Dispatch3

Dispatch 3
Bill Clinton: "I Love This"
David Levi Strauss

I'm writing to you from inside a machine for producing words and images. If anything happens here at the Pepsi Center that is not recorded, it is a wasted act, a kind of sin. Everyone here is divided into use-groups, indicated by the colored tags hanging from their necks. Security forces check the tags constantly to insure compliance.

First, there are the Politicians, the stars, the reason we're all here. Some of them are so important that they don't even wear tags. Their images are so ubiquitous and recognizable that they transcend the need for secondary identification.

Next comes the Designated Crowd, also called delegates. Their job is to dress extravagantly and react enthusiastically to everything the Politicians do. They must act as if they're on-camera at all times, even in the most supposedly private of moments, because when you become part of the Designated Crowd, you sacrifice your identity and image to the greater Image.

The Press is here to record and interpret every act and gesture of the Politicians and the Designated Crowd. The Press is divided into Word People and Image People, and in this setting, the Image People have the upper hand. The Press is also divided into the Mainstream Media and the Bloggers. The MSM have whole buildings (called Media Pavilions) dedicated to their every need or want. They have lounges and cafes and bars. And they have degrees of unlimited access. Some of them have such recognizable images that they have themselves become stars: Wolf, Anderson, Katie, Cokie, Matt. One sees them on the Floor, perfect and motionless, until the cameras roll and they spring to life.

The lowest caste of all is the Bloggers. They are image-less drones, crammed into crowded warrens in tents, outbuildings, and basements, plugged into their pitiful terminals, eating scraps falling from above. They exist at the outer edges of the Machine for Producing Words & Images, closest to the Unwashed, the Irrelevant.

Tonight, the Machine moves.

Filed on Thursday, August 28, 2008, following the previous, third night of the convention.

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Dispatch 2

Dispatch 2
The Fallen
David Levi Strauss

The principle drama of the conventions is the relation between the press (now, the MSM) and the politicians. This entire spectacle is built for and caters to the media and the media cannot get enough of it. This year Wolf Blitzer and CNN have set themselves up in the middle of everything, right down on the floor rather than suspended above it. CNN pundits James Carville, et al. wear black Madonna headpiece mics so that they can hear themselves and each other above the din. They look like astronauts in New Guinea.

After eight years of Bush/Cheney-style bunker mentality and press blackout, the conventions are orgies of access, and the MSM is bleary-eyed and gooey with the surfeit.

Last night, the stage belonged to the Clintons, and they showed (if anyone remained unconvinced) how masterful they are at this kind of stagecraft. Chelsea introduced her mother with a film that almost managed to make Hillary look hip, and Hillary gave the best televised speech of her life, artfully intercut with close-ups of weeping women delegates and extreme close-ups and reaction shots of Bill Clinton (often even in splitscreen) laughing, loving, earnestly rapt, and tearful. The words said “Vote for Obama,” but the images said “Look you now upon the President and First Gentleman who could and should have been, and weep.”

Filed on Wednesday, August 27, 2008, after the second night of the convention.

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