Hard knocks ... and really hard knocks
Thursday, May 8, 2008
It was a joke, I know – but a journalist friend did say he was taking a hardhat to the Denver Democratic Convention.
It’s difficult, especially in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s squeak of a win in Indiana and Barack Obama’s comfortable victory in North Carolina, not to recall that the forthcoming fateful gathering in Colorado occurs exactly 40 years on from the chaotically divided Democratic Convention of 1968 in Chicago.
Clinton of course goes “full-speed on to the White House” in her rhetoric, meaning with more realism that she at least goes on, she hopes, to Denver - and all along the way she’ll be flying the flags of Michigan and Florida. It is, after all, only with those states’ (currently disallowed) votes that she has a prayer of convincing the so-called “super-delegates” that her slice of the popular vote among Democrats entitles her to consideration as nominee. So there's a fierce argument about including those two states' delegations.
And to all the media commentators who think she wouldn’t force the issue in an ultra-divisive Denver show-down (because at the least it would enable John McCain to lambast the “Denver Democrats”, just as Richard Nixon could so easily shout “Chicago Democrats!” and win a landslide) she’s being unwavering and ostensibly blithe.
From a Washington Post interview to briefings on the stump she has said brusquely: “We'll resolve it at the Convention - that's what Credentials Committees are for." The first item on Denver’s entire agenda could well be the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan - who so rashly, in a bid for national media attention, went to the polls before the national party would permit them to.
The historical precedents, or at least the echoes, don’t seem too good. There was, we know, an awful lot in dispute at Chicago, but the unseating of the Mississippi delegation (over racial segregation, as it happened - which makes the forty-year gap seem much bigger, now that a black man is contending for the top honor) was one of the triggers for all the televised scenes of violence. Who can forget then-CBS correspondent Dan Rather being felled to the ground, and NBC's Chet Huntley declaring that the "news profession in this city is now under assault”? Demonstrators trying to exercise their constitutional right to free speech fared even worse.
No one expects mayhem like Chicago’s (despite the efforts of a fringe group calling itself Recreate ’68) but the prospect of desperate last-minute wrangling under cable TV’s excitable gaze is already causing the party’s media handlers severe conniptions.
They are only too well aware of the Nixonian capacity of the McCain camp to exploit any opportunity for an attack, and Queensberry Rules of course won't apply.
McCain now has among his team the noted Nixon hatchet-man Fred Malek – the one who during the Watergate years and at the height, or depth, of Nixon’s vicious bigotry dutifully carried out a headcount of Jews working in government. (Not that recruiting from among Nixon’s dirty-tricks brigade is anything new to McCain – Donald Segretti, the Nixon operative and early Karl Rove mentor, who went to jail for his political hit-jobs, was McCain’s 2000 campaign Chairman in - of all apt places - Nixon’s home district ... Orange County, Calif.)
Deep divisiveness in Denver, maybe. But worse to come nationally.
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NEW YORK’S MAJESTIC METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART CAN GET a bit tacky when it comes to movies.
This week the Met’s most glitter-prone section, the Costume Institute, launched an exhibit titled Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy “examining” (or at least I’m told that’s what it's doing) the influence on fashion of movie characters like Superman, Wonder Woman and, inescapably, Iron Man - whose translation to the big screen just (entirely by coincidence) opened to $100 million grosses nationwide.
But tomorrow the Met displays a much more justifiable engagement with the medium of film. It’s a three-day festival of movies encouraged by the brightly-named New York-based charity Sprout, which is dedicated to supporting those with developmental disabilities and mental retardation. And one film in particular is a show-stopper.
It’s was made by veteran video-editor and producer Ken Browne, is narrated by long-time Sesame Street star Roscoe Oman, and rejoices in the simple title LOOK! I’m in College! (A screenshot above right, and a short clip will play right here:
Four young men are snappily and unpatronizingly profiled. They’re all New Yorkers, all African-American, and all diagnosed as autistic. We follow them, once they have managed to graduate from high school with the guidance of some remarkable teachers, as they take part in a trial program offered by the inspiringly open-minded Pace University. The four teenagers in fact become charter-members of one of the country’s first college-based inclusion programs.
The documentary demonstrates in a cool but dedicated fashion just how a quartet named Terence Woodson, Benny Sackar, Donald Anderson and Rayquan Winchester have proved that the previously impossible can become possible.
It makes you wonder who the real superheroes are.