Well, that's pretty ordinary. Performers are sometimes very shy in their personal lives, comedians and musicians come to mind. precisely the opposite of what their public persona might be. (It's always interesting when we long for a "real" person beneath the performance on a mail list or making assumptions that they are either just like that in real or life or being surprised when they are not, forgetting the things Butler says about such yearnings. :)
OTOH, I suppose that if you know how much fake goes into making it appear tough on screen, then you know just what deep doo you'd be in when up against hijackers with guns. (I'm not surprised that only 25% of the population continues to believe in the Al-Q/Iraq connection. Ever seen that horrid flash ad that's on allthe conservative blogs? Constant repetition of the WTC blowing up, AL Q, etc. etc.
On still another hand, George said this to me with regard to some questions I was asking about his writings (some years ago) on the relationship between audience and artist/performer:
<quote> It is a response that must beset "successful" politicians. I don't believe that (say) Eugene McArthy, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton had and have a mean bone in their bodies, or an avaricious one. At some point in their careers they must have discovered that that was something they projected and it that point it began to become deliberate, to constitute a major factor in the construction of their ethos, that is to say the sense of "character" that the rhetor realizes she must construct and maintain in order to move her audience.
I think, then, that it becomes almost inevitable that with the best of consciences, the rhetor will develop a kind of mixed contempt for their audience--since they are manipulable they are not free, hence the love they direct to the rhetor is being "exploited." And the rhetor then must needs feel ambivalent about her very skill as a rhetor--conclude that all human interaction is exploitative. This must be the hardest to adjust to for the most (loosely) idealistic.
I think I mentioned before a former student who killed himself (he said in a note) because he had concluded that all human, and most particularly male/female (but I suppose it would pertain to all lovers, regardless of gender constitution), and that if that were so there was no love. He did not want to live in a world where there was no love.
I feel like I could go on and on on this head, and I feel like I have some qualifications for talking about the subject because, more importantly that being a student of rhetoric I am a teacher, and the teacher's relationship, interaction, with her class is inevitably a rhetorical construct.
Com Pai, g
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"Scream-of-consciousness prose, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
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