Friday, December 05, 2008

Harrogate's Favorite of All the Videos He, To Date, Has Posted This Year



While getting the ball rolling on the current Retrospective Festival taking place on TRS, oxymoron indicated here that at times, it seemed as though Harrogate preferred Ron Paul to all other Presidential candidates. Reading Oxy's comment, Harrogate was moved to take introspective pause. How much substance, in the end, was there to the claim? It was certainly the case that Harrogate's Award-Winning sequence, "Why Some People Like Ron Paul," included some of the clearest, most passionate prose Harrogate ever placed on these Boards.

But at the same time, while this writing intentionally implied much admiration for the good Dr. Paul, much of it was after all quite hostile, with Harrogate wearing anti-Libertarian bias on his sleeve for all to behold. In the end, the truth is that the thing about Paul that moved Harrogate the most was the incredible response his Call for Liberty evoked in citizens across the country. Paul, unlike every other candidate this season, did not at all come across as having tailored his Rhetoric to Focus Groups. Indeed, he neither hemmed nor hawed. There was never any doubt as to the sincerity of his position, no confusing for anything else his intellectually-grounded Love for the United States of America.

Do many of Paul's convictions nauseate Harrogate? Indeed they do. But one both can and should live with that in the arena of ideas. And the rejection of many of Paul's ideas, by Harrogate, did not thereby insinuate a questioning of his patriotic motives, his Constitutional breadth of knowledge, or his Political Bravery.

Some, by the way, have said that Situationers post too many videos. But Harrogate disagrees. The videos, musical, or political or otherwise, accomplish many important Rhetorical goals, not the least of which is the kind of community-building work that Oxymoron has recently identified with Feminine Sociolinguistics. But the Videos are also expressions of what move each indiviual blogger, and chance to put out into the Blogosphere "stuff {insert name} likes."

The Above Video Homage to Ron Paul, Harrogate posted on two separate occasions in this Year 2008. Now he has posted it for the third and final time. It takes one of our Nation's greatest Musical Pop Anthems, and uses it persuasively on Paul's behalf. This video is all about America, about ideological substance, and it is beautiful.

And so here is another chance for Readers to check it out.

1 comment:

Oxymoron said...

You hit the trifecta on this one, Harrogate. It brings together the three major players in the Situation, at least in '08: politics, music, and youtube.