From the Sportsdesk...

by Mills-McCoin

“For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”
-Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer followed this first paragraph with an additional... eh, 13,800 words or so in an essay that appeared in Esquire’s November issue in 1960- weeks before John F. Kennedy was elected President. In the essay, that many critics say (?) marked the beginning of a new genre of political journalism, Mailer’s idealism drove him mad about the nation’s need for the fresh and new perspective that was JFK. Mailer was cutthroat. Unashamed. Unwavering. Hateful of the many years of conventional government and politics. But Hopeful for change.
In his lengthy creed of “hipsterism” that clearly influenced the rest of the Sixties, Mailer called out for a hero. A man he called, “the edge of mystery” and “a great box office actor.” The essay was titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”.

Okay let’s stop here... and discuss the elephant in the room.

Obviously, Norman Mailer was NOT referring to JFK. Norman Mailer was talking about uh Barack Obama.
Somehow Norman Mailer saw the future. Maybe he watched every episode of the soap opera called Holy Shit!: The 2008 Presidential Election. Maybe he caught reruns of How Is This Happening?: The W Years. I don’t know. I can only speculate,... which is very fun to do.
But somehow Norman Mailer saw America’s maddening crave for a hero in 2008, as well as in 1960. An animate figure, possibly from Earth, to save our souls and cancel our entire 8-year-debt of fuck ups with his American Express Red White and Blue Card. A man (maybe, who knows) to solve all of our problems: heal the sick, feed the poor, and put cash in the hands of people that don’t spend it well anyway! Hope! Change! Amen! Hollalelujiah!


Like us... Norman Mailer and the rest of 1960 America got their Hero. He was tall. Handsome. Had a place in Cape Cod. He was Catholic (that was weird). I think he had a birthday once... But in his mere three years as President, JFK didn’t change the things that America had hoped he would. Instead, supporters like Norman Mailer, found him to be the same old hat that smelled of War, Depression, and Fear. To idealists, JFK turned out to be just a politician, not a hero.
In “The Presidential Papers”, Mailer jotted down this of Kennedy: "he had the face of a potential hero, but he embodies nothing, he personifies nothing, he is power, rather a quizzical power, without light or principle."
In the end they shot him.

Here’s my point:
1960 America expected one man, JFK, to change the fortunes of an entire nation. Almost half a century later, We are expecting the same Fourth Quarter Hail Mary from President Obama.
Breaking News: Superman is not real. Cheers.