We miss you…you make us think.
The Shrub apparently stays in five-star places with putting greens and spurting-nymph fountains and a speed-dial number for the in-house masseur. Not McCain2000, which favors Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Signature Inn, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Embassy Suites, etc. Rolling Stone, who is in no way cut out to be a road journalist, invokes the soul-killing anonymity of chain hotels, the rooms’ terrible transient sameness: the ubiquitous floral design of the bedspreads, the multiple low-watt lamps, the pallid art-work bolted to the wall, the whisper of ventilation, the sad shag carpet, the smell of alien cleansers, the Kleenex dispensed from the wall, the automated wakeup call, the lightproof curtains, the windows that do not open-ever.
Catching up on my reading. There’s so much. After reading Tim Dickinson’s excellent but frightening article, “Make-Believe Maverick“, I pecked around a bit and found out that the late David Foster Wallace wrote an article about McCain in 2000….
It’s impossible to know what McCain’s face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN’s feed, and Randy of CNN’s lens is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, non-cynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like “family values” and “hero” without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching non-violent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and then asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who’d vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wants to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they’re stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.
Now you have to pay close attention to something that’s going to seem real obvious. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. Because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is his own self-interest. If you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying really is in your interest (and it really might be) — still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman’s ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful … although admittedly it’s a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.
Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox — the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other boxes and enigmas that layer McCain — is that whether he’s For Real depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.
The water seems to have cleared now. And after tonight’s debate, despite repeated efforts, I don’t think McCain hit the talking points hard enough to ring the bell and win the big prize.
Well, that’s not it, it’s just that he was playing the wrong game. He hit the talking points again and again, but the real game was happening elsewhere. I heard what Barack was saying.
