A True Story of Horror in St. Paul
by Cheryl Rofer
It was a dark and stormy night. The rain came down in squadrons, which is actually a good thing here in New Mexico. And I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the magnetic pull of the flat computer screen as Sarah Palin’s gynecological history paraded before my eyes.
It was the unknown mixture of imagined and real that was so compelling, along with the sheer everydayness that was being manufactured before my eyes. Do you have kids? Hey, sometimes they behave badly? Ever get pregnant unexpectedly? And if none of this has happened to you, you certainly know someone who has lived through something similar! So you will vote for Sarah Palin!
Memories swirled through my head, some long buried, most evoking difficult emotions. I clicked and clicked again, my dry post on energy policy long forgotten. It was the horror of trying not to look as one’s car was forced to a crawl past mangled cars on the grassy freeway divider. I called friends and family, repeatedly, to stem the fading of my grip on reality.
And finally the convention is over. The third barrage of fireworks last night from Zozobra’s burning coincided with the fake ones on that big screen that the Republicans used instead of a row of flags. The fireworks here signaled the end of Zozobra, the destruction of the years’ woes in Santa Fe in preparation for fiesta.
The speakers’ horror was that randomly changing, frequently moving, backdrop slide show. It loomed over and dwarfed the speaker. On tv, the aqua background seemed to encroach upon Joe Lieberman’s very being. Rudy Giuliani was being sucked down into murky water. Something was ominously moving behind Tim Pawlenty. And Sarah Palin received cheers in front of a coruscating blood red.
In the wide shots, the screen presented closeups of what must have been an American flag, although the aqua shadows give it a psychedelic charge, along with the oceanic undulations. Sometimes it showed, uncontroversially, “McCain – Palin” on various-colored backgrounds. Undistinguished scenery photos, presumably of great places in our great nation, but mostly unidentifiable, competed with the speakers.
All this visual overload came to a climax last night, with the famously unflattering green background behind John McCain for his climactic speech. A wide shot showed a large building. I wondered if it was one of McCain’s homes. Josh Marshall and others took up the challenge to identify it. The green background (I visualized people screaming at each other in the control room) changed to the Lieberman-eating aqua, with a flag undulating in a less seizure-provoking dimension.
Maybe it worked better in the hall.
Governor Palin and her family will make a couple of campaign appearances, one in Albuquerque tomorrow, and then it’s back to Alaska, to spend some time with son Track, who is leaving for Iraq in a few days. I’m relieved that we haven’t heard many new revelations about the inner life of family Palin since last weekend, but every time I click to another newspaper or blog, I wonder what will emerge. We haven’t heard from Todd yet, not even the few perfunctory words that Jill Biden presented to the Democratic convention.
Last night’s fireworks signaled the beginning of sixty days of trial by fire, after which I hope to hear that our long national nightmare is over.