Todd Gehman
Seattle
Untitled — 2 years ago
If Greg Palast wasn’t the worst speaker I’ve seen at Town Hall, he was at least the most ill-prepared. (I assume that he’s more of a writer than a presenter, and would never write a phrase like “at least the most ill-prepared”). Not only was there no order or cohesiveness to his presentation – just a randomly thrown-together set of lefty sarcasm and “shocker” headlines about corruption on the right. That would be one thing. But this man was standing in a room with the capacity for hundreds of people and all his visual aids were printed on 8 1/2 by 11 paper. “Here’s page 73 of the government document describing the delay of Iraqi elections until after the oil and support systems could be sold off and privatized.” (Sort of looks like a small white piece of paper from back here.) “Here’s a graph of the likelihood of your vote being invalidated during the election, categorized by race.” (Sort of looks like a small white piece of paper from back here.) And so on.
To top it all off, the first half hour of the night featured various local lefties giving props out to one another for audience applause. Let’s hear it for independent bookstore Elliott Bay Books! Pause for applause. Let’s hear it for Mind Over Matters! Pause for applause. It was like having too many if-you-like-this-you’ll-like-that previews diminish the power of the main feature.
Palast was genuinely funny at times and a lot of the information was interesting, but there just wasn’t enough of it to warrant the length and cost of the speech.
