The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub

Behind the buses' digestive areas is another couch-intensive section, in which right now Mrs. McCain's personal assistant on the Trail, Wendy — who has electric-blue contact lenses and very complex and rigid blond hair and designer outfits and immaculate makeup and accessories and French nails and can perhaps best be described as a very Republican-looking young lady indeed — is eating a large styrofoam cup of soup and using her cellphone to try to find someplace in downtown Charleston where Mrs. McCain can get her nails done. Just why Wendy is arranging for her mistress's manicure on a press bus is unclear, but Mrs. McC.'s sedulous attention to her own person's dress and grooming is already a minor legend among the press corps, and some of the techs speculate that stuff like getting her nails and hair done, together with being almost Siametically attached to Ms. Lisa Graham Keegan (who is AZ's Education Superintendent and supposedly traveling with the Senator as his "Adviser on Issues Affecting Education" but is quite obviously really along because she's Cindy McCain's friend and confidante and the only person in whose presence Mrs. McC. doesn't look like a jacklighted deer), are the only things keeping this extremely fragile person together on the Trail, where she's required to stand under hot lights next to McCain at every speech and THM and Press-Avail and stare cheerfully into the middle distance while her husband speaks to crowds and lenses — in fact some of the cable-network techs have a sort of running debate about what she's really looking at as she stands onstage being scrutinized but never getting to say anything ... and anyway everybody understands and respects the enormous pressure Wendy's under to help Mrs. McC. keep it together, and nobody makes fun of her for things like getting more and more stressed out as it becomes obvious that there's some special Southeast-U.S. idiom for "manicure" that Wendy doesn't know, because nobody she talks to on the cellphone seems to have any idea what she means by "manicure."

If this all seems really static and dull, by the way, then understand you're getting a bona fide media-eye look at the reality of life on the Trail, 85% of which consists of wandering around killing time on Bullshit I while you wait for the slight significant look from the Press Liaison which means that after the next stop you're getting rotated up into the big leagues on the Express to sit squished and paralyzed on the crammed red press-couch in back and to listen to John S. McCain and his aide-de-camp Mike Murphy answer the Twelve Monkeys' questions and to look up-close and personal at McCain and the way he puts his legs way out on the salon's floor and crosses them at the ankle and sucks absently at his right bicuspid and twirls the coffee in his McCain2000.COM mug and to try to penetrate the innermost box of this man's thoughts on the enormous hope and enthusiasm he's generating in press and voters alike... . Which you should be told upfront does not and cannot happen, this penetration, partly for the reason that when you are finally rotated up into the Straight Talk salon you discover that most of the questions the Twelve Monkeys ask back here are too vapid and obvious for McCain to waste time on, and he lets Mike Murphy handle them, and Murphy is so funny and dry and able to make such delicious sport of the 12M —

Monkey: If, say, you win here in South Carolina, what do you do then?

Murphy: Fly to Michigan that night.

Monkey: And what if, hypothetically, you, say, lose here in South Carolina?

Murphy: Fly to Michigan that night win or lose.

Monkey: Can you perhaps talk about why?

Murphy: 'Cause the plane's already paid for.

Monkey: I mean can you explain why specifically Michigan?

Murphy: It's the next primary.

Monkey: I think what we're trying to get you to elaborate on, Mike, is: what will your goal be in Michigan?

Murphy: To get a whole lot of votes. That's part of our secret strategy for winning the nomination.

— that it's hard even to notice McCain's there or what his face or feet are doing because it takes almost all your concentration not to start giggling like a maniac at Murphy and the way the 12M all nod somberly at him and take whatever he says down in their absolutely identical steno notebooks.

What's hazardous about Bullshit I's lavatory door is that it opens and closes laterally, sliding with a Star Trekish whoosh at the light touch of the Door button just inside — i.e., you go in, lightly push Door to close, attend to business, lightly push Door again to open: simple — except that the Door button's placement puts it only inches away from the left shoulder of any male journalist standing over the commode attending to business, a commode without rails or handles or anything to (as it were) hold on to, and even the slightest leftward lurch or lean makes said shoulder touch said button — which remember this is a moving bus — causing the door to whoosh open while you're right there with business underway, and with the consequences of suddenly whirling to try to stab at the button to reclose the door while you're in medias res being too obviously horrid to detail, with the result that by 9 February the great unspoken rule among the regulars on Bullshit I is that when any male gets up and goes two-thirds of the way back into the lavatory anybody who's back there clears the immediate area and makes sure they're not in the door's line of sight; and the way you can tell that a journalist is a local or newly rotated onto the Trail and this is their first time on BS I is the small strangled scream you always hear when they're in the lavatory and the door unexpectedly whooshes open, and usually the grizzled old Charleston Post and Courier pencil will give a small smile and call out "Welcome to national politics!" as the new guy stabs frantically at the button, and Jay at the helm will hit the horn with the heel of his hand in mirth, taking these long and mostly mindless DTs' fun where he finds it.

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Who Even Cares Who Cares?

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to dislike — what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.