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.
2 commentaires:
Respectfully, M. de Languedoc,
Can one truly say that such "friends" don't exist? To me the very power of Joe the Plumber, is that he miraculously pummels past the stubbornly resistant prison wall of the symbol. If a symbol must always mean more than what it is, than a symbol can never be available "here." The problem with the notion of the "American People" is that we could never hear it speak to us across the space of a barstool. Joe the Plumber, in incarnating the IDEAL generic American, and being for it, nonetheless REAL, effects an incarnation that we have not seen since Jesus Christ.
In his newfound role as literalized metaphor, there is no need for faith in order to be set free: certainty has been achieved. When Joe the Plumber speaks of Obama's lack of patriotism, we can rest assured that the American public is speaking through, plumbing if you will, our own depths. And the feeling of feeling this both inside and outside, is the erotic bid of the campaign.
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