Oliver Goldsmith has been decaying too long to be dug up for any of the Sunday morning talk shows. But if you could grind George Will or Pat Buchanan to a fine powder, and sprinkle it over Oliver Goldsmith’s grave, and thereby transform Goldsmith the dead poet into Goldsmith the talking-head network zombie, Sunday morning TV would get a lot more intelligent.

Goldsmith alive had a nose for mortality, decay, deserted houses, and faded glory. Goldsmith undead would be even more sensitive to those things. No one could equal him for insights into John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Goldsmith would see the implications of McCain’s empty houses, his time buried alive in Hanoi, his love of money, and his age. Goldsmith himself died at age 46, so he would likely regard McCain as a kind of weird living fossil, a Paleozoic curiosity dug out of a hollow in a Welsh coal mine. Were he to be assured that 70 is the new 50, Goldsmith would turn his weary zombie’s eyes to the camera, shrug, and say, “And your point is?”

Goldsmith would be sensitive to that moment at which ambition breaks against decreasing mental and physical powers. Poets attend to these moments, when mortality has outpaced awareness, when courage is hollowed out by irony, when the stage-lights dim and the gods giggle in the wings.

When Jack Nicholson was told of Heath Ledger’s death-by-overdose, he smiled and said, “I warned him.” What Jack warned Heath about was left unsaid, but I think it was to just play the Joker, not become the Joker. If you actually become the Joker, you might not get the greasepaint off. You might fall victim to the forces you exemplify.

Ever since I saw John McCain’s deathly white face behind dark limousine glass and flashed on Jack Nicholson saying, “I’ve been dead once. It was...therapy,” I’ve been worried that John McCain The Maverick is really John McCain The Joker, and McCain doesn’t have enough experience as an actor to get the greasepaint off.

McCain’s support of the nation of Georgia’s ill-fated attack on South Ossetia was a move worthy of the Joker. The Joker makes small moves that result in big things going wrong, and it’s tempting to imagine George Bush and Condi Rice in the Oval Office, dressed up in black rubber bat-suits, saying to each other, “What’s he done now? How we gonna stop this guy?”

When George Romero needed long-distance crowd scenes for his zombies-in-the-mall movie, he used old footage from mall security cameras. He knew what a crowd of shopping Americans looks like at a hundred yards. Stumbling, staring, clutching torn packages, driven by unappeasable hunger, no one can tell how many times these people have been dead before being reanimated by a new credit card or a second mortgage or even a second marriage.

When a Haitian voodoo-master wants to create a zombie, he gives his victim tetrodotoxin, which creates a death-like paralysis, and datura, a nightmare-producing hallucinogen. Then the victim, aware but unable to move, is buried alive. Two days later he’s dug up and told he’s dead.

The emotional trauma is so great that the victim’s personality dissociates into discrete fragments, each desperate for its own house. Old loyalties, to loved ones, clan, or country, are gone.

When an American voodoo-master wishes to keep his victim in a trance, he administers heavy doses of money, the most hallucinogenic drug of all. Under its influence, a zombie will do anything he’s told to do, even as his body and brain fail and fall to pieces. Looking at John McCain, knowing how many times he’s come back from the dead, knowing how hungry he looks, and knowing how contagious his condition is, I’m waiting for the George Romero documentary on the Republican Convention. I’m waiting to watch John McCain walk across the main stage and crush Sarah Palin in a finger-splayed embrace. Then he’ll sink his teeth into Palin’s armpit. No computerized special effects needed for this scary movie.