Junior Meathead Days

Paradox: The quality I hate in Sarah Palin's voice is the same one I hate in Sarah Vowell's!!

Well, I've spent the first two weeks of my life as a 28 year old listening to the Democratic and the Republican conventions.  It's 10:05 here in Austin and John McCain has just finished his acceptance speech, and I'm going to go take a shower soon.

It's a long shallow slope since I was little and my mother used to reprimand us for saying bad words.  I can't remember ever spouting any Pacificas when I was small, but I would still get in trouble for calling someone "stupid," telling someone to "shut up," or for saying "whatever" (the kind that's a whole sentence, not an adjective.)  I say these things every once in a while now, but in the 7 years I've had a radio show, I'm pretty sure I've never said any of the 7 words-you-can't-say on air.  Off-air, when I do, it seems to have great effect, which I think is sort of cool.  And it still shocks me when people use the N word, or the C word, or they call each other sluts or tell their friends to eat a dick.  I don't doubt that there have always been crass people in the world.  But I can't help but think less of people when they say ugly stuff they needn't, because they think it makes them sound cool.

I went to watch that movie with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley tonight, mostly because I didn't think I could handle, but wouldn't be able to resist, listening to the last night of the RNC's speeches.  I made sure the movie would get out in time to hear John McCain's though.

I admit to crying far too much on this blog.  I cried the entire drive home listening to John McCain's speech. 

I was thinking today while telling Stevan what a "wedge issue" was about how excited I was a whole year ago, when the debate cycle was beginning - to hear all these people I didn't know speak and to figure out whether any of them had any real new ideas I had never heard of before.  There were, at that time, something like 18 people running for president.  There was no one I thought was perfect, but you do learn something about people even in the sound-bitey format on a very full stage. Now, a year later, I feel pretty exhausted and the details between the two guys left standing are starting to blur.

Last night after Sarah Palin's speech, which I also listened to in the car, on my way to buy drugs for my cold, I was struck by the anger in the voice of this person I've barely ever heard speak before. I was amazed that someone who joined the race a week ago, who has never debated and never campaigned outside her own state and doesn't have any real feelings about the Iraq war and certainly doesn't know John McCain as well as even I do, could pick up so smoothly on the trail of attacks beaten earlier in the night by Giuliani, Romney, and Fred Thompson.  I was scared that the way she talks will work, and I was scared that I've convinced myself the way she talks is bad, when maybe the people I think are "good" are really just the same.

Then I remembered two things, and I pounded some TheraFlu, and went to sleep.

The first is that the chick who read those multiple insults about the guy who "gives a good speech" was giving a speech herself.  And she didn't write it.  And the people who did write it, wrote nearly all of it before they ever knew who would read it.  She's a very attractive and convenient seat-filler, and I hope she'll stay that way.

The other is that Giuliani, and Romney, and Thompson all got cheers and creepy chants of "USA" last night, but that was in their own house. A house whose seats they couldn't fill until their celebrity showed up last night, and a house so divided that McCain kicked all of those guys asses so fast he wrapped up his nomination three months (maybe 5?) before Obama.

All of them are saying stupid shit to look cool and sound cool to the angry little knot of people in that stadium who have made known what they think cool is.

I remembered feeling a genuine rush of relief when Mitt Romney dropped out of the race in the spring. I said to myself that whoever wins the election in November will be a better man/woman for the job than George Bush is.  I have some reservations about McCain - if he wins, I will pray every day for his health, and pray that - even though the same bastards who beat him in 2000 ran his campaign this time and forced this VP choice on him - he has the strength to get them off his back once he takes office.

I think I was worried that I would listen to John McCain tonight and feel instantly, reflexively angry, and realize that I'm just as biased as all these people who've been creeping me out all week.  I'm really glad that when I heard his voice coming through the radio, that it reminded me of the debates and how a couple of things he said were all right.  I remembered hearing how much some Republicans hate him, and I didn't hear him say anything as execrable as

"Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... [Obama]'s worried that someone won't read them their rights?"

I don't know the heart of John McCain (I'm not able to look in someone's eyes and do that like our idiotic president).  I think he's said some things that are weird or stupid, and then said they were jokes or apologized ($5 million dollars and Janet Reno respectively)

But I think there's a difference between the people I heard speak last night, spewing the same filth about "those people who don't put America first," about anyone who doesn't share their religious views, about people who "think we're in a Great Depression," and even about themselves - I am continually astonished by the self-hatred put on display by Republican politicians, their ability to deride everything government does and to call for its destruction.  I heard John McCain speak tonight about public service and about growing to love his country when he didn't before, and I didn't hate him, and I believed him even when I didn't agree with him.

I know they are just words, and I know that when I look at their records and their goals, I'll still choose Obama.  But John McCain at least made me feel tonight that I'll make it through the next two months and beyond O.K., and reminded me that he already beat the worst of the worst in a primary (VP back-door entry notwithstanding).  I didn't hear him say anything that made me want to spit.  A speech is just a speech but I think sometimes you can tell something about a person by what they won't lower themselves to say.   
 
And I still have hope, because they finally made a TheraFlu that doesn't taste like barf. (the apple one)