Culture Wars for Losers

Although this blog does not generally delve into political issues, I'm going to suspend that unofficial policy just long enough to attempt to articulate what is most heartrending for me about the upcoming election. Ironically, my feelings resonate on some level with a previous commenter's rather snarky remark about "the losers in life."

In a recent blog post, Tertium Quid suggests that, though the culture wars may be waged by intellectuals, their rank and file members are those who consider themselves, in some sense, to be numbered among the aforementioned losers:

If Barack Obama expresses aspirations bottled, stifled, busted, almost lost, and possibly resurrected, Sarah Palin expresses such things for a different kind of voter. Governor Palin will suffer much during the next few weeks, an intense dose of what Senator Obama has become numb to, if not used to. I am afraid . . . that we are going to have a brutal election because a vocal and malicious minority in each party is sure that America is too small a country to nurture the aspirations of both those who cheer Senator Obama and those who nod their heads and smile at the words of Governor Palin.

So Obama and Palin (let's face it, the election is really between them) personify the intense longing of those on each side who believe that they have lost in the culture wars and that their time has now come. The sad thing is, neither Obama nor Palin, nor any other politician in post-utopian American, can fulfill that longing, which is, in many ways, not political but spiritual.