Straight Talk

The Republican candidate for Vice President has awakened a cognative reverie, be it connotation, denotation, or the rhetorical devices so cleverly strewn by playwrights and orators of olden times. See, ubiquitously: "Hockey Mom" -- "Moose-hunter" -- "Pit-bull" -- "Lipstick"– a variation on a theme -- "Change, change, change" – another variation on a theme from a party once changeless. And then, of course, the obvious ones, tossed out to generate responses which are then scorned as "Sexist Sexism." "Palintology" -- "Palin Rhymes with Pain" – "Palintacostalism" – or simply and succinctly – "Palinism."

Democrats are asking, "Should we be Biden our time?"

This woman was the Mayor of Wasilla and is now the Governor of Alaska. She is also every Republican's dream, straight out of and armed with the Phraseology Handbook and Manual of Style, governing the ancient playground game of "King of the Hill," – in modern times, known as "An American Presidential Election Campaign." She punctuates her jabbing, punching words with probing, slashing fingers, like exclamation points. No boxer she, though. She's a hunter out to kill or capture. Then, with the shy smile of a Hockey Mom, a tad reminiscent of the snarling chops of a Pit-bull Terrier, she pops up both fists, both thumbs up, to acknowledge she has heard the approval of the crowd, and becomes as fired up as they, as energized, as it were. The one feeds on the other. Alaska was never like this.
 

Even John McCain, the reserved and numbed, long-suffering hero from an ancient war, titters with excitement. He is somehow energized, old age no longer coming on and on. Holding both hands together in front of him, he sidles towards her and shuffles in close, to stand by her side, mutely. With a slight grin of humble embarrassment to blend in with the ageing lines of his face, John raises both fists up, both thumbs up on both fists, gratitude smoothly calming a forehead, once so frowned in the despair of defeat. That came from the story of his life, caught in his youth as a prisoner, passed over for Four Star Naval Command, then defeated in politics over and over again by his own Republican party, as if he were a maverick. But now, at long last, in the evening of his life, he has a chance for a change, along with a change for a chance. Without her, he was doomed. With her, he is deemed. Presidential. For a while.

In ancient literature, there was a device used by authors like Euripides called Deus ex machina – God from a machine. It is dictionarily defined: "an improbable contrivance in a story characterized by a sudden unexpected solution to a seemingly intractable problem."

Horace, the Latin poet, taught us in his Ars Poetica that playwrights should never stoop to the machine used in ancient theatres to haul up a god onto the stage to resolve a situation tumbling beyond resolution. Somewhat like our modern plots in plays, now called a presidential election. The machine could be a crane to lower gods onto the stage, or a riser to bring one up through a trap door. In modern times, out of a place called Alaska. Author? John McCain, student of ancient disciplines, crafts and skills, a man from out of the past.

And so, from the frontiers of America, deep within that sheer white, wilderness of ice and snow and sled dogs and Eskimos and wolves and moose, good Old John can shuffle a soft shoe, even bubble a bit. He knows how to laugh, with the release of a prisoner, tossed from solitary into the light of day he thought had gone black. He knows how to laugh, with the laughter of a seasoned politician, astonished at the silly people massed in front of him, waving their arms and roaring their acclaim that he, indeed, and at last, gets it. It's not what you say, nor how you say it, that wins elections. It's who you get to say it.

As a mistress of words, her very surname notwithstanding, our disarming Governor of Alaska knows how to phrase a palindrome. She is one, actually, forwards and backwards. What requires far more skill, however, and is, thus, more deleterious, is her casual resort to antimetabole. That's the use of words in one phrase and replicating them reverse grammatical order in the next phrase. An orator's trick, as old and tried as Deus ex machina. And yet and yet, she is making it ever new and fresh and energizing in Republican rhetoric for the election of the President of the United States of America. And his Vice President, too.

The palindromic Palin is also antimetabolic. John McCain used to call it "Straight Talk."

And that, dear friends, from an orator's handbook on words and phrases and style, is how the candidate for Vice President is on her way to the Presidency, as a passenger in John McCain's bus, The Straight Talk Express.