It Has Begun

The rain is falling in sheets on the streets
of Boston as the stage is set for the quadrennial display of rite and
ritual which the coronation of a Major Party Candidate has become. The
temperature is hanging in the low seventies, and is expected to drop
steadily over the next few days, at least according to the 5-Day Forecast
on channel 7. Of course, as Norma Yvonne likes to say, "Those meteorologists
should have stuck with studying meteors."

The Charles River was wind-tossed
and rain-splattered as we drove to our
office a bit before eight this Saturday morning, strangely bereft
of the college and boat club crews working out in the early morning
calm,
the singles
rowing in solitary mechanical focus, the fours working on their turns,
navigating the grey-green stanchions which divide the lanes as they
pass under the bridges, and the magnificent eights, nine with the
coxswain, functioning absolutely as one organism with a single purpose,
to propel
that shell through the water as fast as humanly possible, even in
the summer, even in the rain, hell, those maniacs are out rowing
in
the SNOW, but not today.  The river is completely empty.

Downtown, less than a mile from our office, they
are buttoning down the Fleet Center step by step.  The Secret
Service took control of the area last night at 8.  The nearby
train station and Green Line subway stop are closed. There are literally
police on every corner for a 10 block area, and bomb-sniffing dog are
continually
making the rounds and sticking their noses into everything. The Big
Boys are coming to Boston, and the Powers That Be are not taking any
chances with the possibility of an unsightly incident.

The result is a sight to be seen, and puts new
meaning into the phrase "Police State". The number of police dogs in
evidence is awesome.  They must have called for a convention of
all of the Bomb-Sniffing dogs in the entire country, and we wouldn’t
be surprised if a few Drug-Sniffing or even illegal alien dogs have
been brought in as ringers, to multiply the effect. They say 5,000
delegates, party hacks and upper-crusters will arrive in the next 48
hours, as well as 15,000 media types, including yours truly as a part
of the
miniscule
contingent of 30 Bloggers in this dynamic display of how politics works
in the new millennium in the most powerful empire the planet has seen
to date.

We wonder how many agents the forces of order
will field in their parallel display of how Police Power works in that
same Empire.  Of
course, the true total can never be revealed.  First we have
the Boston Police, those brave boys in blue who even now, less than
48 hours before kickoff, are threatening to actually picket convention
events. Oh, the horror! Democratic delegates forced to cross a Union
picket line! At the same time, what could be more American than a group
of hard-working first-defenders exercising their God-given right to
organize
and protest
what they see as unfair working conditions.  Then, backing them
up, we have a Cadre of – Prison Guards.  Yes, due to their determination
to field the absolute largest team possible, the forces of order have
called up all of the State Prison Guards, to be equipped and used
as crowd control and riot police, and empowered by a special order
to arrest civilians and throw them in the clink. Naturally, the
president of THEIR union is crying bloody murder, basically saying
"We didn’t sign on for THIS."

On top of these local jokers, we have the heavy
hitters from out of town.  State troopers from all over Massachusetts,
SWAT teams from all over the country, the entire Secret Service in
their 3-piece uniforms with the screwy high-tech earrings, Treasury
Police,
FBI, Homeland
Security,
Nuclear
Regulatory
Commission guys, all sorts of armed forces specialists and doubtless
numerous groups so clandestine that their very existence is considered
a State Secret of the highest order. As we walked into our office a
few minutes ago two unfamiliar but obviously law-enforement vehicles
cruised slowly by, like sharks sniffing their way around unfamiliar
waters. On their sides it said "Capitol Police K-9 Unit".

The City and County lockups have cleared out over
3,000 jail spaces for the expected arrests.  Over behind the Fleet
Center they have constructed a steel cage, double chain link fence
topped with razor wire, splatter guards to protect against thrown
urine or acid, patrolled by armed guards with dogs, which is the Officially
Designated Protest Area. Unroofed, covered with a fine nylon mesh to
stop thrown objects, without water or toilets, a thousand protesters
at at time are to be released into the cage for the purpose of exercising
their 1st amendment right to express their political views.

Meanwhile,
the Dowbrigade is worrying about how to keep a decent buzz on in
the face of this massive display of Law
and Order, how to mobilize in a city to tightly controlled and closed
up, and the fact that his driver’s licence is about to expire, and
his University
ID
has
delaminated
to the degree
that
the
dirty
plastic film with the ten-year-old photo has completely separated from
the hard plastic card, and we don’t get paid until Friday.

But we are nothing if not resourceful.  After
all, this is OUR home turf, and they (and here we are including delegates,
party officials, secret service, all of those bastards) are the invaders,
and as we have seen in Vietnam and Iraq, even the mightiest powers
on Earth can be humbled or at least temporarily confounded by a stubborn
and resourceful local population.

And temporary it shall be.  In another week
it will all seem like a bad dream.  The rock stars and puppet-masters
will have left town, and with them the global media spotlight, gone
sweeping restlessly back and forth across the globe, looking to illuminate
a convention here, a bomb blast there, a promising new drug or the
birth of sextuplets on the other side of the planet.

What will have really happened? The Dowbrigade
believes that the American Experiment in Democracy has either been
hijacked or has evolved into a sort of Merchant’s Dream, a highly
organized production and consumption mechanism designed to harness
the resources of the planet and the efforts of the far majority of
the population for the vision of a tiny privileged elite. In the United
States the practitioners of this methodology have been so successful
that they have the far majority of the people convinced that there
is still functioning representative democracy in place which actually
gives a shit what the majority of the people really think, feel
or want.  In fact, by forging an unholy alliance with the Major
Media, the Merchant Kings are now largely TELLING the American public
what to think, feel and want.

However, every once in a while, something happens,
or someone writes a book, or a song, which pokes a hole in the hypnotic
tapestry of information which maintains the modern democratic illusion.
Sometimes, somehow, the fraying fabric of the subterfuge is revealed,
exposed,
visible to the rank and file. "Pay no attention to that man behind
the curtain."

Those among the thinking who still have a modicum
of hope for the resurrection of an authentic American democracy still
believe in the existence of the mythical, slumbering, American People,
a People who believe in their core in an absolute sense of Justice,
a People who do not trust their government, or any government, a People
who just basically want to be left alone to live their lives and pursue
happiness in the manner that seems most natural to them, and who accordingly
go to political sleep for long periods of time, until a major war or sufficiently
gross malfeasance in their elected representatives awakens them from
their slumber to sweep the state clean in righteous disgust and so
renew and revitalize the American spirit of revolutionary democracy.

If that fairy tale is even remotely possible,
it is the moments when the fraying fabric of the current ersatz democratic
elusion are visible when the possibility exists to awaken the sleeping
giant.  The
real reason we are all here is to see if one of those moments occurs
in Boston in 2004, as it did in Chicago, in 1968.