"That's a lot of sleaze."
So said a fellow patron at Barrio (great restaurant/bar right outside the Quicken Loans Arena) when I told him I was on the floor of the convention for Mike Pence's speech.
He'd just finished relating a terrific anecdote about a delegate who was attempting to score some coke from him and his friends. They had no coke, nor do they know anyone who does, but the apparently typically obnoxious delegate was throwing fifties down on the bar, so they decided to string him along. He didn't get any coke, but they got a lot of free drinks.
Anyway, sleaze is an apt word to describe what goes on inside the convention hall. It's a distinguished sort of sleaze, though — a garish, tacky, pompous, clueless sleaze, and surreal to boot. That was my impression as I stood watching the floor's reaction to Pence's soporific speech.
What happens outside the convention hall — demonstrations, protests, street vendors, buskers — is real; what happens inside is not. Walking onto the floor is like stepping into another dimension, the inhabitants of which all share the same brain (and ergo the same deficiencies of thought).
The delegates are more props than people; they're instruments of what Edward S. Herman (co-author of Manufacturing Consent) calls "the unelected dictatorship of money," and their central purpose is to make us believe that what's being said on stage actually means something, that this whole RNC thing is more than just a massive carnival.
Of course, the oligarchy's kryptonite is an informed public, which explains the media's masturbatory convention coverage: it's a very effective distraction; it keeps us proles in line, keeps us from questioning how valid the electoral process is, and most importantly, it's totally free of substance.
The conventions are not like big stage productions — they are big stage productions, complete with script, actors (some more talented than others) and audience. The only difference is that most of the audience doesn't realize they're watching a play; they think what they're watching is real. If blind faith is a virtue, convention delegates are the most virtuous people on Earth.
It's not hyperbole to say that the two major parties in this country double as pseudo religions. Don't believe me? Get a press credential to the next national convention, go down to the floor during a keynote speech, and watch the mob work itself into an animalistic frenzy over the vacant rhetoric booming from the loudspeakers.
Truth, fact, reality, logic, sense — they have no jurisdiction here. It all gives way to primitive sectarian instinct. And therein lies the great paradox: the convention hall is simultaneously the ne plus ultra of 21st century modernism (what with all the technology) and of prehistoric tribalism (what with, well, everything I just said).
This article appears in Jul 21-28, 2016.