American Anxiety Dream

After savoring the vertiginousness of the time-stretching phenomenon commonly experienced due to windbaggery (as seen in Friday's presidential debate), I settled in to a long session of channel and internet surfing through the subsequent spin. The pundits worried away at the important questions, like, who won? Who appeared more presidential? Most importantly, were the hearts and minds of undecided voters changed? Who Knows. All these questions were asked & answered on a mulitplicity of sites/ shows/ forums. All the supporters claimed victory for their candidate/ party. Or in the case of the McCain campaign, a premature banner ad "accidentally" showed up on the internet Friday morning ( ahem before the debate) claiming victory for McCain. Hmmm, victory in a showdown he, ironically enough, was unsure he could bring himself to attend, claiming that he was direly needed in Washington, or the bailout would never ever ever be solved--grandstanding by any other name. Whatever dude. John McCain just doesn't understand.


And as for Palin? By now many of us have seen some of those mini-clips of her interview with Katie Couric that are being fed to the public in tiny ( and thus non-lethal?) doses. Before I had checked out any of it, I heard pundit David Brooks say he could only bear watching for a minute or two without cringing and turning it off. So, I fired up a clip--the one about seeing Russia from her house. And wow. It's a nightmare, really. It's like she's enacting the worst anxiety dream ever-- the one where you're unaccountably back in middle school but you've forgotten to read the book you're doing a presentation on, you have no pencil, and for that matter, no pants!

Ouch. That's gotta hurt.