evil glee

I've been listening with glee to all the news of Barack Obama's overseas adventure, meanwhile John McCain languishes here at home, petulantly whining about the dearth of coverage his dull escapades are attracting. I hate to be an ageist here, but I have to note how marked is the distinction between the two candidates: Barack Obama -- fresh, beaming, lusty and confident, and John McCain -- stooped, flaccid, pale and timorous. Of course the cameras love Obama. He's better on film. He's better on tape, his voice sonorous and deep compared with John McCain's thin whine. I giggled when I read of the scene in which McCain rolled along in a golf cart with George Bush Sr. and together they "looked more like fellow members of a Past Presidents’ Club than a party elder passing the torch to his political heir."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/us/politics/23watch.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin)

And I feel slightly evil. It is a poor human soul that takes such pleasure in the discomfort and suffering of another. But it is so dreadfully hard for me to feel sorry for Republicans. This sentiment reminds me of a passage from a fantastic book I just finished by Anne Lamott called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" (the book really deserves it's own special blog post, thick with favorite quotes and analysis). Lamott writes:

"I keep wanting to do what Martin Luther King taught us -- to walk in love, to love the racist and hate the racism --but I must say, it is not going very well these days. I am often beside myself with hate. I have a quote of his on the wall over my desk that says, 'Let us not despair. Let us not lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed and that man, by the grace of God can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love.' But I sometimes despair. My hatred of American conservatives apparently sustains and defines me as much as my love of Jesus does, since I don't think I'm willing to have it removed. Who would I be without it? I know I'm as much a part of the problem as anyone else and that we're all like the people in that old Dylan song who think God is on their side. Part of me does not want Sam to be like this at all, and part of me thinks that it's right and important to scorn and revile the conservatives, because --well, because they're bad, or at least their wrong."

I confess that I am far from Martin's so-called mountain of love. It's sick, but I relish the thrill of scorn and judgement from time to time. And the ultimate irony in all this is that the very thing I hate most about conservatives is their judgement.