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Edited on Sun Jan-13-08 08:15 AM by libbygurl
I agree with Armando Ianucci (who also writes about classical music in UK's Gramophone magazine) about the 'hot air' in the candidates' speeches. Love his comparison of how US candidates vs. British candidates would describe something as simple as a chair! ========== Like Will Smith, who in the new film I Am Legend wakes up to find himself the last man alive in a world of zombies, am I now the only person left on the planet who finds Barack Obama a little bit dull? Every time I listen to him, I start off thinking I'm about to wet my pants, but a minute-and-a-half later find my mind wandering, asking itself things like: 'What does "the challenge of hope" mean?'
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<...> rhythmically, it's quite alluring. It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: 'See that chair. You can sit on it' when you can have someone like Obama say: 'This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl's behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America's huddled arse.'
Speeches full of hot air...
Maybe Obama is so successful because he's the supreme master of what American politics excels in: high-flown language that denotes as little as possible. America is curious in that it is the most powerful, influential nation on Earth, it's a doing country, but its politicians rarely spend time on the stump specifying what precisely they will do in case it makes them lose votes. Instead, they settle on emotive, intangible phraseology, such as Hillary Clinton's recent 'I intend to be the President who puts your futures first', uttered in New Hampshire.
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<They> appealed to voters who believed strongly that elections should be about types of people. This is a theme Clinton developed when she said: 'I believe in what we can do together', a brave message this, since there was always the risk she could alienate people who don't believe in what a lot of people can do together. It may well be that the people who do believe in what people can do together came out in droves at the last minute to vote for her, hence her remarkable comeback. Similarly, John McCain's pledge that as President he would 'make in our time another, better world than the one we inherited' might have won over a lot of voters who were dead against making another, worse world than the one they inherited.
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...and empty promises
This abandonment of specifics is the opposite of how politics is articulated in Britain. Here, politicians have less power, less international influence and are at the mercy of the markets and even the weather, so they try covering this up with language that is all about pledging and specific target-setting - anything, in fact, that sounds like action.
'We intend to provide a chair, which, over the next five-year period, will guarantee stability for anyone who sat on it.' 'We will introduce the most sweeping measures yet to ensure that all four chair legs are of exactly the same length and we will measure every leg on the chair twice a year and place those results in national chair-leg database.' 'We will stop other people coming over to use the chair before us.'========== See full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2240115,00.html |
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