A few weeks ago I read a Rolling Stone article penned by Matt Taibbi explaining why Sarah Palin represents everything that is wrong with America. I agreed with most of what he said, and I always enjoy anyone taking shots at Palin, who is just about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to American politics. The most striking thing Taibbi said, though, was that he supports Barack Obama because of what he says about America.

It's more than just the fact that he would be the first black president. His various shortcomings notwithstanding, Obama is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate and open-minded person. He is no radical; we can't expect from him to bring about the socialist revolution the right keeps shouting about. There is no prospect of Obama overturning the political power structure in America; if Wall Street thought he was going to put the lid back on their honey pot, they would not have contributed so much to his early campaign during the early part of the primaries. But I think he is the best that we can expect that system to produce.

The divisive rhetoric of the right is only fully coherent if Obama is a dangerous outsider, so that is the narrative his opponents have constructed around him. It is a nebulous construct indeed; we have the word 'terrorists' thrown around without much attention to historical accuracy or grammatical number. The McCain campaign's official line is that Obama has a close friendship with '60s-era radical and domestic terrorist (singular) William Ayers. Never mind that their association was strictly professional, involved only charitable efforts with other leading Chicago citizens and a single fundraiser for Obama, and ended over three years ago. What matters is that voters hear the word 'terrorist'.

That word plays into two other (sometimes subliminal) memes pushed by the right. If Obama is a '60s-style leftist radical, is he also socialist or communist? Maybe he's a Muslim terrorist. Or maybe he's with the Nation of Islam- a violent black separatist and a different form of '60s radical.

Once these ideas get inside the soggy heads of so-called low-information voters, it all intermixes into a hazy, anti-American caricature. Both McCain and Sarah Palin are calling Obama a socialist; Palin and McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer have made comments about certain areas being "not real" America and some being more patriotic and pro-America. It's clear from the remarks made by McCain surrogates that, contrary to what Taibbi's argument, they think of conservatives as the best Americans, the ones who embody what America really stands for.

The game here is in-group identification. It has been no secret that the Republicans' best chance to overcome Obama in a very Democratic year is to paint him as alien. Most of the bad things about Obama stem from the degree to which he has sold himself out, ingratiating himself to the political establishment in order to become a player in the presidential race. Hitting Obama on that count doesn't play well with thinking voters, since their major alternative is a 26-year Senator who has assiduously followed the incumbent president during his second term in office. The other reality-based criticism of Obama is his lack of experience, which also doesn't carry a lot of water with anyone lucid enough to understand the danger in putting Sarah Palin within a heart attack or metastatic melanoma of the presidency.

With the legitimate criticisms blunted by their own candidates' shortcomings, the right has had to resort to turning Obama into a scary, angry, communist black man. The people who respond to those kinds of tactics are not the ones I would put forward as exemplars of what is great about America. One of the major reasons why I support Obama's candidacy is that statement that his election would make about America. He would not merely be the first black president; he would be a president who won despite prolonged appeals to ignorance and bigotry by his opponents.

Freedom of Choice (of Breakfast Meats)

This morning I heard an ad on the radio which struck me as a poignant commentary about the United States. It is increasingly obvious to me that our values and institutions are centered on commerce, and commercial interests dominate decisions which are supposed to be dictated by principle and concern for the "public good." While I have been aware of this state of affairs for upwards of a decade, recent developments have for some reason rekindled my interest in the questions of why America looks like it does, why we Americans act as we do, and how the public policies that determine these things are set.

I plan to research and write a series of posts dealing with these questions and how they relate to America's place in the world and particularly how they shape the presidential race. For now, I want to get back to the radio ad.

McDonald's recently introduced a breakfast sandwich called the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit, which true to its name consists of a fried chicken patty on a biscuit. It accompanies a number of other greasy, disgusting biscuit-based items which have reportedly been added to McDonald's menu in the years since I stopped eating there. Some consider the new sandwich remarkable in that it has moved chicken onto the breakfast menu, but as Joel Klein of TIME notes, this is not an unprecedented coup. Furthermore, there is no coherent reason why pork should be included in our morning meals while chicken is categorically proscribed. If there ever was some sanctity of breakfast, it was long ago defiled by the introduction of cereal shaped like waffles and sausage on a stick wrapped in pancakes, corndog style.

The radio ad for McDonald's new arterial calamity began by extolling the US's hallowed freedom of speech. How lucky we are to live in a nation where each person can express his ideas without fear of repression by his government! All manner of divergent opinions are tolerated in this nation of courage and integrity. No personal opinion or taste is grounds for ostracism, the ad continues. (Let us ignore the fact that you can't even see the truth from where you have to stand to be able to say that.)

What should we do with this precious freedom of expression? The radio told me that the proper course is to start eating chicken for breakfast, which was somehow not the first thing that came to my mind. I never had any inclination to include poultry on my breakfast menu, but then again, my tastes are so distant from where the ad industry would have them that I may qualify as a bad American on that count alone.

Isn't this appropriation of patriotic concepts and imagery in the name of selling a breakfast sandwich a form of sacrilege, to be decried and deplored by Americans from sea to shining sea? No. No, it isn't. What I find distressing about this ad is that there really isn't anything unusual about it. It's perfectly acceptable to use patriotism and America's purported ideals to implore consumers to buy your product. No one sees that as a debasement of what we stand for. This is a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that consumption is really what we're all about. What's the point getting upset about it? People who supposedly hold America dear to their hearts don't really want to impede commerce, so they never raise their voices in objection to this kind of thing.

This state of affairs reinforces my conclusion that most or all of the patriotic talk we put up with in American is entirely for show. Somehow, our politicians are excoriated for the mere omission of conspicuously patriotic (and Christian) rituals. Every lapel is adorned with a flag pin, every speech closed with "God bless America." Politicians never venture anywhere near vocally diluting or devaluing our shibboleths (which says nothing about what they do with their actions rather than their words). When a corporation suggests that the happy providence of the First Amendment should be utilized to eat chicken before 11:30am, that's business as usual.

Once again I find myself devoid of any obligation to participate in any of this- the patriotic pageantry, the consumerism, the greasy breakfast. I must be in the minority, though, or no one would pay to make those ads.