Barney Frank gets nasty in response to wild hyperbole from a loon at a canned town hall, in which "debate" is a euphemism for a marketing push. The effect is surreal. Frank is tasked with the sales pitch of a product that does not yet exist, even in its eventual, inevitable bait and switch form. The reluctant consumer puts the idiot in useful idiot, for the benefit of Frank, who couldn't ask for a better opposition. Liberals offer middle management applause to the equivalent of an angry marketing veep losing his shit over a bat shit crazy mail room clerk who is delivering the package he needs for a promotional effort.
The real world context and content of the farce is completely irrelevant to the applauders. A merit class senior manager, oh blessed relief, is showing signs of shaking off the nembutal haze of a decade's long powerpoint presentation. He could be attempting to fuck the xerox machine, for all they care, as long as he's doing it loudly, vigorously and in a way that offends people they just don't like; it's a mirrored version of the corporate millenarians' corporate epater les bourgeois.
Footnote: Thanks to Jay Taber for this profile of Alan Gottlieb.
Comments (4)
The Alan Gottlieb story http://www.publicgood.org/reports/merchant.htm sheds light on the history of mobilizing resentment in the US.
Posted by Jay Taber | August 26, 2009 11:11 AM
Posted on August 26, 2009 11:11
"He could be attempting to fuck the xerox machine, for all they care, as long as he's doing it loudly, vigorously and in a way that offends people they just don't like"
in 1987 this very same
barn swallow frank
tried to fuck the letter opening machine
at the newton hyatt --why?? who's asking??--
i know he did
cause his piece by kismet incorporated
fell into an
open manila envelope lying in the output bin
mine no less !!!
i had addressed it to a certain
madame x
staying there for the week ...or so i thought
it contained a small novelty item
at any rate
later i guess
or at least some how
the envelop carelessly resealed
---with decorative scotch tape no less --
marked return
to sender
and well needless to add
the jersey bird man
never bothered to thank me
when i forwarded "it" on
to his office inside the loop
and i was then a constituent of his !!!
btw
hung like a texas jack ass he was then ....
now ???
only the devil can tell
Posted by op | August 26, 2009 1:54 PM
Posted on August 26, 2009 13:54
It's the best 30 seconds of Frank's career, which isn't saying much. Yet, as you say, its only real meaning is of the Alice in Wonderland variety. Franks' words are the ones he and his fellow Dimbots would be getting from the left, if the system had a left.
Posted by Michael Dawson | August 27, 2009 7:01 PM
Posted on August 27, 2009 19:01
For my part, I welcome the town hall crashers; their assaults break through the manicured pageantry of the "political process", even if only in a small way.
Posted by Peter Ward | August 29, 2009 5:28 PM
Posted on August 29, 2009 17:28