11th
convention coverage
A little late, but boy oh boy.
It used to be a charge against McCain that he hadn’t come back the same from Vietnam. This was a part of the old George W. innuendo. Many think it’s a problem, now, that at his age, and with a history of cancer, McCain may not live through a term in office.
In the new myth both troubles were suddenly made into virtues. Above all, the mythology must prove that the man in the flesh, standing before you, is not the man who matters. He is larger than this; his blood has been spilled and his spirit loosed; we will be washed in his blood. Is it a Christian allegory? McCain can’t lift his arms high enough to be pinned to a cross. It is all loose revelation: he died for us; he is the Great Papa in the sky; he was a man, but it’s all right if he should disappear; he is spread out in the soil, and above the clouds; this time, it is Country First.
And:
There is some spirit working through the Republican Party, that of the tempter. We used to call the spirit Karl Rove and we were wrong to do so. He too was an instrument, and was cast aside. It seemed the abuses and madnesses of the last two elections and two administrations had burned up all the sulfur at last. But this requisitioning of Sarah Palin from the frozen wastes, this theology that sidelines a sane political man to introduce the symbolism of sacrifice, reawakening an underlying cult of death … This is the old W.-era touch.
My fiancée has developed a paranoia that Palin’s ascension means a speedy end for the fleshly McCain. He won’t live long in office. There will be a palace coup. A simple “heart attack.” Does McCain believe he will govern? Has he let himself fall too much into the belief, once again, in a normal political world—a GOP of the kind he wants to believe in; not the party he actually saw in 2000 and in 2004—his torturers transplanted to America, the penny-ante Machiavellians, with their disdain for the unfamiliar, and their easy way of disposing of human life?
The rest here.
