medicare-killing budget. he said anybody quoting him saying that was lying. don t quote me. if you quote me, it s a lie. but there s one candidate in the race this year who is different. the art project formerly known as herman cain is giving us a whole different way of looking at stuff like this on the campaign trail this year. herman cain is purportedly a presidential candidate, but he has essentially no campaign staff to speak of. he also continually makes what are treated as gaffes, but even though the media treats them as gaffes they are frankly too perfect to actually just be mistakes. more often than not, what he does that gets covered as a mistake, as a gaffe is really a sort of genius obscure has to be deliberate cultural reference. it s art referencing art. and we have a rich tradition of this, right? i mean, you can t understand the genius of what these muppets are doing here to explain the letter g unless you know that they haven t just come up with this whole competitive s
doing here to explain the letter g unless you know that they haven t just come up with this whole competitive school singing conceit out of nowhere, they are making reference to another cultural product that is the tv show glee. art referencing art. you cannot truly appreciate, for example, the subtle glory of lou barlow from dinosaur jr. doing a soft-spoken acoustic emo version of the song round and round unless you know that the song was made famous by this hair band. i m going to make you mine you can t get the genius unless you know that the band that originally did this is a hair band called ratt, with two ts. it s art referencing art. or at least art referencing hair band. it s an internal cultural reference. and in order to understand the herman cain art project you not only have to understand modern republican presidential politics, you also have to understand what he is doing as his art project. you have to understand the breadth of cultural genius that he is drawing