Monday, July 18, 2005
Frogmarch watch: The chuckling point?
Laughter really is the best medicine.
In comments, Leah writes about Inerrant Boy's presser this morning:
The one thing an Emperor without any clothes can't bear is laughter.
Does anyone have a pointer to a video that includes the laughter? We should really try to propagate this.
UPDATE I suspect that the endlessly repetitive "always on message" behavior of the Bush and his creatures is what is (finally!) exciting derision among His knowing auditors. From philosopher Henri Bergson's "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic":
("A really living life should never repeat itself"... What a suggestive critique of Bush's [cough] "culture of life"...)
It's really a classic case of karma, isn't it? Bush's repetitive, mechanical, speech, his talking points, are in fact an artifact of Rove's always "on message" political machine. The very success, the very pervasiveness, of Rove's machine is what excites laughter.
Note the irony: Rove's strategy has always been to attack his enemy's greatest strength and turn it to weakness. And here a great strength of Rove's machine—message discipline—is being turned into weakness before our eyes. We can but hope that as they have always done in the past, Bush and Rove will repeat their behavior, but more forcefully, since this will only excite greater laughter.
Maybe not a tipping point... But perhaps a chuckling point?
In comments, Leah writes about Inerrant Boy's presser this morning:
[In this morning's news conference] with the Indian Prime Minister, there was an immediate question about Rove; from the moment the Prez started on the sentence "There is an on-going serious legal investigation in progress," or words to that effect, there was the rumble of audible laughter. Bush continued on to note with disapproval that instead of the serious investigation, the whole thing is being played out in the press. [And so on.]
The one thing an Emperor without any clothes can't bear is laughter.
Does anyone have a pointer to a video that includes the laughter? We should really try to propagate this.
UPDATE I suspect that the endlessly repetitive "always on message" behavior of the Bush and his creatures is what is (finally!) exciting derision among His knowing auditors. From philosopher Henri Bergson's "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic":
We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURES and MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern all the phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without any difficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES, GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. [Caps in the original]
“The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.” The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living.
("A really living life should never repeat itself"... What a suggestive critique of Bush's [cough] "culture of life"...)
It's really a classic case of karma, isn't it? Bush's repetitive, mechanical, speech, his talking points, are in fact an artifact of Rove's always "on message" political machine. The very success, the very pervasiveness, of Rove's machine is what excites laughter.
Note the irony: Rove's strategy has always been to attack his enemy's greatest strength and turn it to weakness. And here a great strength of Rove's machine—message discipline—is being turned into weakness before our eyes. We can but hope that as they have always done in the past, Bush and Rove will repeat their behavior, but more forcefully, since this will only excite greater laughter.
Maybe not a tipping point... But perhaps a chuckling point?
