Republican National Convention: Day Five

THURSDAY, NEW YORK - Mr. Bush comes to New York.
The President came to Madison Square Garden tonight, escorted in a caravan of black SUV’s down Manhattan’s west side. At 33rd street, the motorcade turned east, heading the wrong
way down a one-way street, then straight up the ramp leading into the backstage area
of the arena, taking the same path everyone from The Rolling Stones to circus elephants
have been using for decades.

A few moments later, he was on stage, standing at a podium in front of swirling electronic
flags that were waving on the massive screens behind him. Up above, balloons strung
along the orange ceiling waited to be unleashed and the inside of the arena went into
a virtual lock-down mode with hallway doors pulled shut and security patrolling the aisles
from the stage-side corners of the red-carpeted floor up to the farthest reaches of the arena.

Immediately proceeding President Bush, a short video played on an overhead screen
amping up the crowd.
The speech itself, like many others delivered throughout the week had a surreal blandness about it, a kind of politicized Reality TV.

Maybe part of what gave it this quality was the massive screen with its rolling sentences,
whose big white letters scrolling across a black background prompted the speakers line-by-line.

Maybe it was the predictability of the words themselves, distributed in the early afternoon
on neatly typed sheets, that rendered the voices obsolete when delivered verbatim from
the podium many hours later.

Quite possibly it was because each speaker carried essentially the same
message: Vote for me, or Die — without giving any real reason to do so, other
than the alternative would lead a straight path right into the inferno.

There were few truly human moments. Playing it safe was keeping it bland.
Once you discovered that the characters turned into larger-than-life icons on living room
TVs were really the product of some calculated image-making meant to create
the illusion of politics in action, than you understood that the only true spontaneity
to be found was outside, on the barricaded Manhattan streets.
There, a high-tech security force resembling something out of a video game was mixing it up with tens of thousands of demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, and assorted scene gawkers, night after night after night.

Amazingly, you didn’t read too much of this in many newspapers. Nor did
you see it on TV.
With most of the action going on outside Madison Square Garden, 15,000 of the
world’s media were seated inside the arena, rewriting press releases to make it look
like they were actually doing something.
You would think some of them would have thought to see if anything was going on outside.
Then again, judging by their work over the past few years, most of them don’t do too well without a script.

Saratogian writer Thomas Dimopoulos is in New York City providing local
coverage of the Republican National Convention this week.