Again I open this site to find people rushing around with their hair on fire, shrieking that the 2008 Democratic National Convention is doomed to surpass in naked electoral thievery, brazen contemptuous betrayal, violent head-cracking street turmoil, and general all-around ugliness, that infamous convention of Democrats in Chicago in 1968.
Well, I'm with Markos. I think Clinton II is going to get thumped in Texas, and that will be that. She will go, gently, into that good night, and we rest will go about electing Barack Obama President of the United States.
But, in the meantime, this calling up of the ghosts of Chicago--it bothers me. It is first the same sort of silly hyperbole that previously beset this site in the form of "Bush Is Hitler" formulations. Worse, at a time when something is really happening out there, it drags us back to those days that marked the nadir of this party, when, for millions of good Democrats, and for very good reason, the "detestation of politics attained an almost religious passion."
The quote just above the fold comes from William Styron, who, in 1968, was a moderately successful novelist, and also a delegate from the state of Connecticut to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Like everyone else who traveled to that city, for that convention, Styron was in no way prepared for what he would experience there. But, unlike pretty much anybody else who experienced Chicago, Styron, in a September 1968 essay for the New York Review of Books, managed to edge in close, in words, to his experience. It is those words that are coming--and hopefully very soon now--in this diary.
Hunter S. Thompson, who was beaten and gassed in Chicago, famously observed that nobody who had been to Chicago had really succeeded in getting it down on paper (certainly Norman Mailer, who wrote more terrible books about terribly important subjects than any other American writer of the 20th Century, failed spectacularly with his Chicago book).
But Styron, Styron got it right: and with a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory style that runs so far outside his usual precise, genteel, reined-in, gentlemanly style, it seems like the work of another man. It in fact smells awfully of Thompson's own later, post-1970 work. When, some years on, I obtained Thompsons's fax number, and thereby asked him if he--a famously voracious reader of all and everybody--had, perhaps, encountered Styron's essay, and by it been inspired to blaze, blade furiously swinging, into the thickets of "gonzo," I received, writ large in hand-written response, this: "I SHIT ON YOUR CHEST."
Anyway.
Our own Meteor Blades, who was there in Chicago in 1968, recently reminded this site that the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, failed to win a single primary. Not even the most fervent Clinton II opponent can deny that Clinton II has, in this campaign, actually won at least ten contested Democratic primaries, and from coast to coast.
Then there is the matter of superdelegates. We see, on this site, in these days, much rending of garments, over the power of superdelegates. It is interesting to note that longtime Democratic Party poohbah Bob Beckel baldly disclosed last week on the Sean Hannity radio show that "superdelegates" were first forcibly introduced into the Democratic Party process in 1982, as a means to "fend off" an expected insurgent challenge by Ted Kennedy against heir-apparent Walter Mondale. As Beckel himself admitted, we can now safely assume that any jihadist assault on the Democratic Party by Ted Kennedy has been successfully averted. There is thus, as even the devoted Clintonista Lanny Davis admitted last week, also on Hannity's radio show, no reason why the party can't wipe the primary process clean of all superdelegates in the Democratic Party selection process of 2012.
In the meantime, however, and no matter how Clinton II might work to "steal" the 2008 nomination for herself, her efforts cannot possibly match those by which the Titans of the Party awarded the 1968 nomination to Hubert Humphrey. In 1968, primary elections were but smirking token outreach efforts, frivolously extended to the more restless, bumptious members of the party. In truth, all power lay with the fat cigar-smoking fellows patting their bellies in smoke-filled rooms. Almost all delegates then, were what we today think of as "superdelegates."
This manner of picking a president, at least in the Democratic Party, was broken forever, by the McGovern reforms of 1972. Which is one of many, many, many, reasons, why McGovern remains, in the post-FDR years, the quintessence of our party.
There were four types of "insurgents" in Chicago in 1968.
There were people, like Styron, who were wholly in the party, who came to counter the party on its own terms, believing they had the righteousness of the rules on their side.
Then there were the people Meteor Blades refers to as "popular-front Democrats," people who, depending upon their own personal preferences, in Chicago in 1968 confronted the Convention either inside the hall, or out on the street.
Third, there were the carnival barkers--the Rubins and the Hoffmans--who associated the Democratic Party, in 1968 in legislative and executive control, with Power, with War, with Folly, and who worked no farther than to piss all over the party in the street--drown it, drench it, humiliate it, prick it, bring it, as an object of ridicule, down.
Fourth, the LSD people, who pretty much physically didn't go to Chicago at all, but who had an unnerving way of understanding the times--though, always lacking oomph, too often hole-armed, they could never bring forth the change they saw:
The information we're plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It's built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it's a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We're living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately it's very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.
Still with me? Bless you. Here's Styron: Chicago: 1968:
As for myself, the image of one young girl no older than sixteen, sobbing bitterly as she was being led away down Balbao Avenue after being brutally cracked by a policeman's club, is not so much a memory as a scene imprinted on the retina--a metaphor of the garish and incompehensible week--and it cannot be turned off like the Mr. Clean commercial that kept popping up between the scenes of carnage.
And suddenly they were here, coming over the brow of the slope fifty yards away, a truly stupefying sight--one hundred or more of the police in a phalanx abreast, clubs at the ready, in helmets and gas masks, just behind them a huge perambulating machine with nozzles, like the type used for spraying insecticide, disgorging clouds of yellowish gas, the whole advancing panoply illuminated by batteries of mobile floodlights. Because of the smoke, and the great cross outlined against it, yet also because of the helmeted and masked figures--resembling nothing so much as those rubberized wind-up automata from a child's playbox of horrors--I had a quick sense of the medieval in juxtaposition with the twenty-first century or, more exactly, a kind of science fiction fantasy, as if a band of primitive Christians on another planet had suddenly found themselves set upon by mechanized legions from Jupiter.
[I]t is mainly that night scene out of Armageddon that I recollect or, the next day, the tremendous confrontation in front of the Hilton, at the intersection of Michigan and Balbao (named for Italo Balbao, the Italian avaitor who first dumped bombs on the Ethiopians), where, half-blinded from the gas I had just caught on the street, I watched the unbelievable melee not from the outside this time, but in the surreal shelter of the Haymarket bar, a hermetically sealed igloo whose sound-resistant plate-glass windows offered me the dumbshow of cops clubbing people to the concrete, swirling squadrons of people in Panavision blue and polystyrene visors hurling back the crowds, chopping skulls and noses while above me on an invincible TV screen a girl with a fantastic body enacted a comic commercial for Bic ballpoint pens, and the bartender impassively mooned over his daiquiris, and the Muzak in the background whispered "Mood Indigo." Even the denouement seemed unreal--played out not in the flesh but as part of some animated cartoon where one watches all hell break loose in tolerant boredom--when an explosion of glass at the rear of the bar announced the arrival of half a dozen bystanders who, hurled inward by the crush outside, had shattered the huge window and now sprawled cut and bleeding all over the floor of the place while others, chased by a wedge of cops, fled screaming into the adjacent lobby.
Styron concedes that, there on the streets of Chicago, in 1968, "there were some bearable moments amid the dreck," but concludes:
[T]hese moments were rare and intermittent and the emotional gloss they provided was unable to alleviate not just the sense of betrayal (which at least carries the idea of promise victimized) but the sorrow of a promise that never really existed.
We do not need to be yearning to return to that place of "the sorrow of a promise that never really existed." This is 2008, not 1968. We err, in calling up the ghosts of that time.
I was too young, for Chicago, 1968. But, four years later, canvassing for voters for McGovern, I was shocked by the fervor, the emotion, the bitterness, I encountered among former Democrats, who had, because of that four-years-past world, been forever turned off to our party.
These were people who understood what newbies often don't: that people who yearn towards street demonstrations do not understand what street demonstrations really mean. They mean the government has failed in its essential duty--to represent, to reflect, the will of the people. That when the people must take to the streets against the government, such an act, is, in essence, suffused in sadness; an admission of failure. That, when you march, it is nothing, really, to be proud of. It is an admission of failure, of shame.
In this year, 2008, the campaign of Clinton II, is collapsing into failure. It will, soon, admit itself as such. There will be no need to relate it to 1968. It will quietly fold into nothingness . . . .