“For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.”

Those lines from Hilda Doolittle evoke Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, she who is the wolf murderess and the opposite of all I hold dear in my own gender – and the homophone applies. For me, women are meant to embody the wisdom of the Lady of the Beasts, not shoot innocents from the air.

“After her came gray wolves, fawning on her, and grim-eyed lions, and bears, and fleet leopards, ravenous for deer; and she was glad in heart to see them, and put desire in their breasts, so that they all mated, two together, about the shadowy vales.”

H.D.’s poem also defines the frantic way McCain handlers enact what they must know upon the brittleness that is the next VP of these United States, if we remain inside my nightmare. Periodically plunging her into deep waters (as in the Couric debacle) they pluck her back to that vast remove where reporters can’t even shout a question successfully. The shame of the fourth estate has just staggered me. Who realized that failure to be accessible was an option in Presidential politics? All by her little lonesome, she has made it so.

On the night Palin made her speech at the RNC, I had a terrible dream. It did not make the essay devoted to reader’s nightmares about Palin on the Slate site. Perhaps they thought it was overworked and improbable. I certainly thought so. I suppose the dream was my fault. I’d been picking through my nineteenth century edition of Alice in Wonderland, marveling at the way the Tenniel illustrations have remained on the back burners of memory all my life. Huge Alice with her telescoping neck, the Rose Garden with upturned faces embedded in the blossoms, the storm of playing cards flying around Alice’s head when she wakes from her long strange dream. No wonder these thoughts of Alice, for what have the last eight years been but a strange long sleep from which I have prayed to awaken thousands upon thousands of times?

I was at the Tea Party of the Mad Hatter, and I was Alice. But instead of sitting in a slouchy pout a la Tenniel, I was apart from the group, bound by the wrists to an armchair. The Mad Hatter was Cheney, and the Red Queen was there, and of course, she was Sarah. She saw me and called for my head, and I knew I was about to die. I looked around for John McCain, thinking he would spare me in mercy for the imprisonment he himself had endured. But he was asleep and had grown very fat, and I saw he was the Dormouse. Cheney was trying to stuff him into the giant teapot that stood on the table. Palin sidled over to Dick and hissed: “Fold him! FOLD him!” That bit of horror was too much for my sleeping psyche and I woke myself.

Why can’t he close the deal, ask the talking heads? I am furious every time I hear the question. He can’t close it because he’s a black man and Americans as stupid as dirt. No one running for office can tell us the truth about ourselves. They have to tell us we’re noble and intelligent. But the story lies elsewhere. We’re wounded. And we have become a little people, listless and fearful and willing for a Fascist state. And when the Dormouse and his Red Queen ascend the throne, we’re going to have one. People are thrilled to the marrow by Sarah Palin. For me she is a criminal by mere vice of her slaughter of wolves, and her vices are many for one so young. Dems do not get that she has tapped some kind of weird sick erotic Cordelia thing, but I get it loud and clear. John McCain is King Lear and parts of this dumb cluck country (the pro-American parts, perhaps!) have gone ass mad for his Red Queen.

I know and experience this every day of my working life in the vocation that has spanned thirty years now – when people go mad, they fuse sex to religion. I have seen that maenad thing, that taper up of sexual and evangelical fervor that will inevitably signal the downfall of reason and the return to the primitivism of childhood. This is what one may observe in the excitement and resentment of the Palin- McCain rallies. Without her, I do not think we would be seeing this level of mass hysteria. Deny it if you will – it is Germany in the build to the Hitler state. It is the Beast. It is no mere contest – it is the sound of a great and still young nation devouring itself like some unredeemable Quetzalcoatl.

I’m voting tomorrow, lest I die before the fourth of November.