Dartblog

Mark Foley was the one, you will perhaps recall, who had trouble with pages—but not the one who had trouble with pages in airport lavatories. He was the one who had trouble with pages from the convenience of his personal computer.

Anyway, comes news today that Mr. Foley is an enthused supporter of Barack Obama, which is the Sign of the Cross these days, and begs that we forgive him his past infelicities in consideration of his present enlightenment.

I order coffee from Starbucks each morning. The patrons know this sight well: the turning away from the baristess and toward a slattern slate of coffee paraphernalia, upon which sit shakers of cinnamon, cocoa, vanilla, and nutmeg. Beside rest three or four steel jugs of cream or cream-flavored product. Like the pattern of tiny blood vessels in the retina, the melange of these ingredients are to each patron a unique identifier; they and the blended beverages make up, absurdly, an identity. Barack Obama, although superficially a man and a politician, is more like a shaker of nutmeg than a man. He’s a topping, a choice, an iPod playlist, a checked checkbox that’s free to check. He is pre-shorn, pre-stained jeans from the Gap. He called John McCain’s late flight to Washington a cynical stunt; he knows; he is cynicism itself. A shaker of nutmeg who for the moment has been shuttered, by a commanding few, from the usual public inquest, he seems to be totally pure. He is the easy, obvious choice, a choice fraught with conspicuous virtue. Has the frivolty of Barack the Savior produced a mock Parousian moment? Does Mark Foley believe that Obama can breathe life into a dead political career? He does, he does. O, but Mark Foley, he thinks they’ll say, was a believer when the time to decide came.

Colin Powell, too; and the newspapers in whose persistent adulation John McCain basked till he actually had the presidency within reach, at which point his destruction became for the press an existential imperative.

It is almost never true that “this is the most important election of our lives”; but who doubts that this is at least the inanest?