Man on the Street

Try as you may, there's no way to escape it. Believe me, I've tried. But last Friday morning the endlessly hollow coverage of the longest presidential campaign in human history caught up with me while I was walking the dog.

As we strolled past the entrance to Loyola's North Shore campus a reporter from the Chicago Fox affiliate called me over. I'm an involuntarily polite Midwesterner, so I stopped.

And since she is a television reporter in a major market, her hair and makeup were flawless, which meant that she'd probably been up for hours at that point. Her camera operator, as so often happens in television, was scraggly and could have passed for homeless, although he too had probably been up untangling cables and checking batteries for hours. At this point, I'd been awake all of 20 minutes and had only spoken briefly to the dog, who for all his good points isn't much of conversationalist.

The ravishing reporter asked if I had watched John McCain's acceptance speech the night before and I told her no, but that I'd heard some of the news coverage. That was good enough for her. Would I mind talking about it on camera? Uh, I guess so. Ravishing and Scruffy leaned in, she with her microphone and him with his camera, and posed a question, something along the lines of "What did you think of the Republican convention?"

Gore Vidal once famously quipped that a person should never turn down an opportunity to have sex or be on television, but this was back in the days before HIV, AIDS, CNN, MSNBC and other dire acronyms. And of course it also assumes that you're able to organize your thoughts into a coherent arrangement of subjects and verbs and predicates, which Vidal always seems able to do. Problem is that even on a good day I'm no Gore Vidal, but especially not at 6:45 AM, unshowered, uncaffeinated, and holding a bag of dogshit.

Up until the question was asked, time seemed to be clicking along more or less at its usual pace. But as a random assortment of words began to make their way out of my mouth, my voice took on the quality of Charlie Brown's teacher. I rattled on for what seemed an eternity, but what a stopwatch would have clocked at a minute, tops. Unfortunately, it was all rattle, baby, and no hum and made about as much sense as the preceding simile. The term farrago comes to mind. In the middle of my blather a bus roared past. The dog tugged politely at the end of the leash.

Having been on the other side of the microphone I could tell that Ravishing and Scruffy were already mentally moving on to the next person on the street, next vox of the populi, hoping for something they could actually use. And I can't blame them one bit.

I kept thinking about it as the dog and I made our way home. After a couple blocks, I had a finally come up with a pithy statement: "I miss the old McCain." You know the one, the actual maverick, not the Stepford/podperson McCain I've been hearing for months now.

As so often happens these days, the fake news folks have the truest take on this.

I don't know that I would have voted for the pre-2006 McCain although it's certainly possible. That guy at least had a soul. And for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Well, Jesus, just ask Dick Cheney.

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See also: My friend Fred has an astute point and cinematic comparison to make about the Palin nomination.