Peter Coyote finds that the first night of the Democratic convention is a mix of cynicism and hope, selling out and political courage.

by Peter Coyote

From: coyote@motherjones.com
To: mojowire@motherjones.com

It's Monday night and I'm off to the Convention Center in the Sports Arena. It is such a curious, American amalgam of pitch and product. Signs for GM, Xerox, and Sportswear compete with sports memorabilia in the lobby, and someone has decided that immense rubbery red white and blue tubes threaded through the architecture are somehow political and therefore exempted from being ridiculous.

The arena is vast, and resembles precisely what it is: a huge TV set. Various networks are advertising their presence with illuminated signs winking in the background. Flows of people are moving along the floor like magma and lava. No one is listening to the speakers or even bothering to stop talking. Expensive promotional movies are showing, pay-backs to this or that political figure, each of whom is given his moment in the sun to address the crowd. But the crowd could care less, and except for occasional applause, keeps right on caucusing, networking, chatting, jiving, soliciting, and insulting one another in a variety of ways.

I bumped into Michael Rankin, whom I met once before at a dinner in San Francisco, and his story is worth telling. He had been living in Menlo Park in 1978 when someone brought an ad which said that Arkansas was seeking a Mental Health Commissioner. Since Michael was a native of Arkansas, his friend suggested that he "go for it" and so, in August, Michael found himself in an audience with the Governor of the state, Bill Clinton. Things were going very well, and it looked as if Michael was a shoo-in, but his personal integrity forced him to fess up and he said:

"Mr. Governor, I really cannot accept this post sir. You see, I'm gay."

Governor Clinton's response was a puzzled, "Yes?"

"I'm gay," Michael repeated, with added emphasis, to accentuate precisely how difficult and embarrassing this would be to the Governor should he consider making the appointment.

When Clinton said, "Yes" again with the same uncomprehending, "what-the-hell-are-you-driving-at" tone of voice, Michael edged into delicate exasperation and said as clearly as he could, "Sir, I am a homosexual."

"Clinton never broke stride," Michael says, smiling at the memory. "I figured if you were gay you were probably homosexual," Clinton responded. "Most are."

"I knew I had made a friend for life," Michael laughed. As I turn from him in the swollen corridor, I hear the phrase, "Senator coming through, Senator coming through," repeated formally, like an old English ritual, and a mustachioed functionary parts the crowd so that Senator Paul Simon can pass. He is in high gear, following a manic woman clutching a microphone. He could care less, speechifying for her microphone, walking forward, and simultaneously scanning the crowd to see who is noting his passage, which is swallowed up by delegates about as abruptly as a flushing toilet.

Don Fowler, chair of the Democratic party appears on the stage with the family of Ron Brown, three extremely handsome African-Americans: a young man, his son I assume, a daughter, and his stunningly beautiful wife. The crowd snaps to and during the sustained and moving applause, my mind roves back to the convention I watched on television as a boy: the Mississippi delegation was being challenged by black civil rights workers because all the delegates were white. Tonight, in this hall, Alma Brown and her children are being embraced, no doubt about it. And I must say, that for all the manifold flaws and imperfections, the stupidities and missteps, the misery concocted by our corporate-capitalist, grind-'em-down system; things have changed at least to the degree that black people (admittedly, black people of skill and wit and charm and genius) have not only managed to fight their way into the room but into the heart of the political system as well. It is no longer unusual to see black men and women, admitted to the realm of the gods, and for me, at least, it is good.

Alma Brown unwittingly acknowledges this. As she accepts the gavel and the position of honorary chair of the convention she gives a little speech, in a tiny, barely amplified voice. She reminds those who knew and loved her husband, that even now, he is "looking down," covering the convention, taking care of us in his plans and dreams. I think her elevation of her husband to the status of a god was unconscious, but not inaccurate. In ancient Greece he would have been one of the heroes. And the knowledge that he was allowed to enter this realm signifies a minuscule press forward that I will not allow even the most cynical notes of my consciousness to sully with reminders that he may have been a servant of capital or forces with whom I remain in obdurate disagreement. It is quite clear to me, that it is his humanity which this crowd is celebrating, and I choose to concur with it, and again, am moved in spite of myself.

Kenny G. is introduced to play some tribute and I leave the room at that point to preserve my own thoughts in the face of relentless sappiness. I take the elevator upstairs and show my coveted pass to the PENTHOUSE LOUNGE, the one other delegates have been eyeing covetously all night, the one with the words, GUEST OF THE PRESIDENT AND MRS. CLINTON printed in blue.

Upstairs in the VIP room, I grab a beer and am introduced to a man who immediately becomes a friend. His name is Paul Berry, an old friend of Levon Helms' (an actor, writer, and most famous as drummer for The Band -- an acquaintance of mine as well.) Soon we are laughing and giggling, down and dirty, trading Sixties stories and memories of excesses any one of which would have foundered the political career of a lowly State operative.

We laugh and drink our way out of that room and into the fundraiser back at the hotel for Senator Barbara Boxer, where I am one of the celebrity guests along with Julie Light and Billy Baldwin, fuzzy as a Calvin Klein model but bright as a light bulb, articulate, and naturally and spontaneously political. The evening ends with more talk, more introduction, more invitations, more networking, more cards exchanged, more handshakes, more introductions.

As I leave, exhausted and still facing a mountain of notes to be transcribed and ordered (barely) before being sent on to Mother Jones, I stop in the empty hallway before the elevators; stop and collect myself, and cannot help but wonder about the relationship between all this noisy roiling grubbing fol-de-rol and the dented-car people; the tattered clothes folk I walked and fished among in the Northwest. There is a connection, I know there is, between public policy and the man on the street, but at this moment, past midnight, in the gilded glitz of ritzy hotel, it is, for the moment strained at the seams.