Sarah's Spectacle(s)

In the aftermath of Palin's imperial ascendancy in the American Hyper-Eroticized Moment(um), we shall bypass the Alaskan governor's trumping of Hillary's sensible pantsuits via dominatrix-oriented pencil skirt/stilettos. We shall defer any discussion of her (family's) baby-bursting-Manifest Destiny-as-over-fertility ("go west, (white) man!"). We must (re)focus instead on a portion of Palin's accessorizing which has literally transfixed an American electorate no longer spellbound by Obama's waving arm and declamatory upraised index finger(ing)--- viz, Sarah's Palin's eyeglasses.
Those geometric, sleek, librarian/law-and-order spectacles render (have rendered, shall keep rendering) her as a mediated Medusa to flaccid male media pundits (press corps) and G.O.P-leaning "undecided voters" stirred toward an excitation that is fueled and confirmed by its own compulsive self-questioning (cf Chris Matthews, et al, crying out, "Why are we so obsessed with this Palin phenomenon?"). The Palin esthétique aux yeux is an overdue feminine counterpart to Cindy McCain's eyes with their brightly-light, tiny Barbie Doll inertia and Michelle Obama's alternatively happy/surprised and angry/defensive glances. (To say nothing of Joe Biden's tired, Botox-impaired eyelids, Obama's overwhelmingly self-possessed yet distant wide eyes and McCain's spooky hyper-blinking, hyper-winking and hyper-squinting.) So the world can only watch in horror as the United States of America is helplessly tantalized and subjugated by Palin's metaphysical binoculars: her eye/glasses. These awe-full spectacles conceal and reveal her rifle-toting, moose-slaughtering, Bible-thumping, sideline-shouting, Hummer-driving death-gaze: her specs both absorb (maternal brown pupils) and simultaneously deflect/refract (patriarchal squared-shaped lenses), thus her eyeglasses ontologically position Palin as both dominating subject (Palin-the-seer-who-sees-all) and dominating object (Palin who is seen-by-us-seeing-us) which, in turn, will maintain indecisiveness and thus suspend American democratic reason(ing) over the coming weeks (perhaps), just long enough for the hypnotized voter to enter that private and civic bedroom known as "the voting booth" ("close the curtain!") where, still narcotized by Palin's spectacles, she/he will pull the lever (mindlessly-yet-not-so) on behalf of (Mc)Palin's gaze.

Guy Has Tea with Republican Women

September 2: Chanhassen, Minnesota. Here we are in the upper-middle class suburban milieu where these largely contented 'desperate housewives' are these days simply desperate for a Republican victory. Still these women yielded hints, traces, vestiges of transgressive fantasies, subliminally interjected in what was otherwise un cirque du bourgeois: afternoon tea with female Republican delegates who had traveled to St Paul for John McCain's nomination. What follows below are representative exchanges during the tea (and here below my anglais has not been at all fixed or edited).

Jessica from Illinois: So, Mister Lake-Doc, what do you think of our Republican party? Are American conservatives like French conservatives? Are your conservatives pro-life? Bet you Frenchies would never put a Sarah Palin on your ticket. Or maybe you would, she's a hottie, no?

Guy: Your question presupposes, if I hear you so, that I am of friends with French conservatives. And besides, all politicians are anti-life. They rule life, which is to constrict it so that it is not life but rather, I would say, puppetry. So this is not the case. I do not know friends who are, what you say here, conservative. No. Rather, I am aware that beneath even the most radical, what you say left wing, under the skin of this most left wing French person there is a conservative mentality, esprit perhaps you might say soul, meaning, what you call etiquette is, in fact, for the French the very essence of daily behavior. In the USA etiquette is the exceptional. That said, there are no true outlaws in France.

Megan from California: Gosh, Guy, no outlaws! And everybody is all chivalric and law abiding, hell, I'm moving to France. The road rage in Orange County is off the charts. And people dress these days like teenagers, grown men do! Not you Guy, I mean, look at that designer shirt you have on, it must cost $300. Here it's this Peter Pan syndrome. Oh, the French. Yes. Chanel, Yves St Laurent, ohhh, I so wanted to move to France. My husband had an offer from Apple to relocate and they were ready to set us up in one those pretty ban-loos near Lyon but our youngest boy Isiah, my my, he is so afraid of planes and flying that we just couldn't bear what it would do to him. But oh, France.

Guy: America, to my eyes, is a place that is fascinated with flying, yes? Soaring, you say. So your son would be the exception, to my ears. Superman, for instance, is super because he is the man of steel, yes, but mainly because he is the man who can fly, and you have your astronauts, your jumbo jets, Wright Brothers, Tom Cruise and The Right Stuff and so on, see, Top Gun, space shuttle and so forth. But to the French, we prefer to walk. Alors this American dream of flight is precisely why 9/11 was so shocking for you. Of course it was shock on us too of course but for us this is the price of power.

Hillary from Virginia: Guy, please, don't say 9/11. I mean, you would think from my name I would be all for Hillary who is tough on the Islamo fanatics but I was a delegate for Rudy Giuliani. What do you think of Rudy, Guy? Have you been to New York City?

Guy: This Rudy. Ah oui. He is what they call as nickname Batman of Gotham City. Yes? Well, Superman, as you recall climbed or sortied over tall buildings at the speed of sound. Or some such, yes? But Giuliani, it seems cannot escape the dust cloud of 9/11 which was the collapse of tall buildings. Very unSuperman, that. Plus you Americans do not like crossing dress, as you say and Rudy did he not dress as woman?

Nancy, from New Mexico: Oh God yes, he's scary that Rudy. Liking women's clothes. Eeek! Originally I was going to become a delegate for Fred Thompson but, then my husband, he's a die hard Democrat because of the plumbers' union he's in, but he likes McCain so he talked me into being a McCain delegate, anyway, my husband one night he told me Fred Thompson was really Foghorn Leghorn in disguise, and we went on YouTube and my God ! Sure enough there was Foghorn Leghorn quoting Fred Thompson, or vice versa [loud laughter ensues]

Guy: I like this Anglo-Saxon Fog-horn, Leg-horn sound, very so. Yes. Fred Thompson, we are a fan in France of Law & Order. Special Victims Unit is our best version. For us, it is less British a la Sherlock Holmes than what we call hard-boil American noir, I have an essay on this Law & Order SVU how I would translate the project. Hmm. I say call it "an erotics of the slit and the cadaver."

Helen from Louisiana: Oui oui Guy mais ses paroles sont tres macabre! Il y a des jeunes enfants à la maison! Ni 'le cadaver' ni 'erotique', si vous plait. Translation, ladies, in a nutshell, I told Guy here to hush up with the dirty talk.

Guy: I would like to talk of one more candidate of, you say, G-O-P who, is this Mitt Romney. Yes, he is like a telecaster, you saw, of news? Yet he is also Andrew Carnegie. But, as a Mormon, his knickers are believed to be of magic, no?

Hattie from Texas: Guy it's newscaster not telecaster my Lord! You no parlez English too well! [loud chuckles]. Mitt Romney doesn't believe in magic underwear. But I do not, I tell you I do not, trust the Mormons, Lord forgive me [makes sign of cross]. But you should like Romney, Guy, because Romney speaks French! Him and them Mormons were bopping round France in the 1960s trying to convert you froggies to Brigham Young's crazy cult.

Guy: Well, this is not possible, to only speak of religion and become a French speaker. To speak the language you must live as the people do--we French are atheists first, and believers only for the tax code forms.

Jena from Montana: Speaking of France, help me out here, come follow us out here, our host Betty has a china set she swears is from 18th century France and Lord if she waits for Antique Roadshow to drop by her house, she might never get this treasure assessed.. [all converge on living room]

Nancy from New Mexico: Guy are you married? You're too too handsome and smart not to be.

Guy: In France, this is the last question we ever ask. Here it is the first, only after 'what do you do?" I will defer this question, yes? As for these No. This is not French. I tell you why. There you see, this kind of silly prancing dogs on the dish, is the kind of Victorian kitsch you only get from British aesthetique. In France we eat animals, we do not paint them on our plates. No!

Eight is Enough: Obama is Dick Van Patten

August 31: Denver, CO Barack Obama's absent Father and even-more-absent Mother were everywhere present during his acceptance speech, conjured movingly when Obama summoned the visage of that uber-father, Dick Van Patten, père of "Eight is Enough": eight years of George W Bush (W. himself attempting without success to slay his own Oedipal ghost, George Bush Senior); Obama's "eight (years) is enough" calling to that phallocentric beloved American TV show. This "eight is enough" mantra casts him as America's Dick Van Patten (complete with Van Patten's maternal permissiveness but minus Van Patten's Caucasian comb over/suburban paunch). Obama at Mile High Stadium oversaw a motherless American family/electorate that, in the incompetence of Bush/Cheney, has even been abandoned by a protective Father (9/11, Katrina, Iraq quagmire, housing collapse, etc).

Guy's Denver Diary: "Drinking/Games," or "Sloshed Beyond Politics"

August 27: Denver, CO I found myself at a "keg party" just off the University of Denver campus at the Lambda Chi Alpha "frat house" where I drank Coors Light from a "keg," Coors being a watery version of German style American beer which is called in its advertising the "silver bullet" and "Rocky Mountain cold." I was puzzled by these names for beer, this "silver bullet" nickname, as if the beer were a firearm, and also this "light." When it was explained that light means, "yo', it means it don't make you fat, bro" I pointed out to my drunk host ("Kevin from Utah") the inherent contradiction between the calories of "beer" and the claim of "light." To which the "dude" "Kevin," replied, "You know sitting around thinking about words all day can make you fatter than beer does." I was ushered away from this line of inquiry by "Jason from Kansas" who was a history buff, who challenged me more than once to say whether I thought Napoleon's army failed in their Eastern campaigns not because of a poor military strategy but rather "because their uniform buttons made of tin were atomized by the cold of Russian winters." I evaded this acute Jasonian query but agreed with him to participate "par jeu" in "a drinking game" called "The Beer Hunter," an apparent reference to the Russian roulette scenes of a fictionalized POW camp in The Deer Hunter film. This involved shaking one can of beer out of a collection of seven. Then, the sudsy dangerous shaken "bullet" can was shuffled in among the "safe" cans. Each participant then held a can to his forehead in full knowledge that the soon-to-be opened can might be the "bullet" can which would "explode" onto his face. I confess genuine "heartland terror" as I held a Coors can to my head and slowly drew back the top. The "loser" was a "dude" named "Brad" who was then required to guzzle four beers de suite. Brad then proceeded to vomit the contents of his stomach ("hurl", also known as "the technicolor yawn" and "laughing at the carpet"). From there we were picked up in a taxi (our driver, "Sam," was an African-American former garbage collector from Louisville who, to my astonishment, claimed he'd once met Martin Luther King Jr "in a Tennessee dirty spoon, back in '65, that man liked to eat his B-B-Q, lemme tell you"). Sam dropped our frat-boy "posse" off at a local music-cabaret-bar called "The Thirsty Frog" where a "cover" band played songs by musicians with names like "Metallica," and "Slayer," among other grimly titled "metal" impresarios. The jet-engine amplification, the banners and countless television screens seemed to bleed into the manic energy level of my hosts whose serial "downings" of "brews" and "shots" and "depth-chargers," all the while so cleanly shaved and groomed, clad in Polo shirts and Levis, exchanging "fist bumps," displaying both a naive reckless belief in their immortality while in their taste of music, an oddly Thanatos-orientation. When I brought up the impending Democratic National Convention, "Eddie from Kentucky," said, "Hope they win, I mean FUCK George Bush, man, he screwed this country up worse than Saddam did to Iraq," to which Jason replied, "Bush was an idiot from Day One just that no one saw it." When I asked them whom they were voting for, they groaned, demurred and then raised their glasses and said simply, "Politicians are worse than child molesters, dude." Then they asked me who the President of France was. To my surprise, "Brad from Boston" chimed in that "That crazy Sarkozy guy" is the French prez, "the one who snagged Carla Bruni: total-fucking-cougar!" and, punching up an image of la dame de Sarko on his iPhone, as the boys were so libidinally engaged by Carla Bruni that they congratulated me "on just being born French, man you guys know how to get laid!" They insisted I "high five" them, and then, to my utter shock, ordered from the bar a bottle of Moet, which they put on "Gary from Detroit"'s "plastic." To which I had no choice, I was told but to "chug" the Champagne. I managed to drink down half the bottle at once which earned me even higher marks and, increasingly intoxicated by this American wolf-pack, I helped, later that morning, when we decided to "birthday suit," (ie shave the chest and arm hair off) a particularly drunk and comatose "Craig," a "psych and economics double major and total hick" from Oklahoma, who, I was informed, "is such a dick that he told the house captain we had a keg'orator installed and practically got us evicted."

I paid dearly for my frat-house équippé next day with an enormous gueule de bois. I was informed (by "Dave from Nebraska") that I had started "slurring in French the whole drive home, and, dude, you were going on about some chick named Celine. We thought you were talking about Celine Dion." I bid Dave adieu and ambled off the campus toward downtown. As I breathed deep the thin "mile high" air and gazed up at the "big sky," and the harsh, late summer sun, I began to sense a stripping away of my habitual European profoundeurs. Stopping in a local "sporting goods shop" called "Touchdown," I chatted amicably with "Russ," a tan, moon-faced "former kayaking champion" who explained his family's genealogy to me, Apache blood on his grandmother's side ("though she was raised in San Diego, her father was a former warrior chief named "Red Rock Eagle". After his glory days, he lived on a reservation outside Santa Fe and drank himself to death"). From Russ I purchased a "Colorado Rockies" baseball cap and, taking up his suggestion that I cure my "hangover" with "hair of the dog that bit ya," I emerged onto the Denver streets like a born again Tom Sawyer, at large in an America every bit as tribal and yet mobile as our pre-Roman ancients. Caught up in the American fascination with sports-- "beer pong" "Super Bowl," "the race to the White House," "battle for first," "World Series" "world champs," I felt gladitorial myself in my baseball cap, yet also innocent because that sportive air, as if Being itself were really a mere Game. I was briefly content to believe post-Rousseauian ideologies and post-Marxist inquiries were mere intellectual versions of that card game Solitaire, especially compared to my rugged, directionless sojourn through this light-filled Rocky Mountain city, a dude-flâneur, who secretly hoped he'd never find this "Pepsi Convention Center" where the "Race to the White House" awaited my passive reportage.

Les Bras de John McCain

August 25: Denver, CO. Not to be confused with his quasi-homophonous "McDonald" (which does [faire] the "quaint" American body: cf "Old McDonald had a farm"), McCain's body, his corpus, represents the post-1960s American leadership/junta/body politik itself: The genealogy of McCain's damaged flesh mirrors in an Escher-like pattern the violation of other bodies by America itself: hence the "Skyhawk" fighter pilot obliterating innocent Asian villagers from above the earth is transformed by his Icarus-like fall/baptism into Truc Bach Lake and subsequent five-year bondage.McCain achieves a post-Ovid, postmodern metamorphosis, from bomb-dropping killer into a Jesus Christ-like martyr with arms hyperextended on the walls of Vietcong prison cells; there McCain's body is literally suspended in the vacuum of non-history (1968-1973), during, the high water mark-period of Passion-like assassinations and/or public deaths of Christ-figures of the American Left and counter-culture: RFK, MLK, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, George Jackson, et al. The Vietcong-torturers shredding [détruire] of the New Testament/Geneva Convention Law (of mercy) makes of warrior-McCain a tormented [martyriser]and ridiculed [se rendre ridicule] forced-disavowing-POW/Christ (the very Law decades later shredded by the McCain-supported Bush Administration which turned unlawfully confined Muslim prisoners into arms-extended-Christ-figures). Thus, the body of McCain is (like the schizoid self-image of the United States itself) both a perpetual violator of the New Testament/Geneva Convention and a helplessly tortured "victim" of "terrorist" "evildoers" who operate outside the very "respect for law" which Gitmo's torture chambers refute. So as the campaign for Commander-in-Chief unfolds America reads into/from McCain's severely disabled arms and his bulky, awkward debilitations the "redemptive" survival/slow/crippling of post-Watergate US militarism itself ["Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran!"]: McCain's war-induced disabilities not so much earned by a barbaric foreign policy but a physical calling forth (habeas corpus) an actual fleshly incarnation of that very tortured and torturing foreign policy in the guise of its perpetrator-victim (war/hero).
Not completely able to salute nor to wave at his audience or properly hug other bodies, McCain and his arms subtly signify a cross born(e), a Southeast Asian Golgotha endured; thus, in an irony too vicious to contemplate, this Caesar-Pontius Pilate-Pentagonian Warrior is instead looked upon (and so disguised) by his post-1960s-American "swing-state" voyeurs ("we honor Senator McCain's service to our country") as a secularized post-Crucifixion-Christ-with-injured-body returned to earth (read "earth" as "US/New Jerusalem"). The embittered, fallen POW messiah who (for armchair warriors across America) will undo (at the final hour) Obama's own "barbaric" (actually Christian) mission of negotiating "peace" with purported "enemies"(ie, "sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad").

The Logorrhea Of Obaiden

August 23: Chicago, IL In the selection of Obama we encounter the disembodied-messianic-spirituality of Barack incarnated into the ordinary Joe (Six Pack), which grounds the candidacy in a mid-Atlantic plainness that is every bit as un-exotic as its homonym, the Borden brand of household milk: plain, yet also (as a drink) decidedly oral, much like Biden himself, given to a logorrhea so exceptionally unpleasant that one might find this campaign soon to be an OBABEL as much as it is, now OBAIDEN.

H[e]gel Candidacy?

August 15: Nice, FR. My most esteemed colleague, know to his peers as "N-S", Professeur des universités, Litterature Francaise et Américaine Moderne et Contemporaine of Q.C., in a un coup de marteau delivered with an eye on German and French homophonies, writes from Marseilles, an astute exegesis of the nom d'H[e/a]gel, summoning up a pre-Marxian historicity in the face of a potential Hagelian (nominative) regression, which I here quote in full:

The allusion to Derridean différance in the substitution of the 'e' for the 'a' that nonetheless remains invisible in speech, as opposed to the incorporation of the Lacanian petit objet a in the defacing of name. Obviously this points to the aufhebung that is the very heart of the Obamian candidacy, and that is incarnate in a republican on the ticket. In choosing Hegel/Hagel, then, the whole gauche/droite is put into question, much more than it could have ever been if he had chosen, say, Bob Heidagger; or Ed Nietzscha.