Originally Publushed As
On the Not-So-Open Road With McCain and Palin
Washington Square News
By Aaron Leonard
Monday, October 20, 2008
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anyone to think I favor John McCain over Barack Obama — it’s just that McCain’s candidacy captures something basic about the state of the country. That’s why when Palin and McCain went around campaigning last week, I threw together my traveling bag so I could get on the bus with them. Boy did I make the right choice!
On the bus heading south, the first stop was Arizona, John’s home state. This was an opportunity for Sarah to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. She explained how the canyon is a “miracle” and the legacy of the Great Flood. She then told me of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. She said one of her favorite displays was a diorama of “Pecos Jesus” riding on a wild stegosaurus. This was a lot of new information coming at me in a short time.
We traveled through the night heading toward Texas, a land of chili cook-offs, longhorn cattle and the death penalty. A state so big it can hold Dick Cheney’s aspirations for a unitary executive. John and Sarah were in Texas to visit the “Verily I Will Smite Thee Disobedient Child: Home School Library of South Dallas.” I got to say, the place was a little intimidating. In front of the building was a figure of a colonial-era woman in the stocks.
When we went inside, I was struck by how few books it had. Of course there were bibles. Beyond that there was a series of pamphlets, with titles like, “Satan’s Evolutionary Plan for Children,” “Listen to Your Fetus (To Tell You What To Do)” and “Condoms Lead to Crack: What Every Kid Should Know.” I pocketed a few to read on the bus.
We detoured north to Missouri and headed for a stop in Branson. We saw a large ferris wheel on the horizon — Missouri’s “Waterboard Park.” As we drove by the entrance, I spied a billboard of George Bush proclaiming, “We Don’t Torture … We Rock.” Sarah wanted to stop, but time was tight, and John seemed a little uncomfortable, so we kept driving.
There was a lot of downtime on the bus and I got a front-row lesson in morality. Someone popped in a copy of “Knocked Up.” John was rolling at the jokes, but Sarah didn’t seem amused. They both told me that the young man in the movie did the right thing by asserting his fatherhood. This was obviously close to home for Sarah.
“If men,” she said, “seem to be randy, irresponsible jerks, it’s all part of the plan to fill the earth with God’s love. I believe pregnancy is the new abstinence.”
John nodded his head approvingly.
Heading south again, we entered New Orleans and John and Sarah both became somber. They began talking about the horror of Katrina and how the government had let people down. I asked them about the people who at the time said Katrina was “God’s work” and they both became visibly irritated.
“That kind of talk is irresponsible. There are just some things you can’t ascribe to God,” John said.
I asked Sarah about her own beliefs and her worries about her son Track, who is getting deployed to Iraq.
“Well,” she said, “it’s like I told the Alaskan newspapers, the troops in Iraq are ‘on a task that is from God.’ ”
Pressed for more, she looked at me very seriously and said, “We don’t know for sure, but we do know that God sits at the head of the table at the big National Security Council in the sky. That’s good enough for me.”
As we wrapped up the trip I was reminded of the favorite punchline of ’80s comedian Yakov Smirnoff, whom we saw in Branson, complete with his zany Russian accent, “America, what a country!”
The preceding is a work of fiction. Though it may seem older, it was in fact written over the course of the last six days.
A.J. Leonard is a contributing columnist. E-mail responses to opinion@nyunews.com.