N+1 has an interesting article on the RNC:

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.

To understand the trick worked, you must see the core conceit: that John McCain is already dead. Nominee Palin’s speech was a memorial. Her strange phrases conjuring the Presidential nominee as the kind of fellow whose name you will find on war memorials in small towns across this country hung fire, on screens across the country and in the convention hall, until she qualified them—only he was among the ones who came home. The true feeling was that he did not: that somewhere on a town green beneath a motionless flag you can find his name inscribed in stone.

Presuming that McCain, given his age, will not live through one term Mr Grief pens further:

Above all, the mythology must prove that the man in the flesh, standing before you, is not the man who matters. He is larger than this; his blood has been spilled and his spirit loosed; we will be washed in his blood. Is it a Christian allegory? McCain can’t lift his arms high enough to be pinned to a cross. It is all loose revelation: he died for us; he is the Great Papa in the sky; he was a man, but it’s all right if he should disappear; he is spread out in the soil, and above the clouds; this time, it is Country First.

Now I find this not the least bit uninteresting, particularly the idea of a President Palin and her extension of the George W. legacy. However vilified that story may sound, there are competing narratives typified by the essay A Truman for out Times which is talking about you know who. Plus, if we are to buy this whole narrative angle that the more leftist leaning academes have been pushing these days (an idea, frankly, I think has great appeal), then we cannot neglect the Obama mythology.

Hope, of course is nothing short of an eschatological claim which is building on the classic mythology of American progress, a myth underscored by the quantity of melanin in Obama’s skin. It doesn’t help that the mythology is hip and we find ourselves shamed into thinking he is the right man for the job (such has been my experience at least). We should not, however, neglect how fantastic it is that a black man can be taken seriously in politics, but this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that both sides are using the Elightenment project’s eschatology, they just dress it differently. 

Asking for Atlas (i.e.) is naive, it is only asking for the myth of Sisyphus in a different form. I do, however, know a guy but that is another story.