Michele Bachmann is a celebrated performance artist whose controversial act gained widespread attention when she did a satirical piece referencing McCarthyism and its reflex in current political discourse. In a piece she did with Chris Matthews, she mocked Sarah Palin's paranoid campaign rhetoric about Barack Obama "palling around" with anti-American liberals like Saul Alinsky and Tony Rezko, the climactic point of the performance being a call for all anti-American senators and representatives to be exposed.Even when she explained later that the comments should not be taken seriously, that she did not really mean them, and that Chris Matthews was in on the performance, many people still believed she had been expressing her actual views. In other performances she has parodied unfounded fears of mandatory re-education camps and an emerging global currency.
Her act is sophisticated and nuanced. Perhaps not since Andy Kaufman and his Tony Clifton character has there been a more controversial and confusing blurring of the lines between performance and lunacy.
Most Recent Tweet:
Four Older Tweets:
No comments:
Post a Comment