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.