I was reminded recently, and part of me can not stand that guy even if I agree with him a lot some of the time. Yet part of me finds him a pessimistic asshole with his own trauma…. An unbearable pain in the ass!

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gets to the point. You know where the term “open air prison” comes from? It comes from a 1949 Theodor W. Adorno Essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” that became a larger 1951 bookand there are similar passages from 1951 Minima Moralia (subtitle “reflections from a damaged life”), aka what dear old Theodore, dear old Dorthy (playing with his name here, a gift from god) thought was the minimum things we need to prevent another WW2 with the “catastrophe”, the Shoah.

In that open air prison line Theodore was complaining how everything has become advertising, and words themselves have lost their meaning. You can have anything you want under heaven (open air) just as long it does not change anything (the prison part), thus if something bad is happening you also do not have power to change it. Theodore is complaining about the dread and ptsd he is experiencing and he thinks is the new endless reality, how we are all FUCKed!

And look where that three word idiom is now used, does anyone care about origins or is it now just an epithet we sling at others like monkeys throwing ?

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Like I said earlier I do not like dear old Theodore, but he kind of have a dark humor point here! (sad laugh goes here, it is totally not funny) Others may have said it better with Orwell, or perhaps it was Miguel de Cervantes, who knows?