For the first time ever, the 2008 Republican Convention celebrated unwed teenage motherhood by seating Sarah Palin's reportedly 5-months'

pregnant daughter with her teenage lover, proudly in the VIP row.  As the swollen, 17-year-old Bristol Palin complacently gripped her swarthy impregnator's hand, Alaska's governor and the prospective mother's mother sternly lectured on family values and accused "the media" of persecuting her family.

Has the Republican Party gone mad?

No.  But perhaps it's watched "The Da Vinci Code" too many times.

Are the Republicans returning to the cult of the goddess?

Maybe.  Anything to win the election, right?

The Republican wanna-be First and Second Families made a fascinating tableau, with fertility being unabashedly the message.  Sarah wore a tight choker of fat pearls, the luminous gift of oysters, enhancers of libido and mimics of male anatomy.  Her plain, silvery tunic fit like Joan of Arc's breastplate and set her apart as the GOP's new high priestess.  Cindy McCain, swathed in pearls, wore a bright green outfit—highlighting the Republicans' odd claim to now be champions of global warming.  And green is also the color of fertility, of shimmering, budding springtime woods, of leafy glens and grassy fields where fertility rites took place until authoritarian Christianity wiped it out.  With her tightly-pinched face and platinum hair hanging loose, her older children gathered around her, Cindy stood for fertility well-preserved.

But the frisky Palins are fertility real and present.  Bristol showed

us her tummy, her breasts, her pregnant fulsomeness.   Sarah's

husband, whom she calls "The First Dude," a crow's caw of sexual prowess and desirability, exhibited his softer side by cuddling the infant rumored to actually be his grandchild (by the voluptuous Bristol and her lover), although Sarah claims to be the mother.

If there weren't tricolor flags and people wearing elephant hats, one might think we were at Stonehenge.

How will bright green outfits, bouncy boobies, big bellies, sleeping babies, beehive hairdos, and fecund boyfriends help McCain win the presidency?

Because sex sells; sex wins votes; sex seals the deal.

For a man who photographs a frighteningly pale and pasty white, silvery and slippery-looking as an albino eel, with a shiny noggin'

that gives him the appearance of a hairless Yeti, John McCain has in Sarah Palin and her fecund family what he needs to harness the most to win—health, virility and youth.  And sex.

By adding sex to his agenda, McCain has changed the electoral discourse. Why enter discomfiting debates about whether torture is legal, or whether we can exit from Iraq sooner rather than later, whether the Guantanamo detentions are legal, whether oil prices will ever stabilize, and on and on, when we can stare at Bristol's bursting tummy?  Why fret over America's economic collapse when we can help plan Bristol's wedding in the White House Rose Garden?

Obama went for brains with his veep pick.  But McCain realizes that Americans don't really trust brains.  We're happier with a babe, or a baby, or a babe with a baby, and then the dude who has the babe and the baby (proving just what a truly capable dude he is).  Can McCain deliver this himself?

No.  He's "the Wraith."

But not when he's holding Sarah's baby, or embracing a pregnant teenage babe.

The Republican Convention is not the end of the world.  But it marks the end of a post-war political process that was distinctively conservative, and signals a modern spiral into decadence.  The McCain-Palin sex-fest marks the rise of what sociologists might call "the primitive" in American politics.  Things became too complicated under the Bush Administration.  Rather than admit to state rape, George Bush advertised the Iraq War as the passionate love affair between the rescued maiden and her holy knight.

Instead, like a raped woman, Iraq became angry and complicated.  To win again, Republicans need to create more simple times.  By dressing his wife in spring green, draping Sarah in luminous pearls of the sea, and exhibiting Bristol's pregnant, buxom body and her hockey-playing lover out for all to see, McCain has accomplished a feat he could never have pulled off on his own.  He's challenged the ascetic-looking Obama's virility.  "Where's it at?" McCain's tableau screams to the American voting public.  "Why vote for the skinny Democrat with the 2.0 kids, when you can thrash about in green glens with fertile young goddesses?"

McCain's gambit is dicey.  Hilary Clinton was never a sex symbol.  Her political success comes from the reflected glory of being married to one.  And McCain's gambit comes at a time when many Americans have lost their own young and fertile children in far-away places.

McCain's made a brazen and calculated move, and he may well gain from it.  But will traditional Republican politics survive?