laugh Love” style of phrase may seem, the custom itself is good and wholesome white culture subconsciously carried on by white women, and that’s nothing to thumb your nose at. I just wish they hung up the 14 words instead.

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  2. SmithsFan84 says:
    December 2, 2022 at 5:10 am

    “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

    — Kurt Vonnegut,  Slaughterhouse-Five

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  3. Fred C. Dobbs says:
    December 2, 2022 at 5:21 am

    Bravo Mr. Costello! I gave you a round of applause after reading your brilliant piece. My own wife is guilty of these atrocities. She has two masters degrees so your theory that this is not limited to white women with only high school diplomas is correct.
    Black people typically don’t hang word art in their homes because most don’t have permanent residences. Instead they will tattoo what they consider profound biblical verses to their bodies. Or even more hilariously they do it in Chinese characters.

    I was a little lost by your reference to the movie Last Tango in Paris? It’s one of those movies you might see in your 20’s but don’t fully understand until you’re in your 50’s and have been married for a while.

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    1. Mister Agreeable says:
      December 2, 2022 at 10:14 am

      In Last Tango in Paris, Marlon Brando sodomizes his teenage lover using butter as lube. In context here, it’s a hilarious joke, and it made me laugh out loud.

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      1. Fred C. Dobbs says:
        December 3, 2022 at 6:56 am

        O yeah. I forgot about that

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  4. Fire Walk With Lee says:
    December 2, 2022 at 7:20 am

    My wife and I bought a house a little over two years ago.  It’s a big, beautiful brick house built in 1930 and it’s previous owner went through great trouble to maintain it’s original style with wonderful crown molding woodwork, original Art Deco light fixtures and a beautiful wood burning fireplace.  The only piece of hokey word-art we have is in the kitchen and it reads “Take time to laugh, it is the music of the soul.”  Had her mother not given it to her, it would probably be in the basement bathroom.  But when we first moved in and started to decorate, she came home with one of those God awful wall decal deals with giant cursive lettering of some banal motivational slogan that takes up half a wall.  Thankfully she didn’t put up too much of a fight when I told her that we’re not putting something that belongs on a fridge magnet at my mother’s house on our living room wall.  Instead, I decided to go with a classic film motif that compliments the design of the main floor with framed posters of Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, Cagney in The Public Enemy, Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil and my favorite, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.

    This is a great essay that made me live, laugh and love.  Thank you.

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  5. James Kirkpatrick says:
    December 2, 2022 at 7:22 am

    Nailed it!

    This is one of best articles I’ve read in a long time.  Incredibly insightful.

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  6. ArminiusMaximus says:
    December 2, 2022 at 8:13 am

    This is a great article full of many great insights. I’ve seen these signs in the homes of people of any ethnicity. There is another aspect of this, which is magical incantation. James Howard Kunstler has described this as Wishful or Magical Thinking. It is tied to the new age religion of manifesting. If I say I am Blessed than I am blessed.

    Of course in all cases it represents disempowerment. Perhaps in the age of the Fiat Debt Regime, at some fundamental level, people know they haven’t earned what they have. My job as, [Chief Diversity Officer, Senior Assistant Perception Manager …] is not only valueless, it subtracts value, yet I make large sums of money. I must be Blessed.

    I hate to say this, but this is all pervasive and not confined to Karens. I came to a major metropolis to put together a band and I brought with me a portfolio of songs and recordings of what I wanted to do. I was shocked that nearly every time I encountered a prospective collaborator, the question, “Who do you sound like”, came up as an instinctive response. The same happens with potential audience who first ask, “What do you do?” Similarly, most people say, “I sound like this band and that band and another band.” I’ve even heard an aspiring artist say something like, “It is really popular so it must be good.” As you an imagine, there isn’t a drop of talent in that person’s body, and if there were, with that mentality it will never express itself.

    All of these are related. Inability to think for oneself. Inability to carve an individual identity through self expression and let that speak for itself. A total lack of curiosity and desire to decide and characterize for oneself. A need to rely on credential and pedigree to make value judgements as opposed to relying on ones honed ability to make judgements for themselves. A life without real achievement and accomplishment but a deep desire to have achieved and accomplished that expresses itself through. An unbelievable level of sloth and self disgust that needs to utter magical incantations in order to manifest something rather than putting in endless hours cultivating, failing, experimenting, progressing and breaking through the unending sequences of learning plateaus. The inability and lack of confidence to see these as the real moments of opportunity to find oneself and make progress.

    The other day I stumbled upon a clip of the Wacken Open Air Festival with some German death metal band playing before throngs of people with a full stage size rainbow flag as backdrop. I don’t think it was irony. I think it was virtue signaling. I could be wrong. I hope I am. If not, this visual and the many similar observations I have made show that we are at a moment of mass death – death of confidence, death of vision, death of the desire and will to realize a vision, death of the culture that once made developing and realizing a vision an imperative.

    I take all this not to despair. It is our opportunity to light our torches and quietly carry them in the dark. In our light, and the light of the brothers we find in that dark, we will have the confidence, knowledge, vision and the Apollonian cultural and spiritual imperative to create what the Rainbow Era cannot.

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  7. James J. O'Meara says:
    December 2, 2022 at 8:55 am

    Hegel, being a philosopher (or, as Schopenhauer preferred to call such creatures, a “professor of professors of philosophy”) no doubt assumed the move from art to philosophy was a net gain. Be that as it may, the move from art/images to words does not reflect the triumph of philosophy but the triumph of the Jew. The visually impaired but verbally clever Jew hates images, and has done his best to persuade the world that representational art is “kitsch” and serious art is, well, blank canvases, monochromatic canvases, or indeed words (including blown up comic strip panels). As this attitude permeates society, it appears in many levels, from “serious” art to signs reading “Porch,” the only difference being whether it is installed in a gallery or a porch (cf. Duchamps’ urinal, the “found object” being the first stage of the transition from artistic [i.e., crafted or created] image to object to word).

    Hegel was well aware that his paymasters were signing his checks to promote the Prussian state (the final development of reason — excuse me, Reason — in history; cf. Fukuyama), which included the Lutheran church. Protestantism, of course, is crypto-Judaism, hence its obsession with The Word, scripture, preaching, iconoclasm, etc. This fits with the sign obsessions of White evangelicals, as well as the Woke (woke being, as Nietzsche pointed out, the idea of Christian morality minus Christian belief).

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    1. Buttercup says:
      December 9, 2022 at 6:20 am

      What sort of art interests you most, James?

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  8. Nah says:
    December 2, 2022 at 9:16 am

    Interesting timing. Crumb’s wife Aline Kominsky just kicked the bucket. As seen in the Crumb documentary, she’s the little worm’s fantasy wife: a loud headstrong Jewess with a leftist axe to grind and who’d indulge his degenerate proclivities.

    The Koch-funded globalist leftist pantomime ‘libertarians’ at ‘Reason’ magazine had a recent article calling her the ‘Mother of Modern Feminist Cartooning’. If ‘Reason’ praises something, you can be sure it’s not in our peoples’ interest.

    The Crumb documentary is an interesting watch. The family is highly dysfunctional and a poster board for eugenics. R. Crumb seems to straddle the line between his shut-in mentally ill obsessive brother Charles and his sexually assaulting new age weirdo artist Maxon. Maxon swallows a great length of fabric and runs it through his body regularly like a giant gastrointestinal floss.

    Crumb is such a vile self-hating submissive leftist White man that he *feels* like he should be Jewish. He’s the classic artistic ‘nebbish’ (ala Allan ‘Woody Allen’ Konigsberg), and like all of them, is a pervert.

    Good article.

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    1. Mister Agreeable says:
      December 2, 2022 at 10:11 am

      Kominsky clearly only married Crumb because she was jealous of him, a crap cartoonist who wanted to hitch herself to acknowledged, if extremely creepy, artistic talent. Subsequently her sub-toilet-wall doodlings appeared alongside Crumb’s in co-authored works. Maybe it was Crumb’s way of flipping off the artistic and critical establishment with an act of self-sabotage, conscious or otherwise. As for what Kominsky brought into the bedroom, well, that’s definitely better off left between the two of them.

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  9. La-Z-Man says:
    December 2, 2022 at 12:06 pm

    I recall years ago, the big thing was the Footsteps or Footprints image with the religious message that God carried the subject when he was most in need of His help.

    I don’t mind these word-decor items. For starters, I find the wood medium attractive as well as the usually preferred rustic lettering and images.

    I did find the column funny though. I wonder if there’s a market not necessarily for ‘opposite’ messaging like Die, Weep, Hate but perhaps asterisk the I Loooove Chocolate apron with a *not as much as cocaine, but I’m all out of llello. Or Blessed *with patience to cook for these ingrates.

    I love the coffin. I want my tombstone to read ‘he liked reading tombstones ‘ or better ‘he liked to proofread toombstones ‘

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  10. Cold Gin says:
    December 2, 2022 at 3:53 pm

    Is that coffin in poorer taste than a KISS coffin? I can’t tell. It should say “First, socks, THEN shoes.”

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  11. Petronius says:
    December 2, 2022 at 6:01 pm

    Great (and somewhat depressing) piece!

    I refuse to believe that coffin is real. Otherwise I need an entire bottle of Whiskey now.

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    1. Jef Costello says:
      December 3, 2022 at 12:29 pm

      It’s quite real. Take a look at the link. But stay away from the whiskey.

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  12. Al Dante says:
    December 3, 2022 at 3:49 am

    In our neck of the woods it is not uncommon to see dueling lawn signage.

    The two houses always seem to be directly opposite. I guess both are forced to look at the other and get irritated. If you live to the side it is easier to ignore.

    And then there is the algorithm that is a lot like Santa Claus…he knows when you are sleeping… he knows if you’ve been bad or good…

    This turned up in a YouTube feed hours after reading this article:

    https://youtu.be/k0e8Q5M6ycQ

    I gave it the first Like.

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  13. JubalE says:
    December 3, 2022 at 8:58 am

    Put a sign in the Oval Office:  “Live, Sniff, Grope”.

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  14. hyperborean1992 says:
    December 3, 2022 at 9:44 am

    Great piece. It brings back memories of a great Aunt who filled every inch of wall space with corny knick knacks and word signage.  I also never understood the appeal of photographs with inspirational quotes…the kind that coworkers have on their desks.

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  15. JubalE says:
    December 3, 2022 at 9:47 am

    I have an idea to get rich.  To the extent that these vacuous people care to produce babies anymore, there is a fortune to be made selling the women shirts to dress their babies in, reading “Will Live, Will Laugh, Will Love”.

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  16. Bobby says:
    December 3, 2022 at 9:57 am

    Jef, thank you so much!  Great stuff.  I thoroughly enjoyed this.

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    1. Jef Costello says:
      December 3, 2022 at 12:29 pm

      Thanks!

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  17. Nick Jeelvy says:
    December 4, 2022 at 10:47 am

    When I saw that my brother had put up a sign saying “in this house, we love, we forgive etc.”, I stopped seeing him socially. I still consider it one of the wisest decisions I’ve made in my life.

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    1. Fire Walk With Lee says:
      December 4, 2022 at 11:27 am

      I agree.  When I see an “In this house we believe…” sign it’s enough for me to know that those people aren’t worth my time.  Also, what the fuck does “water is life” even mean!?!

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      1. Pusheen says:
        December 5, 2022 at 1:07 am

        It’s an incredibly irritating reference to the Dakota pipeline scam the Indians perpetrated. It was a hugley popular virtue signal amongst liberals at the time to voice support for the Indians in their “struggle,” against the pipeline. One of the most annoyingly shallow and fake causes of it’s day.

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  18. MBlanc46 says:
    December 4, 2022 at 2:33 pm

    Pictures of dogs playing poker are bad? Who knew? Okay, I’ll take ’em down.

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  19. Pusheen says:
    December 5, 2022 at 1:01 am

    That coffin truly is priceless. But I think I’d want mine to say:

     

    “But what is it to live? What is a good life?”

     

    Can I steal that?

     

    You know, This phenomenon reminds me of the trend in motivational posters in schools and the workplace. One used to see them all the time in the late 90’s. They were nigh ubiquitous, until they were ruthlessly mocked out of existence.

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  20. Uncle Semantic says:
    December 5, 2022 at 4:22 pm

    As often as I castigate jewishry’s debasement of creation, especially architecture into hideous eyesores like that Stata Center at M.I.T., I do love Leonid Afremov’s rich color paintings even more than I loathe rothko’s muted and drab splotches. Nathan Sawaya’s lego installations are impressive as well but my current favorite is Scott Weaver’s toothpick masterwork Rolling Through the Bay.

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  21. Elenka says:
    December 7, 2022 at 3:52 am

    An anagram of Live, Laugh, Live is Value Hogville. Definitely preferable.

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  22. Weave says:
    December 8, 2022 at 5:50 am

    This article made my whole damn month. I have a physical reaction to those yard signs that borders on violence. When I see one I am absolutely positive that the idiots who live inside are the meanest, most vacuous, condescending, bad tippers on the planet. It’s like wearing a shirt that says “I’m really pretty.” If you have to tell people, it’s because it’s not evident.

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  23. Bob Roberts says:
    December 8, 2022 at 6:42 pm

    I suspect this trend was started by real estate agents.

    When my wife and I went shopping for a house a few years back, every room had moronic word signs in them like the ones mentioned in this article. They all seemed to be variations of the theme “dream”, as in “The American Dream™”.

    I tried to explain to the agent that owning a house was not my “dream”.
    Being the worlds first trillionaire with a harem of super-models was my dream. In the meantime I needed a place to stay.
    I don’t think she understood which makes sense in light of your article.

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    1. Weave says:
      December 9, 2022 at 6:33 am

      Female real estate agents are a special kind of Karen.

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