Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Lost Bearings/Moisture
Evidently I've engaged in the ongoing--and indeed vital--critique of John McCage's "face"and "head" area--its material and structural deficits, even paradoxes, aporiae or singularities--without actually having seen/heard much of McCage himself lately. I haven't listened to his stump and haven't heard his speeches on primary returns nights since I realized, after South Carolina, that he was going to continue repeating that line about Americans not being "history's victims."
Anyway, I watched this video from TPM showing the recent back-and-forth with Obama on Iran, and I was genuinely suprised at how poor a presidential figure McCage cuts. I had been under the impression that he was actually quite verbally dexterous--even at times keenly witty--but here he seems to have adopted Bush's relationship to language: the voice stumbling around and over words and phrases as though they're threatening, alien structures thrown arbitrarily in the path of the sound coming out of one's mouth. Not only that, but:
1) Not to be "ageist," but his voice sounds breathy and raspy and distinctly moist, in a way that can't but repulse people.
2) His right eye has developed a palsy or something that makes it appear on the point of failure, as if it's just going to collapse inward or shrivel to a small dark point or suddenly seize up into a fixed, terrified glare.
This can't bode well for McCage.
posted by Blicero : 5/20/2008 02:21:00 AM
Anyway, I watched this video from TPM showing the recent back-and-forth with Obama on Iran, and I was genuinely suprised at how poor a presidential figure McCage cuts. I had been under the impression that he was actually quite verbally dexterous--even at times keenly witty--but here he seems to have adopted Bush's relationship to language: the voice stumbling around and over words and phrases as though they're threatening, alien structures thrown arbitrarily in the path of the sound coming out of one's mouth. Not only that, but:
1) Not to be "ageist," but his voice sounds breathy and raspy and distinctly moist, in a way that can't but repulse people.
2) His right eye has developed a palsy or something that makes it appear on the point of failure, as if it's just going to collapse inward or shrivel to a small dark point or suddenly seize up into a fixed, terrified glare.
This can't bode well for McCage.
posted by Blicero : 5/20/2008 02:21:00 AM
