Democratic National Convention
(August 29, 1996)The days are getting longer contrary to the revolution of the Planets because I am increasingly sleep deprived. Last night, after I'd gone to sleep some woman called my room, described herself provocatively, and wanted to know if "there was anything she could do for me." She called again early this morning and I told my breakfast companions that it was time to leave Chicago since I had attracted a stalker.
Mickey Kantor is firing up the troops at breakfast this morning, and so far, despite his being a man who has not run for office, he is the first person whose litany of thank-you's sound sincere and passionate. He is a coach, warning, urging, and inspiring his team, reminding them to "take nothing for granted." Addressing the California delegation, he informs them, "this campaign begins, ends, and is critically relying on California." He reminds them how often Clinton has visited their state -"one more trip and we'll have to tax him." It is clear why he was sent to negotiate with Japan. He is centered on his mission and wastes nothing on self-aggrandizement or posturing. This is a man dedicated to a mission, consequently his message is forceful and direct.
I leave the breakfast early, driven from the room by Diane Feinstein doing 15 minutes of humble thank-you's, to do a TV interview at the Convention Center. In the daytime, it is devoid of life, chilly and vaguely ominous like the introductory scenes to a cheap horror flick. Cables and firehoses are strung everywhere. Janitor's carts litter the rooms, garbage flecks the floors and one gets the impression that away from the prying eyes of the world, anything could happen in here.
I wend my way of to the Mornings on 2 booth on the fourth floor, have a pleasant, inconsequential, get-out-the-vote interview and return to the hotel to discover a demonstration on the sidewalk. A group of young people, serious hippies on the edge of dereliction, draped in flags, threadbare blankets and beads, carrying pouches and drums is sitting in a hand-holding circle, while a bearded man in an American flag hat which appears designed by Dr. Seuss, holds aloft a white chicken feather wrapped in leather and a clump of Sage. They are the Rainbow Gathering, part of a coalition of coalitions called the Festival of Life which is addressing a different issue in a formal protest each day. Today's issue is peace. A gray Chevy undercover car with two uniformed policemen has moments ago arrested Bonney Tocwish, one of the group organizers. A gray-bearded black man named, Joffrey Stewart, with his shirt pocket stuffed full of paper scraps, says he was threatened with arrest for asking why she was arrested. People see me taking notes and congregate to offer information and rumors.
"Rob is missing too, he should have been here by now," someone offers. Rob turns out to be the other organizer of today's demonstration.
"The cops are quietly picking us off one at a time, "someone else advances. Dr. Seuss is urging a march to the police station to "Free Bonny". No one knows what the charges against her are, but everyone feels that it is related to a demonstration which occurred at the United Center on Tuesday where some RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) people burned a flag.
"Bonny wasn't even there!" an extremely overweight boy in a green shirt complains. According to group anecdote, another member, Ben Masell, has been arrested twice for leafleting and now, "they're gonna press felony charges against him." The group is dismayed because they applied for permits to protest in February and were not granted permission to do so until August 21st.
"We're gonna sue the City of Chicago for preventing us from having an audience", a slight boy with a fuzzy goatee informs me. If and when that case ever comes to trial, that is a suit I would follow with some interest. If they win it would permanently end the problem of small audiences, a subject of marked interest to performers like myself.
Back at the hotel, the two patrolmen I've been friendly with don't know much about the protest or the arrest, but volunteer that videotapes of the demonstration were taken and scanned by the police and that people were identified on the videos and later pursued for arrest. Technology is an impartial Lord I suppose, prosecuting and then abetting the police even handedly.
No sooner is this brouhaha settled than word flashes over the TV that Dick Morris, Clinton's political advisor (hated by Democratic party regulars and White House insiders) has resigned. The news informs us that Dick has been keeping company with a hooker. Someone shopped him, because news reports already know that she was allowed to read Hillary's speech days before it was given and to eavesdrop on Presidential conversations. Speculation among White House people is rife when I return, and suspects range from the hated Harold Ickes ( sworn to have cloven hooves and be responsible for Satanic worship in the Lincoln bedroom) to Republican dirty-tricksters. When I offer the thought of what Dick Morris might have tricked the President into saying before a witness, no one disputes the speculation as bizarre, but a White House insider says, "you can be sure that heavy-weight negotiations are occurring at this minute. I mean, Morris didn't apologize to the President for embarrassing him, and the President went way out in his announcement for that 'ol boy."
If Dick Morris went down in flames, he or the folks who dropped the dime on him picked the time and place of his crash landing, to preclude the President and the Democratic Party from totally controlling the agenda of post-election coverage, forcing them to answer questions about this issue. The Borgia's would have been proud.
I drive to the Sheraton, to check out the political vibes and note that the story has been dropped from the next news headlines. Gloria Cabe, who ran the Presidents first campaign greets me in the hallway. We chat about the Morris issue, and she expresses relief that he is gone. Not only did he create a vile racist ad for Jesse Helms, but he leaked secret campaign information to Trent Lot and tried to blame it on Stephanopoulos.
Martha Whetstone and I meet Ruth and Bill Wagner, to share a cab to the RFK Memorial fund-raiser at the Four Seasons. Bill is taking long pulls on a white plastic water bottle with a logo from the Florida Democratic party. He passes it to me in the back seat, and I am pleased to discover that it is filled with champagne.
The Grand Ballroom has a tasteful sign in an ornate gilt frame set on an easel announcing the RFK Memorial as if it were a precious art piece. It is a grand room, set up in the grand manner, and could have been imported from the Carlyle Hotel. A society combo, the Stu Hirsh Orchestra (white script on black bandstands) is playing, "Don't get around much Anymore". The decor is sedate and understated - Aubisson knock-off carpets, heavy silver salvers and floral bouquets, create the weighty, slightly dated elegance of a lounge on a stately ocean liner. Black business suits and Hermes ties dominate men's fashions. One or two black faces pepper the otherwise homogenous white audience. Several priests stand around sipping cocktails self-consciously.
Federico Pena, Secretary of Transportation, whom I had met previously at dinner in San Francisco, greets me warmly and introduces me to his wife, Ellen. We chat about New Mexico, her native State, until some young Kennedys command attention from the small stage. They appear polished, gregarious, good, noble, exemplary people, exactly what aristocrats should be. A family friend, however, confides to me that the curly blonde boy speaking (I can never keep them straight) is "a total brat" and defends her assertion by describing a tantrum he threw one morning because he could not get blueberry muffins. Being partial to blueberry muffins myself, I can understand however, and willing to take him at face value. The Kennedys are pursuing the mandate of their father/uncle and giving awards to people with exemplary efforts in human rights. A handsome girl, Ethel's daughter, whose name eluded me, tells a haunting story of indentured children weaving rugs in India, and the man named Tailash who freed them. In the middle of her story, I catch an unmistakable whiff of burning opium and whip my head around trying to locate the source. Another man in my field of vision does the same thing and our eyes meet. We smile slyly, each having busted the other for recognizing the odor.
After the reception, our quartet drives to the Convention Center and the cab leaves us off at the edge of the barricades. Anti-abortion demonstrators parade in force with graphic blow-ups of dismembered babies. In one vivid three by four foot color special, a baby's severed head is present to the camera, gripped at the back by a forceps. The unanimity of the horror presented subliminally suggests that every abortion is precisely this ghastly and advanced, which is obviously untrue. They are chanting. "5400 a day" an old man tells me as I pass. "5400 lives a day snuffed out." I am tempted to question his selfless commitment to life by asking his opinion of war, capital punishment, veal-calves, chemical insecticides and how much responsibility he's prepared to take for these children after they're born, but my companions, sensing my decision to linger for combat, pull me along. Leaving, I observe that he has neither a womb nor ovaries, and that perhaps this painful and personal decision ought to be left to people who do.
After passing through the world's most meticulous searches and metal detectors to gain admission to the Convention Center, I am please to note that while protesters outside are dealing with frivolous issues of life and death, delegates inside, wrestling with the serious issues, have declared it funny hat night. People are thronging by in chapeau's none would be caught dead in outside these walls, shapeless and oversized confections in red, white, and blue. Either, like supplicants for The Price Is Right, they hope to be recognized and immortalized as a reward for self-humiliation (I mean, for Christ's sake, their leaders are not dressing this way) or, and more probably, they are expressing the unconscious association between politics and the ridiculous.
The President speaks this evening and passions and expectations are elevated. Emmy Lou Harris and two friends sing, "My Old Friend Abraham" and her high reedy voice, cuts through the crowd static like Radio Marti overwhelming Cuban airspace. Everything has higher stakes tonight. Credentials are checked and re-checked, and seats are in high demand and often contested. The humble stoop and sheepish grin of people abandoning seats to which they are not entitled is a theme played repeatedly in the crowd like lights popping off in a pin-ball machine. Patrick Kennedy, introducing his father, Senator Ted, is eager beyond containment, as if he has just discovered goodness. If everyone were as virtuous as the man he describes, we wouldn't need government. Ted Kennedy arrives and that man really looks like a Senator. He has a big, picturesque head capped with a snowy mantle of hair, and his face ( familiar from so many tragedies and scandals) is magnified several hundred times on the TV screen behind him. (I could not help myself, an image of the Wizard of Oz came to mind.) His voice is stentorian and the man gives good speech.He defends Hillary from Dole and Kemp and Newt (effectively tying them together) by telling the crowd that, "we love her for the enemies she has made." Cheers! "Before you read their lips", he continues later, "you better read their platform" and his liturgical recitation; his chant of Republican platform points provokes such a wealth of applause that he cracks up, and you have to like him for that. Kennedy digs the hell out this and it's clear that it is his element.
Unbeknownst to the Senator however, a video operator spots Mohammed Ali in the crowd and projects his face on the screen behind Kennedy and the crowd goes berserk again. Kennedy laps it up, mistaking the applause as his, and might be forgiven for considering whether or not his powers might be is approaching the transcendental. He continues with his agenda of linking Republican penury and mean-spiritednesss to Dole's pliability - "Newt thought it up, but Dole swallowed it hook, line, and sinker."
"Tie the bastards to that corrupt, out-of-shape, wife-abusing little pud and sink them all Teddy", I think to myself, and then realize that it is not a thought at all, but a prayer, and immediately, hard-on its heels, consider that I may mean all; the whole conniving, strategizing, self-centered, up-for-sale political class, and have an instant fantasy of the, the politicians and this silly display disappearing by magic, whisking me back to a familiar neighborhood to contest familiar issues with familiar faces. This infantile reverie occupies the last of his speech, and Teddy leaves and Harry Carey, beloved announcer for the Chicago Cubs takes over the podium and leads the crowd in a spirited rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." His voice is corrupted and raw from years of screaming into microphones and I am wondering what the hell this song has to do with a national election, but hell, the crowd loves it; and join him in a spirited song fest, and if I'm the only one in the room hoping for something more substantial well, so be it, what do you expect of a Jew with an animal name?
He is followed by a video about something indeterminate and Bruce Springsteen singing "Born in the USA" (something for everyone) and the crowd is eager to sing that too. I am out of step here. This is a major party: everyone clapping, shimmying, boogie-woogeying, laughing, rollicking and rolling as the TV cameras scan the house projecting images of winsome girls, half-gassed old men who look as if they prefer Guy Lombardo but will seize the excuse to party hard, yuppies, handicapped folk, Asians and Afro-Americans all, dancing their asses off to BBBRRRUUUUUCCCCCEEEE, jiggling like landfill in an earthquake. Jubilation! America sho' 'nuff is weird and wonderful.
Another Kennedy named Joe comes on with more blah-blah and one-too-many lessons from the same failed drama coach making the rounds of the Democratic party. When he tells a sad story, he makes a sad face and softens his voice; and when he wants to convey inspiration, he looks upwards and raises his voice in measured cadences with all the charisma of a sweat-shirt and my focus drifts until, presto, he is gone and my attention is suddenly reclaimed, dominated, overwhelmed, and colonized by Jessye Norman, the great (artistically and dimensionally) black coloratura, singing "America the Beautiful". Regarding her performance is akin to watching Medea performed by a species which has imperfectly impersonated a human. The skin on her face is wind-tunnel tight; her hair been pulled back severely as a Samurai warrior's, limiting her motion of expression, but lending her eyes an extraordinary ferocity. Her mouth is moving on her face like an independent life form. It is enormous, expressive and powerful, unnaturally stretched and distorted by the force blowing through her windpipe and the need to articulate consonants and shape vowel sounds. It appears expanded by the force of the notes she is projecting and I would not be surprised were she simple to explode, so Wagnerian is her intensity. Selfishly I notice that except for the real leaders, it is only artists who are able to command real attention from this crowd.
As she finished, some members of the crowd located Mohammed Ali, sitting behind me and began to chant his name, "Ali, Ali, Ali," an Arabic prayer, and I would not have been surprised if the top of his head opened up and the genie (with Robin William's voice) appeared floating over him with his arms folded. It was a moment which could have occurred at any place or time; a hero's name invoked by his admirers. The crowd looked right past his palsied hand and puffy face, and chanted his name as if the force of their intention might re-invoke him as the paragon of speed and brassy power which electrified our feeling of youth...so many years ago.
A film about Bill Clinton plays, and makes it clear why Clinton is President. He sits in a living room and speaks, no, talks with us. He is completely on the one, in the moment, without affectation, unscripted, apparently unguarded, searching for his words in front us. The man with the highest status in the United States and arguably the world, has descended to our level to share his deepest feelings. Open-hearted, radiating sincerity, generosity and humanity, his honesty in the moment puts every other campaign speech I have ever heard into bas-relief, and anyone who ever has need to give a speech should take a lesson from this man. If he is nothing else, William Jefferson Clinton is a great and gifted communicator with great humanity.
The Macarena plays. The signers for the deaf and dumb on either side of the stage dance it, leading the audience in the rhythmic play of hands from ears, to shoulders to hips and back. Gore appears at the podium, and there is no longer any doubt in my mind that he has become a man. He no longer resembles a boy wearing his father's clothes; no longer exudes unquiet, self-conscious rigidity. Something in him has toughened and metamorphosed into an authentic dignity. The steel which must reside somewhere in all politicians, is beginning to show through his features and it is good to see. He is beginning to look Presidential from the inside out. His face bears no trace of meanness, a comforting detail in a man who would one day be President. He says the obligatory something and then the rear-screen TV goes blank and President Clinton takes the stage.The audience display explodes like Washington Cherry blossoms. White college pennants with Blue letters saying CLINTON wave in a tumult. Whistles, cheers, and stamping feet send walls of sound cascading over the stage. The President thanks Al Gore, Hillary "the love of my life", Chelsea, and his thank-yous are solid as the blows of a hammer. I liking this guy despite railing against the majority of his policies and decisions for the last four years. Then again, I might have liked Bush and Reagan, personally, which goes to show the limits of personality when one considers leadership and public policy.
Beginning with the words, "I accept" the President (or POTUS as he's known in Secret Service parlance) recites a litany of accomplishments. It is what I would have expected, and it is a long and impressive list. He takes the Presidential high ground, refuses to attack Dole and Kemp and reminds the audience that it is not, "who to blame, but what to do. This must be a campaign of ideas not insults."
He lists nearly forty specific proposals, many tax credits for education, a million volunteer reading tutors to combat illiteracy, and again, it is an impressive list. He challenges any businessman who has ever complained about welfare to hire someone off welfare, and he projects such an earnest, can-do impression of good-will it seems almost mean-spirited to resist him. But I cannot help thinking, is public policy only concerned with cash flow and who gets it? How will tax credits diminish class sizes from 30 to 15? (Among teachers, the universally agreed upon pre-requisite to higher academic achievement). How will tax credits revise and refine curriculum or amplify the salaries of teachers? What about the seven million Americans already presently unemployed? What about non-defense Research and Development spending? What happened to Health Care reform, currently consuming 15 % of our Gross domestic product? What, besides the amplifying of dollars to the police, was advanced as solutions to the crisis of our inner cities?
[Since the convention and while editing this piece, I have been listening to reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele of the Philadelphia Enquirer on the radio, puncturing the myth of worker re-training as a boondoggle to the education establishment. According to these two journalists, it is the policy of both the Democratic and Republican parties to train workers to earn less money than in their previous employment. Furthermore, while they make take some of the sting out of losing a job, retraining programs provide zero jobs and no systematic study of their effectiveness has ever been undertaken. This is so, assert Barlett and Steele, because it is generally accepted among the re-training community that 95% of the re-employed workers are making less in their new jobs than previously. The potential for violence among affected (and disaffected) workers as their standards of living plummet is staggering, but neither this, nor the recent disclosures by the San Jose Mercury News that CIA operatives were selling drugs in the inner-city of Los Angeles to finance anti-Communist operations so much as cast a shadow during the President's speech.]
As the President continues, I am also thinking, bizarrely I know, about the Cuban people starving, reduced to horses and carts for transport, sickened from vitamin deficiencies due to our mean-spirited blockade. I'm wondering, if children, mentioned so often and everywhere in this convention, are so precious; our children, Bosnian children, Irish children, what about Cuban children and Nicaraguan children, and the millions of Vietnamese children we maimed, burned, and ground into fodder without even an apology. What is wrong with this picture? Why are people not demanding universal standards of decency and respect? Where, in this supposedly Christian nation, are the lawyers who discovered the sub-clauses in the Ten Commandments, and exempted our leaders and policy discussion from considerations of people who did not behave as we demand? It is not what is being said, or proposed, but what is not being proposed which bothers me, and I am once again relegated to my alter-ego as the wandering Jew, in the back of the auditorium, happening to notice that members of the cheering crowd are having their pockets picked and feeling unable to warn them.
The Kennedy/Kemp bill is offered as a triumph, protecting the health insurance for fired workers for six months, but what about the seventh month, or the tenth month after they have lost their jobs? Why are people so happy, so quick to block further thought or consider alternative possibilities and scenarios? Is it so necessary to feel good at any cost; is the jettisoning of critical thinking a requisite for team play? The President's speech is barely a beginning, not a triumph to me, but I am so obviously in the minority here that it feels as if all I am capable of doing here is serving as a witness.
The Rico act is to be invoked to fight gangs, and wire-tap powers will be extended to catch "bad guys" and terrorists, I am unaccountably sad. All the anti-drug talk; anti-crime talk is top-down imposition which, at the end of the day, will simply amplify the flow of dollars, power, and influence to the police who never seem to want for funds. This is not the plan of visionary synthesis I keep anticipating (despite lack of evidence) from this man and I am restive and irritable again. In the next instant, he is off the subject of police, as if it were a mere parenthetical gloss, and he is stirring me with his speech; calling me together with the old, the young, the straight, the gay, the healthy, the blighted; those who believe in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, Freedom of Speech. "Those who work hard and play by the rules" and will "show up to work tomorrow to begin building the bridge to the 21st century." It's a goddamned, bravura hypnotic performance and the crowd roars its appreciation of the man, the ideas, the proposal, the fact that he is their leader while I am looking into the shadows, picking up stones and turning them over, and wondering where the wounded have been hidden.
The speech is over and the room explodes into jillions of pieces of tinsel released from the ceiling, jillions of red, white, and blue bits of crepe paper, and jillions of balloons. Light bounces off everything, and looking up into the blizzard of confetti, it appears as if the universe has been reduced to its molecular constituents whizzing in random directions, flicking light about so multi-dimensionally it is hard to see the stage. A country anthem, a surprisingly Marxist little ditty about working people creating wealth plays in the background: "Hello, Detroit auto workers, thank you for your time". The President is joined by Al Gore and they are joined by their wives. I turn to Martha Whetstone, my guide through the shoals of this convention during the last week and observe of them, without irony, "They're hipper, they're smarter, they're younger and they're prettier." I cannot conceive of America rejecting such people, but what the public will receive for tendering their acceptance is something I cannot quite comprehend.
The impenetrable blizzard of particulate matter continues, choking the space, hiding the floor. Balloons are bursting like gunshots, making the Secret Service men edgy. The country song is over, and trumpets are bleating, amelodically. The stage is filling up with hot-shots and VIPS, pressing closer and closer to one another to seize a piece of the lime-light and adoration of the crowd. Sam Farr, Congressman from Monterey, stops by my seat and coins description of the moment, "It's the Academy Award of politics," he observes.
I stop for awhile at a post-Convention party at a sports bar and say my good-byes. I am curiously lonely like a traveler who arrives with no one to greet him. People are dancing and eating finger-food, expansive in the victory of their chief. Perhaps I'm too tired. Paul Berry bumped into James Carville this morning who admitted that he was so tired he didn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his butt. I leave the party and to collect my thoughts.
It's all over but the overtones. The fat lady sang and sang magnificently. My expectations proved to be true, but meant less than I thought they would. It was all here, the slick suits (including mine) the food, the hype and whoring, the self-congratulating and back-slapping, the canned distancing and slick packaging, but there were other elements I hadn't anticipated. The inclusion of black people and representatives of other races; the presence of gay and handicapped people offered a minimally optimistic relief. The conviviality and hopefulness, the optimistic fervor that things would somehow work out, was pleasant and politics as a sense of strength and continuity which grows from community, made a strong impression on me. The real-deal of local political organization (even machines) was a relief, an antidote to the vast, impersonal, nowhere-ness of electronic politics.
It may be that the imperfections I find in myself, in Bill Clinton, in the Nation at large are constituent parts of a larger process towards which I will one day develop more patience and less urgency. My disappointment and anger appears to myself as the flip side of high expectations; a quickened desire to extend perimeters of inclusion; to deepen the nation's ideas of compassion so that I can feel truly proud of my country without putting half of my critical nature to sleep or consoling myself with conundrums like making the best of a tough situation. Standing besides my anger, and equally to it is a love for this adolescent, raucous, clever, spontaneous, sentimental, impetuous, and ambitious people of which I am a part. The ambiguity I am cleaved by tonight is, I'm afraid, intrinsic to the divided nature of my own soul.
In the final analysis, I am alone on the platform, clutching my suitcase, as, in the final analysis is each of us. While no one has come to greet or see me off, the station is roiling with people, and, if I choose, I might find here friendship and inspiration. Furthermore, the station itself is magnificently constructed. The city it serves and those it connects me to promise wonder and curious experiences and as I heft my bag, and head for the facing street teeming with life, I feel that I might learn to like it here; might come to be liked, and perhaps in time, even comfortable. Casting about for reference, I look at the sign identifying the station to learn where I am. I am not surprised, to read, writ large, THE WORLD.