iPod Picks Up Yoda?

I was just lounging listlessly at my bus stop last night, trying to look even half as cool as the dozen folks around me, all but one twenty years younger than I, while still grokking (ok, yes, occasionally leering at) the remarkable human spectacle passing by. Truthfully, the holiday may have upped the ante 30%. I admit capes and exposed upper thighs are rare most days.

Perhaps it was an errant cosmic ray that led me to crank up the iPod lest Anka or Sedaka or the like (and yes, I have discs by both and enjoy them when the time is right) gift me with an ear-worm.

What I got were back-to-back signature tunes for the respective campaigns. Or so I concluded. First up was Garth Brooks, swaggering on about going "Against the Grain." Yeehaw! I have gotten a kick out of Garth's music and at times even his over-the-top persona for years, while realizing that more traditional country performers I also favor have often looked askanc

Folks call me a maverick
Guess I ain't too diplomatic
I just never been the kind to go along
Just avoidin' confrontation
For the sake of conformation
And I'll admit I tend to sing a different song
But sometimes you just can't be afraid
To wear a different hat
If columbus had complied
This old world might still be flat
Nothin' ventured, nothin' gained
Sometimes you've got to go against the grain

[...]

Does that remind you of a certain tweedle-dee and -dum, at least in terms of their self-descriptions? It sure does me.

Of course we know in the case of Mr. Dee that it all boiled down to being constipated, spoiled, and unable to do nuances or ever revisit a Decider moment. I believe the polls make it very clear what sentient, non-authoritarian, i.e. stable folks with a healthy ego and self-esteem think of a president whose perhaps sole public attempt at an apology was his woeful, actually pitiable skit of looking for WMDs behind the curtains in the Soiled House.

As for Mr. Dum, he may have had a brief (faint) chance at a cameo with James Arness back a good long spell. Lately of course, he will sell out any principle at the slightest hint that another might sell better. Independence or even principles have long departed. This brightened my day a good deal:

In Colorado later this afternoon, Barack Obama will pounce on Dick Cheney's endorsement of John McCain earlier today. From the prepared remarks:

I'd like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington's biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney's support.

But here's my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain's going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?

Colorado, we know better. After all, it was just a few days ago that Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a "common philosophy." And we know that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain and Dick Cheney share a common philosophy that thinks that empty bluster from Washington will fix all of our problems, and a war without end in Iraq is the way to defeat Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So George Bush may be in an undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush's economic policy and Dick Cheney's foreign policy -- but that's a risk we cannot afford to take.

A huge gift.

Oh, indeed. But so much for Against the Grain.

Next up was Marvin and Tami doing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." This was when it occurred to me that the pod was channeling something!

Cause baby there
Ain't no mountain high enough
Ain't no valley low enough
Ain't no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you babe

Now if you paid any attention at all to that 30-minute rehab session Wednesday night you should understand how this had me thinking my little toy was suddenly connecting with the cosmos. I resorted to handkerchief more than once Wed., so moving it was to see a person who so obviously cares about others, is not so hung up on ego and self-infatuation that he can't admit personal foibles, and offers so much hope of working with us to move on.

[Aside: I believe the next tune that iPod brought up was "Sister Morphine." So much for my muse! "Here I lie, in my hosptial bed . . ."]

And, while I was dutifully collecting all this audio data for later processing and analysis leading to above, my bus passed the marquee of one of the few remaining slightly naughty First Avenue venues in Seattle. Ever-so-topical, this featured "We Forgot Our Costumes" on one side and "Happy Halloweenie" on the other. There you go!

I'm a linear critter in general, but when the stakes are high, I can multiprocess.

Turning to the Palin soap opera, it's hard to know where to focus. I settled on this episode, more tasteful than others I have encountered, but must admit that staging and details are unclear and stretch this poor bear's brain. This particular account courtesy the admirable Ms. Walsh at Salon, who I believe features video that I cannot access that might clarify how this happened:

This is painful to listen to. You know I'm always in danger of feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah Palin. But she might have known she was being pranked by Quebec comedy duo Masked Avengers when a comedian posing as French president Nicolas Sarkozy talked about going hunting with Palin by helicopter, and exclaimed, "I just love killing those animals, taking away life, that is so fun!" He also asked if Joe the Plumber was her husband, and told her he enjoyed "the documentary they made on your life, 'Nailin' Palin,' that was really edgy," a reference to a recent Palin-inspired porn film.

[...]

Thanks for hanging in here with me, especially those of you bombarded by my stuff. I mean that both in the sense of this post and in general. It's been a stretch for me to overcome instinctive inhibitions and let my inner blabbermouth loose, and I appreciate your tolerance and greatly appreciate the occasional feedback.

I guess I saved the big post for last here. But I think a stanza of Jackson Browne's "Fountain of Sorrow" is needed first (this strictly from memory, while above were googled; JB and Baez both have versions pretty well implanted on my aging gray matter). I've always cherished the words "taken by a photograph," as just one little kernel of a terrific tune:

Looking through some photographs
I found inside your drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you

There were one or two
I know you would have liked a little more
But they didn't show your spirit quite so true

You were looking around to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that the camera happened to find you
There was just a taste of sorrow in your eyes.

[...]

But here's the capo. It should be common parlance that the McCain campaign has gone way beyond the pale. The crap they are attempting to stick to the wall is absolutely shameful and absurd. Aside from the fact that their sneering insinuations are readily disproven, many of them have a distinct element of projecting their own frailties onto the opposition. They are obviously sifting through and selecting the heinous, biggoted, racist, filth-mongering nuggets from the demagogery we should be trying to rise above. The fact that the bush/rove thugs, together with most of their mainstream corporate media lapdogs, have been doing this same cheap crap all along is no excuse. Josh at TPM puts words to his disgust:

For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I'm under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don't think that's realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It's part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many of us have for the issues at stake in our elections.

But McCain's campaign has devolved into something altogether different ... what with its increasingly open appeals to racial conflict and aggressive invocations of blood hatred of Arabs and Muslims. As The New Republic phrases it, McCain's "subtle incitements of racial warfare and underhanded implications of foreign nativity." Over the months we've become desensitized to the moral depravity of McCain's campaign.

There is of course what appears to be a more conventional attack on economics and taxes. But 'socialism' refers, if we can speak in shorthand, to state ownership of large portions of the economy. In other words, something like the Bush administration's decision to have the government purchase a large amount of the financial services industry. But as John Judis notes, a closer look at the language and imargery McCain's 'socialism' pitch reveals it's actually "about whites paying their taxes so that lazy, indolent, unemployed blacks can live off them."

McCarthyism has rightly become an American shorthand for smearing liberals and anyone else from the center leftward as political traitors. The McCain campaign's current campaign of villification of Rashid Khalidi is cut from a very similar cloth -- the kind of rancid race-baiting that we sometimes see at the fringes of our politics but seldom quite so directly and formally from a national campaign, even going so far as to have McCain himself compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi. Where McCainism is different is in its particular amalgam of racism and xenophobia specially suited to this historical moment, to this opponent and to Americans' continuing fears of foreign threat from Muslims and Arabs seven years into the War on Terror.

We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.

Amen. The bigger the defeat the better.