Actually, I am not convinced that what we have seen in San Diego and Chicago is theater at all. I think we have observed reality. The ways in which the language of the theater has been borrowed to describe the proceedings mislead the audience – the public. This borrowed language leads the public to expect the impossible from its leaders, the best of whom have come into office to serve, not to act. Voters are beginning to expect both a real and a transcendental experience.
That is a very tall order to fill. I would settle for civic discourse, where the language is plain, where people could be a little more unkempt, where someone could scowl and flail about. We don’t expect our politicians to dance, we don’t expect them to sing. Why do we expect them to act? By and large, what they do, and feel, is real. All summer, this has been the conventional wisdom: 1968 was a time of genuine passion, conflict and import; 1996 one of packaging, scripting and insignificance. But there were passions in Chicago this year – if you knew what to listen for.
““Paul was on a ship one time, and the ship wrecked. The captain panicked, said “We’re going to drown!’… [But] don’t panic. Those who can swim, swim. Some can’t swim… get the boards. Hold on to that. Don’t give up. Just ride the waves. The rest of you who can’t swim and don’t have boards, you make it on broken pieces. Many of us, our hearts are heavy. Rock to the left as we try to reel to the right. Rock and reel.’’ Jesse is rocking. Is it a lullaby? Or a wake-up call?
If anybody would seem to have kept on going and hung on to the boards from Radcliffe College in the ’60s to survival in the ’80s and a Grammy in 1990, it would be Bonnie Raitt. I asked her about the blues and she told me about how politics was the blues: ““It’s the same sense of indignation and hurt and pain. It’s the same well that I’m tapping into. Whether it’s about – you know – ‘Don’t-treat-me-that-way’ or “Don’t-leave-me.’ It’s the same whether you’re singin’ it to a man or you sing it to the person not lettin’ you live your life, or the government.’'
Studs was born on May 16, 1912, almost a month to the day after the Titanic sank. ““That was a hell of a year to be born, 1912, the Titanic, from which we learned nothing! It was the tip of the iceberg, the greatest ship ever built, nothing could sink it. Bam! And we still haven’t learned!’’ He’s disappointed with this, the last campaign of the 20th century. “"[Nineteen sixty-eight] had some fizz! f-i-z-z! Here’s what happened [in ‘68]: the tear gas came, and I was standing with this English journalist. The canister got to our feet, and a kid about 18 years old, about six feet tall, a skeleton of a kid who weighed about 130 pounds, a goofy-looking kid with long hair and kicked the canister of tear gas away from us towards himself! That kid is what the ’60s were all about! And he’s being put down today! ‘68 is put down, it’s scorned, it’s put down by those who delight in the failure of dreams. But that dream has not failed! It’s been distorted! And that’s my sermon for the day!’’
Jesse Jackson Jr. asked one of his staffers to escort me to a housing project in his South Side district. I went to a clinic; it was teeming with young children who had come for back-to-school checkups. I met Dr. Gloria Jackson Bacon, who has been working in the neighborhood since 1964. Born in New Orleans, she had a beautiful way of talking with fast spurts of words. I asked how she’d come there, and why she’d stayed so long. ““And I don’t know how I got to that – I don’t know. I saw poor people. This was in the ’50s. I just said that was a population I was gonna serve. I don’t know how I picked it. From whatever little dream I had. People were poor. The people were nice. I was nice to them. They were responsive, because for the most part most doctors didn’t have eye contact with patients.''
Welfare reform is going to affect her and her community: ““You pickin’ on the people who pretty much can’t defend themselves. Well, you know. But you understand that nobody loves the poor. And people don’t love people who take care of the poor.''
Ann Richards is one of the funniest people I have ever seen in action. All the acting coaches in the world couldn’t train someone to be that funny, or to present themselves in such an idiosyncratic way. She says right-wingers who try to bridge the gender gap are ““like some boy who snubbed you at the dance showing up at the door with a box of old, cheap, grocery-store chocolates and a bouquet of old, wilted flowers. And he wants you to take him back. And the answer is “No, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me’.''
There’s a turn in the conversation. ““There is something at work in this country, though, that I can’t analyze or explain in terms of previous history,’’ Richards muses. ““There is a discontent. What is it about? You can point to any number of groups that make up the population where there is a piece of discontent, a serious, worthwhile discontent. But this country is economically doing very well. We’re educating far more children today than have ever been educated in history. They’re educating kids who are so disabled that they are literally wearing diapers in high school. But there is something missing. And what is it? We don’t have an enemy. I think human beings have to have something to oppose.''
She was one of the last people I spoke with in Chicago. She told me that the intellectual antecedents for their movement ““were not Marx and Lenin, but Sartre and the beatniks and the notion of being alive in a society of spectacle.''
I’m rethinking the theater of these civic moments. In San Diego, an audience waited for abortion to disrupt the convention. In Chicago ‘96, some waited for the debate over welfare to disrupt the convention. The platforms had been set, but there was no theater, no violent confrontation, no great clash of certitudes. We may never see such sweeping conflicts again. We should probably pray that we don’t. Perhaps we should pursue instead smaller conversations, and smaller, more considerate acts.
