Sunday 26 July 2009

Nick Griffin speech revisited

It's interesting to see the responses to the 'Elvis' post below. It illustrates a wood-v-trees way of looking at things. Psychologists have done experiments in the past - for example, if you show a bunch of people the YBA Sensation exhibition portrait of Myra Hindley, and ask them what they see, some will say 'it's Myra Hindley' and others will say 'it's lots of little handprints'. (Perhaps not the best example, but the only one I can think of at the moment.)

So some, perhaps more literal-minded, folks have honed in on what they see as the main point of Nick Griffin's speech, i.e. that we should not go to war with Iran, which I am sure is a view most people can endorse. But others are seeing the handprints: the swivel-eyed ranting, the overblown rhetoric (he's obviously been studying Galloway), the paranoid vision of MEPs employing their private militias, the portrayal of himself and his fascist colleagues as 'nationalist dissidents' being hunted down by 'far-left criminals'. That's what I meant when I say he's even madder than I thought.

2 comments:

TheBoilingFrog said...

the swivel-eyed ranting

Interesting choice of words considering the chap concerned.

Was it deliberate?

Kerry said...

I was just thinking of cartoons of him when I wrote that, but you're right - perhaps a poor choice of words given his disability which I'd completely forgotten about. But is that all you have to say about it?