“McCain stands in front of a great green screen that makes him look like the undead, which in so many ways he is. The years in captivity, the cancer and age have made a mess of him. He can’t lift his arms above his shoulders. He walks like a man who’s been bayoneted in the groin. He is a man who’s been bayoneted in the groin. But most worrying is his head, which behaves like a rejected muppet.”
Thus, in today’s Sunday Times, the incomparable AA Gill. One of AA’s amazing qualities is the scholarly precision he applies to even the meanest personal detail - and no one put this aspect of the presidential election more brutally than he. It may seem cruel, but it’s long overdue. Let’s face it, unlike Hirst’s Cow in Formaldehyde, McCain put
himself on stage. And this is no pygmy-minded giant-slaying but the honest, if
heart-rending truth.
Stupidity, though, is a different matter:Not of his appearance or manners necessarily, but of the surfeit of mental rigour and of the free-flowing absence of wit. For AA also speculates that McCain, exemplifying as he does
the spirit of uprightness and integrity, is painfully unprotected against the
conniving nature of political trolls. A symptom of his downfall. And as far as I
am concerned, if Robert E. Lee had had McCain at Gettysburg the outcome might
well have been different. But, now, it just so happens that “He stands there, stiff
and twitching, with his skull grin, a good man, a decent, humane and committed
man, fated by bad luck. It is his destiny to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time, to fall from a great height into the hands of bad people.”
Perplexed? You ought to be, and here's why:
Actually, I'm all for Obama - powerful, charismatic and a natural
talent. But in a predictable reversal, McCain will be elected, precisely because
in America nobody with the name of Barrack Obama can ever enter the White House.
Nor will McCain see the end of his own administration. Washington will endure a
major psychological crisis before 2010 is out. There’ll be rumours of hernias,
rheumatism, melanomas, goitre, scrofula, convulsions, cerebral paralysis and a
riot before the end of his term. He’ll have his head pickled in Botox, and
nothing will move. He’ll then retire on health-grounds, and Beauty Queen Sarah
Palin, the legitimate heir to the throne of America - and now the title proves
prophetic - will be sworn into office...
Gosh, don’t you just love a fairy-tale...
Dreamy
