The pure emptiness of Katie Britt

[marmar]

The pure emptiness of Katie Britt
The Republican way of life has emptied her of anything even marginally recognizable as real

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Columnist
PUBLISHED MARCH 12, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days. Take the woman who has dominated the news over the weekend, Alabama Senator Katie Britt. She appeared on national TV to give the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Thursday and for her efforts was famously lampooned by Scarlett Johansen on Saturday Night Live.

The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” seemed to have been invented to describe Britt as she posed in front of what appeared to be a greenscreen image of her own kitchen. She went from weepy to ecstatic to inordinately sincere and back again, zig-zagging her way through a script some committee of Trump campaign staffers had lashed together for her to act her way through. The disconnect between the words she read off the teleprompter and her voice and expression was, uh…how can I put this? Jarring isn’t quite right. Annoying? Well, yes, there’s that.

What’s that feeling I’m reaching for, hovering just out of reach of my consciousness? Okay, I’ve got it. Watching Britt’s face and listening to her whisper her way through the introduction of her remarks, I felt embarrassed for her. Really, I did. She had no sense at all of what she was saying, or how to say it, because she was just reading words, not expressing them, or feeling what she said. She whispered, “our country is less secure,” and then smiled widely into the eye of the camera. That is simply not the way you say those words, and having said them, how you react to what you’ve said. It doesn’t even rise to the level of fake. It’s just…nothing, a pure emptiness knowable only to, yes, Katie Britt.

....(snip)....

It's hard to capture just how blatantly studied and overacted and false Britt’s entire spiel was. But the thing that kept coming across to me was how learned her delivery was. She was good at it in a way that bad actors are – they deliver lines with what they’ve been taught is just the right emphasis on certain words, with just the right turn of the head, flutter of eyelids, pursing of lips, and in the case of Britt, smile after smile so posed and automatic, any emphasis a real smile would have afforded to an alleged thought or fact in an individual line is lost in a glare of teeth and lips. Following her whispered secrets of what she and her husband Wesley say at their kitchen table, Britt settles into a mock-confidence you can only attain if pretty much everything in your life has been given to you by connections and powerful friends and whispered confidences that began in college dorms or sorority bedrooms: “Because the truth is, we’re all worried about the future of our nation.” Delivered by a woman who probably has yet to feel an actual worry beyond having forgotten to pick up diapers from the store or empty the cat box, the line had all the force of a snowflake landing on a gloved hand. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/12/the-pure-emptiness-of-katie-britt/

[sop]

1. Well, at least Britt didn't stop mid-sentence to chug a bottle of water.

[RainCaster]

3. held with both hands

[Drum]

2. Nicely written