This being the first and only write-up on last night’s presidential debate that I’ve read so far, I’m coming from a distinctly uninformed standpoint here. But never mind that. There are only three points which I wish to call attention to, and I don’t think any of them requires a higher degree of credibility than I have:

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain’s almost-decision to “suspend campaigning” in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country’s plights than his own campaign. But it’s a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don’t leave until someone’s been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

“Later, McCain’s voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama’s statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and we say, ‘No, you’re not’?” the senator from Arizona said.”

Oh, I know what’ll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, “gut-based” electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he’s absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships–however tremulous–is something we clearly haven’t tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders–however terrible they might be–can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate…

3) Also from the Post: “The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war.” I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier’s mother: “But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything — promise me one thing, that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.”

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier’s mother: “She asked me, ‘Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I’m going through?’”

I couldn’t help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes’ play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It’s not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it’s about how it effects the women left behind, and it’s painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war–a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is “not in vain”. Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

“I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place,” says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes’ play. The candidates are in the “this place” of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where “future” and “possibility” exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

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A few weeks ago, I experienced my very first St. Giles’ Fair. Surely this must be some kind of secret Oxford induction: in the dead-quiet of early September, when the leaves are on the cusp of changing and a hush has come over even the busiest streets, suddenly the flame of festivity erupts on one of the city’s most charming tree-and-college-lined roads. In my research, I read that, “since the nineteenth century, St. Giles’ Fair has been held on the Monday and Tuesday following the first Sunday after St Giles’ Day (1 September)”—a fittingly circuitous formula for a circus-esque display.

Here’s what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

“It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles’ and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell’s right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles’. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles’ the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one.”

It isn’t so very different today, fundamentally: “Beyond St. Giles’ the University is silent and dark…”.

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: “A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter.”

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn’t need to anyway: it’s a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today’s young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don’t know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can’t help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn’t. There’s doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election–McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

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Have been trawling the web all day for health/politics reporters at work, so I am absolutely swimming in the shit of US politics (well, slogging through, more like–wading with rubber boots and a grimace painted on my lips). It’s a country-wide, all-bets-are-off, money-fueled circus, and the elephants and the donkeys of 2008 sure do produce (and inspire) a lot of shit.

As my father very wisely said: “You could not make this stuff up — it would seem too absurd.” It falls more in the realm of science fiction than public affairs and political analysis. Who stole the politicians’ brains?

“Chuck Norris doesn’t endorse. He tells America how it’s going to be–” so says Mike Huckabee, who seems to be under the impression that Mr. Norris’s presence at the US border will solve all our immigration woes. (yikes) Norris has officially endorsed Huckabee; it’s hard to say which of them is crazier, at this point.

And in this corner, we have headlines like: “Paul ‘08 Bid Endorsed by Brothel Owner: Presidential candidate Ron Paul receives endorsement from Nevada brothel owner.” Apparently the kids who run around stumping for Paul have a name: Paultards. The New Yorker had a little blurb about a group of them at Columbia University. I’m paraphrasing, but one of them said something that basically amounted to: “I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t vote for someone who actually wants to lower your taxes!”

In other American news, a four-year-old-boy has been suspended from class for sexually assaulting his teacher. Apparently he buried his head in her chest whilst giving her a hug.

???!?!?!

*sigh*

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The usual Wednesday night push. I hear snippets of lecture, but not the lecture itself.

We need to reframe all of this.
He was an ostrich.
I stamped it too. Consultants can be wrong sometimes.
Turf battles. Office politics. State politics. National politics.
And a man known as “Shrumy”.

I said the city was dizzy yesterday; well, now I’m dizzy.

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Here I am in class, and we’re discussing a hypothetical: Clinton had a lesbian love affair at Wellesley, you’re on an opposing team, what do you do? Leak it? Sit on it? Post it anonymously on a blog?

Quote: “Why not sit on it and wait until it can really strike a fatal blow?”

Why on earth is the election of a powerful world leader occasion to “strike a fatal blow”?

We talk in circles about how to get it out to the press anonymously, because no one wants to be seen as homophobic. Well then, don’t use it! Or perhaps I’m too strong a proponent of honesty, but I’d like to see someone slip it in the papers and have Clinton say, “oh, yeah, that’s right, I did have girlfriend once. It didn’t work out.” I’ve completely lost track of why on earth this is a relevant topic for discussion. When did the foibles of people’s private lives—and we all have them—become the basis of our decision to elect them?

I feel a bit like I’m drinking liquor from the bottle: it burns. It makes my head spin. It tastes awful.

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