McCain 2: Anti-Heroes

Dayton, Ohio: October 31: The American super-hero, Batman of Gotham City (Giuliani) and The Terminator (Schwarzenegger) of California, join forces here in "undecided" Ohio to support the "war hero" John McCain. Listening to the shouted litany of cliches about "John McCain's proven leadership" and "real American fighter" one feels a very long way indeed from classical heroism, with its requirements of irreparable tragic loss, its stoic stern eloquence of humility and control and its dark almost nihilistic charisma which would have no traffic with sugary "stump" speeches. And watching these two rouse McCain's rally, Arnold with his warnings against the evils of European socialism and Rudy about the Satanic villians of the Middle East, one envisions the vacuous East Coast and West Coast loci once dominated by these two alleged "superheroes": Batman-Giuliani's New York City and muscular Arnold's Calee-forn-ya, Arnold's state mired in environmental nightmares, popular rage against immigration and a current bankruptcy, and Rudy's city well on its way in a dangerous recession, still stifled in 25 years of a real-estate squeeze that has left the city's core a homogenous blur commercial franchises and corporate condos-and-lofts. And yet the prevailing myths of these superheroes' "conquests," that they have "cleaned up" their respective "planets" and brought "law and order" ring hollow in this mostly landlocked manufacture-less mid-America of the Information Age, undecided Ohio which has long since recessed into weary yet angry resignation about the postmodern, postindustrial, post-heroic age of America.

McCain 1: Malaise of Reflexivity

November 1: Newport News Virginia: One reaches the end of McCain's campaign weary of its insistent re-beginnings, its open-ended endings, the pundits parsing of the "real" McCain vs the presumably false version, the campaign's constant attempts to identify itself with its own non-existent "my friends" (small businesspeople, hockey moms, Joe the Plumber, et al), its anchored-in-place inaugural refrains ("we're mavericks" "we're going to Washington" "we're going to fight earmarks, etc"), its backfiring strategies against Obama, its boxing ring bravado to being behind in the polls ("we have them right where we want them"),
its "fundamentals are sound" and "serious financial crisis" reversals on the financial recession, its "surge is working" and "mistakes were made" metaphysics about the finished-yet-ongoing US occupation of Iraq, McCain's meandering, convoluted "straight talk" about the Presidency of George W Bush, his compulsive thumbs-up and pointing into his inattentive audiences, his phony rally cry that "Mack is back" their own faces and bodies concealed behind red, white and blue face paint, over-sized floppy hats and race-baiting placards about "real Americans", McCain squinting from the stage as if unsure that any outside is truly out there: he is, alas a malfunctioning robot yet an all-too-human Narcissus blinded by the light as he faces the darkness of his vanishing (Presidential) mirage.

The Florida Courts

October 30: Orlando, Florida. Once again back near Disney's Magic Kingdom, I was on hand to witness, near-and-past midnight, a deux (deus) ex machina at the end of a long and torturous Grimm Brothers' story (cf Bill's labeling of Barack as a "fairy tale," an allusion which enraged black Americans but which also overlooked the awe-fullness of the fairy tale genre) here we have the long-delayed appearance of former President Bill Clinton ("the first black President," thus spake Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison in the 1990s, though she has since disavowed that nomination in light of Bill's fairy tale "diss" of Obama) and also here on the same stage we have the first white President Barack Obama (thus spake one Kai Johnson, as I will explain). First, note the messianic problem of the dual appearance, as if Christ himself were to show up at his own Second Coming: the stage a mirrored black/white, white/black self-canceling. Bill Clinton reminded his 35,000 auditors that it was he ("oh virile one!") who had put Florida back in the Democrat's side (or did he say in his "hands"? a term more appropriate for the violence of his historical conquest of this Sunshine State), as if Florida were a maiden of psycho-sexual conquest, a re-minder which rendered Al Gore and John Kerry (defeated here in 00 and 04) eunuchs re Florida, though for Gore all one need say is, "The Florida courts," to strike a chilling memory into the bones of Democrats who recall the Supreme Court-ordained theft (cf Bush v Gore) which set the USA on the bloody road it has been wearily on ever since: and, apropos of that legal space, the court, I took the opportunity earlier in the day to be esco(u)rted by one of Barack's African-American young staff members, one Kwame O'Connor, he from Port St Lucie, who took me to the "projects" to meet so-called "urban" youths and have them "testify" to their political leanings: I met Kai Johnson, 24, Gary Toussaint, 27 and Dwayne Campbell, 25 (their white friend Billy Hightower had to leave). These men spend a good deal of libidinous energy playing on the Florida (basketball) courts. Our brief exchanges are recorded below.

Dwayne: Yo, Guy, where you say your from, France?

Guy: Yes.

Gary: France is smack, bro, how long you been trotting your own self around this U S of A?

Guy: It has been about seven months.

Kai: Yo! Seven months. Nigger been stuck on an episode of Lost a long time eh, bee?

Guy: Are you men voting in the election on Tuesday?

Dwayne: Yo check it, my sister Shantia went down and tried to do that early voting stuff man I was tripping when I saw the lines man snaking round the block like they were giving away Grand Theft Auto or some shit. She said they be hassling the elders on line. They be thinking that this early voting thing just a scam to throw out their votes when no one is looking.

Guy: Shall you vote, Dwayne?

Dwayne: Nah, I shall not. I got too long a sheet. I stay away from them polls. I don't need no snake from parole slithering up to my door on account of seeing my name on some dumb ass voter registration sheet.

Guy: And you, Kai? What do you think of Obama?

Kai: Man, Obama, you guys seen that clip online about the secret half-brother of Obama, lowlife sucking on the pipe who lives in a trailer? Some laughing at that so much I was crying. They send a TV crew out there talk to this secret half-brother who says "Barack disowned me!" that shit was sick funny. But, for real, I like Obama, Guy. But let me slip you a little secret about the bro. This just you and me, ok, Guy? The bro Barack ain't a bro. See, he's half black half white but in this country your skin is black you be black.

Gary: Word. So why you saying he ain't a bro?

Kai: So, see this guy, Barack, face it, he's one smart dude. He's Einstein this guy. He knows, Yo, 'I got to be as white as Wonder Bread if I want to win this election, man I got to be as white as mayo-fuckin-nnaise, you know what I mean, I'm talking I got to be Hellmans Mayonnaise white.' You check what I'm saying here, homie? So every day man, Barack gets up and says, ok, let me make sure I talk white enough for whitey today, dig? He's thinking white white white white, twenty-four and seven.

Gary: Man, you sick with that Kai.

Dwayne: No he's right man. That's the God's truth. But hey, I don't hold that shit against Barack. He's doing what he got to do.

Kai: You bet your ass he does. And so, see, Guy, that's my little secret you take home to your bros and sistas and even the hoes in gay Paris, okay? You tell them that what they will see while they're sitting round their little French TVs eating their mofo croissants and mofo cafe-au-lait is we here just elected ourselves the first white President.

Guy: Obama will be the first white President? Alors, do explain more, please. Maybe I mishear. Is this like Franz Fanon's theory of white masks?

Kai: You heard me straight. I ain't talking Halloween mask and I don't know no Franz Phenonemon. This is my theory. Listen, no other brother, white or black, in the history of this here country, which you know Guy, we started out with slavery--

Dwayne: Hey hey hey. Don't go there Kai. We don't need that negativity this week. You cause Guy here go home and say he talked to a bunch of bitter-ass, pissed-off no good black homies in F-L-A.

Kai: Chill, man. Hear me the hell out first. What I am saying is, we got this brother about to be elected President. And you tell me what other dude running for President ever spent that much energy making sure he got people thinking he's white even though his skin be black? So you see man, even every white we elected. Even George fucking Washington never had to wake up and say, okay, let me make sure whitey knows I be white, you know? So that's all I'm saying, dude. No disrespect to B-a-r-a-c-k. But check it, he'll be our first white President.

Gary: Hey but he still got the black in him. He stayed true to who is skin says he is, you know what I'm saying? You see that little strut he got in his step like he coming down here to call us out on the court.

Kai: That's right. That's right. I said from the get-go, you watch, this Barack one smart-ass gangster.

Saxby+Chambliss=Le Bruissement de la langue

Savannah, Georgia: October 29 One passes the Garden of Good and Evil house in the arboreal tranquility of this Southern city to take pleasure in the name of the state's GOP Senator whose seat is "at risk," Saxby+Chambliss, a name so phonetic it evokes a presence that answers the abscence of a history, the name's enunciation, a name ever prior to writing, charged by aural contrasts and incestuous Anglo-Gallic-Germanic mixed roots: the violent English "s"/"x"-ee consonant phoneme alleviated by the traces of a soothing assonance of its Gallic "Sh-ahm-blee" a curious name which I find in my casual laptop recherche here: Saxby 'deriving from places called 'Saxoby' in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. 'Saxi' or 'Saksi' farm', derived from Old Norse 'byr', farm, settlement. Both Lincolnshire and Leicestershire were areas of major Scandinavian settlement. The first recording of the modern surname 'Saxby' from this source is that of Nicholas de Sxebi, in the Pipe Rolls of Leicestershire of 1200. The second possible origin is Middle English 'sakespey', from the Old French 'sacquespee', a nickname for one quick to draw sword, or a trainer in swordsmanship" While for Chambliss we find Chamblis, Chambley, Chambly..first found in Burgundy where the family has been prominent for centuries; some of the first settlers of this name or is variants were: Rochard Chamblis, who came to Barbados in 1634; Marie Chambney, who settled in Virginia in 1635; Morris Chamblis, who arrived in New England in 1663.

"Godless Money" in the Carolinas

Raleigh, North Carolina: October 29: In the airport I hear of Senator Elizabeth Dole's "tight battle." (Dole evokes runaway American agricapitalism in South America: Dole Inc., the banana corporation). Dole's ad ties her Presbyterian opponent, Kay Hagan, to an atheist organization which wishes to expunge the Deity from American texts: One Nation Under God In, God We Trust, etc. South Carolina confronts a Nietzschean threat.

Reading 'Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking' and Barack's 'Dreams of My Father' in North Carolina

Charlotte, North Carolina: October 28: Following a brief Palian swing down here I remained overnight and was invited by Ms Vivian Hashwell, an interior design specialist, 46 years old, a charming divorcee, to sit among her "book club" where they would be discussing Malcom Gladwell's text Blink: Thinking Without Thinking, and, in light of the recent election, they agreed to do a hurry-up read of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I was chauffeured to the Tudor home of Ms. Hashwell, perched on a knoll at the end of Elm Street. Her lawn's oak tree just now was turning a blazing orange, the houses on her street adorned with carved pumpkins, driveway candles, neat piles of raked leaves. We sat in a red-carpeted conservatory in black leather couches and chaise lounge. Among the readers were Joyce Garrity, real estate agent and 35 year old mother of two, Cindy McFarlin, 42 year old housewife whose husband is stationed in Afghanistan, Ruth Gregory, 37, a guidance counselor and mother of two, and Nancy Fleming, 32 years old, a registered nurse currently attending evening college in order to go into teaching. Ad you can see, they were good enough to wear name tags, that uniquely American social tool.Guy: Tell me what is the premise of this text called Blinking.

Nancy: Blink. Well, in a nutshell, he's saying you don't need to really think in order to think.

Cindy: Not so much that, Guy. What he means is that when we first perceive something and have that gut sense, that gut sense is mostly right.

Joyce: Yes but, frankly, I found he contradicted himself. Like the Diallo example where some cops killed an unarmed black man and shot him like a hundred times.

Vivian: But his point there was that if you have a built in bias it can blur your "blink" and make you resist what your gut knows is right.

Cindy: I think that cop example also meant is that it doesn't mean our instincts are always right. But like the Woody Allen example where the guy gets ready for years to audition and then Woody Allen just looks at him straight away and says you're in.

Ruth: Oh speaking of Woody? Did you see the movie Vicky Christina Barcelona? There's a lesbian scene in it! Penelope Cruz, oh la la la, did you see it Guy? It's set in Barcelona.

Vivian: After he ran off with that sixteen year old daughter of his I couldn't take him anymore. Ugh.

Ruth: Oh but it's a gorgeous movie. The settings! Oh!

Guy: This is no surprise to me. Americans tend to think that it is Paris that is the decadent capital but Europeans know it is Barcelona. The prostitutes are, how you say, tour guides there.

Vivian: Oh I visited Madrid once on business but I heard the same thing. Ladies, can we stick to the Gladwell lest Guy here think we are a bunch of nattering hens?

Joyce: I thought he made a good point but really I felt like mostly he was telling me what I already know: go with your gut.

Guy: I wonder if this title is not a slogan sort of, like think without thinking, diet without dieting, eat without cooking, and so on?

Cindy: I disagree, Guy. Though I know where you are going. One thing that bothered me is, if this were true, how come Wall Street guys aren't filthy rich?

Vivian: Because they think too much! I once met George Soros, do you know him that Hungarian gentleman who made a fortune betting against the British pound. Well, he works in hedge funds. But--and Guy you would appreciate this--he was a philosophy student and he told me what the markets don't realize about the market is that it operates on the uncertainty principle and unless you factor that in, you tend to think markets are logical and such.

Guy: Ah, oui, Karl Popper?

Vivian: Ah so you know him?

Guy: I met him once in Swizterland, oui.

Cindy: Ok, let's not get all philosophical. My brain is mush tonight. Can we talk about Barack's book? What did you think of Barack's mother choosing that guy?Ruth: Well, she was only nineteen. I have to say I was very very impressed by his writing. Do you think he wrote this all himself?

Cindy: I was wondering that myself. But given how personal this book is I;d have to say yes. For sure. Do you have those in France, Guy, 'ghost writers' who come in and write a book for an author, or, more like a celebrity and then the author takes credit?

Guy: Ah yes I am sure these exist.

Cindy: What books have you written Guy, you mentioned one.

Guy: Well, my books do not sell many copies like Gladstone's Blinking but the one which did make me, how you say pocket change, was a memoir about my college years, Buried Alive in an Ivy League Grave.

Vivian: Oh that sounds like a frightful experience. Did you go to university in America?

Guy: No, I attended the Sorbonne but this was the title in English very different, difficult to translate in English the French title was La Vie Sorbonne, ou Ma Mort lente

Vivian: Ladies we are reading Guy's book next week. I tell you, Guy is something special. I was in a screaming throng at this Palin rally, half squashed to death and the press are really beastly, especially the men! And here along comes Guy and he saw my predicament and invited me to stand in this free space in front of him [lots of OOOOHHing follows and ladies tease and flatter Guy]

Joyce: I must say I did like Barack's book. I mean, imagine what we would write if we told thetrue story of how we felt about our upbringing. My word, I;d have a few choice words for my father and I woulnd't hold back like Barack does. Or be so circumspect. I mean the guy was a CREEP. Period. Why couldn't he just use those words? C-r-e-e-p. I really wondered about his mother getting suckered but I mean, come on. It seemed like Barack couldn't quite say what he really felt about his father til after he died. But he sort of fudges what his mother thought about this scamp.Vivian: Well the past is the past. It seems to me Obama is the type not to hold a grudge. Doesn't he talk about that? He has all these little proverbs about grudges. Now his wife, Michelle..whoa Nellie! she's another matter. I wouldn't want to cross her. I mean they talk about Palin as pitbull. Watch out, girl!

Cindy: Oh my Lord, and how blunt she was to Barack, at least when he writes about their first date... I read the other Barack book by mistake, ladies.

Ruth: Well, if we keep getting round to talking politics again world war three might re-erupt...

Nancy: Basic background Guy. Last week, while we were discussing the horrible Woodward book about Bush, Vivian and I had a huge argument, I mean it was our own kind of little The View cat-fight, wasn't it ladies?

Cindy: Amen.

Vivian: But we made up. I took her to that new Italian place on Harrington, and let's just say Nancy by her third glass of Chianti this little firecracker was forgiving my calling Barack a socialist! [much laughter]

Nancy: It was a little bit of a stretch is all. A big stretch, really.

Ruth: Ladies! Let's not go there! We don't need Guy going back to France telling how catty American women are. Guy does your wife travel America with you? Does she do the book club thing in France? Or have you French read every book under the sun already and don't need a silly club?

Guy: She is joining me on November four in New York for the finale. She is, how you say, headmaster, or Dean, she teaches psychology. In Lyon, you know Lyon?. But she does not have this book club fun. Her friends tend to prefer to play cards together.

Vivian: I wish I could meet her Guy I am sure she is a doll! You know, getting back to Barack, Guy, I am going to come clean. Only because you are here, Guy this is a scoop. Ladies, I am even thinking about voting for him. Barack. Oh lord I can't believe I'm admitting this. I mean never mind the who-would-you-want-to-have-a-beer with-test? To me it's who-would-you-want-to-go-on-a-date with, with, right, Guy? I mean do you see the way McCain kisses his wife Cindy? I mean, I have seen fish kiss with more passion.[much laughter ensues]

Nancy: I can't believe you switched after dragging me through hell and high water last week when we talked politics! [much laughter]

Guy: Ah yes. Well that would mean that you would violate the Gladstone rule to follow first instinct?

Vivian: Well, not really. It actually proves his point. I thought about McCain-Palin and tried to think my way to voting for them.


Vivian: Well my blink moment with Barack was when he won Iowa and gave that stirring speech. But I ignored that blink.

Nancy: Blink is on?

Vivian: Can you forgive me Cindy?

Cindy: Well, not to tell stories out of school but I got an e-mail from Craig in Kabul who said at least half his brigade sent in absentee ballots and....even he voted for Barack.

Bored in Virginia, "Mother of Presidents"

October 27: Frederickburg, Virginia. Half listening to Palin's stump speech in this park rally plastered with posters ("Country First: No Surrender" "NObama" "Redistribute THIS" "I am Jane the Plumber") I was re-minded by this state's imperial and Freudian nicknames ("Old Dominion" "Mother of Presidents") that Virginia is the state of Presidents. One thinks of its famous farmer and Revolutionary scribe Thomas Jefferson, with his Bible, which, like this rally, was fully sanitized, the miraculous and supernatural words excised from the text, even as Palin's calculated earnestness was met with disproportionately atavistic cheering, I felt numbed by her oft-repeated promise to "shake things up in Washington" that "shake things up," [secouer] such a favorite colloquialism in America, bestowing on whoever says it the immediate status of both the fussy matronly housekeeper and the "maverick" [franc-tireur] and "reformer" [réformatrice] as if to re-form were to create a new form...and through these wholesome Puritan Palinian pleas "to rein in wasteful spending," [surveilleur étroitment] one pines for the less anal-retentive companionship of immoral, prolifically ill-behaving former U.S. Presidents: the promiscuous hedonistic Epicureanism of Old Dominion's Jefferson, the rowdy gun-toting, dueling Carolinian anarchy of Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson, the hard-drinking former Southern general Ulysses S Grant.

Mickey Mouse, Karl Marx, Joe the Plumber

Orlando, Florida: October 27: Witness the Bidean dressing down of the Republican news anchor here in Florida, not far from the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney. (That American dream-park created by Walt Disney who before the House Committee on Un-American Activities named the Screen Actors Guild as a Communist front). Said Floridian news anchor quoted to Biden Marx's dictum about communal necessity and cooperative potential as representative of Obama's platform.'Karl Marx' creeps into American discourse. My American hosts here in Orlando assure me Karl Marx himself was never invoked during the four decades of Cold War. Instead pundits and politicians evoked "Communism" as a looming military bogeyman, a danger bereft of any ideology other than as a military Other bent on destroying Freedom. Why then is Marx's name, now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, getting an airing this week in the county of Mickey Mouse? Perhaps, one speculates, because the frightful ideological beards of Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden have been shaved by time, receded beyond threat, leaving the wholesome, clean-faced "natural" American ideology without its bearded opposition. Unable to locate itself in relation to anymore evil antitheses, the psyche of America breaks with McCain's raging dialectic of 'fight for America' and finds fertile calm in the Obamian O. McPalin, having failed to truly stir an antithesis through the specters of Obamian black nationalism (Reverend Wright), Obamian Muslim 'foreignness' (Barack Hussein), Obamian terrorism (Bill Ayers) now float the specter of Karl Marx, who is interpreted largely by way of Joe the Plumber (ne Samuel Wurzelbacher), that Ohioan skinhead proletarian teetering on bankruptcy, who dutifully does McCapitalist's bidding, trumpeting himself as a wizened scholar of global economic and foreign policy, an entrepreneur of all entrepreneurs (viz, only in America is he-who-is-not-a-business man-nor-never-will be so easily fictionalized into a false consciousness by GOP capitalists seeking corporate tax breaks, a tax policy which ensures that disgruntled and possibly threatening Joe the Plumber remains safely removed from any real power, laboring on his working-class basement renovations, narcotized by the flag, FOX, football and fear). Hence we hear again this Samuel Wurzelbacherian doctrine that an Obamaian presidency would be the death of Israel and his ongoing assault on Comrade Obama's communist plans to re-distribute the wealth. Who's wealth? one asks, Joe's wealth? Oui. The specter of Karl Marx truly shadows these tense final days before le jour d’élection

"I know just enough probably to be dangerous,” Joe the Plumber, October 27, 2008.

La Mort de Gipper

October 26: Arlington, Virginia. Appearing on Meet the Press McCain was asked by Tom Brokaw to script his candidacy into one of two American films, either as Kevin Costner in the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams or as George Clooney in the seafaring disaster The Perfect Storm. McCain doesn't realize, of course that his own life has already been rendered in Hollywood's miserable, literally tortured epics, from the grotesquely imagined prison camps of Vietnam (The Deer Hunter) to the nightmare of the neglected and wounded returning veteran (Coming Home) to the plight of the helpless American imprisoned overseas (Midnight Express).McCain's strange, flippant response scripted himself as the Gipper: Ronald Reagan's character (in "Knute Rockne, All American"), the football player George Gipp, who dies of strep throat but inspires the movie's "win one for the Gipper" battle cry. Thus McCain predicts his own campaign's demise.

The difference between Ronald Reagan (whose coattails McCain rode into political life in the 1980s) and John McCain could not be more glaring than it was on Meet the Press: Reagan had a perfect pitch for the call of the studied seduction, the luscious lure of the surface and the inherent child-like longing for the simple answer and he rode these Gipper-motifs into unparalleled electoral success. His distant, charismatic ease of the body and soft, eloquent disguise of his horrible shallowness made for a sugary middlebrow acting which would never win an Oscar but which always won the day. McCain, on the other hand, with his halting and defensive answers to Brokaw's movie question, found himself wrestling with the air, caught in a poorly scripted web of neo-realism: he grimaced at his own failure to act. He gropes for a prickly heroism, rails as his own disastrous campaign fails to make him a Star: his scripting of Palin has the film's GOP=producers enraged; his stump speeches are reduced to a strained Method acting that allows no space for playful pleasure, no room for visual relaxation, no thrills of a rapt audience passivity. He assaults his auditors rather than caresses them (qua Reagan, Clinton and Obama): the finesse of the matinee idol will permanently elude McCain. Increasingly he voices Robert DeNiro's bitter rendition of the "fighter" Jake Lamotta.

Brief Dialogue on Surfing & Being ('Stoked')

October 25: Santa Monica, California. On my stopover, inspired by the Hawaiian example, I explored the subculture of surfing communities. I put Beach Boys "Pet Sounds" into my iPod and revived a hobby I'd first taken up in Bali in the 1970s, and shared a surfboard and a marijuana cigarette with one Jay Deerfield, an Oregon native, a former stock analyst for the telecom industry now turned spirits-and-wine buyer for a Venice Beach network of bistros and pubs. I spent a wonderful afternoon away from media and politics, riding the "swells" at a Santa Monica beach. I paste below an extract, recorded by Jay's girlfriend, Safflower, of our conversation on waves.

Guy: What is this human desire to conquer the wave?

Jay: Guy Guy Guy you're talking like a true Westerner, man. C'mon man this is beyond metaphysics. The goal is not to conquer the wave but to be the wave.

Guy: Is this not an illusion? I know myself and my board and I know to be separate from the wave and yet I insist that I can be 'one' with the wave?

Jay: It's not that you try to be one, you are one with the wave. It's when you get in the splintering mindset, that you put yourself above what we are in, man, which, is life, Guy, in all its forms. It's when you get with that me-vs-it mentality that you divorce yourself from your birthright, the sea, the sky, what you're married to by birth, when you get into that split mentality while you're on the board that you lose your balance and go under. Riding the waves gets my mind back in the It. That's what we mean by the word stoked, on the board, which you asked me about.

Guy: What is the myth of California dreaming? Is it the Pacific Ocean? Is it drugs? Or is it a gold rush mentality?

Jay: Nah, it's not a money hunt or just about weed. It's the air, Guy, breath this air. Nothing as liberating as breathing the air that washes over you out here. It's as if everywhere else--and I have lived in at least ten different states in this country, the bad vibes running around the landscape below somehow sucks down all the air and it's hard to breath, you know in the yoga sense, Pranayama. Here, the air is always replenished. It's what you call en plein air, right?

Guy: Indeed, surfing teaches the wisdom of Monism. And now I must, as you say, hit on the road and go back to sharing the bad air of Dualism on the campaign trail.

Obama 2: Kamehameha, or Motherless Hawaii

October 24: Honolulu, Hawaii.Dropped into this Asian island of America, 2563 miles from the United States mainland, one is struck by the role/s the relatively recently colonized and distant states Alaska and Hawaii have played in this presidential battle of 'all fifty states,' here, where Barack eulogizes his ailing grandmother even before her death, at the very moment pundits and media in the U.S. have begun to hail his ascension to the Presidency ahead of his November 4th election: now Barack is not the public and publicized figure who one day earlier stood before 35,000 cheering strong in America's literal Hoosier heartland but is rather a solitary, orphaned (from the mother-mainland) One, roaming his old neighborhood where he had been sent to live over three decades ago by a mother, Ann Dunham (pictured below at Barack's wedding) Ann Dunham who'd bid her son farewell in 1972 and had him flown from her care in Indonesia back to Hawaii where he was raised by his Kansan grandparents. Now the one who raised him, 86 year old Madelyn Dunham, lays dying and the specter of mortality hovers over the naissance of the O, calling to mind the unifying Hawaiian King Kamehameha (Hawaiian for "the lonely one"). But Obama's stoic grief will remain, like Obama, sealed ("without going into too much detail" Barack tells the press here), and he will return to the U.S. (Thebes) for what his supporters hope will be his impending election-coronation, a potential throne-taking shadowed by an Oedipal motion which drives him endlessly on and away from his ambiguous abandonment(s) here in Hawaii. Thus the O which propels Barack's messianic campaign is a fear of his own ruptured Origins: he is both the fatherless father (First Black President) and motherless son (Young Overachiever) about whom his American voters, as surrogate Parents, will declare themselves 'proud').

Obama 1: Public: Folded into the O-Fold

Indianapolis, Indiana: October 23 We confront Obama first as a public performance of a magnitude we long for but can never master: witness 35,000+ in this downtown park, in this state of basketball-mad Hoosiers, a red state stronghold turning blue with in the (Ba)ra(ck)pture. Obama's present-ness brings tears to some eyes near me (and I note that Americans cry mainly for innocence that has made its mark, the Lassie come home moments made true: however, in the face of a tragedy, Americans, unlike tragic-minded Europeans, retain a hard optimism of face which Europeans envy). Here in Indiana, getting ready to join Obama's plane westward into the night, I locate in Obama that secret power we want for our selves yet never admit to wanting: the irrational charisma of the fascist and the stadium-stage of the rock star, the stance of an iconic Martyr and the mellow langage of Lucifer's seductions: his is a poise and a posture we imagine is us but know isn't, in our slouching stubborn demeanor(s), we fall short and seek a version of this flawless Obamian phantasm outside ourselves: his eloquence is the speech we know that is in us but never makes its way through us: O-bama has already vanquished the O-bstacles that still bl-Ock our paths (money, class, race, disability, access to power, geography) he ceaselessly (like another endlessly celebratory line from that American bard Whitman) over-comes to make it to the top of the very ticket that elides and eludes us and places us into its audience: the Obamian O letters and performs what our anonymity simply cannot: the fantasy of endless, admiring audience will never be (for us). But, before Obama, as he mirrors us, hypnotizing Indiana about Change, his Standing somehow IS makes of us this imagined charismatic/magnanimous we which we didn't know we were (and, (O)-barring a McPalin victory) are and shall be. We, this Indiana crowd signs, WE wish to be this THOU that enters the O.

Palin 2: McCain's Melting (Faire Fondre)

Colorado Springs, Colorado: October 21: I trailed Palin to Colorado (she who trails Obama-Biden in national CNN's poll of polls: a superlative-transcendent Poll, not unlike the New Testament's Lord of Lords), we find her buying ice cream for her daughter in the midst of a worldwide financial "meltdown." The ice cream shop-visit, a small town ritual of American togetherness and humble escape a contrast to the big city's arrogantly plunging Dow industrials. And always the daughter. Daughters have been a defining trope with Palin: her ice-cream loving daughter Piper, the "scandal" of her pregnant daughter Bristol, Palin's own daughterly presence beside the aged fatherly McCain in recent TV interviews in which the very daughter-father chasm which they seek to close -- inexperience/experience -- is actually confirmed by their appearance together -- Wasilla mayor/war veteran. One is also struck, in their interview with NBC's Brian Williams (himself the robo-reporter with his robo-interviews, the robo-Ken Doll to America's robo-Barbie- audiences), by her rhetorical flight away from a definition of "pre-conditions" (for diplomatic talks with American "enemies") and instead stressed her ability to pronounce the Iranian president's name (which she repeated twice). Palin's verbal impulses ( much like her achats d'impulsion) work in resistance to the naming of any one condition: indeed Palinian rhetoric is remarkably bereft of conditionals, context-making; instead her speech enacts and reenacts a slow melting and re-melting, with its circuitous swirl-cone syntactical topping/dropping into a (cone)-question, filling air with an answer that is not an answer but which, in its sweet flavored tones, indicates she enjoys this delicious Proustian or Jamesian grammar of not-settling, her sentences not even resting even upon the particular objects which punctuate her otherwise flighty, restless, sugary swirling-and-melting pronouncements (about "new jobs," "goodness," "pro-American" "uniforms"). As postscript, my Gallic inclinations cannot help but allow me to applaud her sense of vogue ($150,000 shopping spree paid for by the Republican National Committee: an extravagance not unlike our own Carla Bruni's trips to Hermes, or, on less rich days, Le Bon Marché); at least, by American standards, Palin's ensemble is as close as the mid-American woman comes to haute couture, with leather pumps from Saks and svelte-shouldered silhouettes from Neiman Marcus: Palin's rather urbane designer clothing negates her small-town identity and adds an element of danger to the melting ice cream cone which she purchased in Colorado, itself emblematic of the melting McCain campaign: she melts the McCain (vanilla) ice cream cone: a melting which her "warmly received" August nomination instigated.

Palin 1: Fear of Alien Abduction

Roswell, New Mexico: October 20: I have returned to New Mexico from Nevada by bus, enjoying along the way rest-stop conversations still to be posted to this site. Here I chart Sarah Palin's rally in town, Roswell, made famous by its locals' abduction [enlèvement] by aliens in the 1947. A sea, or lake, of waving flags, met her, as if these witnesses to her landing wanted to make sure she understood that they could speak in non-verbal language. Like much here in the desert Southwest, the rally felt ephemeral, a sideshow, an off-road detour, as if, per a 1950s Martian film, Palin's mothership [ravitailleur] had touched down only temporarily, to make brief contact with swing state earthlings [terriens] before re-orbiting. I stood among young conservative blonde girls wearing tee shirts illustrated with vicious canines in lipstick underscored with bold lettering "Send the Pitbull in Lipstick to D.C." Abduction was on the minds of many, shadowed by a news story about a Mexican drug gang in Nevada who had recently abducted a child to extort money. The sole Frenchman as usual, I felt as if I were the late Francois Truffaut re-recruited for another cameo in a sequel to Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like my former friend and French auteur, Truffaut, I tried to mitigate between the invading UFO-Martians (who were Cold War stand-ins for Communists) who have come to possibly "abduct" the free and the frightened American earthlings (those squinting fearful residents). Indeed one thinks of Palin as having been "abducted" from Alaska and brought to the "lower 48" states by the GOP. Unable to speak the aliens' tongue, Palin stammers, winks, emotes, gyrates, claps hands, nods, bobs her head,adorns her chest with symbolic pins, brooches and photo-buttons: Palin cannot understand the outer-space speech of foreign policy, the other-world semantics of the liberal media, the far far away galactic diction of economic policy makers. Thus Palin fears being, like those residents of Roswell, abducted by these aliens [and taken to Washington DC to live forever among them] and so Palin touches down here and channels the same fears of her earthling counterparts who, in 2008, fear abduction by Blue State Martians (Barack Hussein Obama, Muslims, Bill Ayers, democrat-socialists, liberal news journalists, the Indian and Chinese economic "engines," the United Nations, illegal Mexican "aliens" creeping northward just south of Roswell).

Mack the Fatalist of Flagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff, AZ:October 20. In the early hours of the morning we arrived in Flagstaff en route to New Mexico where I had a few moments to speak to one of the floor managers, Monsieur Mack Cousins, here at the Nestle Purina (dog and cat) Food plant, the largest in the nation.

Guy: How do you enjoy life in Arizona?

Cousins: Life anywhere is good, Guy. As long as you ain't pushin' up daisies, right?

Guy: This means to be dead?

Cousins: Pushing daisies, yeah. So, Guy you like Sarah Palin?

Guy: On the subject of American politics, I am mute. To speak of this would be like a Catholic bishop discoursing on Tahitian voodoo. Do you think American dogs and cats are as well fed as their masters?
Cousins: On the whole we do quite well. Purina is to American dogs as Corn Flakes is to American kids. What do French dogs eat, fois gras and creme brulee? [hearty laughter]

Guy: Will you be voting for your state's Senator, Monsieur McCain for President?

Cousins: Guy, last time I voted was for Ross Perot, that little screwball billionaire who ran for president back in 1992. Now, looking back I realize what a schlump I was voting for that nutter. So I figure, if I go an vote for McCain now, who knows, twelve, thirteen years from now I might regret it like I regret pushing the button for Perot.

Guy: This is called the fatalist's quandary.

Cousins: One question, Guy.

Guy: Yes?

Cousins: Perot. That name. No offense. But with a name like Perot, he was French, wasn't he?

Hoover Dam, Bush's Levees

Boulder City, Nevada: October 19 Stopping at the Hoover Dam en route to see a Palin rally in New Mexico, I took the time off the bus to walk these astonishing vistas, survey this hydroelectric marvel of concrete and engineeriing, this energy-producing behemoth of the Manifest Destiny set within plateaus, mesas, rocks of Black Valley Canyon, and, of course, its namesake, President Herbert Hoover, he of the Great Depression, he who calls to mind the tag "worst President in US history," now re-placed by George W. Bush who has his own problems with water: Persian Gulf uncertainties, Louisiana and Mississippi levees collapsing, all the Anglophone metaphors for financial conditions: foreclosed homes throughout the nation called "under water"; "liquidity" and "solvency" and cash "flow" problems in an economy that has "dried up" and is "on the brink" of a horrible "deluge" of economic woes: corporate "washouts," and bank "bailouts," an impending "flood" of bankruptcies, and a "dam burst" of unemployment rates at "rising levels" Americans haven't seen since, alas, the age of the dam-building Hoover.

Ce qui se passe à Vegas reste à Vegas: Paris, Las Vegas and The Karaoke of Love

October 17: Las Vegas, Nevada. Now an evening among the swarming pre-Enlightenment aristocracy made of new-money, new millennium plebeians, in this city that is nothing and everything, a glittering nowhere that draws billions of pilgrims from everywhere: it's knowing God is pre-rational pure Chance: animated by accents from Japan to Jersey, Jerusalem to Java, here, in a manifold mecca to the religion of the con and the conquest, the fake silver coin and the genuine poker chip: beyond history, it rolls on without a clock or calendar, like an ever spinning re-cycle of Hegelian history, enough to make even Giambattitsa Vico dizzy: from The Defending the Cavemen comedy show to the ancient Egyptian Luxor Hotel to the (Samuel Taylor Coleridgean) "Xanadu Showcase" ("devoted to imagination and invention") to the Wild Wild West Casino, a city of light bulbs and boas, theme-parks and peep shows, Jehovah Witnesses and snake swallowers, taxi queues and pole dancing sideshows: this is the site of America's open secret, its ultra-private infamous transgression, the pitch black space more brightly lit than an Australian summer beach: Las Vegas, the high price postmodern American prostitute in the frugal feather bed of the American preacher, an infernal rhinestone glittering on a desert's brimstone.

I spent a few Euros at the roulette wheel in the Paris Casino, and true to its Gallic authenticity, this "Parisian" casino's roulette wheel broke with the bastardized double-zero American version of our little wheel. I then settled at the bar for a few "Manhattans" with Pierre Grandier, a croupier, originally from Reims, who'd re-settled with his American wife in San Diego, ostensibly to open a bistro, only to find himself distressed by San Diego's conservative grip, recently divorced, penniless (as Pierre told me, "Le rêve américain est le cauchemar du crédit"). I then left morose Monsieur Grandier and, before boarding my Eastbound flight (to return to the campaign to follow Sarah Palin's entourage after her appearance on Saturday Night Live), I visited with one of the "church leaders" at the many wedding chapels here in Vegas. Here follows my surprisingly Socratic exchange with one 'Reverend Ricky' of the Shotgun Chapel for Latter-day Sinners. (Pardon, as usual the unedited English in this transcript):

Guy: why is it Las Vegas city and weddings became so afffinitied?

Reverend Ricky: well, what happens here in Vegas is inhibitions are lost and love is turned loose. And found. Love, I tell you, is a karaoke of the soul.

Guy: Karaoke? Love is mere imitation?

Rev Ricky: When we use words, are we not imitating other words?

Guy: True.

Reverend Ricky: Then who's to say our emotions, even love, are not just beautiful imitations?

Guy: Do the marriages which you ordain, last?

Reverend Ricky: We don't keep no records Guy. not my concern in the least. Most toxic words ever invented were "happily ever after." If a couple finds a moment of bliss by tying the knot on impulse, even if they lose the magic the moment they hit the highway and leave this desert of mirages, does that mean their nuptials were in vain?Guy: Certainly not.

Reverend Ricky: As a free thinking Italian, surely you--

Guy: I am French, not Italian.

Rev Ricky: Well then even more so then. Why so serious, Guy? Why is it weddings have to be so solemn? Why not have, as we do, a choir of singing Elvises instead of angels. Or our Elvises are angels. We here at the Shotgun Chapel feel very Zen about what we do. The moment is everything. Life is one shimmering illusion after another shimmering illusion. So we honor the surface and leave it to the philosophers like yourself to ponder the depths. A wedding is about glitter--not lead. And who cares if not all that glitters is gold?

Biden 2: Leaving Las Vegas

Las Vegas, Nevada: October 17: After a night spent in the city of the unreal, the Sodom and Gomorrah of the American West (my roundtable with Vegas locals is forthcoming), I was intrigued by the John the Baptist-specter of Biden. At times his tall, jarring white-haired there-ness was striking against the night sky, his wheezy, declamatory vaguely senatorial insistence gave way to pauses which filled the night air with bird-like cries from an audience who seemed painfully away of Biden's (mere) role as Obamian surrogate, a substitution known in advance by the rally attendees and yet (like the toll of words themselves) still we felt Biden's body as the presence of (Obama's) absence, [perhaps the very zero effect posited by the Mayans not far south of here centuries ago]. We stood in the night like ancient Romans awaiting the return of a general from the East who would bring to Rome its Oriental booty (victories in swing states): restless vox populi dutifully applauded Biden who decried the "Robocalls", phone messages sent en masse to recruit right-wing voters scared of Obama's "terrorist" ties. Biden's vulture-like gaze befitted this hard-scrabble earth, here, in God's country, safe outside its opulent city of lush technicolor ruin.

Biden 1: Dreaming of the Mission

Mesilla, New Mexico: October 16: Here Joe Biden arrived to contra-dict Palin's claim of patriotism as exclusively located (locus) in "small towns."I have never been to a state that hasn't sent its sons and daughters to serve its country," Biden told his auditors, couching national loyalty as willingness-to-war, a mission (itself calling to mind the genocidal "missions" of imperial Spain against the Mayans, Aztecs, Pueblos: Bush's mission accomplished; McCain's pledge to "complete the mission" in Iraq; Elton John's faux-rebellious lounge hit "Burn Down the Mission"), Biden off-to-war-mission-mirroring Palin's militaristic defintion of patriotism: the fiercely energized roared under the sharp stabs of Southwestern sun (cf the arrow of the sun of Pueblo Native myth) moved (em/bowed--up/ward) by Bidean battle-cry (mission) of/to change which, in its mimicry of Bush militarism, is a self-cancelling erasure shouted into this big sky flatland, to mesas and to the cacti.

Joe the Plumber: Addressing the Son of GOP/GOD

Hempstead, New York: October 16: Joe the Plumber descends on the debate like the Word (of the anti-tax Logos) made flesh. Joe is the incarnate Son of the GOD/GOP, an unknown known whose actual identity (nee Samuel J. Wurzelbacher) is effaced by the truncated simplicity of "Joe." This messianic plumber who, alas, is no plumber at all, an unlicensed, unauthorized freelancer in Ohio, an Ohioian ghost to whom Obama and McCain addressed their sacrificial offerings of "No Taxes, Joe." This repeated water-into-wine promise of an invisible and free government (loaves and fishes=you pay no taxes) is the coming of a fleshly god: the son of the GOP/GOD made flesh (Joe-the-Plumber) whose very name evokes a simplistic phallic everyman, the all-good American laborer who yet aspires to transform his self from an invisible being to a ruthlessly visible "owner of a small business." This mere man-to-owner-god-savior transformation threatened to be prevented by the (taxing-terrorist) Barack Obama and his Joe-castrating, Joe-crucifying tax proposal on people (who Joe is not yet nor ever will be) who make $250,000 or more. (McCain to Joe: "Forgive Barack, Joe, for he knows not what he does"). Alas in truth Joe is no God at all: not only not oppressed by taxes he actually owes back taxes. The tyrannical grip of the fictional Joe, the hall of mirrors which language addresses that which is not (Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe), and the falsely messianic narrative (aspiring owner crippled by a tax proposal which is-yet-to-be) are all proven too seductive to a bewildered and newly bankrupt America, and more, impenetrable to Truth.

Guy Talks with Hofstra Students

Hempstead, New York: October 15 On the day of the debate, the campus swirling with paranoiac panoptic Secret Service agents, I gave a morning lecture here at Hofstra University ("The Ontic Cringe Behind the Smile: A Semiotics of Michelle Obama's Face"), I ate lunch at one of the many malls of Long Island (at what you call Taco Bell, with its faux-Mexicano flavor signed by "Taco" and it's homespun American front porch signed by the "Bell").
I then retired to the campus grounds for an outdoor Q&A with young Hofstra undergraduates about politics and culture. A sample of our lively exchange is below; my editor of course leaves in my sometimes broken English.

Guy: So are you all voting in this upcoming big day?

Helena (Psych Major): of course Guy, do you think we would have attended your talk on Michelle Obama if we didn't care? And by the way, what did you mean when you said [consults her notes] the smile of Michelle Obama represents an agency of acquiescence about which she is both unaware and aware Guy, are you saying Michelle Obama is letting herself be used, like a pawn by her husband's campaign?

Guy: I do not know how you mean this word used, but, I will say, to be short about this, that she is acting a role which she dislikes and yet which liberates her as well.

Johnny (Business major): You mean, like she's cool with the cost benefit analysis? She puts up with Larry King and all the media jerk-offs and interviewers and in exchange she gets to be First Lady if Barack wins.

Guy: Yes but I meant she surrenders part of her Being, her wholeness is ruptured by the camera lights, a quasi-suicide to be so much in the public and forced to pose.

Kyle (Sociology major): That's called 'false consciousness,' what you're talking about with Michelle Obama, Guy. I think you're a Marxist at heart.

Johnny: Of course he is, all the French are communists, right Guy? But man look at his threads. That's Brooks Brothers tailoring, no?

Guy: No, it is Yves St Laurent. But I do not mean Marxian false consciousness, Monsieur Kyle, though yes I know this concept. What I mean is, ontologically, how you say, in the core of her being, Michelle Obama is displaced from the role she had made, successful lawyer, mother of two, suburban privacy, and has been asked to be, how you say, the white genteel lady of the plantation, if you will, the first lady of power, smiling through the psychological race-warfare waged in these campaigns, no?

Jennifer (English major): It's like the Elizabethans who believed in self-fashioning. Like, a self isn't just some natural thing. You make it up from different material. Like clothes.

Guy: Ah, oui. Perhaps. Alors, in America you can not only make self but re-make self. Like the Tide laundry detergent I see always says New Formula, Better Acting, Faster Stain Remove.

Jacob (Accounting major): So is France like a total socialist dictatorship?

Guy: France is socialist only to some small degree. We have more how you say "safety netting" of social needs and health but, inside that, we French can be very medieval-fascist about class and accent, which I do not see to be the case in America. Here, if you are fascist it is about invading countries to solve problems bot because someone has a lower accent than you. You drop bombs to solve problems but let people speak poor English and you don't think them unequal to you. And now of course socialism in America is okay to save CEOs.

Jacob: I agree, it's total bullshit, this bail out. Even my brother who works for Lehman Brothers and has this huge house in Highland Park, he's not even into this bail out. And McCain and Obama, they just go along.

Maria (undeclared major): At least Obama is going to lower taxes for poor people.

Kyle: All the tax talk is just a phony way to avoid the ideology which is the rich take care of the rich once they have pretended to campaign for the so called middle class. Obama might not own 10 houses like McCain, but if you think he's for the poor, get real, Maria.

Jacob: Yeah, plus Obama's going to raise taxes [much arguing ensues]

Guy: Tell me, each of you, if you were to say, here, here I hold up one single product of American culture that is, how you say, the quintessence, the best of, for you, to hold up and say this person or this business, or a product which is American truly American, what would you say represents America?

Jennifer: Ok. Don't laugh. I have traveled a lot in Europe. In all seriousness, ice cream. Carvel. The old drive-up parlors like the one near my house in Levitown. We make it the best, soft ice cream.


Jacob: Nah, not Carvel. America is not food, it's people, man. Warren fucking Buffet baby, the man got bucks to burn.







Maria: I'd say Jennifer Lopez, because I came out of Parkchester section of the Bronx myself and J Lo made it in movies and music, big time. And I tell you that is not easy being Latina. We are the invisible millions we Latinos and Latinas. J Lo, baby!






Kyle: Charles Bukowski, you know him Guy? He's our Artaud. "What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."


Helena: I'd say Meryl Streep because she has been at it so long and so well.

Johnny: That's all pretty intense, Streep, that Charles Lubowski poetry stuff. But no, I say America is technology, inventions. The Mac computer. What's more USA? Steve Jobs.
What about you, Guy, what single thing in our country do you think sums up America the best for you? And don't say "McDonalds."

Guy: Well, I have not seen everything yet I would say, I come back to that famous collar of Elvis Presley, how you say, 'up turning' collar.
Maria: Upturned collar, yeah.

Guy: Yes that collar up like so. It is sort of James Dean origin too and Fonz, yes, Happy Days? But it is distinctly American. In Paris in the 1950s when I was a student, this turn up collar was a sign that you hated French establishment and believed in American rebellious ideal of partial self concealment. In movies you see this too, the collar up. It is American defiance which yet wants to be seen and yet protects itself, hides a little under this collar which paradoxically also draws uneasy attention to the person. Elvis always wore this, yes? And Top Gun Tom Cruise. And George Bush on his declared mission accomplishment day, on the aircraft ship?

Kyle: Mission Accomplished. Yeah, that sums up America, Guy, that phony phrase. Did you prefer young Elvis or the fat Elvis?

Guy: Of course, fat. Look at me. How can I not prefer fat Elvis? [Guy pats his belly and much laughter ensues]