Bush, Kerry, and "Body Language" v. "Message"

[fugue]

This is pretty much my feelings on the whole "body language" thing, regardless of whether Bush or Kerry is seen to be having the superior body language.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Street1012.htm

Bush, Kerry, and "Body Language" v. "Message": Notes on Race, Gender, and Mass Infantilization
by Paul Street

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That aside, let's take Ms McGirr's approach to its ultimately absurd but logical (by perversely authoritarian thought process) conclusion by imagining a purely hypothetical debate involving Adolph Hitler. Hitler strides out aggressively to take command of the stage and to reach out to the audience with his message of imperial expansion, authoritarian militarism, and white/Teutonic racial superiority. His angry "energy and liveliness of spirit leave no doubt as to the strength of his convictions" and his willingness to act on them. Beneath a barrage of lies about his opponents, his policies to date, and his plans for the future, he is relentlessly "optimistic" about the future of the Third Reich and the New World Order he and the elite of his homeland - I mean fatherland --- will construct. His optimism is written in his posture and across his face. What a man.

Hitler's opponent, let's call her Gerda Luxembourg, speaks eloquently but a little quietly in defense of legal constitutionalism, international law, the community of nations, religious, racial, and ethnic equality, democracy, civil liberties, social justice, and other soft humanist Enlightenment Age stuff like that. She does so, however, from a wheelchair, to which she has been consigned by a recent automobile accident. The wheelchair is placed near the middle of the stage.

Luxembourg is a bit hunched over at times and occasionally shows the hint of a grimace because of the pain that has been troubling her for the last month. She is certainly not eating up any physical space on the stage and the audience occasionally strains to hear the final words of her sentences.

Let's give Ms McGirr the benefit of the doubt and assume that she prefers the quieter female debater's values over Hitler's. By McGirr's chilling calculation, which claims that a candidates' physical demeanor (distinctly male/highly gendered and somewhat imperialist in her hands) is "every bit as important" as the actual moral and political content of the candidate's declared values and policy proposals (what McGirr quickly sound-bites as "message"), the debate between the bloody Nazi Holocaust perpetrator and modern western liberal is at best a draw.

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[fugue]

1. At risk of getting in trouble for kicking my own thread . . .

kick

[shockingelk]

2. Jr's pounding ...

... it reminds me of Kruschev's shoe ...

[juliagoolia]

3. somone good with flash graphics

could put that shoe in his hand right>>>??