A Study in Rigidity

I just got through a small bout of self-torture and watched the memritv clip of the FutureTV of Lebanon interview with Norman Finkelstein on January 20,2008. No. I'm not masochistic but this sure wasn't an interview either. It was a roughly memorized monologue in which the renowned professor sat stiff in a comfy looking chair. The interviewer did not really have many opportunities at all to interject as Finkelstein breathlessly moved along a rhetorical chain of rationalizations. He used some narrative devices such as his characterization of Jews while all the while his being Jewish seemed to be employed to impress both the TV audience and the interviewer (monologue facilitator). I suppose that gives him an aura of sorts in that part of the world.



So I would rate this guy's performance on a scale of one to ten as a five. It's seemingly the bland sort of commisar speech one would have been subjected to if you lived in Russia back in the Twenties and Thirties. There's nothing particularly refined or polished about his delivery except for the lengthy blandness. What makes this useful is that it can shown to the world to see how far some people will go to in order to publicly indulge in a pathological soliloquy.