So hi there. Welcome to Pig’s Eye, Minnesota. Funny old name. Funny old place.
Minnesota. It’s Indian for “wrap up warm”. The Sioux used
to say, “We’re going to Pig’s Eye” and their mother would say, “Minnesota”.
And then, as so often happens, the religious right came along and spoilt
everything. And changed Pig’s Eye to St Paul and told everybody to go to bed
at 7pm and feel guilty.
St Paul is the state capital, although nobody knows that. Everyone thinks it’s
Minneapolis next door. They call them the Twin Cities and St Paul suffers
from sibling envy. Minneapolis is bigger, louder and picks up loose women.
Minneapolis used to be called All Saints, but to stick it back to the
Catholics they renamed it Minneapolis, which is Indian for “I’m not wearing
any knickers”.
The Republicans chose St Paul for their convention because, like Colorado,
Minnesota is a swing state. It doesn’t swing very far and it doesn’t swing
very often and it doesn’t swing in a way that is exciting. This is where the
Swedes and Norwegians came to try to whittle Scandinavia out of the hem of
Canada. Back home they grew to be the most liberal nations in the world.
Here they grew silent and maudlin. There’s a Minnesotan joke – only the one.
It goes like this: there was an old Norwegian man who loved his wife so much
he almost told her. That was so funny I almost laughed.
Minnesotans are hard, dour, diligent Calvinists with handmade virtues, genetic
stoicism and long underwear. They boast a state characteristic called
“Minnesotan nice”, and they are. They have an unrelenting, unwavering,
unvarying and unquestioning niceness.
The convention is a nice, lacklustre affair. It starts badly with an empty
hall, cancelled on the first day in deference to Hurricane Gustav. So we
have to spend Monday finding out interesting things about Minnesota. The
state mushroom is a morel. The state drink is milk. I’m not making this up.
The state grain is wild rice. The state fish is the walleye. Its bird is the
loon. Minnesota has the world’s smallest carnivore, the least weasel, but no
one’s ever seen it. Each year the 11 prettiest farm girls are sculpted in
butter and exhibited in a rotating fridge. I know – the excitement.
St Paul doesn’t quite boast – because boasting isn’t very Minnesotan – the
largest shopping mall in the world. A perky, peachy girl told me that if you
spend just three minutes in every shop, it would take you three days to get
round. If you spend three days in this mall, you’d need a straitjacket and
intravenous opiate.
There was one thing that I quite liked. It was a T-shirt among the otherwise
dull McCain memorabilia. On it was the face of Barack Obama superimposed on
Mr Spock. The similarity’s quite spooky, what with the predominant ears.
Obama Vulcan is giving the Star Trek salute and saying, “Live long and
prosper”, which could be a quote from one of his speeches.
You see what they’ve done there? It underlines, exaggerates and emphasises his
otherness. He’s clever, but he’s alien. Only half-human.
Half-extraterrestrial. And the thing that stopped Obama being just another
skinny lawyer from Illinois is his blackness. The symbolism couldn’t have
been any clearer if the face had been projected onto Al Jolson.
The elephant is the Republicans’ totem animal and the great pachyderm in this
ice-hockey stadium is blackness. Nobody mentions it. It isn’t in speeches or
off-the-record background briefings, but it’s just the constant humming
theme, like a distant generator. The Republicans’ bottom-line strategy,
their last hope, is that, when all alone in a voting booth, enough Americans
in enough states won’t make a black man president. They’re not racist.
They’ve seen it on TV and in Hollywood. But in real life, the
commander-in-chief has gotta be a white dude.
At this convention the Republicans have just 36 black delegates. That is
perhaps the most shocking statistic of the whole election. That’s less than
2% of all the delegates. Fewer than one per state and less than any other
election for 40 years. THOSE are the interesting things that I found out on
Monday and Tuesday. But on Wednesday everything changes. It all gets
Technicolor with sprinkles on top and it comes back to the subject closest
to Republican hearts: sex. Sex and the young. Hot, procreative sex.
Sarah Palin is making the keynote speech. She has flown in from Alaska with
her family. The announcement that this obscure governor is going to be the
vice-presidential nominee has propelled the convention into the biggest,
kitschest reality show in the world. The relations and the speculation about
paternity, maternity, fecundity, mendacity and the gestation period for
Eskimos has led to a Gustav of schadenfreude that has overwhelmed the
shallow blogs on the web. Sarah’s womb is the black hole into which the best
laid plans of the Republican party have disappeared.
Depending on how fundamentally hard right you are, Palin is either a godsend
who speaks to the experience of ordinary small-town large-breasted American
women and sticks two fingers in the eyes of the coastal latte liberals. Or
she’s a hideously embarrassing mistake that will swamp the election in
underclass redneck sexual incontinence and that everything is about damage
limitation and trying not to think about what would happen if President
McCain died and this was the first family. Not so much from igloo to White
House as igloo to White Trailer.
The convention does what it knows its heroes Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan
and Arnold Schwarzenegger (in Terminator, not Kindergarten Cop) would have
done: they charge. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee make vicious ankle-biting
speeches. Rudy Giuliani gives the speech of his life, a sustained rant of
spittle-flecked invective, innuendo and verbal cage-fighting.
Giuliani is Republican road rage. He is also a Republican road wreck: pro-gay
marriage and abortion, with a private life that would get bleeped off Jerry
Springer. But he tees up Sarah’s speech. (We all know her as Sarah, because
this is so like morning agony television.) Entering with her family, she has
a “throw the snowmobile keys into the fur hat” sled-dogging look to her. The
naughty smirk of the killer librarian. There’s a whiff of baby oil and moose
blood, a heady pheromone that rouses delegates to waggle their paunches at
her.
She has been given a speech that is as well oiled and finely crafted as a
synchronised beaver trap. It’s very aggressive. It goes for the throat of
liberals and Obama. It mocks and it ridicules. And some of it hits home.
It’s good for the room. They cheer to the echo. But outside, down the
unforgiving prurient tube, I think she looks hard and calculating and a bit
of a bitch. I can imagine people all over the country saying, I wouldn’t
want her for my mom. The first poll seems to indicate that she loses a vote
for every one she wins.
At the centre of the week’s fetid speculation on the blogosphere about Sarah
is a baby. He’s sweet and flaccid and beautifully behaved. And even if Sarah
is not prepared to keep her family out of politics, at least Trig Palin is
serenely keeping himself out. He’s passed backwards and forwards through
sisters and father and brothers and then on to Cindy McCain – a bizarre
Dynasty character in mad woman’s lime. People come up and pat him and coo at
him and he just looks beatific and comforted. He is the eye of the storm.
And it reminds me of a paraphrase of Hillary Clinton: it takes a whole
Republican party to bring up a child.
Yet the most sustained excitement of the week isn’t for Trig or Sarah or even
McCain, or sticking it to Barack. It’s for oil. For self-sufficiency. For
cutting the umbilical pipeline with the eyeball-eating, terrorist-funding
Middle East and the commie gangsters of Latin America and Russia. Let the
world wallow in its own sump and turpitude. America needs to drill, drill
for its dream. The marvellously priapic image of getting the bit between the
loins had them chanting, then shouting, then roaring: “Drill baby, drill
baby, drill baby, drill.” THURSDAY, the last day, belongs to McCain.
This is when he accepts the nomination. Before he starts there are problems.
The Republicans have used all their best speakers – Romney, Huckabee,
Giuliani – to bolster the vice-presidential nominee. Today all we’re offered
are a couple of old mates you’ve never heard of and a millionaire Nascar
owner who got evangelism along with money and delivers a buttock- clenching
motivational speech as a bone for the religious right: “Let God be your
team’s coach and play to his game plan.”
A couple of political cronies bang on about the military. The Republicans’
lachrymose fondling of the services is weird. Any mention of boys in Iraq
incites instant whoops and stomping cheers from the floor. It’s the easiest,
cheapest applause and it’s at odds with the long American tradition of a
citizens’ militia, raised reluctantly, and of arms borne modestly.
Cindy McCain is sent in to secure the podium for her man. She is another
brilliantly weird woman, a second wife who started her affair with him just
after he had separated from his first. She is the heiress of a beer fortune
with cloudy origins. She has devoted her life to impressively hands- on
charitable work in the developing world, extreme beauty treatments and
part-time drug abuse.
A short and selective film of her life reveals a woman who has modelled
herself on Diana, Princess of Wales. There are photographs of her with black
babies and Mother Teresa that look like Alison Jack-son spoofs.
From Mother T she adopted a Bangla-deshi baby, Bridget, now a plump teenager
who is paraded on stage with all the other kids.
The hall never quite fills up. It has been a long and dreary week. Everybody’s
old. Dinner was at six. And it’s getting close to bedtime. As McCain walks
onto the stage to accept the ovation, he begins by thanking George Bush.
There’s a bit of a gasp. This is the first time the president has been
mentioned.
It’s a reminder that all the things the Republicans claim they will change in
Washington are a result of eight years of Republican government. The hard
right is more comfortable being the opposition. It finds having to take
responsibility for things full of awkward contradictions.
McCain stands in front of a great green screen that makes him look like the
undead, which in so many ways he is. The years in captivity, the cancer and
age have made a mess of him. He can’t lift his arms above his shoulders. He
walks like a man who’s been bayoneted in the groin. He is a man who’s been
bayoneted in the groin. But most worrying is his head, which behaves like a
rejected muppet.
The expressions bear little relation to the words. His mouth can spring into a
child’s terrifying rictus grin at random intervals. One eye winks
lasciviously as if it were out on the pull on its own and he has the voice
of a cartoon character: reedy and softly sibilant, the tone of an
anthropomorphic vole.
The speech is a calamity. He rambles and confuses sentence endings with
beginnings, he punctuates tentatively and emphasises arbitrarily. There is
no story, no thread, no interest. He loses contact with the audience who are
distracted by a couple of angry war demonstrators. They chant “USA, USA”
into the gods like a losing football crowd. McCain blinks and grins and
slaps. It’s not good. When he actually gets to tell his own tough story of
captivity, it’s a ho-hum anticlimax. We’ve all heard it a dozen times
already this week.
Finally, the desperate, bored crowd, who want to see the balloons, give him a
standing ovation before he has finished, drowning out the last paragraphs.
Even as he’s thumbs-upping mates on the floor, the blogs are assassinating
him: “The worst acceptance speech since Jimmy Carter.”
Cindy’s back on stage, elongated, polished and blonde, the apotheosis of
Barbie. He is an abused puppet. And then they’re joined by Palin, all too
human. McCain seems to shrink between these two compellingly spectacular
tabloid women.
It has been Palin’s convention, the pit-bull Bovary. There is the brassy glow
of nemesis about her, a delicious hint of salty revelations to come. Parts
of the nation are addicted to soap opera drama and blue-collar tragedy and
they will cling to her. She waves into the spotlight, naughty and
manipulative and defiant.
Someone comments that Palin should drop McCain from the ticket. He stands
there, stiff and twitching, with his skull grin, a good man, a decent,
humane and committed man, fated by bad luck. It is his destiny to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time, to fall from a great height into the hands of
bad people. The balloons gently, mockingly, carpet bomb the stage.
