I’ll get to the Worldcon stories in a bit, but first I wanted to post this missive from Larry Aronson on living in NYC the past week:
Wow!
Am I glad that’s over. Today the city quickly returned to the normal quiet you’d see going into the Labor Day weekend. The police state is gone and we have our city back. Thankfully, Bush himself, was in the city less than half a day. His coronation was handled entirely by operatives and after his rapid departure, few GOP bigwigs hung around to do any business. I’m sure you have your own opinion but I found Bush’s acceptance speech boring. Most of the new proposals were rehashed Democratic programs that Congressional Republicans blocked in the Clinton administration. To follow a recitation of costly, new-new deal initiatives with an attack on the Free-spending Democrats was hypocrisy. The rest of Bush’s speech was occupied with the fashioning of flag motif, silk purses out of the Economy’s sow ears and pushing the RNC’s singular campaign strategy of sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt, regarding the opposition.
At least they were better behaved on Thursday. People I talked to, and the local email discussion groups I subscribe to, all carried the impression that the Republicans went overboard on Wednesday night, venting a lot of rage and acting like a bunch of drunken, rowdy, in-your-face, TV Texas cowboys. Those delegates from areas East of Appalachia were Mad as Hell and weren’t going to take it any longer. Mad at What?? Where did all this rage and, yes, outright hate come from? I’m mean, these are the folks that won! They control all three branches of the Federal government and the majority of state houses and governorships. As a social class, they have riches and power, relative to the rest of society, that’s unprecedented in my lifetime.
In personal psychological terms, the behaviors I and others witnessed Wednesday would be diagnosed as displacement, a transference of the frustrations of living in a state of vague fears and guilts by engaging in hostile actions against a perceived enemy. The republican party has been taken over by religious conservatives who are, by definition, believers in authority. The speakers Wednesday night, especially Cheney, a mythic hero among this group, not for any achievements of his own, but for being able to tell a Democratic senator to “go fuck yourself”, without fear of consequence, granted license for bad behavior that night. The same people that reacted in horror to Clinton’s oval office blowjob, Janet Jackson’s Superbowl breast and Howard Stern’s obscene truths, cheered ecstatically with each “Fuckin Liberal” in Kid Rock’s ad-lib lyrics. I swear, If he gave out guns at that moment he could have led a mob out of that club, into the streets of New York to kill them some liberal faggots.
Are the sub- and ex-urbanites that make up the masses of the GOP suffering from collective 9/11 guilt? Great Cities are part and parcel of great nations, yet the Republican party has abandoned the cities for the comfort of suburbia and the safety of the country ranch and disdains our culture. New York City took a terrible blow on 9/11, one that congressional and presidential commissions found the Bush administration had plenty of warning about but did nothing significant to prevent. We’ve been indoctrinated in the importance of 9/11; that it changed history; nothing would ever be the same again. Yet, for republicans, especially those in the upper income brackets whose wealth has been sustained by tax cuts, nothing at all has changed! It’s been a period of stasis in many of their lives, marked by increasing fear and unfocused uncertainty about the future. Here in NYC I live under an orange terrorist alert level, yet I’m clueless about what I should be doing differently than you in yellow alert America. Now that we’ve started (but have no idea how to end) two wars in the middle East, is the World really a safer place?
So, when people sense strongly that things are pretty screwed up and yet feel powerless to do anything but pretend life is perfect day after day, what do they do? They get bitchy, that’s what they do and they focus their anger at being put in such a position on the outsider, those that don’t share their values. If the different one is suddenly shown to be weaker then feared, they pounce. A massive advertising assault designed to cast fear, uncertainly and doubt, about John Kerry’s Vietnam War experience was timed to take advantage of the downside of Kerry’s post-convention bounce and manipulated into a media controversy that amplified its effect by endless repetition as a news story. It was a victory, albeit a tactical one, and it stopped George Bush’s decline in the polls just in time to take full advantage of his convention bounce. As a tactic, the whole maneuver was without honor and will only encourage people to stay home on Election Day, but a serious blow was dealt to the Democrat’s campaign, giving the RNC troops their first real taste of blood and they wanted more.
Am I being too harsh here? Too alarmist? At the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention I witnessed the police as they degenerated from an orderly formation for clearing the park into a riot. It happened when a protestor slipped on the grass before the police line and fell. A cop broke formation and began clubbing the protestor on the ground. Next thing I knew, all the cops had broken ranks, each chasing down his own hippie to hit and hit and hit. I saw the same thing happen two and a half years later at the University of Illinois when the campus police, augmented by the Illinois National Guard, tried to clear quadrangle of people protesting the Kent State killings by lying down and playing dead. This is what comes from political campaigns that divide the country; pitting red states against blue; playing on people fears and insecurities for political gain, and that’s what I saw the Republicans doing here in my city the past few days.
Adding to it: whatever it was last week, it wasn’t New York. I was going through the town and the streets were empty during the day, the stores were vacant, and people felt half anxious and jittery, half dead inside. Not like the post 9/11 feeling of, let’s roll up our sleeves, there’s work to be done and we’ll pull together– this felt more like being under siege.
