Per one of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
In my senior year in high school, I took a class called "Advanced Social Sciences." It was taught by a portly curmudgeon with a shaved head named "Mr. Tumlinson" who had a face like Billy Bob Thorton in Sling Blade and the diction of Richard Nixon. He was an odd man (he actually claimed to not listen to music) but very smart.
The premise of the class was to teach students the rules and pitfalls of rhetoric and debate. We learned about straw men, faulty dillemmas, and all sorts of logical fallacy. But Mr. Tumlinson's favorite sticking point was one he surely invented himself. It involved the poem I quoted above and on the first day of class he actually gave us the full text as a handout and asked us to discuss what it meant in terms of human interaction.
Eventually he gave us his own interpretation: as the poem begins the Tennessee hillside is a pristine wilderness, something that is beautiful to the eye and would surely attract the attention of passers-by. But once the jar is placed upon the hill, all attention diverts from the scenery to the jar itself, by virtue of its very oddness, its juxtaposition. In other words, the jar distracts us from what we should really be seeing.
For the rest of the year, any time a student made a comment or introduced an argument that was so glaring it served as a distraction and drove the debate completely off topic, Mr. Tumlinson would stop us and point out that the student had, intentionally or not, placed a jar in our midsts. He warned us that public figures often master the act as a technique and they use it to keep people from debating what is really important. We must, he said, learn to recognize a jar when we see one. And we must be able to differentiate that jar from a Tennessee hillside.
Kossacks, John Mccain has just placed a giant, gray-bare jar right smack in the center of this election. I understand the impulse to respond, the rush of excitement at the pure novelty of it and that sensation we all feel that tells us that surely this, THIS, must finally be the thing that ends his candidacy and eight years of GOP rule.
And it may well turn out that way. It may be that once people see all the evidence they will flock to Obama like cows to a pasture. That is why in the first day or two that followed Mccain's announcement I was excited to see all the well sourced diaries that suddenly popped up, full of information that the Mccain camp either figured we wouldn't notice or didn't notice themselves. I too smelled blood in the water. And there are still people who are digging up valuable quotes and damning facts about her time as mayor and governor.
But seriously, look to the right of you. Just take a good long look at the diary list. How many diaries do you see right now talking about Sarah Palin (this one included)? How sad is that this site, which at its best is an engine of progressive ideas and a repository for stories the media missed, is donating over half of its space to diaries about the Governor of Alaska?
Others have said it first, I'm just reiterating, hoping to frame the point in language and manner that people will understand. She is a jar. She is not important. John Mccain is important. the RNC is important. Our nominee is important.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy reform, middle class tax cuts, rebuilding our infrastructure, the dangerous tit-for-tat with Russia, the truth behind Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, the unitary executive, torture, health care, the potentially massive hurricane that is bearing down on us and what it says about our climate, and scores of other issues - these things are important. Hell even meta diaries like this one sometimes make a significant contribution to the discourse (not saying that this one will, mind you).
We are coming dangerously close to jumping the shark, to irrelevancy. We're like a bird of prey that is distracted from its meal by a shiny object. I know you want Mccain to be held accountable. There's still a good chance that he will, thanks to people like Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan and several intrepid diarists on this site. But there is no denying that the constant focus on Palin, here and in the electorate at large, is exactly what John McCain wants.
Don't give it to him. The more you make this election about her, the better the chance that they win.