Fiery writing on the wall

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 5:07 PM, my friend Edwin wrote me:

"Joe the Plumber" says he has no plumbing license.
    Does no one in the McCain camp have a computer? Has no one there ever heard of Google? This company that has two employees, the owner and himself, I doubt has ever made $250,000.
    As I watched the debate I thought of a college that was going broke and all the heads gathered around the table trying to come up with a plan that could save the day. The door opens and the coach runs in shouting about how fired up the team is and how he believes they could get a bowl bid. Two guys get up from the table and give him a high-five while the others look at them like they've lost their minds.
    I miss the 60's. It was more fun watching this stuff on drugs; now it makes me want to cry.
    I see the light at the end; let us hope it's not a train.

I share Edwin's sense of foreboding. Despite the high hilarity afforded us by the crumbling McCain and preposterous Palin (whose pronouncements can be distinguished from those of Tina Fey only because Fey refrains from becoming incendiary), I can't shake off a terrible sense of doom. That McCain could be proud (or claim to be proud) of the Americans who come to his and Palin's rallies and jeer at The Other (the questionably brown man with the suspect names) is not just desperate, it is ominous, like fiery writing on a wall. My local morning newspaper reports that those very people cheered maniacally yesterday afternoon at a Palin rally within fifty miles of where I sit to write this. Oh, America.