Weirdgate Debate! Is Romney a Weird Mormon Guy Or a Weird Rich Guy?

Efforts to put a finger on what it might be that just seems so darned weird about Willard Romney have been dismissed by Romney's Hu-mon surrogates as nothing but coded signals of anti-mormon bigotry. Indeed, BooMan raises a few questions of the ways in which Willard might be weird in a weird mormonic mode. I freely admit as a crusty atheist that I find all the various UFO cults rather weird, Trekkers, Raelians, Scientologists, Mormons, Roman Catholics and so on. I am of course highly informed on such matters, having studiously watched South Park for years.

But, I also have to say that for me personally it is Willard's long inhabitation of a bubble of moneyed hyper-privilege that yields that abiding strange stiff inhumanity of his. Think of Glinda the Good Witch descending on the Emerald City, bathed in pastels, smiling vapidly like an anti-depressant commercial, clearly strung tight as a banjo string. Watching Romney interact with average Hu-mons in group settings is like observing a social variation of the uncanny valley. I am reminded of William Gibson's insight expressed in the gooseflesh inducing phrase from Count Zero:

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.