Runaway, Del Shannon, 1961

What's with all these questions? The old songs are full of them: Why do fools fall in love? Why must I be a teenager in love? Will you still love me tomorrow?

Sometimes there's adolescent male bravado behind the questions. "Do you love me?" screams the Contours' lead Billy Gordon, "I can really move, do you love me, I'm in the groove." Dumped earlier by the girl, now Gordon is back, he tells her, "to let you know, I can really shake 'em down." That'll show her.

Bo Diddley in "Who Do You Love?" takes the psychotic approach—he wears a cobra snake for a necktie, his chimney is made out of human skulls, and when he growls, "Take it easy, Arlene, don't give me no lip and tell me, 'Who do you love?'" what's she to answer but "You, Bo, forever."

This is the brutally male side of teenage innocence, the I-don't-care-if-you-don't-want-me-I'm-yours-right-now approach to romance.

On the female side the questions are more pathetically poignant, but just as detached from reality. "Is it in his eyes?" Betty Everett asks in "The Shoop Shoop Song," "Is it in his sighs? Oh no, if you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss, that's where it is."

Sure it is. It makes you shiver to think that a generation this out to lunch had the atom bomb. The people in these songs lived in a different nation, the land of the clueless, and Del Shannon's "Runaway" was their national anthem.

Like much of the best rock 'n' roll, "Runaway" is nightmare music, rising out of dumb animal pain. I'm talking about suffering unrelieved even by an awareness of the cause of the suffering. It's bad enough to be crushed by life, but even worse to comprehend the agents of your destruction no better than road kill under the wheel understands the workings of the internal combustion engine.

Rock 'n' roll builds its myths out of this kind of suffering. The music best defines itself in moments that are mythic in their stupid, clueless, purely emotional response to life's least comprehensible, and therefore cruelest, blows.

So what's so mythic about dumb suffering? Where's the grandeur, the heroic vision, the bigger-than-life spectacle in the fate of a run-over possum?

It's in his kiss, that's where it is. If you've been run down, screwed over, cheated on, turned inside out, and hung out to dry by seven ratty guys in a row, how do you find the stomach to take a chance on number eight? You make up a myth.

You tell yourself you've got the magic love detector this time, that you can feel true love in the way his lips meet yours, that you can't possibly be fooled again because you've got the Book of Love in your hip pocket and passion in your heart.

At least that's what the poor sucker in "Runaway" told himself. And where did it get him? Well, his love affair didn't turn out that well, but that really doesn't explain exactly where he is.

He's out "a'walkin' in the rain" somewhere, and there's a tinkly cantina piano playing and this movie cowboy music swelling up like the theme from The Magnificent Seven, and when he tells his story it's like the Ancient Mariner spilling his guts to yet another complete stranger, not telling the story to anyone so much as reciting it again to himself in the darkness, like maybe if he goes over it one more time it will begin to make sense:

As I walk along I wonder

What went wrong with our love

A love that was so strong

And as I still walk on I think of

The things we done together

While our hearts were young

The story, the suffering, are transformed in the retelling into something less distinct, less particular—a hazier, dreamlike narrative—less specific in its details but more universal in its meaning. More like a myth, in other words.

This is not a hardboiled detective novel, where a relentless torrent of facts—it was a cold day in West Hollywood, the rain drifted down in a fine mist, I stopped under a drugstore awning at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea and lit a Chesterfield—drive the story down a blocked alley to an inescapable conclusion. In detective fiction the clues are all there and the cold, hard facts add up to cold, hard reality. The mystery dissolves in the wash of facts. If there are larger philosophical conclusions, they are cold, hard, tough conclusions delivered like a punch to the kidney.

"Runaway" lets the mystery be. "Runaway" lives in the moment of mystery, before anything is clarified. The storyteller in "Runaway" is up against questions of misery, loneliness, loss. He can and does tell you how that feels, but he never tells you why it must be, because he hasn't got those answers.

The song, rather than giving us an answer, itself becomes the answer. It elevates style and mood and beat into meaning, as all good rock 'n' roll does. "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," Johnny Rotten snarls, and in the rock 'n' roll world that's all you need to know.

So Del Shannon's voice cries out in the darkness:

I'm a'walkin' in the rain

Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain

Wishin' you were here with me

To end this misery

It becomes too much and the voice cracks in stuttering, falsetto agony;

And I wonder

I WA-WA-WA-WA WA-UN-DER

Why

WHY-WY-WY-WY-WY

She ran away

And I wonder

Where she will stay-ay-ay

My little runaway, run-run-run-run-runaway

Then the whole song is gathered up and carried away in the instrumental break, it just soars off, transported by this silly-assed, high-pitched, whining carnival calliope (actually an electric keyboard called the Musitron played by Shannon's co-writer on the song, Max Crook). It's a weird noise, like you would hear at a county fair on an unbearably hot, sticky August night in Mississippi, maybe, a sound so tacky and inspired it defies the forces of gravity and reason.

The singer comes back again, still stuttering and wailing the final chorus, but now he's riding on top of that whining keyboard line, irresistible, triumphant, and mythic in his suffering. And so he rides off into the fade-out.

I was six years old in 1956. As the great songs of that time were released they came to me unawares, over radios playing through open windows on a summer day, in snatches heard briefly as my parents turned the dial. They floated into my consciousness as if by magic, like unwritten truth absorbed through my skin. I didn't know from Lieber and Stoller; these songs could've been written by Homer, for all I knew.

Certainly now, looking back, "Runaway" strikes me as a talisman handed down from a time when myth and mystery were real and walked among us. But so the song always was, even on that day, almost a half century ago, when I first heard it and asked myself, "What was that?"

Annie Spayed

Annie had been in heat for about a week, writhing on the rug in front of Puss Merlin, our big king tom cat, who would look at her (like Elvis regarding an over-excited, underaged fan) as if to say, "Darlin,' don't you think you're a bit young for this?"

 

The smallest cat in the household, Annie is a tiny, Halloweenish-looking thing, dusty black, fluffy coat with splotches of orange all over, including an orange line running down her forehead, between her eyes, down her chin to her neck and chest.

 

She would follow Puss around the house, batting at him, rubbing against him, rolling around on the rug in his absence, half-mewing, half-moaning and clearly in immediate need of relief. No doubt she had no clue what had hit her, but it was pretty obvious to us, so we called the vet and booked the earliest date available for spaying.

 

Everything went fine. She came home groggy the same day and we put her in a big cage to keep her from being jumped on by Ritz, her over-affectionate and boisterous litter mate. Ritz ended up spending the night curled up on top of Annie's cage.

 

I used to think I was allergic to cats, before I married my wife and moved into this menagerie. We have two inside dogs, an outside cat, and five inside cats. Ritz and Annie we found abandoned in the woods on the road up to our place about four months ago; Puss Merlin and Mimi, the outside cat, also came to us more or less on their own.

 

I believe there's an emergency hotline for abandoned cats listing every easy-touch human within a 50-mile radius, and my wife is at the top of the list.

 

We keep the animals out of our bedroom and, while my head stops up periodically, the allergic reactions to cats and dogs that plagued me in my childhood, and that I imagined I would still suffer if living with indoor animals, did not materialize when I moved in with MaryElizabeth. All I can figure is that love trumps immune dysfunction.

 

The other revelation I experienced on moving in was what a community of unspoken connection and caring I had joined. My Aunt Ethel used to take in stray dogs. She had what seemed to be 40 of them, nearly all of them obviously mistreated in their former lives, trusting only my aunt and uncle, and snarling threateningly at all visitors to the household, including myself.

 

As a kid, I couldn't understand why anyone would surround themselves with these nutty, apparently dangerous animals, and I certainly couldn't understand how my aunt could relate to these snappish critters as a mother doting on wayward adopted children.

 

When I first met my wife, I reacted to her detailed descriptions of the pets' activities each day as I used to react to Aunt Ethel's—"Come on, these are only animals!"

 

But as I spent time in the household, I began to notice that the animals showed themselves remarkably sensitive to the ups and downs of my moods, gathering around me when I was upset, figuring out what was going on with me emotionally before I had even explained my mood to MaryElizabeth.

 

This was different than watching Lassie do doggie-charades to tell the humans that Timmy had fallen down the well. It wasn't that the animals could communicate as well as humans. It's that they are often better than humans in sensing my emotions, and more reliably responsive to them.

 

Even more interesting and moving is their sensitivity and responsiveness to each other's suffering. The way that Annie's brother Ritz keeps watch over her recuperating in her protective cage, the way that the cats gathered around one of the dogs when he was suffering from hot spots and licked his toes (even though this is the same dog that regularly growls at the cats if they get too close to him), those are the things that get my attention.

 

I'm not expecting them to take care of me in my old age, or pay for my prostate surgery. I'm the one getting them fixed and buying the cat litter, not the other way around. But I don't feel like I'm these animals' keeper or landlord, I feel like I've joined an interspecies community of kindred souls.

Toot Is Dying

Barack Obama's white grandmother, Toot, as he calls her, is seriously ill, so ill that Obama is taking a day and a half out of the home stretch of a two-year presidential run to go to Hawaii and be with her.

The man loves his grandmother, obviously, and so do a lot of us, but this man is universally regarded by traditional American standards (one drop of black blood makes you black), as African American, and his grandmother is white.

That fact has given rise to a number of complications in Obama's complicated personal history, including the now famous incident in which his grandmother was afraid to take the bus to work because of a panhandler who had accosted her at the bus stop. Her husband, Obama's grandfather, was furious with her, and the young Obama couldn't figure out why.

"'It's probably a little scary for her,'" Obama recalls telling his grandfather in the autobiography Dreams from My Father, "'seeing some big man block her way. It's really no big deal.'"

"'It is a big deal to me,'" the grandfather answers, "'You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.'"

"Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me," Obama writes. "Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad."

Such are the sad and complicated consequences of America's sad and complicated experience with race. But to our potentially great benefit, Obama turns out to have been the kind of person who, when handed a lemon, makes lemonade. 

Something about his own struggle with racial identity lit a fire in Obama that has driven him all the way to the door of the White House. He discovered that his own story had the power to give people in our sometimes hopeless country great reason to hope.

By personifying the real connections between people in an atmosphere in which people are constantly at each others' throats, by having a white grandmother that he loves enough to set aside his ambitions at a critical moment, he demonstrates the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and reconstruction in America at large. 

I think that's why he's surging in the polls right now.

People are realizing that he's not a "Muslim;" he's not a "terrorist;" he's not a "socialist;" he's not the feared Other, he's one of us. People are realizing that the boundary between "Real America" and that other frightening shadowland is not only completing open and porous, but that maybe it's OK that it is that way.

For 200 years we've whispered about Thomas Jefferson and his hidden half-black offspring; for the first time people are beginning to realize that the ties of blood and community that stick all of us together in the same teeming soup may not be a national shame or scandal or disaster, but one of our saving strengths.

Drowning the Cat

My wife tells me I have tickets to see Randy Newman next Wednesday, the 15th. I just realized that means I will miss the final debate between Obama and McCain.

The surprise is that I find myself relieved at the prospect. Right now this election has come down to drowning the cat, and it's not going to be a pleasant spectacle. The continuing market meltdown (minus three hundred points in the Dow Jones today) and the increasingly bad news in the economy in general (E-Bay is laying people off!) put the McCain campaign in terminal jeopardy.

You don't have to watch McCain too long to realize that gracious loser is not a role he will play comfortably. Mr. Anger clearly expected this to be his year and in the last debate seemed to be astonished that people were making him stand next to this weenie Negro for an hour and a half and actually have to explain why we should hand the War Hero the scepter that he'd earned in the North Vietnam prison.

Consider the fact that McCain wants this so badly he forced himself through the public humiliation of hugging the miserable draft dodger President who stole the office from him in 2000 by claiming he had fathered a black baby. That's how bad he wanted to win this thing.

Now all we can do is watch this bitter coot writhe, scream, spit, bite, and gasp for air as his ill-conceived and spastic campaign is mercifully held beneath the water in the toilet until it finally ceases to be.

It's not going to be pretty. So I'm going to see Randy Newman, for a helping of healthy bile. 

Go to Final Check-Out

I am now the former grocery store critic for the Knoxville, Tennessee, alternative paper, Metro Pulse. For roughly 10 months I have pursued the truth about Knoxville in its supermarket aisles. Though I believe the truth is still to be found in these stores—in produce perhaps, or inadvertently buried in a bin on the bargain aisle—the press of more urgent and lucrative business pulls me away. I admit that at times it has seemed to me that this column, like Seinfeld, was about nothing at all. Few places feel more empty of meaning than a grocery store at mid-afternoon with nothing going on.

One of the things I learned in grocery stores, though, is that if nothing is happening in front of your eyes, stuff starts happening in the grey matter behind them. A trick that Alfred Hitchcock used in his movies was to hold an establishing shot of a building just a little bit longer than usual. As the viewer stares at this house he begins to wonder why he's looking at it, and then he wonders what's going on inside it, and before long he begins to wonder where the bodies are buried in it.

Grocery stores were like that for me. (I would watch the butchers emerge from the back room with the meat and wondered where it came from and why they wouldn't let me watch it being prepared. People in the deli department have nothing to hide, so what was it with these meat cutters?) In the way they seemed to operate off screen, below the radar, on autopilot, the stores seemed to me like mini-Knoxvilles. Nothing was happening, but that was just on the surface, because underneath everything is going on.

This town, like all towns, has a secret history, a secret past, and a hidden present full of subconscious fears, desires, resentments, ecstasies. Stare down that empty aisle long enough and the linoleum begins to shimmer strangely and you hear suppressed whispers and invisible footsteps.

In some stores those glimmers of truth manifested themselves clearly enough for me to believe I knew what was going on from the minute I walked in the door. Other places I knew about from experience as a longtime customer.

I was keenly aware from talking to owners and operators of these stores and from my experience with family members in the business that it takes a lot of hard work to make money in groceries, particularly in a small, family-owned store. Those small stores often had the most vivid atmosphere and personality about them, and I did my best to do them justice.

Even the supposedly faceless chain stores spoke to me with distinctive voices, and I know I wasn't the only one who heard them. In a couple of instances people reacted strongly to what I had written, in some cases angrily. It was clear that these stores meant something to these readers—they were not "just grocery stores" at all, but places they felt strongly about, almost as strongly as they felt about their own homes, their own neighborhoods.

I have enjoyed writing about these places that people care about, because it has given me a greater appreciation for my own feelings about Knoxville. I arrived here 25 years ago with no personal connection or history in this place. Now I periodically see someone on the street or visit a location in town that I haven't seen in years, and I remember how my life was going and how I felt at that time and I feel happy or sad or angry at the thought of it.

The place has developed meaning for me, and I think that's what makes a town a community. The sum of all its peoples' memories and experiences of the place, its ghosts and its schools and its grocery stores, creates a spiritual feel that, for better or worse, defines our hometowns in our hearts.

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.

Food Club on the Parkway

The Parkway in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, wears me out. This is the road to Dolly Parton's amusement mecca Dollywood, the road to Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As you drive south towards it out of Knoxville there are hints of what is to come--billboards for the Elvis Museum and the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which features a disconcerting face with what appears to be three irises per eyeball.

Driving down the Parkway in Pigeon Forge is not like curling up with a good book. It's not like mindfulness meditation. It's not like Vivaldi or cool jazz. Parts of it are like "Surfer Bird" by the Trashmen, but "Surfer Bird" makes a more compelling, unified statement.

The Parkway takes bad taste and then filters out the intelligence. It's more like Soupy Sales than Jerry Lewis, Freddie and the Dreamers than Herman's Hermits, a chicken with its head cut off than a penguin. Gatlinburg is just as tacky, but is nestled charmingly in the mountains. The Parkway in Pigeon Forge is a relentless, garish strip, an eternal traffic jam, with no redeeming geography.

It aspires more to the grand gesture than it used to. As you enter the Endless Drag from the north you now catch glimpses of enormous commercial developments on your left, big concrete entertainment venues the size of Lenin's Tomb with exotic names ("Cirque de Chine"), and blocks and blocks of brand-new pastel-colored shops.

Before you know it, though, you are in the midst of the flying pigs, looming plastic dinosaurs, and hideously grinning sharks that line the Parkway proper. A lot of new stuff has popped up here as well since my last visit (1987). Adventure Quest's castle looks as if it was built with Legos, and I like the upside-down WonderWorks building. You can do it all in Pigeon Forge—drive 40-mile-an-hour go-carts, do indoor skydiving, get married at more than one site, play miniature golf at what seems like dozens.

You can even buy groceries.

Penetrate far enough into garishness and you start running into artifacts of vacations past—old-time souvenir shops, fudge and funnel cake shops, and stores after store selling products "As Seen on TV."

That's the section of the Parkway where the Pigeon Forge Food Club sits, right before Dollywood, between the Sevier County Bank and Pigeon Forge Traders Gift Shop (offering knives, swimwear, leather, plastic bears, and huge Support Our Troops lawn sculpture).

Like the surrounding stores, the Food City is a period piece. Its logo is displayed on a broad band of 1962-vintage corrugated plastic that runs the length of the store. Inside the door is a full rack of tourist brochures and three grab-the-prize-with-the-pinchers arcade games. The bargain products on the wall as you enter feature charcoal, fire starters, cook-out implements, and camping supplies.

There are similar displays at least two other places in the store, as well as bins of bargain rods and reels, swim gear, ice coolers, and a display of board games for killing time by the campfire. Along with the outdoors products there is also a definite party theme at work here, with a well-stocked specialty beer section and hard coolers like Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and Mike's Hard Pomegranate Lemonade.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pigeon Forge Food City, though, is how unremarkable it is. Outside the store it's Female Elvis Mud Wrestling, inside it's a quiet store in the country. You get the impression that aside from the tourists from Michigan there are plenty of regular people living in the surrounding hills who come into the Food City to stock their cabinets and refrigerators.

Prices are moderate. The store is large with rather low ceilings, but clean and pleasant with the usual amenities, reasonable produce and meat departments, attractive deli and bakery, and an operating pharmacy.

Where's a guy supposed to get a tattoo? Down the Parkway at American Rebel Tattoos Studio. Can I experience a 65-mile-an-hour hurricane here? No, visit WonderWork's Hurricane Hole simulator. Have you got anything on the dawn of Creation? No, but you can check it out onstage at the Biblical epic The Miracle. How about world-famous racing pigs? Go to Dixie Stampede.

But where are the people with the extra eyeballs that I saw on the billboard driving down here?

I'm sorry, sir, our shoppers all have just one per socket. Would you care for some grapes?

The Fresh Market

It must take at least three geese to make up a gaggle, but what constitutes an embarrassment of riches? Everybody in America is created equal, but that still doesn't keep us from gushing over the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We're fascinated by the rich and fantasize about being one of them. No one seems too embarrassed about making big bucks or aspiring to do so.

 

Economic inequalities are serious business. Some people believe the pursuit of wealth is rigged against the people on the bottom, and it makes them angry. I feel that way myself at times, but more often I've got a more complicated reaction.

 

The Philadelphia Story, a Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant comedy made in the middle of the Depression, is about the ambiguities of American class conflict. It contrasts the lifestyle of a super-rich family marrying off its elder daughter with the struggling, lower-middle-class style of a reporter—played by Jimmy Stewart—who is hired to cover the affair.

 

I think this movie gets closer to what economic inequality feels like because every time I go to the Fresh Market--the grocery store serving old-money Sequoyah Hills, in Knoxville, Tennessee--I feel just like Jimmy Stewart. It's not anger at all, really, more a weird combination of dazzled fascination and reverse snobbery.

 

Take the musak. I honestly doubt that Baroque quartets are the appropriate soundtrack for squeezing tomatoes, but that's the way things are at the Fresh Market. And while my sense of taste should have me gagging at the store's studiedly casual ostentation, I find it instead so inviting and cozy that I want to move in.

 

I probably couldn't afford it. Comparable staples totaling $45.81 at the Kroger across the street cost $53.72 at Fresh Market. But you don't come to Fresh Market for staples. Meat and potatoes they've got, but they've also got Organic Flax Plus Multigrain Cereal, prepared chicken cordon bleu at the butcher's counter, frozen Cuisine Solutions Braised Veal Osso Buco, cans of Haddon House Hearts of Palms.

 

This is a specialty store. They have specialty beers, specialty salsas, specialty potato chips. There are whole aisles of bins of bulk nuts, mixed snacks, candies, and coffee beans including flavors like molten chocolate and caramel macchiato. The store offers Christmastime abundance year round.

 

The store smells like Christmas cookie dough. The ceiling is dark and the aisles colorful. The store has the elegance and bustle of Grand Central Station. Price specials on meats and produce are posted on blackboards hung on the walls.

 

The flowers at the front of the store are beautiful, and the potted plants near the produce section include six-inch-tall bonsai trees and a full selection of potted herbs.

 

It pays, just for your own sense of personal integrity, to keep reminding yourself that this is a planned environment; that there are chain of 80 of these stores, centered mainly in the Southeast, from Florida to Wisconsin; that what you're experiencing is a well-executed formula. This is particularly important at this store, where the old money ambience of Sequoyah Hills washes over the entire scene and makes subjective judgment nearly impossible.

 

Europe has art, architecture, and culture that have been around so long that the moss grows on them; in America the main lasting heritage we've got is our money. Where other countries have prospered and faded, we have been rich for a long time.

 

Downtown Rome looks like it did in the Renaissance, in some parts like it did in the Empire. Downtown Knoxville has individual old buildings, but the overall look is knocked down and rebuilt continually.

 

An old residential area like Sequoyah Hills, though, offers continuity, substance, permanence, and its Fresh Market is part of that. Maybe the best use for our money is to simply sustain identity; Fresh Market is an artificial village market that's been around so long it's become a real one.

Not Ready to Lead

The clearest signal that Barack Obama's campaign message is achieving traction with voters is the fact that he is losing the election.

For months Obama and his people have been pounding home the message that a vote for McCain is a vote for a third term for George Bush. Little do the Obama people realize that despite Bush's abysmal approval ratings--or perhaps, in some horribly twisted, quintessentially American gesture of self destruction, because of them--a third term of Bush is exactly what the voters want.

"W, The Warlord," read the parodies of the Bush bumpersticker, but to many people, I am convinced, they aren't parodies at all, they are a more direct expression than the originals of Americans' yearning for The End, one final, spastic, grotesque orgy of violence that takes us, and all the foreigners who hate us, down together.

Ever since 1955, when Fess Parker stood at the Alamo in the closing shot of the Davy Crockett series, swinging his rifle like a club, fending off the enclosing Mexicans, that's been our subconscious national dream, to do down swinging in glory taking as many of the encroaching aliens with us as possible, and John McCain is the candidate most likely to make the dream a reality.

The two issues, I read, that have made the difference for the McCain campaign in the past few weeks are offshore drilling (the heroin addict's answer to addiction is finding more heroin) and getting tough with the Russians (for "Remember the Alamo" substitute "We are all Georgians"). I've watched America waste years, lives, and treasure trying to remake Iraq in our image. After that experience it seems perfectly apt that we should all burn in nuclear fire to save South Ossetia for democracy.

Obama's problem, we are told, is that he lacks experience. Maybe this means his brain has not been sufficient pickled by the ways of Washington to achieve the level of madness attained by McCain. I really don't believe that's the problem the voters are having with Obama, though. It's not that he's too sane for their tastes, it's that his skin is the wrong damned color.

Sam's

I told my daughter I was going to check out Sam's Club for this blog and she showed me a YouTube video, Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart, in which the evil Lord Waldemart shuts down every shop in Diagon Alley by selling cheap wands and potions at his own store.

 

This is not what you would call good press, but if bad press didn't hurt the Rockefellers at the cash register, why should it hurt the Waltons?

 

Well, for one thing, Sam Walton was selling his goods directly to the public in their hometowns and making a big deal of his small town roots. He was not sitting off in New York City relying on a massive international monopoly to make people take his products, like it or not. He was one of us.

 

So when the hometown boy's WalMart and Sam's Club megastores undersold every shop on the square in the county seat and drove down wages across rural areas already depopulated by the death of the family farm, why were the only people upset some egg-head liberals in the city?

 

Because you can't beat the prices.

 

My Sam's Club, located in the prosperous suburbs of West Knoxville, Tennessee, undersells the local Kroger $31.08 to $42.23 on  standard grocery shopping trip. Because this is happening in the suburbs, not the country, the effects on the community are minimal. Surrounding businesses are not sucked dry; Sam's is not about to depopulate West Knoxville.

 

Maybe the West Knoxville customers feel remorse about exploiting the Sam's "associates" running the cash registers and stocking the shelves for $10 an hour (the average wage for Sam's nationwide). If they do, they're dealing with it pretty well. The SUVs pour into the parking lot at midday in the middle of the week and parking spots are hard to find on the weekends.

 

It kind of reminds you of the day the Yippies dumped money into the trading pit at the New York Stock Exchange to see if the stockbrokers would fight for it. In West Knoxville, the power of a bargain is apparently irresistible, even if there's plenty of money in the bank.

 

There are a couple of catches. Only "members" are allowed into Sam's and the basic membership costs $40 a year. You have to figure you're going to buy enough to save $40 in the next 12 months to make it worth your while.

 

You also have to decide whether you're willing to be photographed while you shop and submit to inspection of the goods in your cart as you leave the store. Unlike other exclusive clubs, this one counts the silver when the party breaks up.

 

And the store smells like fermented plastic, a naugahyde processing plant maybe, my eyes were burning from the fumes.

 

But no one has real problems with any of that stuff. The place is a clean, pleasant, enormous controlled warehouse. There are plenty of non-grocery discounted goods. Lines are long at the check-out, but associates routinely tote up the contents of people's carts at the back of the line to speed up the process.

 

Really, the biggest catch I could see was the sheer volume of goods people end up buying. The day I visited signs in the lobby offered customers a list of products—Tyson boneless chicken breasts, Quaker State motor oil, Gatorade, among others—available by the truckload.

 

I'm assuming buyers of these shipments are other businesses ("We Are in Business for Small Business," signs proclaim), but many of what looked like ordinary household shoppers were walking out of the store with pick-up-sized truckloads of groceries piled on flat carts. They were spending $600 to save some money.

 

You can buy three-quart Margarita mix buckets at Sam's. Four-and-a-half-pound jars of cole slaw. Ninety-six-count packages of Tootsie Rolls.

 

Some extract of vanilla, enough to feed Godzilla, as Allan Sherman sang it decades ago. He was singing about green stamps, yesterday's racket to get people to buy more food than they need. Today's racket is called Sam's Club.

The Revenge of the Nerds

It never surprised me to learn that Karl Rove was a high school debater. As a former debater myself, I am very familiar with the syndrome. These were the guys who, like Rove, walked into debate rounds with briefcases full of blank evidence cards, just to intimidate the opposition.

These were the guys who, in the first round of their first tournaments, peed in their pants from self-conscious stage fright and who, by about their fourth tournament, had developed into full-blown humiliation monsters ("I don't pee in my pants, I make the other guy pee in his!") They became masters at making their opponents look like brainless, mumbling, incompetent fools, and won a lot of debate tournaments doing so.

These were the acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, sophomoric nerds who became acne-faced, pudgy, bespectacled, sexually frustrated, super smart, senior presidential advisory nerds (doing the bidding of the nasty little bullies who, like George Bush, spent their childhoods blowing up frogs with cherry bombs).

I have come to believe that the entire Republican Party has transformed itself into the refuge of socially and psychologically crippled geeks and bullies who are too maladjusted to function anywhere but in a club of equally dysfunctional geeks and bullies.

Consider David Addington, for example. Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Addington is often referred to as "Cheney's Cheney." New Yorker writer Jane Mayer has reported in the magazine that Addington was centrally involved in formulating the Bush adminstration's policies on treatment of detainees that resulted in U.S. forces engaging in torture on a systematic basis.

Mayer reported that Leonard Napolitano, a close friend of Addington in high school, described himself and Addington as "nerds."

"Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them 'too distracting to our interest in cards,' Napolitano recalled."

Irwin Hoffman, Addington's history teacher, told Mayer that Addington "had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable."

Sound a bit like Karl Rove? Consider Rove's recent attempt to label Barack Obama: "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

The projection is obvious ("makes snide comments about everyone") but the resentment and envy of a nerd who never had a "beautiful date" is even more striking.

Year after year, election after election, Republican administration after administration, the whole country has had to pay because social cripples like Rove and Addington were never able to get over high school. They take out their revenge on all of us.

The democratic process is repeatedly subjected to versions of the overstuffed debate briefcase trick. It's one sophomoric dirty trick after another. Democrats get Willie Hortoned, and Frenchified, and Swift Boated year after year by psychologically twisted gnomes who consider elections nothing more than primitive machines easily manipulated to win power.

The democratic process is jiggered to protect rich people's money and, more importantly it seems, fulfill the nerds' own need to show the suave, sophisticated, sexually satisfied high school Caesars who didn't even know the debate team existed how powerful a nerd can really be.

This is why I am sitting through these guys sniggering at Barack Obama for being successful (meaning "uppity") and lying about his energy policy to make him look incompetent (the nifty tire gauge gambit—as if Obama wouldn't easily be able to prove they are lying and make a pretty effective joke of it) and sticking him in an ad with beautiful white blondes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears (the miscegenation visual—a harder bullet for even some one as smooth as Obama to duck).

This is why I have to sit through these guys trying to use this bullshit to hold back the flood of reality that is driving this election—the real gas prices, and the real food inflation, and the real housing collapse, and the real global warming, and the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real strategic collapse of U.S. foreign policy—and that John McCain is having a hard time trying to put out of people's minds.

McCain has got a couple of percentage points out of this baloney, and it certainly is his best hope for winning, and he and the geeks could actually pull the whole thing out of the hat one more time.

But if the geeks get their man in again they will have to govern in a reality growing so much more insistently real that no amount of sophomoric bullshit will ever cover it up.

The Wile E. Coyote Kroger

Approaching from the south you see the Kroger suspended above the intersection of Pellissippi Parkway and Northshore Drive, hanging in the air supported by—well, by not much of anything these days, beyond the convictions of suburbanites west of Knoxville, Tennessee, that gas prices are bound to fall soon.

 

The store's namesake coyote (scientific name Overconfidentii vulgaris) is, of course, always bound to fall, but only after his Acme Rocket Shoes have failed to make that last hairpin turn and blasted him instead 1500 yards from the edge of the cliff into empty space.

 

He doesn't drop immediately even then—he hangs there maybe a good 10 seconds, when it finally dawns on the hapless animal that there's nothing below him but a gaping chasm. He gives us one crestfallen glance before his long descent, ending in a muted crash and puff of dust at the bottom of the canyon.

 

You know what's going to happen every time. The repeated failure of beautiful illusions, that's the American story, from roadrunner cartoons to suburban grocery stores. What do you do with people who spend election after election looking for a General Patton type who drinks Budweiser and bowls 300—especially when you know that given a choice between the real Patton and the guy who played him in the movie we'd probably go for George C. Scott? Americans live in permanent suspension of disbelief.

 

The Kroger at Northshore Drive and Pellissippi also hangs like Wile E. Coyote, happily suspended in that instant before the long fall. The store looks great. Hell, it is great. It's huge. There's a veritable garden center outside the store, plus a pharmacy, a bank branch, and a Starbucks inside.

 

The Kroger sells and rents videos, greeting cards, lawn furniture, TVs. The produce department offers beautiful fruits and vegetables, there is a large selection of organic and natural products, the deli and bakery are large and well stocked, the meat department is everything you could want it to be. The prices are reasonable and the store offers double off manufacturer's coupons.

 

So what's the problem? Nothing, if gas prices fall back to $2.50 a gallon by winter. Maybe they will, but Kroger itself seems to be betting that's not going to happen. The store has opened its own gas pumps, with a minor price break for shoppers with a Kroger card. The price has fallen somewhat in the last week but still hovers above $3.70 a gallon, up 30 cents since the spring.

 

The shoppers buying gas and groceries at the Northshore Kroger, and there were a lot of them, pulled up in Escapes, Blazers, Odysseys, Explorers, Quests, and Caravans. Presumably they came out of the green hills dotted with subdivisions visible from Pellissippi Parkway, and from the homes springing up along the Tennessee River for miles to the west. They probably filled up for the trip home.

 

Does it help to know that the price of gas is twice as high in Europe? Does it help to know that, with food prices driven by the cost of oil, hungry people have rioted in the Third World? The price of Kroger's chuck roast is up 70 cents over what it was in February, but the shoppers there haven't taken to the streets.

 

We haven't got streets to riot in, just interstates and exits and parking lots. As far as the Europeans are concerned, they've got trains, and subways, and coffeehouses within walking distance on every corner. We have to do Starbucks drive-through, or at best go to the Kroger, park in the lot, and then stroll in for our coffee.

 

All things considered, I can't say that West Knox County really has the infrastructure it needs for the coming fall; illusions out the wazoo, but no infrastructure.

The Sheriff Is a Ni—!

Believe it or not, we are currently living through the plot of Blazing Saddles on a national scale. Perhaps admit it or not would be the more accurate phrase.

Just like the movie's fictional Western town of Rock Ridge, the country is beset by a beastly gang of misfortunes--soaring gas prices, stumbling economy, resurgent inflation, global warming, and two or three unendable wars.

Just as in the movie, a dashing, eloquent, smart, handsome, decent, and charming hero has appeared on the horizon to save the day.

And just as in the movie, the hero is black. The extended joke, in the movie and in this year's election, is in watching the white people of Rock Ridge and the country try to come to terms with this strange turn of events.

As funny as anything is seeing how few people can even bring themselves to acknowledge what might be happening. There are any number of articles about the puzzling fact that while the Republicans are almost universally blamed for the fix the country's in, and while the Republican candidate is an overaged, underinformed, flip-flopper with a wooden speaking style and a platform that promises to stick doggedly to the policies that got us in this fix, the election remains tantalizingly close.

Pundits scratch their heads over Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, wondering whether it's his "newness," his "inexperience," his "strangeness," or his "inaccessibility" that is holding him back.

Just as people tip-toe gingerly around the N-word, so they avoid considering the most likely explanation for what's happening, that Obama's background, the story he proudly tells us "could only happen in America," is itself generating the old All-American racist reaction that we have seen in action repeatedly over the years.

It's like we've got the inarticulate Gabby Hayes-figure from the movie perched on the tower with the spyglass on the new sheriff coming over the horizon, repeatedly trying to yell down the news that "the sheriff is a ni—" but repeatedly having the end of the word garbled by the noise of the crowd. It's as if the word of the new sheriff's identity hasn't gotten through to us.

In Rock Ridge, the word eventually does get through and the townspeople's negative reaction is immediate, overt, and unambiguous. In America today, there's no way to tell for sure what's going on. 

The infamous older, rural, white males might still be ready to acknowledge their racial hostility. But even among old white men "he's not one of us" is about as clear as anyone feels they can get without being called a racist. Any reporter looking for people honest enough to acknowledge that they don't like Obama's skin color is going to come up with slim pickings. 

We've got plausible deniability on this issue. There are plenty of other reasons people can give for opposing this candidate. Obama is new. He is inexperienced. He is, for all his eloquence, somewhat inaccessible. But he's also black. And that's what makes his success to date the miracle that it is.