The end result is that I feel at ease “most of the time”.

Most of the Time
My head is on straight
Most of the Time
I am strong enough not to hate
I got enough faith I got enough strength
I keep it all away way beyond arms length
I can smile in the face of mankind…
Most of the time.

Everyone points to the laughable lack of experience of Palin and the very real chance she will become president should McCain become ill during office. But this is precisely why she is there. She is pliable and completely malleable by the neocon machine that runs our government. They truly don’t want anyone who has experience or autonomy, for this would just be a liability. Look at how Bill Kristol gushes all over the Palin pick. He knows deep down she is pliable and that is best they can ask for in order to promote their agenda.

This gets to my next point, we need to stop attacking Bush directly. We need to attack the entire necon apparatus. The people who surround Bush/McCain in the shadows. The marionette handlers not the marionette doll. Bill Clinton started to address this in his convention speech by speaking in terms of policy and not the persona of Bush. Clinton seems to be one of the few who actually understands politics as it actually functions. As an affective process. He gives credit where affective credit is due. He doesn’t underestimate the opposition, but rather accepts them for their strengths. And understands that it is a machine behind the person, not a person behind the machine. And for Bush, McCain, and Palin are all just symptoms of a larger disease-machine that is corroding our society. The rhetoric needs to be taken beyond the cult of personality and persona politics and brought into focus on the systematic fascism that is overtaking our system of government. When we spend all our time talking about what a failure Bush the person is, or how inexperienced Palin the person may be we fail to draw sharp contrasts to the systematic differences the parties offer. And to spend time talking about personas we run the risk of devolving in an affective personality fight. And in that fight we lose. We have lost ever since JFK. Bill Clinton was a brief relapse but every other major candidate pick by the Democrats and the left has been a disaster on the affective front. And while the Republicans may be terrible for the country in policy they are masters of affective politics. They learned this lesson ever since the disaster that was Nixon. And Sarah Palin is just another media friendly photogenic trojan horse presented to the American people. And we should be more wary and less smug.

Go read Steven’s posts. He says it far better than I.

Which gets to my gripe. Why do we have to search for songs in movie trailers? It was fairly easy to research the song by looking up IMDB message boards. But I was kind of zealously interested in the song. It seems to me that when a trailer uses a previously released but relatively obscure pop song it would be good to be more upfront about the music. Why not flash a quick name and band at the end? Song XXXX by Band ZZZZZ, something simple for 2-5 seconds. Catchy little song that grabs the audience? Do the band a favor and put the info out there so that people when watching a trailer can go buy the single right away direct from their iPhones or computers when they get home. Give the band a chance to capitalize on the the impulse buy potential. And if you don’t want to give screen time at the very least put this info up on the website in a prominent place.

Towards the end of our visit we meandered over near the Giraffes area. After a few minutes of standing around we caught this lovely site out of nowhere.

I guess even in nature one can find examples of the Urolagnia fetish. Or perhaps the Giraffes were simply engaging in a form of Urine Therapy. Who knows?

But I can’t help but laugh when I see this spot. It truly is funny and wickedly sarcastic. In a sense, it is perhaps the most devastating ad I have seen from the McCain camp. To which I say bravo, touche, and thanks for making me laugh in the time of dire darkness. The Obama people would do well to respond with a sense of humor and lightness to these attacks.

Nietzsche, that self proclaimed “anti-christ”, once said

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn:
he was the spirit of gravity–through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of
gravity!

I am fully in sync with the Obama view of the world, but I worry a bit that the seriousness of the campaign might become too heady and we veer off dangerously into deception. This McCain ad attacks a vulnerability of the self seriousness of the Obama campaign. Lest we succumb to this vulnerability we must rise above it. Unfortunately, the response and tone of some blogs seems to be one of gloom and fear that McCain is invoking the Anti-Christ. This is the wrong approach because it reinforces what the McCain ad so deftly attacks.

No, the right approach would be an acknowledgement of the criticism, and with levity, and a lightness of being declare I am not beyond your reproach or criticism, merely immune to it. I have no doubts that Obama will accomplish this. It is the cultists around him that I worry about. For if you can’t seem to see the irony and humor in this ad then you can’t see the humor and irony that it falsely offers up as pomposity and self absorbtion. We all know that Obama does not see himself as the second coming of Jesus. But perhaps his followers don’t realize that yet.

While some would argue that McCain is speaking code language to the religious right, I think on the surface of it the tone is much more anti-religious. It chastises the very religious rhetoric that has seeped into the political dialog. In this sense I think McCain is authentic on this point. One can tell merely by posture and body language that he is uncomfortable with the religious wackos he must make his political bed with.

McCain rightly so reminds us of the problems of taking things on mere faith alone and mixing that in the political realm. And while the object of this attack (Obama) may be incorrect and misguided, nevertheless this ad seems to attack the very dynamic of faith based politics and charisma. This force of faith is a very dangerous force. And although I would rather see McCain deploy the criticism against the more zealous form of faith in the Bush administration, the criticism still rings true no matter who it is directed at. This superabundance of faith and self certainty can lead to so many crises and a kind of illness. As Nietzsche warns us in his book “The Anti-Christ”:

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?—The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem….

This is originally from a Canadian TV show called “The Acme School of Stuff” that aired in the late 1980s, hosted by David Stringer. I just love David’s matter of fact and easy going way of explaining complicated topics such as digital counting, current, and electricity.

For all things are baptized at the well of eternity, and beyond good and evil. But good and evil themselves are but shadows inbetween and damp afflictions and wandering clouds.

~Thus Spoke Zarathustra III

The BBC has a nice overview of Nietzsche.