Maybe she'll disappear too?

This paragraph from the LA times kind of threw me for a loop. Partly because it's dead on.

To McCain's incarnation of this powerful archetype has been added the sidekick Sarah Palin. Palin mobilizes a powerful and unusual -- powerful partly because it is unusual -- supplementary combination of myths. She is Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter who foolhardy men underestimate at their peril even if she has a penchant for tall tales. But Palin is also Wonder Woman, the super-heroine whose exploits and attractions appeal to both sexes. And she is Aimee Semple McPherson, the onetime revivalist and moralist of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In the imagination of her followers, Palin is some combination of Glamour, Outdoor Life, Playboy and DC Comics.

Poor Sister Aimee. I keep writing about her, and it's so much fun, but the poor troubled soul shouldn't be dragged down by association with Caribou Barbie.

So I'll let Pete Seeger talk trash about her. "The Ballad of Aimee Semple MacPherson":

Oh, have you heard the story of Aimee McPherson?
Aimee McPherson, that wonderful person,
She weighed a hundred eighty and her hair was red
She preached a wicked sermon, so the papers all said.

cho:
Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi
Ho dee ho dee ho dee ho.

Now, Aimee built herself a radio station
To broadcast her preaching to the nation.
She found a man named Armistead who knew enough
To run the radio while Aimee did her stuff.

Now, they had a camp meeting out at Ocean Park
Preached from early morning 'til after dark.
Said the benediction, then folded up the tents,
And nobody knew where Aimee went.

Now, Aimee McPherson got back from her journey,
She told her tale to the district attorney.
Said she'd been kidnapped on a lonely trail.
And in spite of all the questions, she stuck to her tale.

Well, the Grand Jury started an investigation,
Uncovered a lot of spicy information.
Found out about a love nest down at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
Where the liquor was expensive and the loving was free.

They found a little cottage with a breakfast nook,
A folding bed with a worn-out look.
The slats was busted and the springs was loose,
And the dents in the mattress fitted Aimee's caboose.

Well they took poor Aimee and they threw her in jail.
Last I'd heard she was out on bail.
They'll send her up for a stretch, I guess,
She worked herself up into an awful mess

Now, Radio Ray is a going hound;
He's a-going yet and he ain't been found.
They got a description, but they got it too late.
'Cause since they got it, he's lost a lot of weight.

Now I'll end my story in the usual way,
About a lady preacher's holiday.
If you don't get the moral then you're the gal for me
Cause there's still a lot of cottages down at Carmel-by-the-Sea.

ok, I suck at blogging these days.

But what can you do?

So, there was a debate. My plans to watch it fell through, through the serendipity of a lovely late friday nap, and instead I listened on the radio. Like I do with ball games. Baseball is a sport best seen in the imagination, and radio is the perfect media for the national past time.

But I was curious how kennedy/nixon the whole event was. Note the following from John Dickerson's article in Slate:

There was lots of great body language to read. Obama looks down when he's saying something unpleasant—like delivering an attack on his opponent. Obama looked at the audience more (as Kennedy did in 1960), McCain talked to the moderator (as Nixon had). When McCain was talking, Obama looked at him, like he was a listener. McCain stared straight ahead when Obama was speaking, which at times made it appear as if Obama was scolding him for denting the car.

Now, as we all know, most of us having not been there, those who watched the Nixon/Kennedy debate on their newfangled TV's thought it was a landslide for JFK, radio listeners thought the reverse. Of course, and as expected, the criterial equivalence for victory today is simply ideological correlation. J-Mac said cut spending, no pork barrel, no new taxes, victory victory victory, and Obama is liberal. This translates quickly to some as firm leadership, composure, whatever you like. The same can be said for Obama, of course. I'm not going to say that the man I'm cheering for "lost."

But. For those of us out there in radioland, with your home team moving from right to left across the radio dial... [As they used to call the games on Hockey Night Canada]. Quite a difference. Given my PoMo temdencies to see allsigns detached from referents, the whole picture of the debate, the orchestration and the image, is lost, instead just words.

Of course, words account for little. Tonality communicates much more, as all communication studies have shown. So beyond the words-as-sign, particularly of doctrinal orthodoxy, what is left?

McCain utterly shocked me.

With just the vocal, the sign-words were more transparent. The "pork-barrel" lines are so tried and tired in republican discourse. Last november John McCain had a commercial on the topic, pointing out that he was the one man who can save washington from spending like a drunken sailor. And, good rhetorical hyperbole, he pointed to some of the most (rhetorically) aggregious examples. Oh, the bear dna project was mentioned in that commercial, but it paled a second or third following his invocation of the dreaded "Bridge to Nowhere."

Funny how that one's not on the list of rhetorical hits anymore.

McCain was too robotic in these lines, on the radio at least. With just words there was too much contradiction. On Iraq and Afghanistan, the oft-repeated "Obama just doesn't understand" was, at best, condescending. Positing that Obama doesn't understand the difference between a strategy and a tactic - I would first ask McCain to review what notes he has from Annapolis on Carl von Clausiwitz to refresh his own memory, assuming he took notes -- but to say that Afghanistan requires a new strategy, which is the strategy used in Iraq, this is a logical contradiction. That's troubling.

McCain's first comment shook me the most. On the radio a tired and creaking voice intones,"there's a lot of things I'm not feeling well about this week..." Obama was forceful vocally, and McCain came across as defeated, tired, old.

God forbid he should need to hand things over to Caribou Barbie.