SUPERSIZE ME

The Big Mc may not be as banal a menu item as we suspect he is. You may have heard that he's been downsized not only by his competition, but that he has very recently been consumed by his companion menu item, the female apple pie.

How does one fight the one billion already served?

John McCain lives an extended metaphor. He's the Big Mac, something that's been around so long that you tend to forget about it. When you bother to eat one, you find out that it's half as large as it used to be and that the bun is seriously larger than the meat. John McCain would like to remind you that this bun--the white stuff--is ultimately what matters.

Shades of former glory prefaced McCain's speech. Because this is modern America, these glories included the bombed-out Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the towers of the World Trade Center. Nothing, it seems, is free from craven exploitation, and we would have it no other way. We saw it with Sarah Palin's handicapped child and we saw it tonight; we are a country built on tragedy.

This is our strongest bargaining point. Without these catastrophic events, we might still be a country defined by cows and corn and waving fields of wheat. Instead, we have death and destruction at the hands of our enemies, whether these be foreign, domestic, or wrought at the random hand of Mother Nature.

The Republicans seem to think that we have, insultingly, forgotten about these devastating events. That's what this convention was for, to appropriate cataclysm as a vehicle for political coup.

Here is McCain himself, in an opening sequence that shows him trussed up and courageous--Profiles in Courage courageous to continue the hostage takeover of JFK from the Obama campaign--in the aftermath of his stint in a POW camp. Note how a 9-11 propaganda video speaks of taking hostages and compare that to McCain's stint as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. This is clever stuff; it's basic reinforcement by repetition. The linguistic constellation of the evening's presentation involves gut-level language and supersized phraseology: Fight! Believe! Stand up! (So what if this last mostly recalls a purposeful cancer commercial?)

This is strong and persuasive stuff. If nothing else, it operates on basic principles of psychology and perhaps even a little bit of Beat poetry and simple brainwashing language: What action verb will you remember tomorrow? Fight? Fight's a fun word. It's both affirming and hostile. You can have fun with fight, because it offers immediate empowerment and pride. According to McCain, you have a right to fight, and since we've recently turned into an aggressive bunch of shits anyway, here's a guy who is telling you that it is not only okay to fight, it is desirable. John McCain will fight right alongside you, on your ratty, fuzz-covered sofa. Of course he will. He will work two jobs and have his phone shut off anyway. And then what?

What's America's biggest beef right now? It's not the war in Iraq. It's the economy, primarily in the insult of the minimum wage, and it's the outsourcing of jobs to Indian help desks. Think about it: This practice hits harder and more universally than the war ever will. Who hasn't called the Microsoft help line and been unable to distinguish between the foreign representative's "A" and "8"? Letter or numeral? Sorry, Charlie. This involves cognitive abstraction. You might have to speak the language to make the distinction.

It's the nebulous "bad teachers," who are responsible for the breakdown of the educational system. That's right, it's the teachers' fault, not the Internet, which is the real culprit, or the failure of parents to control a child's access to the home computer. These children then graduate as valedictorians of their high school classes, only to find out that they cannot pass a basic English competency class at a state university and must be remanded to a community college. Confused? Throw out your computer and with it the pwnt, the GTG, the BCNUL8TR and the PAH.

The big question of the evening was: Who hasn't been shot down? Whether by the North Vietnamese, the big boss, or the girl at the takeout window, we've all been shot down and taken prisoner by someone. They have not returned our change. They owed us a dollar and we got a crummy dime. We went home and vowed to hold them to accounts the next time. In whatever way, we've all been held captive. We've been tied to Wal-Mart, minimum-wage jobs, illiteracy, and hunger. But let's own up to the sad fact that others have it worse. This was the second ploy of the McCain campaign: Recognize that misfortune is bottomless and revel in it. No matter how far down you go, you can always go farther. Don't you feel better? While it has always been perverse to comparatively measure misfortune, this is the junk food we've been eating since the 1970s.

McCain's speech is being called solid and a bit dull. That's what the white stuff is all about. Everyone knows it's full of empty calories that cause Type II diabetes in formerly healthy adults. We prefer not language but visuals, because we are unable to process more. With their coliseums and scandals and cradles, Obama and Palin are hard acts to follow. They are the gourmet items on the national menu and McCain is the junk, so there was nothing left to do but to revert to a super-sized chant that a child could remember, served up on a sesame-seed bun. When there is nothing left to say, there is always the fast-food jingle:

"Fight for what's right for our country.

"Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

"Fight for our children's future.

Fight for justice and opportunity for all."

All Come to Look for America

If you've come to look for America, something that Simon and Garfunkel understood was a fundamental journey in the experience of being an American, then you need not look to the cars of the New Jersey Turnpike but to the Republican National Convention. There, amid such critical signposts as Mount Rushmore and the Gateway Arch, the American Right detailed its beacons for those who navigate not by critical thought but by extended product placement.

So it was that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin delivered her speech in front of a patriotic backdrop that might as well have included a laser show and scenes from High School Musical. Palin hauled out that and more, including repeat awkward commercial endorsements for four-month-old Trig Paxson Van Palin, the most famous baby in America, second only to Coca-Cola as exploitative American iconography.

Forget about the fact that Trig Palin was born with an extra chromosome, or that there has been rampant speculation about the circumstances surrounding Trig Palin's birth. Each time the camera panned to the infant, the camera became not merely the eye of America but the eye on America as the Republican Party believes we should see it: No child left behind. If this means using a handicapped infant to counter allegedly false allegations as to its parentage, then so be it. Given the overt wrist-slapping, how odd that nothing was sacred in a display of crusty sacred cows.

It's the oldest advertising trick in the book. We love a baby. We love babies in ads for diapers and dog food and stain removers, and now we can love them in specious product placements during political conventions. Poor little Trig, darling in his nappy: This is Madison Avenue at its finest hour and in its manipulative slickness it was both brilliant and repulsive.

Don't blame the cameraman. Babies are actually pretty easy to resist, especially when it is not the baby but the baby's mother who is under fire, and who is herself firing away at rival-party candidate Barack Obama in what is today being called a virtuoso display that leaves no doubt as to whether she can handle a weapon. This pistol-packin' momma whipped out her gun permit, took aim, and fired, in atta-girl tundra fashion. Later, she clutched the baby to her breast. Back off, America, because what you really should be doing is weeping. Palin has now founded her entire nomination on the blessed and inseparable conditions of motherhood and blame.

America loves its guilt, or perhaps more precisely we love being made to feel guilty, and Palin's masterminded speech struck deep in our primitive concsciences. How dare we haul up motherhood, that most cherished of conditions, and call it anything but saintly? How dare we associate it with political machinations? And while we're at it, who are we to question whether our government (of whichever party, really) is doing right by us? Come on, America, that's Mount Rushmore on the backdrop. Would you accuse Thomas Jefferson of not looking out for the little guy and his gas station? Would Teddy Roosevelt tax the pants off a plumber? Shame on you.

Palin's speech was a model of modern choreography and utterly obvious media bedfellowship, cutting as it did from her to the trite iconography of the backdrop to the baby to Cindy McCain's platinum doll wig and back again, through an audience of mesmerized war veterans ("Hoosiers for the Hot Chick") and the average American (overweight), all of whom appeared to be experiencing some type of rapture. If the "Hot Chick" button seemed random, rest assured it was not. What it also was not was semantically sound; there is the implication that there is another female--a not-so-hot one--as a rival.

I watched the speech with a friend who called Sarah Palin "a hood ornament," and I think he's on to something. What he meant was that Palin was the ornament of the broken-down Bush pickup (probably a Ford, our good-ole-boy brand); everyone knows what a difference a snazzy ornament makes to a tired vehicle. Never mind the engine: Ornament or mud-flap girl, here's more relatable Americana dear to the hearts of men everywhere. American men are known to lavish a good deal of attention on their automotive ornaments, polishing and caressing them to a fine gleam, which is precisely what septuagenarian McCain seems to have done.

Palin also attempted to steal back JFK for the McCain camp; as tired as the comparisons are, it's worth remembering that Kennedy just about got us nuked by Cuba while at the same time being hailed for bringing glamour to the White House in the form of the ultimate hood ornament, Jacqueline Kennedy. Believe it or not, Camelot was nearly half a century ago, and our American vernacular has changed. We now speak in sign language. We communicate by means of Star Wars and dancing cans of Coca-Cola and all manner of other venal symbology. Still we look and look as if we've been transported. We've all come to look for an America that we can no longer articulate with words alone, and Sarah Palin is hitching a free ride.