Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.

Dismiss

Torgo for President: The Master Likes It

1 view

Skip to first unread message

strychnine

unread,

Aug 15, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/15/96

SAN DIEGO, California (Wed, !4 Aug 96)-- Mojo and I have retired to The
Blarney Stone, which is usually a pretty decent Irish expat bar in the
gaslamp district, but tonight it's full of giddy Republicans. Mojo is
holding forth on the lessons to take home from our shared experience:

1. "The Republicans are as disconnected from reality as your most paranoid
fantasies would suggest." 2. "Sexually frustrated middle-aged white men."
3. "If you repeat something enough times, it magically comes true."

Numbers one and three are self-evident at this point, and I'm having
difficulty seeing a lesson in number two -- it just looks like a simple
noun phrase to me. I figure that either Mojo or I haven't had enough
anejo yet. In another hour or so this will be sacred knowledge.

Indeed, it's difficult to come away with a sensible interpretation of the
strange black mass we have witnessed up close. Yet, I have set myself up
here to try. There are people depending on me to perform the dubious task
of sifting through the entrails of the carrion left behind by this
stinking affair and read some omen of import from it. Here goes:

-----

After a few days of shadowing delegates when they aren't in the convention
center and picking through the brains of the people I can talk with who
have floor passes, it appears that the rank and file delegates have
basically no personal experience with the celebrity members of their
party.

While we were walking from the parking garage to the convention center, we
tripped over a yapping pack of journalists stricken with George Wallace
syndrom. They were camped out in front of the Nordstroms waiting for Jack
Kemp to emerge from an elevator and get into a waiting car.

There were about a dozen secret service agents standing around and easily
three times that many reporters, photographers and cameramen, basically
there to make sure they didn't lose their jobs when some random
gun-wielding communist gunned down the presumptive vice presidential
nominee while they were lounging in the Bell South media lounge snacking
on free mile-longs and Coors Lite.

And true to his breed, Mojo joined the pack. "It's a disease," he
explained. "We're all living until the cure." That, however, does not
explain the handful of quivering women with delegate passes ready to
strip, if necessary, to catch a glance from the silver-haired sex god of
the GOP. You mean they have beef protecting the stage in case one of the
squids on the floor makes a mad rush on the dais to touch the hem of the
popes?

Later in the afternoon, while the award ceremony was in full swing, I was
out taking photographs of the Buchanan delegates attempting to hold a
press conference. Exactly what they wanted to tell the press is unclear,
and the meaning I gathered from the event was assuredly not what they
intended.

They opted to hold their press conference on a little grassy knowl a
little ways from the "playground" where the AFL-CIO was holding court
passing resolutions to the effect that American workers need to be paid
higher salaries. This little grassy knowl was at the end of Martin Luther
King, Jr. Promenade, a pedestrian walkway that parallels the San Diego
trolley tracks next to the convention center.

Set into the sidewalk at irregular intervals were inspiring quotes from
the Old Man himself, and the following quotation was right under the feet
of the Buchanan delegates, completely unnoticed until I dropped to one
knee and began transcribing it onto the back of a florist's advertisement:

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of
extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will
we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of
justice?"

From the reaction of the Buchanan people, I'd guess they didn't know the
origin of the quote. Once I drew their attention to it, they began saying
things like, "This is so cool," and "I wonder who said this," and "This is
exactly why we are here. This says it all."

Before long, they were engaging in primitive cargo cult behavior, dressing
up the engraving with Buchanan for President paraphenalia and trying to
keep people from stepping on it. Journalists were taking pictures of it,
and videotaping the beaming white faces smiling with inspiration from the
words set so ironically in stone under their feet.

Moments later, the predictable cadre from Act Up arrived to perform their
hit single, "Racist, Sexist, Anti-gay, Pat Buchanan Go Away!" Within
nanoseconds, the media saavy campaign people realized the potential for
bad press and began yanking the leashes on their right-wing trained pets,
saying, "Alright! Time to leave! Everybody! We're going away! Now!"

There were only two ways to disperse, and most of them chose to follow the
campaign people up the street away from the convention center. About two
blocks away, their fearless leaders disappeared into thin air, and I had
the delicious opportunity to stand there and take photographs of their
faces as the dim realization of how abjectly they have lost threatened to
dawn on them.

Mojo and I followed about half of them to an anti-immigrant rally in front
of the Federal building, which was equally pathetic. All told, we were
seeing about thirty scrubby borderline cranks led by a psychotic kid with
an unfinished communications degree, and a mutant tax protestor from the
Flat Earth society putting on a tawdry little show of racist, xenophobic
outrage for the San Diego Peedee and a very bored looking squad of federal
marshalls.

I managed to take a couple pictures of a very bemused looking latino
marshall with a huge gun strapped to his hip standing behind a sign
reading, "This is the United States, NOT Aztlan!"

Eventually, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach, CA)
magically appeared out of a cloud of pungent smoke in a pair of baggies
and a Hawaiian shirt to denounce the federal government for failing to
adopt a zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration and to demand the
closedown of the border with Mexico. He babbled on incoherently about
drug smugglers, the United Nations, the Face On Mars and aliens with
heroin rigs, abducting our children and recruiting them to become vampire
lesbians for Kali.

He left as mysteriously as he arrived, and the rally began to wind down.
The anti-immigration people are generally pretty old, so they're not
physically up to getting into the kind of scuffles that make for
interesting stories. They just packed up their signs and trudged back to
the convention center to meld back into the crowd where they would be
indistinguishable from the rest of the greedheads and fools.

-----

So. What is there to learn here? I'm well into my third shot of
tequila. Mojo is asleep in the seat next to me, his second pint half
empty. The bar is still packed with Republicans.

The party is basically over. The delegate vote is counted, and the only
thing left is for Dole and Kemp to make the speeches in which they say
things like, "I'd like to thank the members of the academy and everyone
who worked on the picture from the directors to the actors to the best boy
and the grips."

I have two observations to take with me. First, this convention is
different from previous Republican conventions in one important way. Both
the RNC and DNC have never really been conventions, but rather the formal
presentation of the outcome of conventions. However, the RNC has finally
reached the point where they have dropped all pretense of conducting the
public's business at these things.

The VIP's, bankers and lobbyists and hangers-on from all over the world,
pay obscene dollars to shmooze with the power junkies behind the scenes.
Everyone is jockeying for some kind of influence they can wedge into more
dollars with which to ply the party hacks in an ugly spiral. But it
doesn't happen where the security system permits imaging and audio
recording equipment. If a check cashes in a dark room where there isn't a
camera to record it, does it really happen?

Secondly, I think it was Sam "Mark Twain" Clemens who said that there are
two things that are not for the squemish to see how they are made: sausage
and legislation. The conventional wisdom I learned at my wacked-out
father's knee is that watching how Congress operates is one of the most
disillusioning experiences an American can endure.

That's bullshit. Watching the political parties nominate candidates for
President and adopt national platforms. Now there is sickening
spectacle. I truly believe that full comprehension of the nameless horror
inherent in the system by which we select our representatives is dangerous
to the fabric of our culture.

But the fabric of our culture is perverse and deserves to be rended and
sold for scrap. It's a bleak existence for millions of people, trapped by
forces they can't even comprehend, let alone see, touch and effect,
manipulated by superstition and myth, and forced to strive for goals that
are counter to their basic interests. One day, we will see a new form of
political life arise, and I have no doubt it will arise here in the Land
of the Free and the Home of the Brave, but not soon. Likely not in my
lifetime.

In the meantime, it's the best game there is. Well, okay, baseball is the
best game there is. This is the second best game. All the other games
pale to simple bead-counting, chip-taking games, games with no depth, no
breadth and no heat.

"Yeah," Mojo says. "That'll do. Ship it."

Addendum: On the way to the hotel after writing this, your humble narrator
was pulled over on suspicion of Driving Under Influence of Drugs or
Alcohol after making a wacky last millisecond lane change to catch the
right offramp. The California Highway Patrol officer was benificent and
serene in asking me the standard questions and giving me the Test. I
honestly thought I was caught, busted, collared, in the tank, on the group
W bench.

But fate smiled on me tonight. Perhaps the CHP man was sympathetic to my
plight and permitted me to escape the wrath of the state just this once on
account of my earlier good deeds today. Alternatively, perhaps I wasn't
hallucinating and I really did pass the sobriety test. Either way, I
drove away unharmed and the storms moving through the San Diego region are
even now lighting up the night sky, shaking the pillars of heaven with
thunderous booms, and I am free. Free, I tell you. Free.

0 new messages