Mood music: what to hear when writing about politics, Part I

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …

If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of aggrievement, the official theme song of the disillusioned Obama supporters I mentioned in a recent meditation upon hookers (a piece composed, coincidentally, mostly to the music of Sneaker Pimps).

In fact, and somewhat weird fact at that, most of the tunes on Forty Licks, a Stones compilation about which I’d completely forgotten until it emerged, gasping, from the depths of one of my hard drives, baby, could serve more or less the same purpose. I give you “Under My Thumb,” Beast of Burden,” Brown Sugar,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” It’s All Over Now,” “Anybody Seen My Baby,” “Stealing My Heart,” “Emotional Rescue,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Shattered.” To name just a few.

But we’re not here to beat up on Obama supporters, or at least not entirely, or at least not entirely because they’re Obama supporters; some Obama supporters are worth beating up on in and of themselves. I give you Americablog proprietor John Aravosis, who not so very long ago called Hillary Clinton a “sick piece of shit,” and is now attempting to prove that McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, was a slut (via Avedon Carol). It turns out that Aravosis has quite the Victorian sensibility, sitting around with the love of his life counting backward on their collective fingers (thus doubling their grasp) and their collective morals, to figure out whether Palin’s first child, Truck, is a natural bastard or someone who will have to achieve the distinction by dint of choice and furious effort, as Aravosis has done.

I once invested a good 800 words in a story about Trent Lott’s hair having escaped to terrorize the Senate cloak room attendants and an AP photographer, so I’m fully down with pettiness and febrile imaginings as partisan political tools. If Aravosis hadn’t previously distinguished himself with some astonishingly malignant shots at Clinton, his Grundyesque assault on Palin and her son, Turk, might be sort of cute, in a twisted, adolescent, repellently Freudian way. But Aravosis is 40-some years old with a previous history of misogynist thought and he’s looming creepy.

Of course as we all now know, the real meat for gynecological morality spelunkers is the sex life of Palin’s eldest daughter, Rhetorica. The woman (the mom, not the daughter) is a paleolithic conservative with any number of bizarre political tics; hadn’t we best be looking at that rather than at how her female bits, and those of her daughter, are gumming up the abstinence script? Can anyone be entirely oblivious to the range of perils associated with obsessing about a teenage girl’s private parts?

Anyway, whether or not Aravosis ever got around to proving whatever it is would be proved by placing young Tank’s birthday here or there, these excursions into darkness and humidity are generally pointless other than to exercise a sickly brand of malice that should have died off a century ago but still gets plenty enough play without dragging Thor and his fecund younger sister, Hibiscus, through the swamp. Unless the younger Palins are on tape fooling with goats — live ones, not storybook ones, and something more than shooting and skinning them or drinking their blood — conservatives aren’t likely to bail on their mom for anything Lubricia, Thunderbird and the rest of the brood get up to.

Well then. As it happens, Mother Palin has a bag full of scurvy tricks, and they’re spilling out in clumps as fast as an astonished press can tick off items on the shopping list. Any less a grab bag of delights and the journos would be torn between their love of scandal and their duty to protect John McCain, but fortunately for us all they can’t stop laughing long enough to recover their corrupt decorum. Yet. My prediction that McCain would need luck to crack 45% in the popular vote assumed a mildly competent GOP effort, an assumption that now seems insanely Panglossian.

There’s a somewhat astonishing essay, Kemalism, in the current London Review of Books. I confess to spending about three times as long reading it as the length, about 15,000 words, would ordinarily predict. The author, UCLA historian Perry Anderson, dives right in to an exploration of Turkey’s historical relationship to what is now the European Union, a body which some time soon will swell geographically and metaphysically to include the Ottoman Empire’s somewhat tamed offspring, doesn’t come up for air very often, concedes little and condescends not at all.

It’s probably not necessary that the next president thoroughly understand what makes Turkey and the mainstays of Europe, which is and will remain mostly white and mostly Christian until the Muslim state officially joins it, nexible strands of a functioning EU. Or to put it another way, the president who doesn’t understand what makes who tick over there isn’t necessarily soi-disant, but the one who can’t understand it is. The latter would be McCain and his current vice presidential pick (and yes, that’s a prediction); it’s possible to imagine Obama or Biden not just devoting a few days of study to the institution that is ripe to eclipse the US on multiple fronts, but possessing either the background necessary to make sense of the study or the discipline necessary to acquire the background in a hurry.

Imagining the same of McCain and Palin will only give you hiccups.

This is part of McCain’s charm; the press have been privvy to moments, apparently a great many of them, when neither McCain nor they had any idea what he was talking about, and it has won him their undying devotion. It’s possible that the McCain-press relationship is now the campaign’s model — despite what the campaign says about McCain and his experience and smarts, what they’re showing us is the sometimes malevolent doofus the press love. And who knows, stranger things, etc. etc., but about the best they can hope for by putting a malevolently goofy McCain on stage with the hallucinatorily vivid Obama is a strong sympathy vote.

This is not to be taken as an endorsement of Obama, who will become the most insightful president ever to go down in foreign policy flames.

Join us tomorrow for Part II, and some new musical recommendations.