Beyond McCain's Obscene Erraticism

McCain's recent spate of erratic political behavior is not so much in view now, thank goodness. There has been some success in keeping it under wraps and from public view. Success by default, one ventures the thought; for one suspects that it could break out all over again, any time soon, given the requisite mix of stress and delusion -- though the clock is surely running out.

October's slipping away, even as McCain speaks -- speaks of a victory that, he still believes, is sure to come his way (and that the rest of us know, more and more, isn't coming). CNN's trio of Paul, Alex and David [David -- not George as originally posted], and others, opine that all McCain really has is four days (from yesterday) to turn his fortunes around. Four days do not an eternity make: and why did I find myself in agreement with the trio between 5 and 6 this morning -- Nairobi/Baghdad time?

The erraticism was/is obscene, but the "ill-logic" that accompanied and "survives" it leaves all ill at ease. To the rest of the world, and I think to most American voters, if there's anybody that's truly "scary", it's not Obama but McCain.

Let me speak for the rest of the world, if I may, very briefly. The rest of the world will welcome with warm embrace America's choice of Obama as their next President. It will be a good thing. Sarkozy thinks so -- told The One himself. The Chinese do. Europe does. So does Africa. Kenya can't wait for the ecstasy, however brief, that's to come -- the same Kenya from which someone wrote several months ago that "Obama is not one of us", and in which the gutter press has issued a list of prominent local politicos who will not be all that crazy about an Obama victory. "But, if he is not one of us," I would like to ask her belatedly, "are you one of me?"

We, the rest of the world, are used to feeling good for others in their own success. We have no kimnadhoo. We cheer when champs Brazil win the world cup, and even desire that they do. But when Argentina does, we cheer (for they are champs too). When China succeeds at the Olympics, a triple success, we cheer. We want to cheer America when America does good. It's not none of our business.

Indeed, McCain is very much our business. The man's scary, and we worry that someone thinks we shouldn't worry. You cannot, we fear, have a reasonable argument with the man without being subjected to a barrage of convoluted argument without inner consistency -- and/or without the man's throwing a tantrum of one kind or another. The world would be (would have been) a thoroughly stressed, distressed and even intimidated place during a McCain presidency. Fortunately, it's not going to happen!

The scare goes deeper, since McCain claims that he knows how to win wars -- though I bet that not even Google can show us any hot war he's ever won. He even revealed this week, with some "bintu" pride, that he had been on a navy ship just off Cuba during the missile crisis (we hadn't known that!), ready to fire (I wonder what kind of trigger he, a junior oficer, was allowed to put his finger on) should the order from his Commander-in-Chief, President Kennedy, come. It never came, and the world was saved a self-inflicted holocaust. McCain claims that he was tested in that crisis -- tested or tempted? It's hard to imagine the kind of testing he was talking about. Did the demons inside tempt him, perhaps, to pull the trigger? God knows how many rogue shots across the bow have started wars which someone thought their side should/must get involved in?

About two weeks ago, Steven Hawking remarked in a CNN interview covering his life's work, and totally unrelated to the US presidential elections, that the world has had two or so events in recent memory which, had they gone terribly wrong, might have meant the extinction of the human species. One, which he specifically mentioned, was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he said, quite remarkably and almost off-the-cuff, that humankind needs about two centuries to, sort of, transcend the risk of such a holocaust. This is the duration, in his view, required for humanity to secure settlements in other planetary bodies. Until then, he implied, we have all our eggs in this one basket (this earth) -- which, I may add (as I recently did in one of my graduate classes), is itself an egg. Eggs inside an egg compound a fragility which we are, nearly all of us, too numbed by day-to-day pressures to consistently interrogate.

We have to be very careful with whom we make our leaders. And, yes, America is the world's business [NOTE: I have not checked any of this with Obama, who doesn't even know I exist -- just as I hadn't known that he existed during the years I spent at Urbana-Champaign, and visited or passed through Chicago]