Convention Review
By David Kempler
Too Conventional
What if one of the two major political parties threw a convention and no protesters showed up? If you believe AJ Schnack's "Convention", you'd be of the belief that almost no protestors were in attendance at the last Democratic Convention. Whether the reality is that there were very few protestors or that they were just shunted aside by the police is not completely clear here.
"Convention" is spilling over with people who believe that they are incredibly important to the electoral process. The sad truth is that maybe one-percent of them are in reality major players. In the end, the "machine" eats all of them for lunch and spits them out, but everyone is blissfully unaware that they are pawns rather than players. For example, reporters at a local paper in Denver think they're going to control the show because they sit in front of computer monitors that are spaced throughout the city. Local politicos feel similarly important. They are all nobodies.
The protestors are led by a husband-wife team that earned their original stripes protesting the Vietnam War. They have spent their entire lives protesting anything and everything. There is something incredibly sad about watching them, even if they are having "fun", for lack of a better word.
The absolute worst part is that the whole thing plays like a commercial for Obama, rather than as an examination of behind-the-scenes at a convention. It is rah-rah journalism, or rah-rah something. The single amusing factoid is that the big band playing locally at the time of the convention is Rage Against The Machine. "Convention" can't even raise a phony rage against our convention system, settling instead for being the equivalent of a kid poking his head in where he doesn't belong and watching events unfold, without being able to shed anything meaningful to the program. Let's all celebrate how great everything is because our politicians are leading us into the future. I'm nauseous.
