Rhetorical Questions Department

Can't find a credit for this painter, evidently 20th-century and perhaps Mormon? It depicts Jesus teaching a very young, bearded McCain to waltz in the water, for some dream-logic reason in the Verde river near Sedona.

Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars on Sunday morning:

So why on earth is John McCain on my screen again, for the tenth time this year?

What the hell is that? Lack of imagination? Lack of creativity? Or is it more likely a lack of interest in having any kind of real conversation or discussion of the issues?

My vote is the latter.

This negative view is undoubtedly correct, but it cannot answer the question completely, since it would be easy to have a television program with no real conversation or discussion of the issues without John McCain. Indeed, a lack of real conversation and discussion of [jump]
the issues is practically the main distinguishing characteristic of television as a whole: the only significant difference is that the Sunday morning shows usually have John McCain, and the rest of the week usually doesn't.

Another less conventional way of looking at the problem might be to take it as given that television needs for some reason to have John McCain on, ideally at least once a week, and begin our inquiry by asking why Sunday morning is the chosen time.

We know that back in the beginning of time Sunday morning was a television desert, with no cartoons other than the homiletic animation of Davy and Goliath (a kind of Perpendicular Gothic or Pre-Raphaelite Calvin and Hobbes, if memory serves) and the like. It was devoted in fact to Christianity, with programming for elderly shut-ins who couldn't go to church and children whose infidel parents refused to take them. The only break in this dreary routine was NBC's Meet the Press, which was if anything even drearier; it must have been meant for Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists, who had valid excuses for not going to church on Sunday, as a way of feeding them some commercials without breaking the requisite solemnity of the moment or tempting First-Day Christians** to stay home.

In any event, it is clear that the original impetus for Sunday morning TV was not so much religious as engaged with religion, as trying to find an answer for what to do with the long hours that fill the Lord's Day before you can get to noon, brunch, and golf. Nowadays, when cartoons are everywhere, and NBC's bobblehead show is only one of a dozen, these origins are not so clear.

Of McCain, now, there can be no doubt that he is a primarily religious figure, the first presidential candidate in US history to come out and openly declare whether or not he intended to undergo a full-immersion baptism after the election (the answer was no).

Some other famous McCain utterances on religious subjects, on his time as a POW:

I was selected to be room chaplain because I had an abundance of religiosity... I had gone to church all my life. I had gone to an Episcopal school where we went to church chapel every morning. I went to the Naval Academy where chapel attendance was mandatory. I knew all of the words to the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed. So I had an ability to lead a church service.

And on Islam:

I admire the Islam. There's a lot of good principles in it. 

So perhaps the need to keep booking him is itself religious in character, part of an effort to keep some of that sacred Sunday-morning character alive. My idea is that McCain has become the sole raison d'être of the programs at this point in their evolution; that what they really are is a kind of multi-network reality show in which the different channels compete to see which of them can get him to come on. Then Gregory sees Stephanopoulos at some Georgetown party and says, "Ha, ha, George, I got McCain again on Sunday. What've you got?"

Pope John XXIV. Image by Longhairedbum at DeviantArt.

*Seventh-Day Adventists used to prove to an audience—for all I know they still do—that Saturday was really the Sabbath consecrated in the Ten Commandments by inviting you to look at any calendar, so you could see that (assuming God had dictated the format) Sunday was plainly the first day of the week. 

1. In the beginning God turned on the TV but it all sucked, and God said, "It is not good." 2. On the second day God created the heavens and the earth...