Aug 7, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH07Ak01.htmlPage 1 of 3
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Dying in vain or for George W's daddy?
By Julian Delasantellis
The great 20th-century scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, once wrote of what he called "plastic hours", moments in history so filled with promise and possibilities that all manner of great change for the human race was achievable.
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debate". The moment was not seized on; in fact, it seems more as if the Democratic Party tossed its plastic hour straight into the recycling bin, to sit there as refuse along with the old newspapers and empty beer cans.
The Cable News Network (CNN), attempting to be the very model of a modern major cable news outfit, structured the event so as to have the questions submitted by the real heartland of America or, at least, the part of the real heartland of America that knew how to attach webcams to their computers and then upload the attendant video files to YouTube.
Prior to the actual event, it seemed as though nothing could top the entertainment value of the videos not selected to be posed to the candidates. Among the best of these were a man asking a question about the future US policy in Iraq while wearing a bad-guy wrestler's mask; another man had his parakeet on his shoulder asking another question while standing on some rotating device that produced the effect of the room seeming to spin around him. My favorite was a sophisticated woman in an elegant red evening gown, sitting in an ornate room behind a lovely Queen Anne desk, singing in alto an operatic aria decrying telephone outsourcing.
The most important question of the evening (more so than the questioner with apparent severe eye damage who asked whether Senator Barack Obama was really black or whether Senator Hillary Clinton was really a woman) came from John Cantees, from the state of West Virginia. .....