Extreme political vacuity
So that we don’t have to, Dalrymple once discharged the duty of listening in person to a Nicolas Sarkozy speech. Sarkozy, Dalrymple recalls,
was like a dried pea rattling about and shaken in a tin box. He jumped around the stage making a passionate verbal noise, but nothing he said had any discernible tether to anything concrete. Within seconds of his finishing, no one could have given any account of what he had said.
Like the Prince in Johnson’s Rasselas, Dalrymple says he went away
convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sounds.
He asks:
Is mastery of this kind of meaningless verbalisation, eloquently empty and passionately delivered, the key to political success?
If so,
what does it say of us, the citizens of democracies?
