I will post soon about my volunteering last weekend in Indiana, though I am going down to Indiana again this weekend, so I'm digging myself a hole with delayed blog posts (and loving it!).
Yesterday I went to the black neighborhood bar to watch the vp debate, but they had the baseball game on, so I went back to the student bar, but the one nice (black) bartender around my age was working and he was into the vp debate, so it was all good, especially since the one bar regular who's this 60-some year old retired black guy Ron who comes in every night for 3 or 4 martinis and then goes home once he's hammered ended up sitting near me for the debate, so we had some good times.
For one thing, when Sarah Palin was saying for the third time how Alaska's an energy-producing state, Ron was like, "Fuck Alaska, how about the rest of the U.S.?"
Later, when Joe Biden gave his answer about diplomacy that climaxed with his comment about how McCain wouldn't even sit down with the president of Spain, the guy was like, "I like that Biden," and when I said that I did too, Ron was like, "Good man, good man", and he gave me a jocular mini-shoulder-hug and a fist bump.
But, the best part was when this late-40s black dude in a black baseball cap sidled up to the other side of the bar regular while Sarah Palin was on the screen, and he leaned in to Ron and quietly was like, "Hey, do you think that governor's a good-looking woman?", and without a blink, Ron was like, "Yeah, and that's all she is."
Also, I think this escaped a lot of people, but Palin was really using the evangelical "worldview" language to rally the base in her debate response such as this (taken off of the cnn.com transcript of the vp debate):
But even more important is that world view that I share with John McCain. That world view [sic] that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here. We are not perfect as a nation. But together, we represent a perfect ideal. And that is democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights. Those things that we stand for that can be put to good use as a force for good in this world.
Usually, in things such as a conservative Christian worldview-based home-schooling curriculum, you have the ideal of a Christian worldview arrayed against other ways of seeing the world (e.g. secular humanism, into which all other forms of Christianity are put, usually). In this case, Palin was combining the "city on a hill" biblical language with the idea of America as a chosen nation in conjunction with this. I'm not saying the religious overtones of this part of the speech couldn't be picked up from her other comments, but what's interesting is that Palin, a known evangelical, is saying that John McCain shares her worldview and will be a force for good in the world - in other words, she was sticking up for him for her evangelical brothers and sisters in the viewing audience and saying he's one of us and will do our kind of good in the world.
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2 comments:
There may well be appeals in which she tells evangelicals that McCain is with them, but I don't really feel like this is one of them. Besides--the very fact that she's on the ticket and that McCain is going around the country defending her suggests no more code is required.
But she never really touched on Christianity in the debate, except in way that wouldn't piss off people that aren't really tuned into the religous right, though they dislike them. I don't think she's pushed her religion herself, people never hear about it from her own mouth.
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