American Dreamer: Notes from Underground
Steven T. Jones and Kid Beyond are driving to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, stopping by Burning Man on the way there and back, reporting on the intersection of the counterculture and the national political culture.
By Kid Beyond
Wednesday afternoon: the nominating speeches. They're playing against type. Third-youngest delegate Jordan Apollo Pazell, from a 720-person town in Utah, seconds Hillary's nomination on behalf of his two great- grandmothers -- both still alive and in Utah, both born before women had the right to vote. Nominating Obama is Michael Wilson, a young Iraq War vet and lifelong Republican.
Speaker after speaker, the talking points are the same. The failing economy. Health care. A swift exit from Iraq. A more nuanced foreign policy. Clean energy, and clean energy jobs. Restoring the American Dream -- prosperity through hard work.
Conspicuously absent: Gun control. Capital punishment. Climate change. Immigration. Gay marriage, of course. And barely a peep about abortion. Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz offers the first mention of Roe v. Wade I've heard all week; Hillary never touched it.
Melissa Etheridge comes out, a huge blowup of the Constitution as her backdrop. She leads the crowd through a medley of "God Bless America," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Give Peace a Chance," and "Born in the USA."
Bill Clinton sails in, on a sea of American flags and full-throated adulation. He's immaculately coiffed, all pompadour and gravitas. He's in his element, preaching to a hand-picked choir.
Like Hillary, he's the good Obama-supporting soldier, but boy, is he way more jazzed about the Veep. He likes Barack, sure, but "I looove Joe Biden." He makes sure we know that "my candidate didn't win." And when he says, "Barack Obama is the man for this job," you wonder if that's code for "a certain woman would be better." This is, after all, Mr. Meaning of Is.
He takes the high road. He's sharp, comfortable, expansive, speaking from hard-won experience as President and statesman. As always, he's deft with hard numbers and statistics. He gives the week's first mentions of AIDS and global warming. He makes the most eloquent argument yet for a measured foreign policy: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."
He soars out to the pounding uplift of U2's "Beautiful Day." There is a lot of love in the room for this man.
Then the band launches into -- I kid you not -- Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love." An odd and rather cringe-worthy choice to accompany the world's most famous sex addict. Someone in Mission Control seems to recognize this eventually, as the band abruptly cuts off right before the chorus.
I look around to see if anyone else finds this equally surreal. One row behind me, in a private box, is Gary Hart. I decide not to ask.
John Kerry is up next. At first, he falls prey to some of the same communication problems that left voters cold in '04. He has no sense of rhythm or timing. He's rushing. He doesn't know when to pause and let the crowd in. He steps on their applause.
He smiles only once -- when he self-effacingly skewers Candidate McCain's rejection of Senator McCain's policies: "Talk about being for it before you were against it!"
But once he gets going, his wooden gravitas is put to good use. He pounds McCain mercilessly on foreign policy and national security. And he's still pissed about Karl Rove handing him his keister on a Swift Boat. He's the angry martyr, the soldier who fell on his sword.
Time for Joe Biden. He's a heaping tablespoon of salt-of-the-Earth. He's proud of his kid: "I'm a helluva success." Shout-out to his mother: "Mom, I love ya." This is why he's been picked: to make the ticket less scary to the grandmothers in Fort Lauderdale, more attractive to the hardhats in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Youngstown. The ticket needed working-class, needed scrappy. It needed an average Joe.
His language is bare-knuckled, pugilist: "Millions of Americans have been knocked down... we get back up." A bullied stutterer as a child, his Mom demanded that he bloody the noses of his tormentors. He goes into foreign policy attack mode: Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia (vowing to "hold Russia accountable for its actions" -- not exactly a trivial pledge).
Then he turns on a dime, gets soft-spoken, compassion in his larynx. He feels the pain of the working class. He uses the word "God" eight times. He fumbles his words here and there. It's endearing, humanizing. Someone has finally realized that folks tend to distrust eggheads, preferring Dubya's misunderestimated strategery to the long, clause-laden, patrician paragraphs of Gore and Kerry.
In the past, Biden has struck me as a bit of a blowhard, someone who likes to hear himself talk. Tonight, he wins me over. As SF's own Willie Brown tells me afterwards: "He did good. Kept it brief, kept his mouth in check."
The evening ends with a surprise appearance by the Man Himself. The crowd goes raucous: Obama Ex Machina. He's taller than Biden; this is good. He praises Hillary's speech: she "rocked the house last night." Not a phrase you'll find in McCain's lexicon. It reminds me of Obama's speech back in April, when he brushed Hillary's dirt off his shoulders -- the first candidate with Jay-Z on his iPod.
This feeling of strange cultural bedfellows pops up again later, at an afterparty way across town, in a rundown industrial neighborhood -- a warehouse gallery exhibit of Obama-inspired art, featuring the work of street-propaganda artist Shepard Fairey, of "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and "OBEY" fame. The entertainment includes comedian Sarah Silverman, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, actress/singer Zooey Deschanel, indie sweetheart Jenny Lewis, and rockstar turntablist Z- Trip. The hosts: the mayors of Seattle and Providence, and our own Gavin Newsom.
Fairey is, not coincidentally, the creator of the ubiquitous "HOPE" poster that iconicizes Obama as a heroic, constructivist revolutionary. It was commissioned by the Obama campaign, which sells it on their official Web store. According to a Washington Post article on Fairey, he has a letter from Obama himself: "I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign... Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign."
A campaign with an enlightened view of street art. Politicians embracing the underground. We are the counterculture, and we vote.
ote.
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Comments (1)
Wow. You have some excellent writing skills here. I know this is late, Obama being elected by now, but I just wanted to say it feels really good to read something as concise and human as this. Thank you.
Posted by Patrick Delaney | February 26, 2009 10:12 AM