Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Richard Normandy for President


Richard Normandy as Precedent?


Here in the United States, we the populace-receptors have been living out, for the past 31 months, a campaign-season of epic, well-nigh-novelistic grandeur. Just flash on back to all the promises; all the betrayals; any of the contradictions. The plethora of creeds; the panoply of screeds. That heaping helping of incontrovertibly anti-American inconceivables delivered via BlackBerry — and stamped "Google News Alert." All told, I don't think I'm alone in proclaiming this veritable flume of developments hurtling down the political y-axis to be the defining post-9/11 news-cycle of My or Any Generation, opening, as it or they were, my eyes to just how cogent it is when the news-sayers mention "a narrative"!

Indeed, it is all very like a movie.

All very like an American movie.

But one American movie I'd like to see unreel, in this historic campaign of so many two-party firsts, is the ascendancy of a truly progressive, indelibly radical stumper.

And I believe I have found, wandering through paradise as though in a dream, keeping a poppy to remind him where he's been... sleeping, sleeping, sleeping — that man.

His name is Richard Normandy, and I was as surprised by much of what he had to say as you might realize yourselves to be. Should we consider, for example, Barack Obama's virtues — the man's bold intelligence, infectious optimism, and (no mere metadata) self-symbolic import — we will note the absence of the mindbending. And should we seek out the candidate who can reframe policy within that idiom — all the while silently wondering "Who's Left?" — well, we might discover that it is Richard Normandy who has reframed not just policy but the rhetorical question itself.

I've uncovered some of his campaign graphics to date — along with recordings, presented here for download in the popular MP3 format, of a few speeches that Normandy delivered recently to meetups at the University of California and elsewhere. ("Elsewhere" possibly being Second Life or WoW assemblages, but this hasn't been confirmed.) There's also a website, normandy08.com, which offers some definitely cool shit — although it does appear to be something of a work-in-progress.

Check it out, and feel free to leave your thoughts here in the Comments section. — Is Normandy a viable candidate, or just a dreamer? Or is he a viable dreamer and/or outright vatic? History in the making, or the made? The real democratic ideal? The response to "whence democracy"?

Or is he a million questions?







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4 Speeches by Richard Normandy


To download a speech, ctrl-click (or right-click) the file name and "save."

Speech One: Normandy on Big Card

Normandy tackles Big Card head on. (5 minutes, 11 seconds / 2.16 MB)




Speech Two: Normandy on the Domesticated Dolphin
Normandy rethinks the pet. (4 minutes, 43 seconds / 1.97 MB)




Speech Three: Normandy on Spam

Normandy puts forward his plan to eradicate spam. (8 minutes, 44 seconds / 3.63 MB)




Speech Four: Normandy on the Class Divide

Normandy reconsiders the infrastructure of class stratification. (17 minutes, 34 seconds / 7.27 MB)




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4 comments:

  1. finally, somebody has given voice to the radical middle-of-the road... this guy's neither in the left or the right lane... he's driving right down the center of the road honking his horn merrily... saying "you can either turn around and follow me in this direction, or crash into me headlong!"

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  2. err, I mean, Tycho Brahe. Effed that one up.

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  3. Have any of you ever attended the Barbie Queues around Richard Normandy's success pool? It really is Somewhere Else.

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