After watching the RNC, albeit in an abbreviated form–there’s only so much yelling at the television a gal can do before she wonders if the nice people in white coats are going to come in and give her a happy pill–I realized what this election is about:
How many crackers are there in this country?
And will they vote?
Will they vote early and often and even if they’re dead?
Are there enough of them to swing the election away from those who can speak in extended sentences, nay, full paragraphs?
As I watched McCain try to smile, I wondered why “cracker” had become an insult — and why people take it as a point of pride to be one.
The OED, as usual, provides unexpected answers.”Cracker” originally was a Celtic word that meant a boaster, a braggart, a liar–as seen in this line from Shakespeare: “What cracker is this that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath.”
How perfect is that as a description of the RNC? The entire thing, including the lipsticked pitbull’s speech on Wednesday night: an abundance of superfluous breath that deafed my ears.
Palin’s soon-to-be-son-in-law, Levi Johnston — the gum-chewing, stiff-armed young man on stage Wednesday night (he looked so stunningly out of place that one could almost, almost feel sorry for him) — Levi knows that crackers are boasters; they are, in fact, boasters who like to brag about being crackers, as his facebook page demonstrates in all its asterisked glory: I’m a f***in redneck, he proclaims. A redneck who has a girlfriend but don’t want no kids.
Is his page still there? Did someone from the campaign f***in remove it before less sympathetic readers decided that Levi’s happy embrace of narrow-mindedness might suggest something less than positive about his presumptive in-laws?
Does it make me a member of the media elite because I wonder why it’s a good thing to brag about being something associated with stupidity, racism, sexism, and violence?
Why does the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of US culture seem particularly dangerous at this moment in our history? Is it because it smacks of ostriches with their heads in the sand as the tsunami rumbles closer, about to smash their tail-feathers to kingdom come?
Is that the point? Use up the earth’s resources to bring about the end of the species — ours and all the others, in order to hasten the Rapture? Get the Kingdom to Come that much sooner?
All the superfluous breath blowing around St. Paul the last few days seemed very much in keeping with the swirling air blowing through Louisiana at the beginning of the week. I only hope that the hot air blowing from Minnesota will be less destructive — but I have my doubts.
I’m sure that McCain thought choosing Palin would lift him past Obama, float him into the White House on a tsunami of ignorance and fear. Maybe for McCain, choosing Palin was like whistling while walking past a graveyard: he hopes that twenty-five years of right-wing decisions won’t come back to haunt him.
But we all know it’s impossible to whistle with crackers in your mouth.
