HOW LONG DOUG WILLIAMS, HOW LONG?

The truck driver hates anyone that carries a tennis racket/He drinks all the senator’s coffee & proceeds to put him in a headlock…
Bob Dylan, Tarantula

Look. Listen. So John McCain had to wait until the NFL finished its season opening game on Thursday night to accept a nomination for leadership in a party that, despite all the bullshit to the contrary, had to hold its collective noses to accept him at all. The New York Football Giants wrapped up a 16-7 win over Washington, which, could have so beautifully played into the latest Republican notion that urban elites are running amok in the land of rural, heartland, real family values, except that Washington D.C. is as urban as it gets after all, and the game just wasn’t enough of a beat down to prove much of anything. So it goes. In any case, that didn’t stop McCain from spouting vague platitudes about fighting for change to the “do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd.” “Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight with me.” Well. As far as the Redskins go, he got it right; they have been doing nothing on the gridiron—not since Doug Williams walked onto the field for Super Bowl XXII and coolly commandeered them to a 42-10 victory and the Promised Land. No one wanted to admit it then, but in the wake of the shocking victory, one reporter summed up the palpable white doubt that was most certainly rippling through America, asking Williams, “How long have you been a black quarterback?”

Well, well. Giddy times indeed. Since then, no other black quarterback has reached such dizzying heights, but most certainly there’s one waiting in Washington, and as sure as John McCain needs a staff of seven just to help him crawl to the bathroom every morning, despite all the lip service, good Republicans and their ilk just can’t quite imagine a person of colour in that big chair in the White House any more than NFL fans could imagine a black quarterback winning the Super Bowl. As I remember, Williams won that game throwing bombs and pinpoint passes to relentlessly hammer on the Broncos, including a second quarter barrage (9 of 11 for 228 yards and four TDs=35 second-quarter points). Well, Barack Obama has had his second quarter, but now that the half time show and the third quarter are over, he would be wise to manage the game. There is time to bring the hammer down, change the game plan and hit the holes in the Republican line with some vicious cut blocks and downhill running. Pound the ball inside man! Never mind that it's ugly, slow and mindless, it will be the only way to win this time. Oh yes, about the smartest thing I’ve heard all year was Obama lamenting (in San Francisco no less) the state of his rural nation, and taking dead level and accurate aim on those bewildered masses whose remedy for all things evil in America and the rest of the world is to simply swear on the family Bible with a can of piss water in one hand and grand daddy’s rifle in the other.

But there’s the rub: while this is no time for the high road, and a naked bootleg like that one may play to well to those that read their news in the morning, one suspects that among the voters who live their daily lives in such a deep fog of stupidity that they are still undecided, it is decidedly not option one, two or even six in the smart player’s play book. After all, it appears that no one likes a smart feller, especially a black one who doesn’t have a gun in the closet, beer on every shelf in the refrigerator and a god who hates fags. No, no. One way or another, Obama has to get himself invited to dinner with the slack-jawed daughter of the non-urban American, sit down at the picnic table they call a dinner table, on the concrete slab in the backyard that they call a dining room, under the patio lanterns they call a chandelier and convince them that although he may be eddicated, not white, and from one of those cities so dangerously close to Sodom or Gomorrah, more importantly, he’s not going to take the apple of their eye out later get drunk, fall asleep at the wheel, crash the family truck and date rape her within an inch of her life while she’s unconscious and bleeding in the passenger seat. That is after all what’s been happening to the US for the last 8 years and all the guns, bibles, booze, and restricted abortions sure as hell didn’t stop it.

Weirdly, these kinds of ideas will be a hard sell. People are already so busy fawning over Sarah Palin and a picture of her with a semi-automatic and a moose. Now, I’m not sure if the moose was in a cave making a video about jihad when she shot it, but that would have been a lot cooler and probably a lot more useful in the defense of America. But I’m not a hunter or an Alaskan, so maybe I have missed the point. Besides that, about 40-60% of Americans, depending on the stupid, er, undecideds, still indulge McCain and his self-styled maverick politics and the endlessly noble POW story. Let’s just be clear here, I mean no disrespect to POWs or veterans or anyone else who has had to go fight a war, and especially endure the god awful shit that Vietnam vets took from the right and the left, but a la Wesley Clark, I don’t really see how seven years of getting whipped on by communists deep in the jungle of a country that most Americans would just as soon forget even existed is grounds to be declared a maverick or a president.

Nevertheless, people appeared to vote for the current White House cabin boy because he was the candidate they imagined that they would most like to have over for a BBQ and some beer—never mind the fact that as the jackass at the party he’d be the one to dive head first into the shallow end of the pool, bleed all over the dry ice and beer, and probably piss in your mother’s linen closet, before passing out with his pants around his knees, puking into a lampshade that he thought was a bucket. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what he has done these past eight years. But no one likes to feel stupid at the backyard picnic table, and a “fancy, dancey, prancey” (see Joseph Bruno) crasher like Barack Obama is viewed with a deep, mean-eyed suspicion, cause he just won’t deliver any good ole boy action on a Saturday night. Imagine, he has the sheer effrontery and balls to raise campaign money and pay for a campaign with grassroots support, demand change to a system that has brought nothing but systemic abuse of the taxpayers, poor and middle class alike, and a futile, not to mention an economy draining war that appears to have even failed to get anyone one drop more of the oil it was so cynically waged for in the first place.

But none of this appears important to that crucial demographic of voters who have yet to decide. So, don’t hold your breath Democrats. Just because Doug Williams did it in 1987 doesn’t mean that your man will ever be allowed near something as sacred as the presidency any time soon. Unless those undecideds and Conservatives wake up and have the decency to get up every morning from now until Nov and repeat ‘you are the problem,’ until their ears bleed, it seems likely that a man that in 2004 George Bush clubbed down like a senile goat and a creep who is so far North she wouldn’t hesitate to deny access to abortion to victims of rape and incest will once again pull up a chair at America’s backyard blowout and well, you know the rest—you just sat through eight years of it.