Sometimes music sets the soul free,

more times (much more) it sounds

no more important than the sour

crunch of crickets calling upon

the creator as they are crushed

beneath our feet ... I think listening

to Meghan McCain on television

is more like the latter, as talking 

heads go ... but I think that about

a lot of talking heads on political

subjects.

But now that she has spoken out about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, I am completely relieved one summer activity wasn't a complete waste of time: Such as when I found a free copy of Meghan McCain's book on the 2008 political campaign (published in in 2010), Dirty Sexy Politics. Now, most political books are found real cheap maybe a year or so after they are released. So right now my best advice is always wait to find it that way rather than pay the amazing prices for them in hard cover at the bookstores. This one is (was) $24. Maybe it would have held its value and been harder to find for free if Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wouldn't have been crushed in the 2008 election campaign. But I doubt it. He's still bouncing around, all quite relevant, a national resource, more than just a cartoon character, a Manchurian Candidate or a maverick ... and so ...

Political books are pretty ephemeral. The writers get promoted on the Daily Shows and Colberts and they get to be introduced on talk shows, radio shows and such with a mention they have the books out now. It's quite a calling card. If the American Dream is a fantasy, so then is appearing on these shows as a replacement for heaven, not so much confessing it all but trying to match your wits against the host, like on video games, trying to show us how smart you are ...

Well, you are smart. Sure you are. You are reading this, right, and that must have taken some damn research. And so is Meghan McCain. She's smart, not deep, since she clearly needs a whole bunch more grasp of those things, in this, the post-literate world, of you know, called "history." Yes, she loves her dad. So did about 48 million other people desperately in search of some rational leadership. They have Barack Obama, of course, and he feels their pain, too. But they don't want him to feel their pain. They want any other devil than Mr. Obama to feel their pain. For half a decade now it has been this way, and guess what? Wishes aren't fishes and they don't have a fry, in their minds. So be it.

Anyway, the point is, Ms. McCain's "Dirty Sexy Politics" is not all about her hair and clothes she wore during the campaign and such cool stuff as how she would go all mavericky doing such things as stealing campaign signs. Now, this book is no "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," written during the Nixon/McGovern race in the 1ast century by Hunter S. Thompson. Nope on the gonzo. Nope. Nope. Nope. Even though the title is "Dirty Sexy Politics" the style is much, much, well, salon-washed, in terms of being a piece of literature. Times are different now. Clarity is everything. Hair style is, too.

Moving on ... Let me set the scene a little. The McCain campaign staff goes to Tortilla Flat, which in addition to being a spot in the Superstition Mountains southeast of Phoenix, also is a kind of book tourist trap restaurant outside of Nashua, New Hampshire. There is a giant theme restaurant sized giant cactus at the restaurant near the border of Massachusetts, along a part of the highway where the whole region seems to be a all zoned for these kinds of big feeds for busloads, as I recall.

One thing we are told in the book is it's election day, the primary, and McCain is running against Mitt Romney, perennial loser, but laughing with the bankers, all the same. Tortilla Flat is such an anonymoplace Ms. McCain "didn't bother putting any makeup on. I was so happy not to have to get up at the crack of dawn and be a daughter-of prop who waved in a cute outfit."

Okay, so after that, "on the way back to the hotel, we noticed a street corner with a bunch of Mitt Romney signs. His signs were everywhere, wherever you looked in New Hampshire. I'd gotten pretty sick of them. Somebody from the Romney campaign had even put a ton of their signs right outside our campaign hotel, too, knowing that we were all inside and forced to look at them. So when we saw a bunch of Romney signs on that corner on election day, and nobody else was around, we asked our driver to pull over. We got out of the car and walked over to the signs - planning to put them all in our trunk.

Stealing campaign signs is technically illegal, but I never thought anyone would enforce this. Nor did I expect we'd get caught. But just as we had pulled over and I shoved a ton of Romney signs into our trunk, another car pulled up and blocked us. A super-dorky guy in a suit leaped out of his car. He was pissed as hell.

'What campaign are you with?' he yelled.

'Guliani,' we said."

~

Now at this point it might be a good idea where, exactly, Meghan McCain comes from. I grew up in the same general vicinity, so hey, please allow me to introduce myself, "Sympathy for the Devil" style. The simplest way to do is somewhere ensconced in the North Phoenix Mountains, near what is now called Piestewa Peak, around where the likes of Alice Cooper, Gordy Hormel and yes, the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, the extreme libertarian is just awe-right-by-me guy, once had a homw but currently is a statue ... at the corner of Tatum and Lincoln in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and it's a nice place to live.

~