What a strange phenomenon last night’s debate was! Not the “debate” itself, in which platitudes were exchanged and slogans swapped in lieu of dialogue or actual debate, but the fact that so many tuned in to see what some hoped and some feared would be a train wreck, or the very least a sort of personal meltdown… 

What fools these mortals be! Did anyone, outside of Keith Olbermann, really think that if Sarah Palin had made a complete fool of herself (which she avoided, barely) the nation would notice? Or that it would be acknowledged in the post-debate spin zones, where truth is redefined almost immediately? All the GOP needed was for the governor to not shoot herself in the head, or call Gwen Ifill the N word (same thing) and they could declare victory. Making McCain’s pick of this woefully unqualified person not the lead story any more but just a publicity stunt that grew into a reality. Now that the critics who questioned her qualifications have been momentarily quieted, the senator from Arizona can get back to addressing his real area of expertise: the economy.

History will be kind to those early Cassandras on the right, though, people like Peggy Noonan who suggested JMC lost the election when he tapped her. Next to the Wall Street tsunami, Squeaky Sarah seems like a minor concern. Until you remember that her place on the ticket represents his first executive decision. So as the waters swamp the boat, and you see the captain has brought a clown to help him man the life rafts, you might well wonder if this is the right guy to put in charge.

Biden was strangely subdued for the first hour. He looks like an old fighter who has already gone 12 rounds —  and he’s still got a month to go! But he warmed up before the bell; though the media seems to have liked his questioning of McCain’s “maverick” status most, I thought the highlight of the show was when he choked up talking about seeing his son in the hospital. He showed real emotion and reminded those watching at home that no one party has a lock on parenting and all the trials and challenges that come with it.  He spoke from the heart, and didn’t need to memorize the words.

That’s Wall Street slang for job loss, the kind we are being warned about as we stand on the beach awaiting the tsunami most financial analysts say is coming unless Congress acts quickly to pour oil on the roiling waters of the credit crisis. (I know, roiling waters don’t make waves, and you can’t really see a tsunami coming, but bear with me.) As CNN’s Ali Velshi, one of the calmer prophets of doom, explained it this morning, dislocation is one of those nice Orwellian words that brings to mind Reagan’s explanation of the difference between a recession and a depression: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.”

Given the loss of 600,000 jobs this year, what’s a few more? The one person most Americans now agree should be out of work is the cat with top job: According to an ABC poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Americans now disapprove of the job Bush is doing, a historic low. It’s nice that we can all agree on something! It was also nice to read yesterday that Alberto Gonzalez can’t get a steady gig since resigning as AG. See you in the soup line, boys. 

But how could you lose your job, you say? You can still locate it, most days. The failure of this current bill seems to be not simply one of imagination (a lot of voters, who crashed Congress’s email server yesterday, cannot imagine massive unemployment and the other hallmarks of the 30 percent decline in the economy that defines depression) but of language: Calling it a “bailout” makes it sound like we’re rescuing Wall Street when, if you believe nearly every economist in the country, we are rescuing ourselves. 

The first time I visited Wall Street I was amazed to find, right around the corner from some of the biggest investment firms in the country, an old-fashioned street vendor hustling wind-up monkeys on the sidewalk. As booms and busts have occurred since, I have watched in amazement as giants like the Solomon Brothers and Bear Stearns have teetered and fell. But that guy — maybe you’ve seen him in Union Square, hustling vegetable peelers, three-piece suit, Australian accent? — is still on the job, which is to say: on the street. And I don’t mean Wall Street, either. 

I was flabbergasted to read that David Foster Wallace killed himself Friday. I was not his biggest fan, though I had read his biggest book, Infinite Jest, when it came out twelve years ago and argued passionately for it and its characters at the time. It wasn’t just that it was a Big Ambitious American novel, written at a time when people seemed to no longer believe in the importance of writing a BAAN: it took life seriously by making fun of it (and vice versa). 

The jokers and jesters of IJ suffered terribly; one of the book’s heroes, Hal Incandenza, was a big-hearted recovering alcoholic and drug addict who, as Laura Miller says in her fine appreciation of DFW in Salon, “[fought] to stay on the road through the desert.” What more are any of us trying to do? As lesser writers copied his tricks and tropes (the endless footnotes, especially) as a means of distancing themselves from the reader, Wallace seemed to always be trying to get closer to both his subjects and you. 

The same was true of his nonfiction. I still teach his profile of David Lynch to my journalism students as a brilliant example of what a great profile you can do of someone without talking to them. I asked Jim Meigs, the editor of Premiere who assigned the piece how much editing was involved. “It came in just the way you read it,” Jim said. Suffice to say it made me go back and watch Lost Highway, and almost made me understand it. 

Many of the people who didn’t like Wallace hadn’t read him. They assumed he was a show-off, hiding behind irony and verbosity. I thought he was throwing everything he could into the mix, trying to make a case for living, for continuing. The fact that he couldn’t make that case for himself is devastating. 

It has become apparent since John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate that this was less of a hail-Mary pass (hoping to pick up alienated Hillary voters and any other woman who would vote for any woman) than it first appeared and, more predictably, a play for the GOP’s born-again Christian base. As a story in the Times, or even a ten-minute visit to the Republican National Convention makes abundantly clear, her selection has been hailed as divine. Literally. 

It was this same bunch that was so instrumental in winning the election for Bush in ’04; these people are like Orcs, the unstoppable broodlings in the Lord of the Rings that battled the hobbits and fairies and trolls and men who were trying to defeat the dark empire of Mordor. They can go for days without food or drink and certainly don’t need to be paid to stuff envelopes and ring doorbells. They believe they are doing God’s work, and many of them would be insulted by the offer of money. 

I had the experience, canvassing for Kerry in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre areas of Pennsylvania (a state we won by the way) of driving through the exurbs to ring the doorbell of some registered Democrat and passing all these other houses and McMansions and wondering: who’s ringing their doorbells? In Ohio it was the Orcs, stirred into action by that Lord Sauron of the GOP, Karl Rove (who told the Washington Post.com that choosing Palin was “a campaign decision, not a governing decision.”

Translation: we just want to get this guy elected. Motivating the Christian right, for whom abortion remains the signature issue, is more important than gambling on any voters in the middle, many of whom live in those exurbs and smaller cities in the swing states. We can only hope that this strategy will backfire, that voters who support a woman’s right to choose (a clear majority of Americans) and who are tired of the God-gays-and-guns gang having such sway in government, as they have under GWB, will hit the Change button come November 4. (Most of my wife’s Republican family, who live in the battleground county of Washington in the battleground state of PA, are already leaning that way.)

But hoping (or praying) alone won’t do it. If you haven’t already, find a way to volunteer to work for Obama. Calling the fairies and trolls you know in California and New York (and I know plenty of both) won’t help; we’ve got those states. You need to start reaching out into the red states and trying the gentle art of suasion instead of the bellicose rhetoric of partisanship. Ask people: do you care about climate change? Because Palin and all she represents think it’s part of God’s plan, and the war in Iraq was a Holy War. (Check out this church video from June of this year if you think I’m exaggerating.) Despite McCain’s past statements about the environment, he has backed away from that stance in the last year, and I guarantee he will do far too little too late as president, and has already said he will choose anti-Roe judges for the Supreme and federal courts. You’ve got to dance with the Orcs that brought you.