Chronicle of a Convention Foretold

  They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row 

 

–Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” 

  Monday, July 26, 2004; Canal Street, Boston, 3 pm. 

A hundred yards from the Fleet Center, the epicenter of Kerry-Edwards04, stands the already infamous “free speech zone,” or “protest pen,” the bizarre jerry-rigged assemblage of chain link fence, overhead netting, and coiled barbed wire strung up beneath the rotting girders of the old elevated highway. The protest element at the convention has by and large eschewed going inside, and the cops have been cool about letting us Jacobins gather against the steel gates separating the bewigged and powdered caste from the mob; but this afternoon, the pen is the chosen den of the self-styled Vermin Supreme: gadfly, provocateur, and presidential candidate to boot. The bearded elf is festooned with clumps of red tinsel, fake buttocks, and stars-‘n-stripes bunting wrapped around his waist; a magnificent satanic mask is propped backwards on his grizzled head. Vermin stands against the east fence speaking authoritatively into a bullhorn, addressing delegates giddily descending from buses and limousines as they arrive at the Fleet for the first time: “Welcome, delegates. Due to increased security precautions, all delegates are subject to a full cavity rectal search. Please be ready to bend over upon entering the facility.”   

 

I can’t refrain from telling a woman standing nearby how truly funny I find this. She beams. “Seventeen years,” she says. “I’ve been married to that man for seventeen years.”  She also confides that his current routine, involving the full cavity search, “came to him” when they were busy haranguing passersby at George W. Bush’s inauguration. When I ask what Vermin does in terms of a full-time occupation, she shrugs. “This,” she says, gesturing to where Vermin is demonstrating to some members of the press how the overhead netting prevents him from tossing plastic water bottles at the delegates. “A lot of this.”  

 Yes, the circus is in town. The Herald, our local tabloid, was promising a Dantesque landscape of endless traffic jams, raging protesters, and herds of boorishly clad Democratic delegates, but they went only one-for-three: on Monday the streets are eerily empty of traffic, and the protesters have been raucous but respectful of property. As for the delegates’ wardrobes, well, they’ve got nothing on the official DNC volunteers who roam the streets and haunt the alleys around the Fleet Center in gleaming white polo shirts emblazoned with the inspiring message: “The GILLETTE Company and Boston welcome you!” 

Gillette was the first local company to pony up a million dollars to the convention.

 

The DNC ordered 15,000 shirts. 

 

But the coronation of a candidate-elect officially sanctioned by a can of shaving cream will be the logical endpoint of an event which tosses up the sacred and profane as though they were salad ingredients. Here, though, they do not collide; instead, as events unfold in the street, the ridiculous continuously reveals glimpses of the sublime, and vice versa, in the best traditions of carnival.

 

Distinguishing between sublimity, tragedy, and farce was going to require shrewder eyes than mine, I realized when I left my office earlier this afternoon  and walked the half block to Tremont St., where Dennis Kucinich was finishing a speaking engagement on civil liberties at St. Paul’s Church, directly across the street from the Park St subway entrance. The subway station itself is protected by MPs who are unarmed but, for some odd reason, wearing jungle fatigues, rendering them fit for counterinsurgency operations in the Public Gardens but indistinguishable from many of the homeless folk who frequent the park and who remain utterly disinterested in the political goings on. On the sidewalk in front of the Church, the LaRouche people were distributing a 48-page publication titled, “Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism,” which notes,  among sundry items The Herald has not reported, that Dick Cheney is the “Beast-Man” foretold by Friedrich Nietzsche and sprung full-blown from the mottled thighs of Leo Strauss. They, in turn, were surrounded by members of the Progressive Labor Party, who stormed about in a circle chanting, “Power to the working class / Kick the bosses in the ass!,” which may yet turn out to be the soundest and most practical advice I hear all week.  T-shirt vendors were on the sidewalk flogging a shirt imploring, “Kerry don’t make me vote for Nader,” for “I will not vote for war.”  When a limousine pulled up and Jesse Jackson Sr. was whisked out, the young marxists surrounded the car and hurled invective at the aging preacher.   Such is political discourse at the millennium.

 

 But, too, such is life in any big city on any given afternoon; a political convention simply raises the routine craziness a few notches; a few straight days of 98-degree heat will have a similar effect. Life on the city streets is messy, emotional, and unpredictable—the opposite, in fact, of life inside the Fleet Center, where both the sublime and the ridiculous have been banished, to be replaced, en toto, by Pathos. History will tell us whether what transpires within represents the banality of evil or of good, but the essential banality of the event is already beyond question. That whole show inside, which I am forced to watch on TV, reminds me of nothing so much as a Christian rock concert on ‘luudes. Given their druthers, the Democratic Party whips would render the entire town as antiseptic as is their convention. The newspapers report that Margaret Cho was unceremoniously dumped from her planned stint at a gala sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign for gay Democrats–the party hacks aren’t taking any chances with any type of shenanigans this week, not after the hash FOX and The NY Post made out of Whoopie’s faux pas last week. And the [Grateful] Dead, who’d been invited to entertain at Patrick Kennedy’s swanky soiree at the same club—Avalon—also found them themselves uninvited. Quoth young Patrick following a trip to the woodshed and what must have been a good dressing down by his elders: “When the press started writing about the event as a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll event, the campaign didn’t think we should have that, so now we’re trying to find another band.”  God help us.  

 

The sacred and the profane: later I pause on my way across Boston Common’s Parade Grounds to watch as the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit is uncased and deployed. By the time the curators are done, 907 pairs of combat infantry boots, each tagged with the name of one dead soldier, his age and her hometown, will line up in perfectly spaced rows all too reminiscent of Arlington. It’s the finest tribute I’ve ever seen, and part of its beauty lies in very ephemerality–by nightfall it will have been packed up and gone, as fleeting as young lives snapped short in some desert town. Ghost boots for ghosts. Perhaps the saddest element is the black-lettered sign which notes that these shoes represent the 907 American soldiers killed in Iraq: “907” is printed on another piece of paper and crudely pasted over the previous number. When did the number change last? This morning? Yesterday? A few days ago? And what was the previous number? How many times has that been number been changed?

 

When I pass by again later, all 1814 boots have been arranged in meticulously measured lines that add up to one truly charged tableau as the sun sets over the Common, but I can’t help but think of how they’d look laid out across the Convention Floor. Imagine: instead of whooping it up from the stage as though it’s halftime at the Super Bowl and some tired schlock-rock outfit is about to rock the house, speakers stand quietly amidst the flotsam of war and speak in measured ways that befit a nation at war. Because we are most certainly a nation that strives to remain blissfully unaware that we are in a state of ongoing, ugly war, and a war against a national insurgency; the kind of grinding, ceaseless battle that produces casualties one … by  … one … by one, until that slow but steady casualty rate starts to seem the natural order of things—rather like the daily reports, buried in the back pages, of Palestinians murdered in the West Bank and Gaza. Large-scale killing still draws our attention: the car bomb in Baghdad or Tel Aviv never fails to make the front page, but the steady drip … drip … drip of casualties, soldiers and civilians alike: that is the most numbing of all.    

 

Ralph Nader spoke like that—somberly, austerely–when I saw him last Friday at Harvard. I thought: this is a serious person. Even more startling, Mr. Nader spoke to us as though we, too, were serious people. He did not tell us that the proper response to war was to “go shopping.” He did not lead us in a sickening call-and-response a la “Help is on the way!” Ralph did not blanch at the idea that we are a nation at war. Of course you need must remember that Ralph is himself engaged in making jihad against transnational corporations, the Democratic Party, tobacco, The Greens, the Bushies, commercial soft-core pornographers, Ariel Sharon, Michael Moore, and pretty much anyone else making headlines these days. Nader is nothing if not an equal-opportunity Isaiah. Listening to him, I found myself in near-perfect agreement with most everything he said—as does Congressman Kucinich, who noted this week that “My politics are not just similar [to Ralph Nader’s]; they’re identical.”  Dennis interprets this as reason to support Kerry. 

 

But as important as what he said was how he said it, and where he said it, and how different Nader’s politics look and feel from the holllow stagecradt of the Democratic Party. Ralph walked into an old lecture hall at Harvard, stood behind a plastic banner tacked up near the blackboard (cost: $0. Cost of renovating Fleet for Convention: $14 million) and instead of mounting a grand podium in which to declaim to the choir, he talked “as a man speaking to men”—actually debating with various Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists in the crowd. I’d never seen anything quite like it—not since taking part in a discussion with Mario Cuomo years ago—and I’ll admit it, I was downright giddy when I walked out, I was positively smote. Ralph is angry—he’s my idea of a great dinner guest, but probably not yours. He’s not one for niceties, and his comments to students could border on rudeness; but even when he got worked up into full-scale Old Testament prophet mode, crying in the wilderness and damning the king gone whoring after graven images, he was wholly devoid of what he himself scorned as “pontificating bullshit.”  I would have liked to have seen Ralph here in Boston over the course of the Convention proper, but, having been denied both an observer pass and a broadcast reporter’s pass—understandably enough, given his announcement “I would like to see the bazaar. I’d like to see the alcoholic-musical-political payoff bazaar of accounts receivable”—Ralph is spending the time writing in DC and campaigning in Washington. In any case, his campaign manager has made it clear that “He didn’t waste time sitting around watching the convention.” 

 

 And about that bazaar? Well, if you listened to Kerry the day after he won New Hampshire, you’d have to assume Ralph was just making it all up.  After all, Kerry promised us, that giddy morning, that “I have a message for the influence peddlers, for the polluters, the HMOs, the big drug companies that get in the way, the big oil and the special interests who now call the White House their home: we’re coming, you’re going — and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”   But according to Micah Silfry and Nancy Waltzman something funny happened on the way to the forum, because “the top donors to the Democratic convention committee include at least 19 giant financial firms … seven big pharmaceutical companies … four telecom corporations … one defense contractor … and one tobacco company.” Sounds to me like Kerry took the door right off the damn hinges. And when it comes to donations, “twenty-one companies are major givers to both parties convention committees.” (“Fifteen Weeks and Counting: How millions of dollars will buy influence in New York and Boston,” www.laweekly.com).

 

Now, admittedly, sometimes politicians are mistaken—you know, when they receive, ummm, “faulty intelligence.” Or are “misled,” the way Kerry and especially Edwards were when they were running about the country screaming about the need to go into Iraq. Sometimes they are disingenuous—as when they make an absolute case for a given someone being an “imminent threat” and later point out that they never used the terms consecutively in a sentence. And sometimes they lie outright. It’s not really polite to point that out, especially when so many folks are having such a goshdarn tootin’ good time, but here ya go: this is John Kerry lying. And brazenly at that. That seems to bother the Democrats not a whit. 

 

Well, unlike Mr. Nader, I did my waste time watching the affair inside the Fleet on the TV, though it sure wasn’t easy after the boots. Or maybe it doubly difficult because after that we went to East Cambridge and the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Gallery for the opening of the “Shocked and Awed” exhibit. Here the survivors of war speak for themselves, through their art;  and the artwork on the walls here is that of Iraqi schoolchildren. In one, the Tigris runs red. In another, a missile heads towards a stand of palm trees, and from within comes the plaintive caption, “WE ARE NOT GILTY.”  There are many explosions, much blood, and many dead people. Christ, there’s a damn good chance that some of the kids who drew these things met their own deaths at the wrong end of a precision-guided missile. 

 

I haven’t seen a single delegate at the boots display yet, and not one is here either, though the place is jammed (Howard Zinn is supposed to speak later). There’s even free wine, which should be enough to draw a few delegates–based on the amount of crap with which they’ve festooned themselves, they will apparently graze on anything that isn’t nailed down (the worst of it—the red, white and blue buttons bearing the CNN logo that flocks of brain-dead college students are being paid to pass out in front of the Fleet. And the delegates, get this, they’re WEARING the damn things.  You really need to see your Democratic leaders and delegates up close and herded together to realize how truly bovine they are. Somehow it doesn’t help me at all to know that the porcine mass of sweaty pink flesh and swinish eyes that will trot round the Republican Convention would be even more Boschean).  

 

But look at the dollars—estimated at upwards of $20 million–being lavished on their feedbags: 300 private breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties, with nearly 50 extravaganzas costing $100K or more, thrown by the same corporate influencemongers an obviously confused, deluded, or mendacious Kerry announced no longer have a part to play in American politics.  I can understand why the delegates and politicians might not want to make the trek way out here to this unfashionable neighborhood located across a wasteland from Kendall Square and MIT. A free glass of Chablis and some depressing drawings by Arab kids versus a $30,000 cocktail reception for the Massachusetts delegation, hosted by MassMutual Financial Group? That must have been an easy decision and so what if, come November, Mr. Kerry will happily field calls from MassMutual while those Arab kids … well, all they got is you and me and we’re busy sitting at home getting all misty-eyed over Barack Obama’s vision of loving gay couples in Corpus Christi and godfearing Little League coaches in Harvard Square.  

 

The boots and the drawings have left me without much in the way of appetite and so I go home to the bad dream that is the Convention proper. No boots and no drawings there to dampen the mood; instead, I flip on the TV to stare at a shockingly manipulative video featuring retarded children who weren’t allowed to play in a local baseball league. Not until John Kerry Superstar heard about it, anyway, and, he … well, I’m still not sure exactly what he did, but the video made it clear he acted heroically. Unhesitatingly, self-sacrificingly, with malice towards none and with justice towards all, just like he did strafing the folks on the Mekong Delta and giving that unfortunate hamster CPR and just like he will should the unruly Moqtada Al Sadr give him or Israel any trouble. I think it involved making a call to a law firm or something. In any case, Kerry’s vanity is unseemly.  

 

When Clinton speaks, to great fanfare, I can’t help but note that Madeline Albright is sitting with Chelsea Clinton. Albright, you will remember, was Clinton’s Secretary of State, who stated outright that the half-a-million children who died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq was “a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”   I cannot help but wonder what she might make of “Shocked and Awed.”   

Tuesday Afternoon

 The Convention proper has been notable for an abysmal lack of taste in many things, and very very bad music ranks very very high on the list. But all is not lost. On Tuesday, I left my Downtown Crossing workplace and made my way to the Paulist Center on the Common, a mission-style operation serving as host to one of the various progressive forums that dot the landscape this week in a desperate bid for relevance. The need became more pressing once Sandy Berger—a few days before his own fall from grace—had delivered the previously unruly Kucinich people a swift coup de grace in Miami and denied them anything in the way of an anti-war plank in the platform. Inside, Medea Benjamin sat next to Tom Hayden on the platform and was in the midst of answering questions when I arrived. An earnest good time was apparently in effect, but it was too crowded, so  Ann and I made our way into the Common, where the local anarchist group Bl(A)ck Tea Society was hosting a “Bizarre Bazaar,” billed as “a public gathering space at which we can share our practices and visions of a better world in the form of a free, celebratory, open-air, public market,” which about sums it up so long as you think Salvation Army thrift meets Grateful Dead vending area. Actually, it looked like what you’d imagine the Nader campaign would resemble if it had the Common to itself one afternoon. In any case it was no more bizarre than the money-for-favors bazaar Ralph himself had complained about. 

 

It is more than signage and free clothing and free Green-Rainbow Party buttons as we discover when we stumble upon a thrash-punk trio of anarcho-musicians flailing away for an audience of maybe a dozen. The pale lead guitar wears a dirty t-shirt. The pale bass player wears a gingham dress and an apron. The kids strewn about the lawn wear their hair in spiked Mohawks. We’re really only a few blocks from the Fleet, a sea of fake tans and pre-recorded music and coiffed hair and scripts that have passed through a dozen hands before receiving final approval as pablum worthy of delivery to the gaping maws of the desperate creatures inside, as well as the millions—well, tens of thousands anyway—of Bush-loathers glued to their TVs in search of a drop of hope–but we might as well be on a different planet. This is raw, smelly and sexy—“this is what democracy looks like!”–while the Fleet can best be represented by the sad face of Mrs. Theresa Heinz, flash-frozen with Botulinum Toxin Type A  Purified Neurotoxin Complex.  

 

The band plays poorly, to a smattering of applause.The overcast sky lets loose with a light drizzle. And me, I flash back to the dreck blaring from the speakers inside the dry, cool interior of the Fleet and I smile. It’s good to be alive here on the Common. I join in the applause. And I feel I glimmer of hope: here in the presence of something genuine, of a commitment to a DIY ethic that would be decidedly out of place in the rarefied castles of the Kerry-Heinzes. This is art and this is passion and this is definitely verboten once you get past Gate F at the Fleet. This is unscripted. When I watch the stooges prattle on about John Kerry Superstar tonight, I shall try to recall the teenage waif with the greasy hair banging away on a bass guitar almost as big as she was. 

The Democrats, I think, do not speak for her.

 

But I think maybe I have stumbled on somebody who speaks for me.  

 

A few hours later, back at home enduring the Convention on C-Span, and thereby avoiding big media’s breathless adulation of Mr. Obama, I’m at a loss. His “one America,” let’s-heal-the-wounds-rainbows-‘n-unicorns address gets him a few ovations, but frankly, I’m not ready to sit down and break bread with Tom DeLay. Nor, for that matter, with anyone who supports him. There IS a war on, Obama himself knows it as well as most and better than many, and I don’t mean the one going down right now in the streets of Fallujah, either. And I am growing increasingly tired of the endless sound that signifies nothing.

 

To wit, young Obama:  “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” 

 

“It is essential that the next president be someone who understands America has an important role to play in promoting peace and to encourage others to understand the value of freedom, of free speech, free religion and the importance of the rule of law. I think that each person ought to be judged by their heart and by their soul and by their contribution to society. Group-thought will balkanize our society, and I have rejected the politics of pitting one group of persons against another.”

 

 “We hear much of special interest groups. Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick–professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, `We the people,’ this breed called Americans.”

 

It all sounds very pretty. But only the first is Obama; the second is George Walker Bush (Salon interview, 2000), the third, Ronald Reagan himself (First Inaugural). The words flow smoothly, and I have to wonder how many among the antiwar contingent read Obama’s comments the day before he took his place on the million-dollar stage: “On Iraq, on paper, there’s not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago. There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” The press and the Dems see the Great Black Hope: I see a very polished orator with a great backstory, but to be honest I’ve seen enough of them to last me a lifetime. When I look at the only things that truly matter–POLICY, NOT personality–I see the anti-Kucinich and the anti-Nader. And with Stephen Dedalus, “I fear those big words that make us so unhappy.….” 

 

Wednesday 

 

…and  I’m still hunting Dennis. I’d seen Congressman Kucinich deliver a stunning speech at First Parish Church in Cambridge a few months ago, and thought—even in light of his caving in Miami on the anti-war plank—that he might, even at this increasingly late hour, restore some possibility of hope in the Party. Or even lend it some much-needed dignity. I was too late at the forum Monday, and his spot at the table was empty by the time I arrived at the “Forum on Iraq and Department of Peace” Tuesday. I didn’t get out of work until near 2 this afternoon, and when I arrive at Copley Square for the Mass. ACLU/UJP/MoBo rally against Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, he’s already come and gone. I’ll read later that he delivered a “fiery” address.  

 

The affair is rather dismal when I arrive; there are maybe 200 people left under the overcast skies, but the rally has the look of any show after the stars have disappeared. I wonder if that’s the nature of conventions: the press runs after Ben Affleck, who runs after the Kerry daughters, who run after the photogs who run after delegates who run after the food; the progressives, meanwhile, run after their own rock stars.  Watching the proceedings inside the Fleet tonight, I will catch Dennis at his most eloquent; he’s easily a match for the Party’s new idol Obama, whose centrist banter is more in keeping with the Party’s commitment to banality than is Dennis’  wild-eyed talk about crop circles and a Department of Peace (that’s unfair, actually: Kucinich is damned smart and nobody’s fool. No matter whom he’s channeling that afternoon). The morning papers will describe his speech as “nuanced”—there’s no fulsome praise of Kerry, to be sure—but just to hear him finally endorse Kerry as he concluded was deflating. I’m running damn short on heroes, that’s for sure. Although when they take the roll and 43 delegates—bidden by Kucinich to “vote their conscience”—did just that and gave their votes to Kucinich rather than to Kerry, you couldn’t help but recognize that hairline fracture within the supposedly unified party. They would have loved a unanimous vote, but there are, thankfully, a few disgruntled people left in the Party. Not many, of course. The final tally is  4353-43. 

 

Which raises the question: when Tom Hayden and Howard Zinn and Medea Benjamin and nearly all the leading lights on the so-called left bid us hold our noses and “work for change within the Party,” what kind of genuine pressure do they think they’re actually going to exert?  4253-43–this isn’t the kind of showing that is going to keep Kerry foreign policy advisor Rand Beers up all night fretting about his new, improved plans for Colombia. With all due respect to those 43 delegates, and I do respect them, their case had been summarily dismissed before they made it. Or, as Ralph put it on Friday, “the minute you signal to the Democrats that your vote can be taken for granted, it will be taken.” 

 

Progressives are of course confounded by the prospect of dealing with potential victory—which means getting into bed with Caesar. Supporting a man who doesn’t espouse a single progressive principle is forcing the progs to tiptoe on little cat’s feet around their new hero’s glaring defects while all the while crudely banging away at the man–Nader–who actually endorses every one of their principles. It also explains the dynamic on the street: in late spring and early summer a number of “progressive” organizations found themselves uncertain of their proper role during a Convention. You can sympathize with their difficulty—many were and remain opposed to the war, the Patriot Act, GATT, NAFTA, US involvement in the WTO, the long-lost “war on drugs,” an increasingly privatized penal system, Sharon’s New Israel, obscene amounts of corporate money in politics, and they were and are in favor of Kyoto, gay marriage, and civil liberties—so you can see where they’d have a problem or ten with a team that’s been indelicately referred to as “warmongering corporate whores.”   

 

Recognizing that a non-confrontational approach would best suit both their needs and those of the incrementally-lesser-of-two-evil parties, they eschewed those noisy street demonstrations that shatter the brittle façade of “unity” and instead sought to bring their foot soldiers to various  shadow conventions where issues could be debated, consensuses reached, and results written up in papers that would a) posit specific progressive programs for change, b) note that Kerry wasn’t entirely aboard on and/all of the issues, c) nonetheless urge everyone to vote for Kerry anyway, and, god bless them, plead that we all trust that the progressive leadership both within and outside of the Congress will make it clear to Kerry-Edwards that they had darn well start listening up or else, or else,…. Or else what? The Democratic Leadership Council has absolutely no incentive whatsoever to heed progressive voices. Like every other political faction in history, the pro-globalization, pro-Israel-right-or-wrong, pro-war, pro-drug war, money-gobbling machine that is the Democratic leadership will respond only to coercion. Progressives made a genuine display of their power on ’00 when they turned out en masse for Nader. The Democrats didn’t listen and paid the price. If the movement had any real courage, they’d do it again—over and over, in fact, until it became clear that they couldn’t be taken for granted, weren’t going to back-burner genuine life-and-death issues so that the Kerries of the world could placate the muddleminded middle and the corporate financiers. Instead, they succumbed to the politics of personality, chose to demonize George Bush and Dick Cheney, and the rhetoric of most Democrats today is amusingly reminiscent of the mullahs who were fond of calling George Bush Sr. “The Great Satan.”  When The Prince of Darkness is at large, any alternative is preferable, and the DLC has been gleefully exploiting this caricature so as to enthrone their own puppet. 

 

Hence Nader and his saving remnant of 3%. The Democrats are dreaming: in their fantasy-world, the preening people’s tribune drops from the race and his small but critical handful of supporters dutifully stash their starry-eyed idealism and embrace the tepid neoliberal vision of Kerry-Edwards. The major mistake inherent in this fantasy is that Nader’s supporters are at heart Democrats, “only more so.”  Not true, bubba, not by a looong shot. But even assuming that we could be won back, how have the Democrats proceeded in wooing the disgruntled cadres? Why, by accusing Nader of everything from megalomania to psychosis to pandering to anti-gay bigots to simply wanting to fatten his own organization’s wallets (that was the Ann Richards line); and when these aspersions didn’t work, by doing everything in their power to keep him off the ballot, including infiltrating his own conventions with false delegates and wasting ten million dollars challenging his ballots in 23 states. Is that what democracy looks like, Senator Obama?  

 

Character assassination, infiltration, and wholesale scapegoating (we “threw Florida”) have, of course, had the opposite effect. It’s only now that the Dems have decided to use Dean and Kucinich to woo back the prodigals, but it’s a little late. Kucinich is arguing that since the Kerry people actually took time to meet with his delegates in Miami, there’s evidence that the Democratic leadership is ready to embrace the progressive vision, but he’s wrong—the instant and unceremonious slapdown of his people and the substitution of a mealymouthed commitment to nothing in place of the antiwar plank the progressives had suggested is rock-solid proof that nothing has changed or is going change by begging. And so it happens that we few, we happy few, we so-called “idealists” have the chance to play at realpolitik. The Democratic Party who appeased the Kucinich people made it clear that only electoral leverage would ever serve to make them bend. This is not the first time in history that a fractional minority has held the power to shape a nation’s destiny, but it’s a rare chance, and not one to be laid aside lightly in favor of some sputtering about “unity.”  On Kucinich’s web site, his team hold forth quite candidly on what went down in Miami—each member has his or her own page, a remarkable testament to Dennis’ own faith in people (yes, I do wanna love this guy). But too many are happy simply that they were “listened to,” as though they achieved some degree of validation as a result. That’s politics as therapy, and at this moment, when Stanley Greenberg is advising the anxious strategists in the backrooms that Nader is threatening to tip West Virginia and Nevada and maybe Minnesota, feeling good isn’t good enough, not for you, me, or Bobby Mcgee. It’s time to hold the leadership’s feet to the fire, to see our ideas acted upon, incorporated into the platform, and until they are, we will wait on Canal Street.  

Thursday

 On Thursday morning Boston is beginning—ever-so-tentatively (remember, this is a town haunted by Bill Bruckner and Bret Boone)—to congratulate itself. (The rigorously enforced uniformity—err, “unity,” sorry, unity!—that was marveled over ad nauseam within the Fleet seems to have been the hallmark of civic life in general this week). To date, one protester has been arrested—a far cry from the last convention I witnessed up close, RNC 2000 in Philly, where 479 protesters were arrested, many in advance of the actual convention. No traffic jams ensued. No angry cops picketed. No “terrorists” attacked. The Globe reports this morning that the demonstrators themselves have apparently “made a truce” with the Dems and are readying instead for combat in the streets of New York when Bush arrives in late August.  Me, I’m left wondering where the 50,000 who marched against the war here in the same streets in November ‘02 and March 03 have gone. The 43 delegates who refused to budge should serve as a reminder that the war goes on, and that John Kerry plans to perpetuate it ad infinitum. Or in Edwards’ words,  “… we will strengthen and modernize our military. We will double our Special Forces. We will invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and the best prepared in the world. This will make our military stronger. It’ll make it sure that can defeat any enemy in this new world.”  Cowboy up, John-boy!

 

Nor will this force (Kerry plans to add another 40,000) be guarding the New Jersey shoreline—here’s Edwards again:  “It’s also important for us to send a clear signal to the Arab world that we care about what’s happening in Israel, that we’re willing to have people on the ground over extended period of time to do what needs to be done to ease tension and hopefully ultimately result in peace” (speech to Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 2002). This is the same John Edwards who happily co-sponsored The Authorization to Use Force Against Iraq, October 10, 2002, delivering these words on the Senate floor:  “Almost no one disagrees with these basic facts: that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a menace; that he has weapons of mass destruction and that he is doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons; that he has supported terrorists.”  

 

Well, as I recall, a great many of us disagreed quite strongly with the three most critical aspects of this asinine analysis. Just as we disagreed with him in February 2002 when he stated outright that “I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country.”  Nearly a thousand American and ten thousand plus Iraqi lives, and a hundred billion dollars later, John and John are whimpering about having been “misled” by those cunning Bushies. Kucinich said at a speech last week that “We’re not going to hold John Kerry accountable for the war. We’re going to hold George Bush to account, because it’s George Bush’s war.” Well, umm, no—as Kerry says, “look at the record.” This war belongs to everyone who sacrificed principle to politics; this war was brought to you in all of its glory by your friends the Democrats, make no mistake about it.  Not all—not Kennedy, Byrd, nor Kucinich; but plenty—Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, and Edwards. Blaming Bush for the war is rather like blaming the Republicans for Anthony Scalia, who was approved 98-0 at his Senate confirmation. 

 

In any case The Globe also  points out that Thursday could still spell trouble, and things do heat up—literally—later that morning after several hundred hardcore anarchists, many wearing pirate garb and bearing a black banner declaring “No Lords on Land or Sea” march through the streets to the gates of the Fleet and burn a flag and a two-faced effigy of the candidates, dancing around the fire as the ubiquitous Vermin Supreme recites the posse comitatus act over his bullhorn and insists that the cops do their duty and arrest the soldiers on patrol.  Instead, the police go after a young man brandishing what will be described as a “fake molotov,” though one officer will later identify it as a “water bottle.” A brief scuffle breaks out, two demonstrators are arrested, order is restored, and the anarchists gradually drift away. Somewhere John Kerry is selecting a necktie and rehearsing the speech that will define him. Knowing what I do of the Senator, I figure the necktie will have more to say that the speech does.

 

But all good things must pass. For me, the Convention that began Sunday afternoon with a spirited march of maybe 3000 fades at 7 pm this Wednesday evening as Ann and I stand right up against the barricades face-to-face with the cops brandishing tear gas dispensers as well as the thousands of delegates streaming into the Fleet to cast their sacred vote, but there’s little shouting. Maybe exhaustion and frustration have taken their toll on everyone  I can’t help but feel embarrassed for the delegates when I meet the eyes of those being herded inside, though I notice that all of them avoid our glances.  Pols are showing that an astronomical 90% support our position on the war, but in the name of “unity,” there was nary a peep out of them.  

 

At 7:15 we decide to take the train home and to watch Kerry’s speech, or his necktie, or something. It turns out to be typical Kerry—I re-read it several time since, and there is, of course, not a shred of substance to be found.  After he speaks, the scene on the floor will be indistinguishable from every other stage-managed convention I’ve seen.  

 

The crowd will erupt in one vast orgasm, timed to coincide with the conclusion of network coverage.  

The leadership will hold hands.  

The spouses will wave. 

They’ll drop the balloons.   

They’ll blare U2’s “It’s a Beautiful Day.”   

 

But as we walk slowly away from the gates of the Fleet, the handful of conscientious objectors remaining break into a slow, soft elegaic version of “We Shall Overcome.”   

 

And that’s what I’ll remember.