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| Tom Moore |
CLEVELAND — The Republican National Convention was about to nominate Donald J. Trump as its candidate for president. So naturally the protesters milling around Public Square had something to say about the party and its champion.
“I’m here because Donald Trump and the GOP stand for racism misogyny, homophobia, violence,” said Tom Moore, 24, of Massachusetts, holding a handmade cardboard sign reading “GRAND OLD PARTY, SAME OLD KLAN.”
“Not that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her own track record with racist violence,” added Moore, who wore a green T-shirt, an orange batik skirt, and combat boots. “Hillary Clinton advocates racist hate, but there’s no one like the GOP.”
So which one is he going to vote for?
“I’m going to vote for Jill Stein.”
The Green Party candidate. But isn’t that just a vote for Donald Trump by proxy?
“It is a terrible gamble,” he admitted.
At a colorful mosh pit of belief, where you can't swing a cat and not hit some kind of oddball performance artist, fringe constitutional theorist or foaming religious zealot, perhaps the rarest opinions are proud Hillary Clinton supporters. Those who admit voting for her, maybe, are not exactly gushing with praise.
Erika Husby, 24, of Chicago, wore a rectangular smock painted with orange bricks and "WALL OFF TRUMP" painted in blue.
Does this mean she's supporting Clinton?
"Probably," she said, looking stricken. "I think that I will, sadly and bitterly."
Oskar Mosco, 35, a rickshaw driver (if such a thing is possible) from Santa Barbara, Calif., held a sign that said, "JUST SAY NO! TO WHITE SUPREMACY."
"I want to be able to say to my kids and grandkids that I took a stand," he said.
Does that stand include voting for Clinton?
"I haven't decided between Dr. Jill Stein and [Libertarian candidate] Gary Johnson," he said, rejecting the idea that it has to be either the Republican or the Democrat or a wasted vote.
"I don't want to support dualistic thinking," he said. "The world is not black and white. There's gray."
What's wrong with Hillary Clinton?
"I think she's a wolf in sheep's clothing," he said. "She's the 1 percent."
But persistence pays off, and finally I located Haley Corradi, 24, a high school math teacher from Minnesota who held a sign reading "LOVE TRUMPS HATE" across a background of rainbow stripes.
Was she planning on voting for Hillary Clinton?
"Definitely," she said, smiling broadly.
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| Sandy Buffie and friend. |
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| Melissa Brown |
CLEVELAND — No one goes to the 2016 Republican National Convention expecting to encounter a life-size bust of Donald Trump constructed out of 30 gallons of dryer lint held together with two gallons of glue.
But it makes perfect sense when you do.
“At the end of the week, I’ll take the best offer,” said the artist who created it, Sandy Buffie, who said that the money will benefit the Center for Arts Inspired Learning, which organizes activities for kids including, aptly enough, an anti-bullying program.
Welcome to Cleveland, where the streets are alive with acres of t-shirts praising the take-it-to-the-bank GOP nominee Donald Trump and castigating his certain opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a hellion who should be in prison: on some shirts, she already is. There are cross-wielding preachers, $1 iced water vendors, 100 Indiana State Troopers in their “Smokey Bear” hats, plus thousands of officers from around the country augmenting Cleveland’s lean force. Delegates in suits, media in shorts and a general funhouse effect, though the city is reacting with pride.
“You know the convention’s there?” asked Melissa Brown, riding the No. 75 bus toward downtown Cleveland. Assured her new friend did, and asked what she thought of it, Brown, “old enough to know better and young enough to do something about it,” said: “It’s great. You got all political views and bring a little money to the city. Everybody’s happy. It’s a win-win.”
Not that the hoopla is going to gull her into voting. Brown, who is African-American, isn't supporting either Trump or Hillary Clinton.
"The only way I'd vote is if Jesus Christ put his name on the ballot," she said, explaining that her church, the Church on the Rise in Westlake, is handing out "Elect Jesus" banners.
Brown exits the bus, gets aboard a red line Rapid Transit train to Tower City, the hectic hub of the convention. She takes a seat behind Mike Tallentire, 27, who works the third shift restocking a Walmart Supercenter in North Olmsted, Ohio. He used his day off to handprint a lengthy statement on a white t-shirt, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the need for immigrants to assimilate in this country. Then he headed downtown to attend an America First sponsored by Citizens for Trump.
"He just seems the lesser of two evils," Tallentire says, doing a balancing gesture with his hands. But as he speaks, he warms to Trump.
"He's a businessman not a politician," said Tallentire. "So maybe he can do something about the deficit that never seems to go down."
And the more extreme statements of Trump's, about immigration and such?
"The media twists his words around."
Take Ahmer Mohamed, a Cleveland cab driver for 17 years. He's black, and a Muslim, and voting for Trump. That bit about barring Muslims at the border?
"He's changing his mind," said Mohamed. "He's not against Muslims. He's against enemies. He's said he's sorry. He's OK now. Lot of people have a bad idea, that he's a nasty racist. He's a strong guy."
"There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," H.L. Mencken wrote in 1924. "It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell — and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
Take comfort, then, that the spectacle that will unfold this week in Cleveland is not an unprecedented descent into madness, not a radical departure from the stately decorum we like to imagine our forefathers exhibited when conducting political business. Just the same old craziness in a new box.
That said, given Donald Trump's genius for attracting the carnival fringes of American life, the Republican National Convention, beginning in Cleveland on Monday, promises to be a circus on an epic scale.
Ring One is the candidate himself, whose off-the-cuff pronouncements are — take your pick:
A) a refreshing breeze of candor wafting into our sealed room of political correctness.
B) terrifying blasts of hate and demagoguery that would tear our nation apart if anyone took them seriously. (Spoiler alert: It's "B.")
A woman called my office. From Northbrook. She started by explaining that she had already contacted a local reporter, but the local reporter "wouldn't touch" her story. Now it was my turn.
The story involved a minor traffic accident, maybe six months ago. Or longer. Something she had witnessed, perhaps. She was driving, in line to make a left hand turn. A black van, in front of her, pulled back and veered to the right, across traffic. The car in front of that, was a Mercedes. A kid in the passenger seat turned around and looked at her.
The story pelted me like a sudden rain. When she got home, she heard from the police. She had been reported for leaving the scene of an accident. The driver of the Mercedes thought it was her, and not the black van, that had hit them. The caller said the police came to her home to see her car was undamaged, but she ended up signing a ticket saying she had failed to reduce speed to avoid an accident. It didn't quite stack up, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Detail piled upon detail. Complaints to the mayor. The chief of police. I was obviously the end of a very long chain of woe. She wanted to make sure this never happened to anyone ever again. She said that several times.
I tried to get a word in, but she wasn't having it.
This is a story that I call "a dog's breakfast"—a jumbled collection of glop. It would never go in the paper. To do so, I'd have to contact the police, find the other driver, and for what? A traffic ticket that may or may not have been issued fairly.
Obviously very important to her, though. I listened. She mentioned a husband—that's good, somebody helping her out, maybe. And a daughter, a cop somewhere else. Also good.
Eventually I had to break in.
"You called me," I interrupted her in mid-sentence. "Don't you want to hear what I have to say?"
She paused, startled. I told her I didn't think it would ever get into the newspaper, because, while important to her, it wasn't the kind of story that anyone else would be interested in. Even though she thought she was treated very badly by the police.
"People think it only happens to black people, but it happens to white people too," she said, exaggerating the harm done to her. In fact, no harm, other than having to hire a lawyer and months of worry, seemed to have happened.
"How did it end?" I asked. "How did the court case end?"
The woman she supposedly hit never showed up in court and the case was dismissed.
Really not a story at all. But something that filled her world. I could see that. I tried to be sympathetic, to not shut her down.
I told the woman, she should have her daughter call me.
"She doesn't want her name in the paper," she said.
"I'm not putting anything in the paper," I said. "At least not right now. I just want to hear her perspective on this."
"She's in Denmark, on vacation," she snapped.
"I'm not in any rush," I replied.
Asking for the daughter seemed to change her tone.
"I feel like I'm wasting your time and you're wasting my time," she said.
I agreed, and gave her a piece of parting advice.
"I can see how this has been a stressful and difficult situation," I said. "But you should let it go now."
I asked her how long she had lived in Northbrook. She said 30 years. If this is the bad thing that is going to happen in Northbrook, I'd say she's doing pretty well. But it wasn't the only bad thing. There was another misfortune, even greater than this one, and she started in on that. I won't tell you anything about that, but it was a true tragedy.
I told her I was sorry for her troubles and got off the phone.
After hanging up, I chewed on what had happened. There was an injustice, in this woman's mind. And she wasn't letting go. Instead, she was living in this bad thing that supposedly happened to her, gnawing on the details, suffering anew each time. Maybe motivated by this actual tragedy that she hadn't let go of either, years ago.
Let it go. Easy advice to give. Hard advice to take. I believe it takes practice, stiff-arming worries and complaints that you'd like to embrace hard and hold onto. Don't. Let it go. Bad things happen to everybody, minor annoyances and great tragedies and yes, sometimes you have to seek elusive justice, and pursue it over the years, and I'm not saying that isn't sometimes important. But the things people cling to are often complaints that will never find resolution. All you can do is put them away, eventually. Life is precious, and short, and most of us have it pretty good, if you see how other people live, trapped in cages of their own making. Let it go.
I'm traveling today, so I didn't want a fun activity that would be solved too easily, since I can't supervise the contest this morning, and probably won't check in until mid-afternoon (so be nice).
Where is this man? Bonus points for who he is, and what he's doing. It isn't simple, but it shouldn't be that hard either.
Good luck, have fun, place your guesses below. And the winner gets ... heck, the posters are getting tiresome. How about a copy of "Complete & Utter Failure"? I think that will serve.
The fearful fascist thrills to terror attacks, such as Thursday night's horror in Nice, France, where nearly 100 Bastille Day revelers were mowed down by a truck. Newt Gingrich was on Fox News immediately, calling for Muslim American citizens to be deported (where?) if they believe in Sharia law. Before 6 a.m. Friday, stuff like this was showing up in my email.
What do u think Neil now that there is more blood on your hands this morning? Do you get a bonus from President Axelrod or from Stooge Balack Hussein? Since ur on Balacks inside, no pun intended, describe to me Balacks day, would you? I bet he didn't sleep a wink, he was so exhilarated that his religion has killed more innocent people? I picture him having a cafe au lait, playing 2 rounds of golf, he is giddy, smoking 2 joints after, then maybe some French pastries, all while wearing a beret. We gotta get Loretta over there for some serious hugging. That's what the Islamic terrorists need, is big big hugs. As u promote live and understanding and If only Loretta had been around hugging Hitler, maybe you wouldn't be here today? Ever think of that, sellout? —Vince DiBenedetto
I thought a moment -- there is so little of that nowadays -- and replied like this:
Dear Mr. DiBenedetto:Does it ever occur to you that you are reacting exactly as they intend? It's like you're giving money to ISIS. How does that feel? I can tell you how it looks. Horrible. And you signed your name to it.
Thanks for writing.
Why is it, when the Western way of life is attacked, that some people respond by trying to abandon the Western way of life? Yes, they're terrifying. But isn't our duty as Americans NOT to be terrified? Not to react blindly in terror, lashing out at each other? Gingrich and his ilk, it's as if they're in league with the terrorists, trying to finish their work.
Mike Pence.
Ah, hahahahahaha.
Well, if there is anyone in America still wondering what the 2016 election is all about — and those people seem to exist, though I can't imagine how — Donald Trump's all-but-official choice for vice president, Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, ought to nudge them toward making up their minds.
Pence is Trump's Christian Soldier, the man Trump hopes will march with him onward to the White House. Pence has called himself "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” The Indiana governor is the guy who last year vigorously defended a state law designed to allow Hoosier businessmen to express their contempt for gays and lesbians, provided they could gin up a religion-based justification. The law's immediate effect was to cost Indiana millions, as large corporations — which have learned the gays-are-employees-and-customers lesson so elusive to Republican leaders — scrambled for the exits.
Pence also signed one of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the country, one that would force a woman who had an abortion to pick out a little Twinkie-sized mahogany coffin to bury her aborted fetus in or pay for cremation, her choice.
Mike Pence! Not a lot of ambiguity there. Do I sound gleeful? Honestly, I'm disappointed. I was pulling for Newt Gingrich as the sentimental favorite.
