The Fat Lady isn't singing yet, but her voice can be heard in the wings; she is running her scales, warming her pipes. While Fortinbras, standing to her side, a bit cramped, waits for Hamlet and his people to finish killing each other, whereupon, to the Fat Lady's arias, he shall enter with his army.
It is hard for Democrats, who have suffered one disappointment after another for a generation now, who have seen in the last two presidential elections one election stolen and another narrowly lost, somewhere in the vicinity of Cleveland, to accept that perhaps—just possibly—the loser's shoe is on the other foot this time.
That the party always undone by hubris is about to be humiliated, good and hard, while those of us from the party always undone by ambivalence stare at the evidence in disbelief: like camp survivors, hungry and huddled to the fence, gaping out, incomprehensibly, at the approaching GIs.
From Blitzkreig to rubble. Heyday to the soup line. It happens. Things change. It's arguably the one thing over time you can count on.
Still, it's hard to imagine things going any worse for the McCain campaign, though, again, it is likely only a failure of our imagination, for they are trying. Staffers are seeing that My Fair Palin is dressed in the finest of clothes (putting lipstick on the Pygmalian, as it were) as she continues trying to manage the syntactical challenges of the English language, particularly as they pass through the corpus callosum separating her thought processes from her talking points (poorly considered, maliciously given, we're now told), and run down to and out her mouth, in front of her increasingly rabid and desperate minions. Word is she didn't have any idea where those expensive, un-mavericky clothes came from. She, after all, didn't do the shopping; it was those doggone staffers she's learned she can't trust, running out to where the elitists get their finery, going wild with the money.
Word is she's had it with her handlers ... that, here in the final days, she's "going rogue."
I can't wait.
Again, were we not so conditioned to failure, this should come as no surprise, and be simply something to enjoy. But no, we'll surely find reason to fret. And perhaps we should, as it is our nature.
But also to laugh. Below is an excellent, witty article by Jonathon Raban, from the London Review of Books—a sensibility from across the pond (if residing in the state of Washington), that, for my money, gives the most relevant, and certainly the most syntactically pleasurable, picture yet of just how this woman, so cynically plucked and used, goes about her business.
She may be wildly out of her depth, but she is not one to accept such appraisals easily, and without a fight—fights she has often won, some if not all. She has pluck, this one, pluck that was plucked, pluck that was tempered, dressed and gagged ...
But what is heartening now—or should be, for those of us who might have otherwise pitied her for being used as she has, had she not turned out to be so worthy of her disaster, is that she appears well on her way to using her talents, her gamecock ambition, to cut the throats of her own team—John McCain, a disaster all his own, more than sufficient to the task, hardly needs a partner at this point—so that she might live to fight another day. Loyalty, alas, has never been her long suit. In the end, it's about Sarah. She is no Colin Powell ... no 2008 Democratic National Convention.
And so we may as well do what we must, either by mail, or in person, November 4th, to make the whole disaster complete, and otherwise sit back and enjoy—they certainly have, for too long now. Let's gather our confidence and own it, as the shrinks say, for as long as we can, being Democrats, until someday down the line we get doubtful again and shit the bed and the cycle starts over. Furthermore, let's keep a smile on and try not to be hateful, and wish Sarah well, especially, as she gets out the battle-ax and goes off script these final days, laying further waste to her improbably hapless ticket that, we should have known were we not busy being fearful, was doomed long before she showed up, and lays the groundwork for another try, another time. Let's be charitable and let her imagine, dream, as Dan Quayle surely did back when. Certainly we can agree it is her right after all she's been through. From star to sideshow in less than two months.
But who knows, perhaps she will be the phoenix that arises from this year's ashes. In a land of dying grapes ... Less curious than W., more divisive than Tom DeLay ...
The face of the New Republican Party.
Can we hope?
