A. Saba Dare To Call It Conspiracy
I know next to nothing about Philadelphia except that Frank "Big Bambino" Rizzo, police chief and mayor in the Seventies, ran for election on a pledge to "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." My kind of guy, even though he was a Democrat. Ah, happy days. This week, Attila and his Hunnish hordes are descending on the City of Brotherly Love and doing their best to look like faggots. George Dubya Bush is on his way, his spectacular mound of corpses left far behind in Texas. His new sidekick Dick Cheney, a "widely respected bipartisan moderate" until a week ago, is now referred to by Dems as "The Man Who Voted Against Freeing Nelson Mandela." They say this portentously, like a movie trailer: "Dick Cheney is The Man Who Voted Against Freeing Nelson Mandela. Parental Guidance advised." I don't know why freeing Nelson Mandela falls within the jurisdiction of a Wyoming congressman, but maybe he spent the late Eighties moonlighting on the Cape Town Board of Paroles.
But that was then and this is now, and now compassion is all. As Dubya likes to say, "Don't judge me by how many people I fry, judge me by what's in my heart." (I paraphrase.) If Cheney's in the mood to jail anyone, he's keeping it to himself. The GOP press release on conference speakers is heavy on single moms who believe in tax cuts, Hispanic agricultural workers who believe in local control of education, breast cancer survivors who believe in sensible health insurance reform, etc. If Nelson Mandela were to stroll by the convention today, Cheney would be the first to say, "Hey, if you're the African-American senior who believes in strong missile defence, you're not on till tomorrow night." Thus, the Pledge of Allegiance will be led by a blind mountain climber. A senior Republican tells me that this is the first blind mountain climber ever to address a political convention, though no doubt the Democrats are scouring the land for a blind mountain-climbing lesbian. The non-compassionate conservatives -- the anti-abortion crowd, the gun nuts, the religious right -- are unimpressed by these newcomers to the GOP's big tent. "This blind mountain climber," said one Carolinian delegate. "What's he climbed?"
"He's climbing Everest next year," I said.
"Hmm," said the delegate. "Well, I'll be interested to see if he can make it up to the podium."
Perhaps, asked why he wants to scale Everest, the blind mountain climber would simply reply, like Mallory, "Because it's there. Or maybe over there. Anyway, that general direction."
Because it's there: that's why I'm at the republican convention, scaling the vast mountains of compassionate verbiage, blinded by the lightness, desperate for a glimpse of an Abominable Snowman or two. But Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson and all the other incendiary Pats of yore are nowhere to be seen: the only Patness to be found is in Dubya's responses.
"The republican convention," I said to my cab driver, "and make it snappy." Some chance. He pulled up by a stand offering free mammography consultations.
"This can't be right," I said. But he insisted it was the official entrance. "As part of the convention," said the lady, "we're offering free mammography consultations."
"Thanks all the same," I chuckled, "but that's not much use to me, is it?"
"You'd be surprised," she said, and explained that male breast cancer was America's silent killer. "We're also doing free prostates," she added.
"As long as I don't get Bob Dole's," I said, pressing on before she could start feeling for lumps under my breast and I had to explain that was my unreconstructed conservative hard heart.
But the trouble with flaunting your compassion is that someone else will always come along and flaunt even more. In Philadelphia, this role is being played by Arianna Huffington, the glamorous Greek columnist who's presiding over the "Shadow Convention." She's the former wife of former Republican congressman Michael Huffington, who was prevailed upon by Arianna to run for Senate in 1994, blew a gazillion dollars, lost, and has since decided he's gay. Arianna has also come out of the closet in an even more fundamental manner, and has decided she cares deeply about poor people. This is a remarkable transformation to those of us who remember Arianna as the origin of the quintessential heartless-Eighties joke: Homeless person begging in gutter: "Please. I haven't eaten in four days." Arianna: "I wish I had your will power."
But, radiant as ever and now surrounded by fetching examples of the poor and disenfranchised, the new Arianna yesterday opened her shadow convention by hailing "the overwhelming response to the janitors' strike in Los Angeles." I'd never heard of the janitors' strike, but I'm happy to take Arianna's word for its effectiveness: It's hard for the heartless bosses to organize a lockout against the only guys with a full set of keys. In her new capacity, Arianna had ordered up a gross of placards emphasizing the injustices inflicted by the present political dispensation:
2POOR4ACCESS, said one.
DISENFRANCHIZED, said another. DISRESPECTED, said a third. Two of the people 2Poor4Access asked if the seats next to me were reserved 4 anyone. "Not at all," I said, letting them squeeze past.
"Hey!" said the security guy, bounding down the aisle. "You can't sit there! They're for the media. You have to go over there." So off they went, still disrespected, still 2Poor4Access even at their own conference. John McCain came out and started reading a somewhat listless speech until some faint praise for Dubya roused the mob to a frenzy of jeers and boos. "You're all middle-class whites," shouted a protester against the Navajo-Hopi Relocation Act, which McCain had sponsored. Arianna seemed pleased: "This is the convention that can't be controlled," she said.
I wouldn't give much for Arianna's chances at the big demo yesterday on Ben Franklin Parkway, a mass protest against more or less everything, a vast one-stop shop for all your doomed-cause needs that made Arianna's set look like a bunch of young Rotarians: I spotted "U.S. Military Out Of Okinawa," "Boycott Veal," "Reparations For African-Americans," "The Fraud Of Education Reform Under Capitalism," "Settle The PLCB Contract Now," "No Stadium In Chinatown" and "More Money For Right-Wing Columnists." Okay, I made that last one up. But, though I'm not half as well accoutred as Arianna, my suit and tie were still enough to give me away. "You're with the corporate media, right?" said one of the hot-looking young anarchist babes agitating against police brutality, mulling over whether to speak to me.
On behalf of my corporate masters, I asked how the protest was going police-brutality-wise. "I smoked some dope Saturday during the day and the cops didn't mind," she said. "But at night they were kind of funny about it."
"What do you think about Dubya?"
She turned round and showed me the proud slogan on the small of her back: "F--- BUSH." No solidarity among substance-abusers. By the end of the week I may be asking for the name of her tattooist.
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