James Brody
September 11th, 2008, 01:44 PM
My cheater detectors sensed deceit, manipulation, and fraud even when upwind of a Democrat and Obama intensifies not only those odors but also my sense that America and Americans are being fed into a blender or chopper. Things looked and smelled bad.
My donating $50 to McCain earned me an email that announced Mac and Sarah's appearance in nearby Lancaster. I did an extraordinary, a difficult thing - riding to the county seat, entering the Republican office at opening, and picking up a ticket. They quibbled and wanted to be sure they had enough before giving me one. I played victim: "Please, I rode 20 miles to get here this morning." My jacket and boots probably helped.
I went early to Lancaster the next day, stood in a line for longer than forever. Two males jogged past, the front one chanting, "We have a war" and the second, "Who needs health care." I also had a few thoughts bout six million Jews who stood in lines but to get on a train and die. (I also thought about the oddity that people in a line longer than six individuals are apt to be depressed and that Brits stand in long lines but Hungarians make throngs.)
We moved eventually into a crowd of 6000 in a university field house. The podium, however, was only twenty feet away from me.
There were warm-up acts. The county Republican chair, a lively sort of fellow, roused us but then introduced older Republicans who made statements for each other. Six Boy Scouts marched to the podium and led us in the Pledge. Each Scout weighed less than 120 pounds but wore 48 merit badges. Twenty-one high school cheerleaders did an evolutionary thing: three of them were lifted straight up by three of her peers holding each foot. That lift, combined with the four feet height of the stage, put each girl about nine feet higher. (Of course, I thought of Richard Coss's work on dinichism and how females - according fossils and by reasons of modern conduct - seem to have come to ground much later than males. They also take over territories after males settle them.)
No sign yet of Sarah or Mac. A band - led by the only black in the house - played a melange of rock and rap to 6000 conservatives.
Then, a film history of Sarah showed for a few minutes, then Secret Service increased from three large serious males to about a dozen while photographers - a half dozen with very nice cameras - ringed the platform and complimented the twenty photographers who were already to my rear but elevated six-ten feet.
I guessed something important was to happen.
Then she and Mac came in and the crowd screamed at twice the volumes achieved by the warm up guy.
She looked just like her TV images and she said the one-liners that she had said before.
Mac stood to her side and gave point-and-shoot finger greetings to veterans. My god, the scars and lumps on his face and the oddities in his movement that he brought home from North Vietnam! (While he was in a cell and taking beatings, Kerry and Fonda celebrated our enemy. Walter Cronkite, according to General Giap, encouraged our enemy to keep fighting instead of surrendering two years before Saigon fell and two million South Vietnamese were executed. I was a married post-doc, sinking electrodes in cat brains at Yale in the company of snide pacifists while my old man served in a Saigon bunker doing what he did well - writing procedure manuals for people three ranks greater than his. The draft board agreed that I was of more use to my country doing what I did but my guilt for being a pragmatic clever coward rides yet on my shoulder. And my old man's committee work hints that, even in Saigon, he shared my own fears and took similar strategies to manage them. "Feel bad but let someone else get shot.")
I needed Sarah to be good and she was, saying the thing that my parents said, that I believed despite the acid skepticism at Yale, and that I needed to hear again about family, faith, responsibility, protection of life, and admiration for guys in uniform...things that convinced me about the good nature of the line that I joined.
My response for Sarah may be an imprinting effect, one similar to that of listening to oldies and losing awareness of the last thirty years. She's also in sync with my right cortex, the creative, surprising side that thrives on adventure whether on a sportsbike, thoughts about emergent networks and birds or spiders, writings by Joseph Roth about Ukrainian shtetls before WW2, or the word for "cat" in Russian, Czech, or Hungarian.
Sarah represents the impulses, the fun, and aspirations that I want my grandchildren to have and I look forward to this nation's having eight years of President Palin after four-eight years of President McCain, assuming that those nasty Secret Service guys keep her from being shot as happened to Jack, Bobby, and Martin.
Meanwhile, Pravda's headline still announces on this September 11th that McCain keeps the name of his running mate a secret. Putin must be checking his lipstick...
JimB
My donating $50 to McCain earned me an email that announced Mac and Sarah's appearance in nearby Lancaster. I did an extraordinary, a difficult thing - riding to the county seat, entering the Republican office at opening, and picking up a ticket. They quibbled and wanted to be sure they had enough before giving me one. I played victim: "Please, I rode 20 miles to get here this morning." My jacket and boots probably helped.
I went early to Lancaster the next day, stood in a line for longer than forever. Two males jogged past, the front one chanting, "We have a war" and the second, "Who needs health care." I also had a few thoughts bout six million Jews who stood in lines but to get on a train and die. (I also thought about the oddity that people in a line longer than six individuals are apt to be depressed and that Brits stand in long lines but Hungarians make throngs.)
We moved eventually into a crowd of 6000 in a university field house. The podium, however, was only twenty feet away from me.
There were warm-up acts. The county Republican chair, a lively sort of fellow, roused us but then introduced older Republicans who made statements for each other. Six Boy Scouts marched to the podium and led us in the Pledge. Each Scout weighed less than 120 pounds but wore 48 merit badges. Twenty-one high school cheerleaders did an evolutionary thing: three of them were lifted straight up by three of her peers holding each foot. That lift, combined with the four feet height of the stage, put each girl about nine feet higher. (Of course, I thought of Richard Coss's work on dinichism and how females - according fossils and by reasons of modern conduct - seem to have come to ground much later than males. They also take over territories after males settle them.)
No sign yet of Sarah or Mac. A band - led by the only black in the house - played a melange of rock and rap to 6000 conservatives.
Then, a film history of Sarah showed for a few minutes, then Secret Service increased from three large serious males to about a dozen while photographers - a half dozen with very nice cameras - ringed the platform and complimented the twenty photographers who were already to my rear but elevated six-ten feet.
I guessed something important was to happen.
Then she and Mac came in and the crowd screamed at twice the volumes achieved by the warm up guy.
She looked just like her TV images and she said the one-liners that she had said before.
Mac stood to her side and gave point-and-shoot finger greetings to veterans. My god, the scars and lumps on his face and the oddities in his movement that he brought home from North Vietnam! (While he was in a cell and taking beatings, Kerry and Fonda celebrated our enemy. Walter Cronkite, according to General Giap, encouraged our enemy to keep fighting instead of surrendering two years before Saigon fell and two million South Vietnamese were executed. I was a married post-doc, sinking electrodes in cat brains at Yale in the company of snide pacifists while my old man served in a Saigon bunker doing what he did well - writing procedure manuals for people three ranks greater than his. The draft board agreed that I was of more use to my country doing what I did but my guilt for being a pragmatic clever coward rides yet on my shoulder. And my old man's committee work hints that, even in Saigon, he shared my own fears and took similar strategies to manage them. "Feel bad but let someone else get shot.")
I needed Sarah to be good and she was, saying the thing that my parents said, that I believed despite the acid skepticism at Yale, and that I needed to hear again about family, faith, responsibility, protection of life, and admiration for guys in uniform...things that convinced me about the good nature of the line that I joined.
My response for Sarah may be an imprinting effect, one similar to that of listening to oldies and losing awareness of the last thirty years. She's also in sync with my right cortex, the creative, surprising side that thrives on adventure whether on a sportsbike, thoughts about emergent networks and birds or spiders, writings by Joseph Roth about Ukrainian shtetls before WW2, or the word for "cat" in Russian, Czech, or Hungarian.
Sarah represents the impulses, the fun, and aspirations that I want my grandchildren to have and I look forward to this nation's having eight years of President Palin after four-eight years of President McCain, assuming that those nasty Secret Service guys keep her from being shot as happened to Jack, Bobby, and Martin.
Meanwhile, Pravda's headline still announces on this September 11th that McCain keeps the name of his running mate a secret. Putin must be checking his lipstick...
JimB