Greg writes . . . I'd like to note, for the record, that one of my hopes for our trip was to escape Sarah Palin rallies. And not just Sarah Palin rallies, but Sarah Palin demonstrations, too. And not just those, but Obama rallies, and eviscerations of the Bush administration and John McCain courtesy of Maureen Dowd, and Nicholas Kristof's sober analysis of Obama's international appeal, and really, when you get down to it, the whole New York Times editorial page, and televised debates, and televised attack ads, and conversations about the candidates' policies and hotness, and fucking David Gregory. I wanted, that is, to escape just as the political season arrived at climax, all those obligations of the responsible and well-informed citizen alive in the midst of a world-historical election. I'd been living in D.C. for the prior year and a half, and the darkness of that place in that era corrupted my psychological and physiological health like some grave disturbance in the Force. I imagine the atmosphere as much like that aboard the behind-schedule Death Star: Vader haranguing effete British generals—"What do you mean we can’t find the rebels and crush their technologically primitive insurgency?"—an influx of wounded Storm Troopers returning from Endor and everybody vaguely unnerved about when the next thing might blow up.
And this, of course—the "uninformed" part—begs the whole question: passion about what? I felt I was, at least that one day, at the literal physical front line of the country's metaphysical culture war. But it felt no more fundamentally ideological than wars of the past, two countries at each other's throats over a strip of land, fighting not for higher ideals, but for their friends and neighbors, their families, their heritage, the ideas they grew up with or those now shared among the members of their community. This is the same fight that didn’t end at Appomattox and that rages on in the West Bank; it is the same fight that, in the end, is every fight: not over an idea of the world that you hold firmly in your head, but over an idea of home that you cling to tightly in your heart. It strikes me that much of the difficulty we have in diagnosing the underlying cause of our political and cultural divides comes from this misunderstanding, from trying to explain a messy matter of the heart as a rational disagreement of the mind.
Sarah Palin's candidacy was, as Jenna notes, our furthest departure into political cynicism, dressing up the interests of a very removed elite in the near-comic (fuck it, comic) trappings of the rustic, average and down-home. We've witnessed, in the past decades, the backlash against the idea that politics really mattered, were really more than showmanship and pageantry, and Palin was the apogee in this orbit to the absurd. But there is always a backlash against the backlash, and as with all orbits, after the far-point, there is always the return.
As we waited for the zombies to arrive, in the midst of this shouting welter outside the Asheville Civic Center, where the ill-fated VPILF strutted her stuff—which was not foreign policy knowledge, I assure you—our friend/host Chris hoisted the first sign that both sides of the street might get behind. It read: HUMANS AGAINST ZOMBIE TARDINESS. Indeed, a unifying cause to rally around, even if the astute, so inclined, might cull a political edge from its apparent nonpartisan appeal. I, for one, stand firm against how long it's taken the somnambulist population to show up on the scene, to walk into the middle of our political scrum, the voiceless and undead, lurching and listing down the narrow no man's land between those gathered on the right and the left. The zombies didn't come that afternoon, as twilight dispersed the gathered to lives of smaller, deeper battles. Now, the 4th has come and gone, awaking hope where all had perished. We are still waiting for the zombies to show up and when they do, to come alive.
