Tacky Architecture for $200, Please, Alex

As many of you already know, I spent part of my formative years as a  intern for Bill Clinton. No, I never got up close and personal with his cigar. I don’t have a blue dress from The Gap, either.

There are lots of tacky things about our buddy Bill. Now, I won’t for a minute pretend that I think he was a bad president. I didn’t think too much of his philandering, but honestly, his peccadilloes were well known at the time of the New Hampshire Primary in 1992, when my secretary (yes, dammit, MY SECRETARY) at the state agency where I worked as an administrative law judge, Gennifer Flowers, said she was “tired of all the lies” and told all to The Star, that fine newspaper that is the bulwark of political reporting in the US grocery store lines. This moonlighting nightclub singer had been engaged in an extramarital affair with then-Governor Bill.

Two terms and some fundraising dinners later, the inevitable William J. Clinton Presidential Library was built on land purchased with taxpayer dollars by the city where I live. When the design for the building was unveiled, a collective gasp of horror went up among those of us with a modicum of taste in things architectural.

It looks like a trailer.

A very big, oversized, can’t-deny-the-resemblance-to-a-rectangular-house-on-wheels trailer.

Dear god.

We are so proud that Arkansas can be represented by this larger-than-life replica of substandard architecture. The architects said that the building “symbolically realizes a central theme President Clinton defined during his administration– Building a Bridge to the 21st Century. It is also in harmony with its natural surroundings”.

Are they kidding?

Its natural surroundings are a riverbank in one of the poorest states in the nation. This state also happens to be part of Tornado Alley, where house trailers act as magnets for the world’s most destructive winds.

We can only hope.

Hope. Wasn’t that the town where Clinton was born?

Last Updated on March 29, 2007 by Anne