Arena Knight Cabal
Erwin Beatz
There was a moment on the second night of the great carnival of hooey held here last week, as I sat about two stories up in the shadows of the First Union Center looking out across the exuberant throng of delegates as former President George Bush stood basking in a great tide of partisan affection, when I experienced a moment of pure historical synchronicity.
The picture was familiar from old prints, black-and-white newsreels and TV broadcasts: one man standing before a crowded hall of cheering people, many waving flags and wearing funny hats. At intervals in the crowd there were placards with the names of states listed vertically. In that moment, I might as well have been watching another Republican National Convention a century ago in this very city when Teddy Roosevelt strode into Exposition Hall wearing his "acceptance hat," or have been a reporter in Chicago 52 years later when another war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, rose to receive his own ovation. George Bush's standing O was part of a continuum stretching backward and forward in time, a ritual that connects us to the whole sweep of American history and reassures us of its continuance. And in that moment I felt cheated. If I had been a reporter at those earlier conventions I would have had a real story to cover, real news to break, floor fights, backroom deals, delegate swapping and defections, appalling acts of betrayal, Turkish mazes of subterfuge ... the whole pageant of hardball national politics to plunder. Instead, born too late, I was trapped in the world's most lavish, prolonged infomercial.
Even that synchronicity I felt was, of course, by design. I would feel it again with even more intensity two nights later when Bush II, George W., stepped out onto the stage to his own thunderous ovation, a thing so loud, long and heartfelt that it seemed it might simply rend the vault of the arena, split the sky and lift the anointed one from his spotlighted foothold on center stage straight to the ever-loving lap of the Christian (no, make that ecumenical) God Almighty. I felt the connection because it was what I was supposed to feel. Everything at the convention is by design. It is stagecraft preserved and perfected by people who know how to produce desired emotions and to make desired connections, just as surely as Steven Spielberg knows how to make you scream or cry on cue.
Where politics is concerned, we are blessed to live in boring times, and where there is no passion, there must be artifice. W.'s convention took the ritual of the national convention to a new level. It was salesmanship of the highest order, and it was attempting something particularly hard. It was trying at once to remake (in four days) the party of privilege into the party of diversity, while nominating for president the patrician son of a patrician president -- And, lo! a Yalie shall lead us to the multicultural promised land!
No detail was overlooked. To give you an idea of how carefully scripted it was, how thoroughly thought-through (and socially inclusive): There was this little plot of grass off one of the vast parking lots outside the arena roped off and designated as the place for guide dogs (for the blind) to poop. All this masterful orchestration was designed to help us look past W.'s rather thin risumi, to forget the often harsh truths of modern Republicanism, and to see instead a Rainbow Coalition of corporate decency with lovable W. himself, with his playful wink and crooked smile, firmly in the current of historical inevitability.
The Republicans, tired of getting beaten up by Bill Clinton, have turned the tables, have dropped their more divisive social priorities (or at least have agreed to soft-pedal them), expropriated the Democrats' "We Are the World" rhetoric and at least some of their issues (education, Social Security reform) and have nominated a charming, moderate, Southern governor who can beat up on the Washington establishment and promise a fresh start.
And why are we going to vote for W.? Because his mother says he's a good boy, that's why. And because unlike Al Gore, that stiffy, W. is a real fella, a bit of a reformed party animal who sowed some wild oats before he was tamed by good women -- first his mother, the most popular white-haired woman in the world, and then his wife, by all accounts and appearances a paragon of conventional middle American (Midland, Texas) womanhood. In one of the best lines of his superb acceptance speech, W. said, "I know grace because I've seen it, I know peace because I've felt it, and I know forgiveness because I've needed it."
We are asked to vote for W. as a way of redeeming ourselves from the goofiness of our own youth, from the guiding hedonism of our age, captured by the old hippie mantra "If it feels good, do it" -- not to mention, at least not directly, that popular overage flower child in the White House. If W. could straighten up, settle down (after Laura threatened to leave him and take their twin girls) and give up boozing and partying and who knows what all else, to embrace what conservatives like to call "core values," then we can, too.
W. asks us to rise to the standard set by Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," the folks who helped win WWII, then built the suburbs, the interstate highway system and the hole in the ozone layer, just as he is living up to the standards of his father, the WWII fighter pilot whose dignified service in the White House was interrupted by the first baby boomer president. It helps that the vast majority of baby boomers already have, living in their suburban homes, nurturing their retirement accounts, sending their oldest children off to college (as W. and Laura are) and paying whopping sums in taxes to Uncle Sam. We are asked to finally accept, as W. has, the fact that we're all grown up -- and accept our tax cut as reward.
Coming up for air after a week of total immersion in this production, swimming upstream through what H.L. Mencken once called the "Niagra of bilge," it certainly looks to me like W. is the man of the moment. Next week I'll be holding my nose and diving into the Dem-fest in Los Angeles, into the ring cycle of the real pros out in Hollywood, no less, so remember to check this space. I might just surface believing the 21st century demands Al Gore. But I doubt it. The Republicans have zeroed in on the one thing the Democrats cannot defend, their kryptonite ... that is, Bill Clinton's dick.
There's no nicer way to put it, which is the point. Content as I am with our national prosperity, in agreement for the most part with the current administration's liberal social agenda, a believer in abortion rights (although appalled by abortion), the election keeps coming back to Slick Willy's slick willy. Yes, I wish Ken Starr and the rabid right-wing Clinton haters behind him had never brought it up. Yes, the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal was trivial in the greater scheme of things, and Clinton is not the first commander in chief to discover the aphrodisiac of power. Yes, Republicans certainly share a large measure of blame for the poisonous partisanship in Washington, and had no business pushing the matter to impeachment ... but what in God's name could Clinton have been thinking, playing sexual games in the White House with a ditzy, love-struck intern? What the Republicans realize is that no matter how high the president's favorability ratings, and no matter how angry people are at Starr and the GOP for their mad impeachment effort, America remains appalled by Clinton's behavior ... both the scandal and his classic mealy-mouthed self-defense, which produced that one line for which Clinton is doomed to be best remembered: "That depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." Not exactly Lincolnesque. And Gore will pay the price.
The enduring vision of Bill Clinton's dick was behind Gore's decision Monday to name Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman, something of a moral gadfly, was the first Democrat to publicly slam the president for his behavior in the Lewinsky episode, back when Hillary was blaming the whole thing on a right-wing conspiracy. But it's not going to be enough. If Gore had stepped out in those early days and chastised the president himself, that would be one thing. He who stands beside a giant is doomed to look like a dwarf. Give Gore points for loyalty, and a strong turnout of Jewish voters, but that will be small compensation home in Tennessee come January.
The smell of pending victory was behind the buoyant optimism at the FUC (an unfortunate acronym, but not without a certain Maileresque aptness). It stands with Philly's other sports arenas in the middle of nowhere, at the basement of South Philadelphia surrounded by acres of macadam, bordered to the north by the old Spectrum and Veterans Stadium, to the south by the Navy Yard, to the west by a smelly oil refinery and a vast auto junkyard, to the east by Interstate 95 and the Delaware River. It's a perfect location for security, because a few high, temporary fences were enough to keep all but the invited almost a half mile away. Inside the fence were byzantine levels of further security, each with its own long, rectangular, color-coded pass. Access to the press seats in the FUC were purple; to the floor, yellow. Green passes allowed technicians access to the works behind stage, gray passes for telephone workers, blue for security. There were 19 categories of media credentials, and 14 for nonmedia, and to make matters worse, new passes were issued for each session, so the yellow floor pass for Monday morning's session was obsolete by Monday evening.
Passing through the outer perimeter of security required the low-prestige, red, limited-access pass, which also granted admission to the bustling international media village camped outside the FUC itself. This consisted primarily of four interconnected, blue-carpeted, air-conditioned media tents, which were the size of airplane hangars, and a trailer park for the more equipment-laden TV operations. CNN had a complex of trailers just to house its catering needs, which says something about how far that cable network has risen in the world (and started me wondering about job openings). The spaces between these trailers and tents were roped together by tangles of fiber-optic and power cables as thick in places as Dennis Hastert's waist, like the exposed entrails of some emerging colossus. Inside the tents the various news operations were partitioned off with flimsy curtains, so you could peer through at the portable newsrooms of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Gannett and the other big boys, each of whom imported not just dozens of reporters, but editors, researchers, technicians and clerks to tend their temporary computer installations.
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