Democratic Convention Anti-climax

It is a symptom of the time in which we live that the Democratic convention currently taking place in Denver has been almost entirely cleansed of any real conflict--or reality. This is, of course, an historic moment, the nomination of the first Black American for the office of president. And, yes, there is a palpable tension suffusing the event as the nation waits to see if race will spell failure for the Obama candidacy. For some, this is tension enough perhaps. On the other side of the same coin is a sense that this may be too good to be true. Many Americans dare not--not quite yet--savor with anticpation the excitement that would attend an Obama victory in November. We shall see. Tension enough for any one year may be the decision made by those who craft these events.

It is also true that if we look back to conventions past, what has typically taken place in the arenas housing such events is a lot of silly behavior--silly hats, signs, painted faces, balloons, oompah music, the works. While some may recall the floor fights that have taken place over seating various Southern delegations, or anti-war chants, or tense negotiations over votes, those old enough to recall those phenomena have now lived long enough to know that the 1960s were a special time not likely to soon be repeated. This year is the fortieth anniversay of the 1968 Chicago riots. In those days, we watched not just the convention floor, but the demonstrations in the streets, demonstrations in which scores were injured by an overzealous Chicago police force set loose upon hippies, yippies and more serious protesters by the inimitable Mayor Daley. Daley's tactics provided the occasion for one of the most memorable moments to take place at any convention--the heroic cry of protest made by the usually urbane senator from Connecticut, Abe Ribicoff in which he accused Daley of employing "gestapo tactics." It was a response so appropriate to the moment that David Brinkley announced the gesture as "gutsy." None of this can take place in the present climate because if the rulers of this nation learned one thing from those years, it was that it had to repress such expression--and it has done so completely, surgically. Naomi Klein likes to make the connection between the policy of "shock doctrine" and the actual use of shock therapy for its effectiveness in sedating troublesome individuals. We have been sedated.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/abrahamribicoff1968dnc.htm

And, thus, though perhaps we can forgive stage sets that resemble those of game shows, though we can forgive the usual hoopla surrounding conventions, the balloons and the music, the platitudinous, condescending rhetoric, what we should not be so ready to forgive is the surgical removal from the convention of just about any reference to the tens of thousands dead Iraqis, the trillions misspent, the dissolution of constitutional safeguards, the police state apparatus, the destruction of government institutions designed to regulate against excess the profiteers and protect the citizenry, the outright corruption and theft that has so particularly, so poignantly, characterized the last eight years.

Just as the government learned from the war in Vietnam that it is dangerous to have real coverage from the battlefields of our adventures overseas and began to limit news from the battle lines, to "embed" journalists with the troops, it has also learned that disingenuity, euphemism, double speak, if necessary, pure drivel is preferable to real political discourse. At least one stolen election, a multi-billion dollar security apparatus which we were asked to believe lost track of terrorists taking flight training, a "war" (oh, how we love that word) on the terrorists whom we could seek out, if we really cared, with good, old-fashioned police work, two sovereign nations attacked thousands of miles from our shores,with threats against a third, and a kind of rampant corporate theft that has created the greatest gap between rich and poor in the history of the planet--this is the legacy of the last eight years.

As I write, there are a couple of evenings left to this convention. We shall see.