Friday Funny: The Onion Finds Beauty in the Decay of the Nation's Infrastructure

The Onion is back to satirizing the built environment, this time with a kind of philosophy of despair.

1 minute read

June 17, 2016, 6:00 AM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Cracked Sidewalk

Konstantin Sutyagin / Shutterstock

The Onion's latest totally fabricated, yet-still-funny-because-it's-true satire hits close to home:

Inspecting a lengthy fissure cutting across two lanes of U.S. Route 34, Federal Highway Administration head Gregory G. Nadeau told reporters Wednesday that while the nation’s infrastructure is in desperate need of repair, there was "a certain kind of beauty in decay."

The rest of the article includes more soundbites from this fake version of Gregory G. Nadeau (who is real in real life), as he waxes somewhere between poetry and philosophy about the state of the nation's infrastructure.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in The Onion

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

Mary G., Urban Planner

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