3 days
One of McCain/Palin’s gambits for winning this election is a form of assymetrical warfare on the democratic process. It goes far beyond feigned outrage, “working the refs”, and even the blatant racism and xenophobia oozing from McCain on down (though all of those are horrible enough). In fact, I think it’s the only consistent pattern that McCain has shown throughout the general election season: an attempt to foster a crisis within the very polis. Guiliani is an expert at the kind of off-handed (yet pointed) fear-mongering and fraying of the rule of law. Perhaps someone told McCain, obliquely or not, that this is his only chance of winning. Who knows. But you saw it with his selection of Sarah Palin — a baffling choice except as one designed to inject surplus fear and chaos into the electorate — galvanizing the authoritarian wing of the Republican party (and by “wing”, it is a wing that dwarfs the bird), who thrive on this chaos and, in turn, take it as a cue to blame those who aren’t falling in lock-step with them. It’s a way of getting the vicious cycle of victimology kickstarted.
The “suspension” of his campaign in terms of the financial crisis was much of the same — more than a cheap publicity stunt, he was trying to create crisis, to recreate that “old time feeling” of October and November 2001 where only a strong leader (in his mind) could step in and provide Sun-King-like direction (direction from division of course–the Greek root for crisis is “separation”). The fact that it more or less failed miserably was immaterial for them as a campaign strategy.
And the contradictory layers of Obama typecasting — an uppity socialist Muslim dandy raised in a madrassa in West Hollywood? Coherent messages are for the weak. They want the electorate to buckle under by the sheer kinesis of incomprehensible bullying, viruses of nano-fascism slipped into the discourse hoping to infect the host.
So the only thing left to do is to double down, and keep doubling down, as if the very friction that this doubling down creates is going to catch something on fire.
On that note, Tuesday is going to be crazy.
You bet Tuesday is going to be crazy. I’m having friends over for an election night party. Even if we win, there’s a part of me that will remain tense, I think, for a long time to come. And I think that tension in the political landscape won’t ease up for a while, despite a decision being made.