greenpass

More NYTimes fallout

Betsy stands up for me, and points out the obvious - in that NYTimes article, the female bloggers were either cute and lolling around wearing tank tops, or they were Wonkette. The men got much more substantive attention to their work and actual ideas. To be fair, there were many more men there, but Betsy goes on a nice, polite, irked warpath. And yes, that really is a picture of a shirtless Matt Klam. Sort of looks like he's doing a Japanese cat food commercial.

Conversations

This convention I've been doing a whole lot less writing and having a whole lot more interesting conversations. Hopefully this means that although maybe this site hasn't been as interesting as Pandagon or Kos or Atrios for speech coverage and immediate posting, hopefully there will be more to talk about in the immediate future.

Yesterday I ran around town like crazy - I went to the Garden to check out press releases (I got excerpts of Zell Miller and Mitt Romney's remarks but on paper it was pointless - make sure you watch a video of Zell especially if you happened to miss it). Then lunch with a dear friend from school, and again with Jesse, Ezra and Kate of Pandagon. Back at the Tank, Kate and I discussed women voters and the various ways that they are discouraged from speaking up and making their voices heard - more on this below, and coming soon.

After messing around at the Tank and finding a screwdriver to fix my computer, I listened in to a training session run by one of the progressive grassroots organizations that were using the Tank for a staging ground and training centre. The topic was how a progressive activist could effectively get their message across if they happen to talk to a member of the press, a volunteer they need to recruit, a voter they need to register, or a member of an opposition group. The attendees were fascinating, many of them wearing old Dean for America shirts, and mostly either very young and hip looking or seniors, evidently retired. One by one they went around the circle, stood up, and said why they wanted to defeat Bush, citing reasons as diverse as legalizing marijuana and the draft coming back. The attendees were not bad, although the older members of the group seemed oddly a lot more energetic and proactive than the younger people.

The problem with the session was the moderator who was supposed to be helping these people to be more effective speakers. Note to self - never trust anyone who makes you feel good about yourself after one of these kinds of things. Sample criticisms that I wrote down in my notebook:

"You're such a beautiful person." -- to an older woman with a deep gravelly voice
"You're really aligned, it's incredible. Just so aligned." -- to a young protestor with a red band with a yellow star tied around his forehead
"Have you ever thought about going into acting?" -- to a painfully shy girl with glasses and a Dean shirt down to her knees
"I love your togetherness. Just bring it all together and boom. Just great, great." -- to an older woman wearing a shirt that said "Bush Knew" under a picture of the Twin Towers

I know that positive reinforcement is a good thing. And it always feels nice to be complimented. But I couldn't help feeling that every person who sat down, gratified but no better at communication than before, was a waste of time, money and energy. What I've realized being here compared to the DNC is that when it comes to tactics, the Republican party is extraordinarily good at self-criticism. No strategy is ever good enough. They'll identify and publicly admit that they've failed to target single women, black men, Hispanic transvestites, whatever, if it means that they can be more effective next time. The culture of PC liberal non-criticism and understanding ("everyone has different strengths, we can't be discouraging, we need to be positive") is self-defeating and frustrating. These people who have been "trained" in public communication will be no better at getting out their incredibly important messages to the people that need to hear it, although maybe they'll feel more confident about it.

I talked to Joe Trippi for a while. There was a Dean Meetup happening at the theatre attached to the tank, and he was sitting around, looking frighteningly like Larry Summers and even drinking a Diet Coke to further heighten the comparison. We talked about his addition to the Hardball lineup from midnight to 2am and how MSNBC had an opportunity to step into the breach left by CNN's abhorrent coverage. Deaniacs kept coming up and interrupting though so finally I left and went to dinner.

Across from me was Josh Bearman of the LA Weekly, who had some fascinating stories about the Dean press buses during the primaries and Al Gore teaching at Columbia. In Gore's first class, he presented a case study of an air pollution story, and questioned the conventional wisdom that the journalism students were being taught that they just observed, read some expert opinions, and then put it all down on the page. He said that the automatic filtre of a journalist made for immediate bias, and that since one is picking and choosing in the first place you have to be aware and take responsibility for what you yourself have written - it's not just that you observe and write down and you are merely a conduit. And as a result the class hated him. More thoughts on the journalists on the Dean bus and the ones I've met here later.

Back at the Tank, Zell Miller was speaking and looking shockingly like Ralph Nader - spit flying everywhere, red faced and almost apoplectic with anger. The crowd packing the Tank sneered and booed, and I wondered if this was going to be the high water mark of anger at the convention, driving home the point that Republicans are positive and there's something inherently bad and evil and negative about Democrats. I was wrong though - Cheney was more subtle but much, much worse.

One thing that I noticed about the GOP and the Dems at the conventions is that while Democrats always talk about their parents coming from poverty or how they worked to make it in the world, Republicans almost always talk about their grandparents being in straightened circumstances. I suppose this comes from a sort of three generation cycle - the first generation makes the money, the second maintains it, and the third either loses it or uses it for things like being nominated by the GOP for something (in part because I think growing up with money either makes you into a Republican or into a liberal motivated by class anxiety and guit). But while Edwards talked about his parents the millworkers and being poor most of his life, Cheney talked about his grandparents living in a railroad car, with no mention of their politics and what his parents were like and what they did. I have a sneaking suspicion they were not Republican, probably union members and possibly card-carrying Communists.

Mary Cheney was there with her lover, as I heard via mobile from inside the Garden, but she was cut out of the TV pictures that we saw. Hopefully other networks the balls to show shots of the Cheney family without half of Mary's shoulder next to her partner out of the picture.

After that, three hours of conversation with the likes of Jay Rosen, Matt Stoller, Dave Alpert, a guy who's starting a site called 48 Bagels that warmed my heart with his immediate recognition of the Greenpass, Atrios who is normally very chill but was very angry last night about stuff, Kos, and a number of random protestors. Many interesting observations about the media, centralization, the machismo culture of the Republican bloggers, the fact that the first night of the convention was about balls, the second about women and the sheer base-stirring energy of the third might possibly obliterate the message of the first two. When everyone else drifted away I caught a cab home and passed out, so exhausted I forgot to take my contacts out. It's been a tiring week.

Social protest qualms

As you've probably seen in the morning news, there were at least 900 people arrested in NYC yesterday. I must admit, they didn't cause too much trouble, although I did see the barricades going up at the "Shut Up-athon" outside Fox News. I didn't stick around to find out what would happen, but I heard later that the police blocked off the street above and below the protest and then arrested everyone who happened to be between their barricades.

I won't comment on the effectiveness of yesterday's protests, except to reiterate my view that successful protests and civil disobedience must advocate a realistic alternative to the status quo. It's the difference between sitting at the front of the bus as a protest, which is something you want - to be able to sit where you like on a city bus, regardless of who you are - and lying in the street with a pink feather boa around your neck, a pig snout on your nose surrounded by drifts of dollar bills. That's not a feasible alternative to anything, and even the protestors themselves can't articulate themselves how they'd rather see the world working, and it's why anarchistic protests (as distinguished from clearly issue-based protests such as pro-choice march in Washington) piss off more people than they convince.

The fact that we're seeing an increasing split between independent groups that feel marginalized and disenfranchized, and the main parties that increasingly strive to stake out the political centre, is a problem that manifests itself in the incoherence of the protests we've seen in New York so far. One feels that there are so many problems that have obvious, concrete solutions - repealing the tax cuts for example, or funding educational reforms, or doing away with the embarassing faith-based welfare programs. And yet on Sunday we saw Free Mumia signs, or anti-globalization protests, or protestors yelling about Kerry at what was supposed to be an anti-Bush march. These are symptoms of bigger issues that still need some mulling over.

Internal Contradictions

This morning's NY Times has an interesting graphic with pictures and little quotes from six delegates under 30, which shows a fascinating contradiction within the Republican party and really highlights their success in being all things to all people.

I still don't understand how on the same page one delegate can say "They...stand for freedom from an overly intrusive government" and another delegate can say that the Republicans stand for safety first over civil rights and that it's ok to read her email if it "keeps us safe" (she phrases this as "civil rights versus civil liberties", one of the best examples of language framing I've ever seen).

Do these delegates not see the contradictions inherent in the claims of the GOP? From this graphic alone, and confirmed by the delegates I've talked to, they see the Republican party as a sort of Rorschach test - everyone sees what they want to see, even if it's entirely contradictory to what a fellow Republican sees. What scares me is that this doesn't seem to prompt any worry or discussion within the Party at a public level. Say what you like about the Democratic Party, but you can't say that its adherents don't bicker about positions ad nauseam in public settings. This can either be seen as a failure to stay on message, or as a sign of intellectual strength, but I don't see how much more off message the GOP can be than to be all things to all people.

Observations

Today I had lunch with friends who live on the Upper West Side, and after walking back to Madison Square Garden I realized how incredibly frightening and police-stateish the whole MSG area is. Walking down 9th Ave, at the corner of 43rd was some sort of Guardsman carrying one of the largest gun I had ever seen and wearing shades, a green beret, and a bulletproof vest.

Luckily for me, all the New Yorkers around me were very volubly talking and laughing about the man with the gun: "Think he's making up for something?" giggled a blonde woman in front of me. "Hey look at that freak!" yelled a guy on a bike. I was surprised how little respect the locals gave to the man with the three foot gun, but as I got closer and closer to the Garden the sheer weight of firearms, men in mirrored sunglasses, handcuffs, and crowds and crowds of cops everywhere was both depressing and intimidating - the catcalls and jokes stopped, and I started to see people stopped by cops. A homeless man was on the steps of Port Authority surrounded by four NYPD and another gun-toting camouflage-clad man; a bike messenger arguing (with four cops) that if cars could go up 9th Ave at 50mph, that he shouldn't have to slow down; a lost confused woman walking into the street in front of oncoming cars being grabbed by two cops.

On my way in through security, the cop who checked my driver's license pulled me aside, but all he wanted was to ask me about New Hampshire and whether or not there were any police vacancies in the towns around Lake Winnepesaukee. After a couple of seconds of complete bewilderment as he waxed poetic about the beauties of the Lakes region, I got over my awe of the incredible random disconnect between the silence and grandeur of the pine forests he was talking about and the police state lockdown on the corner of 34th and 9th, with an estimated 45 policemen around us, wished him luck and tactfully extricated myself from his clutches. I have to wonder why he bothered to stop me - was he trying to be friendly? To put a human face on the security madness? Was he hoping that he had found a kindred spirit in the masses of faceless mirrored sunglasses around him? He said he was just bored, which scared me - surely it can't be a good thing for thousands of bored policemen to be stationed all over the city.

Given what I've seen so far, if there is disorder here, it will be caused by a critical mass of bored and possibly nervous policemen who were probably prepped for massive protest and are now looking for a reason to exist. The people stopped by police today didn't look like wild-eyed neohippies, but New York homeless or mentally ill residents that probably don't handle the presence of so many armed soldiers on their streets terribly well. My solution to keep the police on their toes would be to have fewer police, not more, but I don't really know much about large-scale law enforcement. My feeling of security is always inversely proportional to the number of officers on the streets.

Music at the RNC

It's officially the party of gospel and country. I don't know why I'm surprised, although you'd think that they'd at least try to play a little less to type. Dick and Lynne Cheney are looking incredibly bored as the chorus is repeated again and again and again - delegates are doing the white man's overbite and vaguely waving their signs back and forth with varying degrees of success at following the rhythm. I thought the DNC delegates were bad dancers and had no soul - these poor delegates make the Democrats look like Earth, Wind and Fire.

And can I just mention how gigantic my sense of feeling pandered to is at the moment? If I was a Republican young voter, I would be thinking, "Didn't Dexter Freebish release the single "Leaving Town" in September 2000? And wasn't that their only hit single ever? What kind of message are we trying to send here???"

And now Van Halen??? You've got to be kidding. I know I moaned about "Go Johnny Go" at the DNC, but at least that would be right up this age bracket's alley.

And for my final musical nitpick - every single song has been at least 3-4 minutes of repetition, in addition to the actual song itself. Maybe they had trouble finding appropriate songs given the strong anti-Bush leanings of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, and had to resort to repetition ad nauseam of the few that didn't mind their music being used.

Inside the Garden

I'm sitting on the floor of the media centre of the RNC at the moment, using UPI's wireless and feeling terribly hungry as everyone else has their nice catered dinner in the little press tents. I went down to Air America's space, which was absolutely tragic - a single table, alone in the bottom floor of the press center, amongst the pallets and forklifts that normally live down there. It was completely empty and alone, and a solitary laptop sat there indicating that at some point someone had been there...Needless to say, Air America was obviously treated pretty poorly.

I'm watching the Republicans having their picture taken now. It rather reminds me of the final scene of Steve Buscemi's wonderful film "Living in Oblivion", where a 60-second room tone is taken and every character has a minute of silent, personal reflection on the events over the course of the film. I watch these people, and remember the feeling at the DNC at the same moment (after everyone had finished booing the Fox News sign, which was right in the middle of the balcony at the Fleet Centre). There was a sense of beginning, of silent acknowledgement of "something starting tonight".

In both cases, the photo preceeded the first evening of speakers, and it gave me a moment to stop and look at the faces of the Republican Party - overwhelmingly white, and mostly older than the DNC delegates. Dennis Hastert is speaking and he looks exactly like all the delegates do. I counted two African-Americans (not counting the band), about 15 or 20 young people, and not a single Asian or South Asian face as the camera panned across the silent crowd, and it reminded me of the young energy of the DNC. The preponderance of volunteers there were young and energetic - this convention appears at first sight to be composed of many clones of my grandparents.

Anyway, I'm off to the Planned Parenthood concert with Moby. I've missed the opening act because I had to come to Madison Square Garden to get my convention pass for the next four days - just my luck. But I think I can forgo an hour of opening music for four days of media centre access, and as many free publications I can carry back to the East Village.

Ed Schrock resigns

Republican Congressman Ed Schrock of Virginia, co-sponsor of the FMA anti-gay marriage amendment (he also wants to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell for being 'too liberal'), has resigned. He was outed on a blog called BlogActive, and now feels the need to step down. Athough I revel in the irony of the situation, I think it's tragic that in this day and age, a gay American can let being outed ruin his career and his life's achievements. There are seven recordings of this guy on a gay sex hotline, and these recordings - and their posting on BlogActive - were enough to force him to resign.

Good article

The most representative article on the protests so far.

For every young man with an unorthodox piercing in a seemingly painful place, there was an elderly woman who walked in the midday sun for hours.

For each wildly costumed, madly gyrating, drum-beating protester, there was a family that had made the trip into Manhattan together to march as one.

And for all the chants denouncing President Bush as a terrorist, for all the obscenities screamed full throated, there were just as many people, young and old, who expressed in more subdued tones their anger with the Bush administration.

Excellent.

UPDATE: In addition, one thing that I was struck by was the fact that almost everyone I met at the Convention was a native New Yorker. It really drove home the fact that the GOP has picked arguably the most unrepresentative city in the entire nation to have its quadrennial bunfight. I can only imagine what the FMA supporting GOP delegates thought about the overwhelming loud and proud New York BLGT presence yesterday.

Happy thoughts

I'm watching CNN right now, and the storyline for today is that the face of the RNC is far more moderate than the policies of the current Administration. I'm so glad that the media has siezed on this with its usual bloodyminded doggedness, and seems to be bludgeoning this idea into the heads of their viewers. Alan Keyes was just asked whether he thinks the current lineup represents the face of the "party he knows and loves"; Karl Rove was asked why none of the architects of neoconservatism were speaking (and gave a lame answer); and then Ahnold, Giuliani and McCain were shown and the anchor pointed out that they were odd representatives for the face of the Party. And that's just within a half hour of afternoon CNN.