Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going and what do you wish?” the old moon asked the three.
“We’ve come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we,” said Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod.

I first encountered this charming nursery rhyme in an old blue book my father’s parents bought for him shortly after the First World War.  It came back to me in a Sunday school class a couple of days ago. 

Before class, everyone wanted to talk about Sarah Palin’s winking (or “winkin'” as Sarah would say) during her debate with Joe Biden.  It struck me that Sarah was associated with both winkin’ and blinkin’: recall her boast to Charlie Gibson that she hadn’t blinked when John McCain asked her to be his VP and she wouldn’t blink in the face of terrorists. 

The Sunday school class began.  “Where is your brother?” God asks Cain.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” the murderer replies. 

“Don’t mess with me,” God barks back.  “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

One would think (this being the Old Testament and all) that fire and brimstone would make short work of the world’s first murderer.  But Bible stories rarely unfold the way we suppose they should.  Cain sidesteps a death sentence; instead he is banished from Paradise as “a fugitive and a wanderer upon the earth.”

Cain says the punishment is too severe. “Whoever finds me will slay me,” he laments.

And so, we read, “The LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him.”

The story ends with Cain wandering far from the presence of the LORD “in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

On cue, the internal soundtrack playing in the back of my head shifted to the pop version of the old pop song: “Winkin and Blinkin and Nod one night, sailed off in a wooden shoe . . .”

The subconscious mind makes odd and arbitraryt associations.  Was there any relation between the winkin’ blinkin’ Ms. Palin and the land of Nod?

Nod, as John Steinbeck well understood, is the non-Eden, the anti-Paradise; a place defined by the absence of God.  In Nod, folks would just as soon kill as stranger as look at him.  Cain is in danger in Nod because he is an exile from paradise who doesn’t talk, walk or think like the natives.

As I write, three of the four most viewed Washington Post articles are about Sarah Palin . . . all are negative.  With the economy in free fall, the pundits point out, the Alaskan Governor is trying to change the subject by hanging a 60s radical and a radical preacher around the neck of Barack Obama. 

Richard Cohen wonders aloud why his colleagues in Punditland are so taken with John McCain’s Pitbull?  “In effect,” he writes, “columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and digital lamplighters have adopted the ethic of the political consultant: what works, works. It did not matter what Palin said. It only mattered how she said it.”

Dana Milbank chronicles the verbal misteps Palin has committed on the campaign trail, pointing with concern to the angry crowds who cheer her every word.  The media are being jeered.  Folks advocate the murder of a Democratic presidential candidate who “palls around” with domestic terrorists, hates the troops and lies about cutting taxes.

Finally, Eugene Robinson decries the politics of distraction.  “We also know that no matter how skeptical we are when we write about bogus allegations, writing about them at all gives them wider circulation. So when Palin questions Obama’s love of country because Obama knows somebody who did something unpatriotic when Obama was 8, our free-market ethos makes us rush to cover her every ridiculous word. We also find ways to convey that this is pure mudslinging and nothing but a cynical campaign tactic, but that doesn’t matter to the McCain campaign. What matters is that we’re writing and talking about this extraneous stuff — and not about the issues that polls say voters really care about.”

As Robinson surely realizes, his column is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon he describes.  As our economic Rome burns, Robinson and his friends are fiddling around with Sarah.

Is Sarah Palin really as dangerous as the chattering classes would have us believe?  Does she come to us from an Alaskan Eden, or is her true dwelling east of Eden?

The media, unsurprisingly, is divided on the question.  Few show much interest in Palin’s ideas.  She is the woman who drops a wink, refuses to blink, drops her g’s, talks about killing moose and defending Joe Sixpack and lipstick and high heels, and sounds more like a PTA president than a serious politician.  She’s “got it”, she’s entertaining and she knows how to wow a crowd.  In Rockstar America, who could ask for anything more?

I agree that Sarah’s “got it”, but I am far more interested in her ideas.  I’m not talking so much about her take on the great questions of the day.  She seems on solid ground discussing Alaskan oil policy; otherwise she’s utterly at sea.  As I watched the Katie Couric interviews my heart went out to a woman who had been thrown into deep water without a single swimming lesson.

But Sarah Palin has lots of ideas.  She has Noddian ideas.  She draws a line between us and them, prounouncing a benediction on the us people and releasing the hounds on “them”. 

Here’s Sarah Palin on John McCain’s African American opponent: “This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.  I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”

Yesterday, Palin was introduced at a Florida rally by a burly white Sheriff who saluted the crowd while emphasizing Obama’s them-sounding middle name.  Just another sign that the man from Kenya, Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Kansas and Chicago isn’t one of us. 

If Barack Obama is numbered with the “them” people, so am I.  I have the good fortune of being a white man, but I grew up in the wrong country.  Like Sarah Palin, I was raised around snowmobiles, fishing rods, and lakes that are frozen for most of the year.  But it wasn’t Alaska; it was the Northwest Territories of Canada.  I became an American citizen a few months ago.  But I wonder if that’s enough.  Am I a real American?

Like Barack Obama, I don’t always hang out with the right kind of people.  I can often be found in the company of accused criminals.  Having concluded that our criminal justice system is broken and must be fixed, I often find myself cross-ways with the people who stand between Middle America and the criminal classes–prosecutors and police officers.  Do my friends and my adversaries mark me as one of “them”?  Does seeing America as a great but tragically broken nation make me almost as dangerous as the traitorous black candidate?

While researching my doctoral dissertation, I spent long hours pouring over ancient copies of the Western Recorder (the state newspaper of Kentucky Baptists).  In the early 1950s, the paper had a question-and-answer section written, under a pseudonym, by one of the female editors–women weren’t supposed to teach men, a position the Southern Baptist Convention has recently ratified. 

A reader wanted to know what this “mark of Cain” business was all about and the editor gave the then-standard answer.  It was explained that Cain, the world’s first fratricide, was the father of the Negro race; his mark, therefore, was black skin.  Which accounted, the editor wrote, for some of the character flaws associated with Negro folk.

How could a disciple of Jesus Christ be associated with such a hateful and benighted opinion?  How fortunate that such Noddian theology has gone the way of the Dodo.

Or has it?  With the world economy a smoking ruin, desperate politicians change the subject by tossing Noddian dots onto the floor and praying we have the good sense to connect them. 

My concern is not with Republicans, Democrats and the issues that divide them.  As I have often said, the twisted shape of our criminal justice system is a thoroughly bipartisan accomplishment.  I’m asking where we are going as a nation.  Do we see Eden shimmering the distant horizon, a vision of what might yet be; or are we wandering far from God, east of Eden in the land of Nod?