anti-theatricality + politics - UK election eve / Presidential deba(cle)te specials

This sticking-with-Biden defense was retweeted by an account named (((inglamwetrust))). With that moniker, you'd think  they'd have more of a belief in the importance of optics and appearances.

A more image-sensitized and visually-aware analysis came from Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker which goes into gruesome, trauma-retriggering detail about the "misty, moony" vacancy and confusion that passed over the President's face when it wasn't his turn to speak... before venturing: 

 "Biden prepared assiduously for the debate at Camp David. But he needed someone in a nearby room, watching over a monitor, sound muted, jotting down notes solely on his face.

Of course, it’s possible, given Biden’s age, that there is some simple explanation for his facial trouble. Some observers mentioned “masked face,” a symptom of Parkinson’s characterized by decreased facial expressiveness. But, absent a diagnosis, we are left with a possible fate: everybody knows by now that Biden’s performance has damaged his prospects against Trump, perhaps irrevocably.

It’s true that television can unduly simplify, making appearances take on the false impression of absolute truth. And it’s true, too, that punditry based on images can cheapen an already superficial political culture, substituting surface for substance. But the office in question, the American Presidency, has evolved specifically to be an engine for the production of powerful images, a place where visual culture proves its worth as a generator of soft power. Ever since the famous first televised debate—a sweaty, anxious-looking Richard Nixon against the naturally telegenic John F. Kennedy—this weird ritual of in-person retort has been as much pageantry as visual-verbal. Much of the job of getting the job entails looking the part—whatever the part is—and an enfeebled face, lost to its own effects, isn’t going to be any help as a tool in this already quite depressing campaign."

Instead of cramming his head with policy that would inevitably come out garbled and poorly cadenced in the regurgitation, they should have been training him in posture, posing, and  reaction-shot expressions. The mute but all-too-eloquent rhetoric of the face and the body. A huge dereliction and failure on the part of the team around him, with potentially world-historic consequences. 

A stray comment firmly in the antitheatrical vein from someone or other, a few weeks prior to the agonizing spectacle (which I had to keep turning off - literally averting my gaze):

"Only one problem. Trump does not debate - he performs. That what he wants to give - a performance for his worshippers. If Trump understood the meaning of debate, I would agree, but you cannot debate a showman. It is a waste of time."

Meanwhile, over in the UK:

“It’s not about rabbits out the hat, it’s not about pantomime, we’ve had that. I’m running as a candidate 

to be Prime Minister, not a candidate to run the circus” - Sir Keir Starmer

Finally, a dribble from a while back:

 Jack E, Smith on twitter 

"Today, Colorado GOP voters will decide whether to let Lauren Boebert continue flailing at political theater or send her back to her natural calling of performing arts."

"Flail on" was the message from the primary-electorate.