Alone in a crowd

While Clinton addresses the crowd at the convention, Peter Coyote picks up on what's not being said.

by Peter Coyote

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

I leave breakfast early this morning, driven from the room by Diane Feinstein doing 15 minutes of thank-yous, and to do a TV spot over at the Convention Center. In the daytime, the arena is devoid of life, chilly and slightly ominous. Cables and firehoses are strung everywhere. Janitor's carts litter the rooms, garbage flecks the floors and one gets the impression that anything could happen.

I work my way over to the "Mornings on 2" booth on the fourth floor, have a pleasant interview and return to the hotel in time to see a demonstration on the sidewalk. A group of young people, serious hippies, draped in flags, beads, carrying bizarre pouches and drums is sitting in a hand-holding circle, while a bearded man in a Dr. Seuss American flag hat holds aloft a white chicken feather wrapped in sage. They are the Rainbow Gathering, part of a coalition of coalitions called the Festival of Life which is addressing a different issue each day. Today's issue is peace. Rumors of arrest abound.

"The cops are quietly picking us off one at a time." one of the protesters tells me.

Dr. Seuss is urging a march to the police station to "Free Bonny." No one knows what the charges against her are, but everyone seems to feel that it is related to a demonstration which occurred at the United Center on Tuesday where some RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) people burned a flag.

The group is dismayed because they applied for permits to protest in February and were not granted permission to do so until August 21st. "We're gonna sue the City of Chicago for preventing us from having an audience, " a slight boy with a fuzzy goatee informs me. It's a suit I would follow with some professional interest, being an actor, as I could end my career difficulties if they win.

Back at the hotel, the two patrolmen I've been friendly with don't know much either, but volunteer that videotapes of the demonstration were taken and scanned by the police and that people were identified from the videos and pursued for arrest. Technology is an impartial lord I suppose, prosecuting and then abetting the police evenhandedly.

No sooner is this brouhaha settled than word flashes over the TV that Dick Morris, Clinton's hated (by Democratic party regulars and White House insiders) political advisor has resigned. Dick, it turns out, has been keeping company with a hooker, who sold her story to a tabloid. It was reported that she was allowed to read Hillary's speech days before it was given and to eavesdrop on Presidential conversations with Dick. Speculation is that Harold Icke's people will be celebrating, but if Dick had to go down in flames, this was the worst time for it. His very public resignation on the day of the President's acceptance speech may preclude the President and the Democratic Party from controlling the agenda of post-election coverage and force them to answer questions about this issue. The Borgias would have been proud.

I drive over to the Sheraton, where the President and Vice-President are residing to check out the political vibes. The story has been dropped from the next news headlines. Perhaps it will be a non-issue. Gloria Cabe, who ran the President's first campaign greets me in the hallway. We chat about the Morris issue, and she is relieved that he is gone. The man was loathed by many Clinton loyalists. Not only did he create a vile racist ad for Jesse Helms, but he leaked campaign information to Trent Lott and then tried to blame it on George Stephanopoulos. "I have a feeling that there may be very heavy negotiating going on [between Morris and the White House]," she speculates, trying to read between the lines of the President's loyal announcement, and Morris's terse resignation which makes no admission of the embarrassment he may have caused the President on this most important day.

I met up with Marsha Whetsone and we cab it back to the convention Center After passing through the world's most meticulous searches and metal detectors, it becomes obvious that it is funny hat night. Tonight is the night of the President's speech and passions and expectations are high. Emmy Lou Harris and two friends come on stage to sing, "My Old Friend Abraham" and her high reedy voice, cuts through the crowd.

Everything seems to have higher stakes. Credentials are checked and re-checked, and seats are in high demand. At the podium Patrick Kennedy seems eager beyond containment as if he has just discovered goodness. As a matter of fact if everyone were this good we wouldn't even need government. He finally introduces his father, Ted Kennedy who comes on and really looks like a Senator. He has a big, picturesque head, and that familiar face is magnified several hundred times by the huge TV mosaic behind him. His voice is stentorian and the man CAN give a speech.

He defends Hillary from Dole and Kemp and Newt (effectively tying them together) by telling the crowd that, "we love her for the enemies she has made." Cheers. "Before you read their lips", he continues later, "you better read their platform" and his liturgical reading; his chanting of their platform provokes such a wealth of applause that he cracks up. Kennedy digs the hell out this and it's clear that he is in his element.

Muhammed Ali's photo appears on the screen behind him (unbeknownst to Kennedy) and the crowd goes berserk again, and Kennedy laps it up, mistaking it as his. Describing the Republican penury and mean-spiritednesss and Dole's pliability he said, "Newt thought it up, but Dole swallowed it hook, line, and sinker."

Teddy leaves and Harry Carey, the famous and beloved announcer for the Chicago Cubs takes over the podium and leads the crowd in a spirited rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." His voice is corrupted from years of screaming into a microphone and I am wondering what the hell this has to do with anything, but the crowd loves it; clearly looking for any opportunity to celebrate and they join him in a spirited song fest.

He is replaced by a video and Bruce Springsteen singing "Born in the USA" and boy the crowd is right there. Everyone is clapping, shimmying, boogie-woogeying, laughing, rollicking and rolling as the TV cameras scan the house projecting the images of winsome girls, half-gassed old men who look as if they should be dancing to Guy Lombardo, yuppies, and African-Americans all dancing their asses off to BBBRRRUUUUUCCCCCEEEE! Everyone is jiggling like landfill in an earthquake. Jubilation!

Then Joe Kennedy comes on with more blah-blah and one-too-few lessons from the same failed drama coach who must be making the rounds of the Democratic party. He feels that when he tells a sad story, he should make a sad face and change his voice; and he does. And when he is inspired, he should look up and raise his voice; and he does. But he has all the charisma of a sweatshirt and my attention drifts until the stage is suddenly dominated, overwhelmed, and colonized by Jessye Norman, the great black coloratura who begins singing "America the Beautiful." It is like watching Medea. The skin on her face is wind-tunnel tight. Her hair is pulled back severely, limiting her motion of expression, but her mouth is moving like an independent life form. It is large, expressive and powerful, stretched by the expansion of the notes. She is Wagnerian, and she hits some notes that cause little explosions of goose-bumps on my back. As she finished, the crowd noticed Ali sitting right behind me and began to chant his name, "Ali, Ali, Ali." It sounded Arabic. A hero was being called by his admirers, and the crowd looked right through his palsied hand and puffy face, and kept chanting as if the combined force of their voice might re-invoke him as the paragon of speed, youth and quickness which had electrified us all so, so many years ago.

Now The Macarena is playing. The signers for the deaf and dumb on either side of the stage are dancing it, leading the audience in the rhythmic play of hands following one another from ears, to shoulders to hips and back. Gore is there, and something has toughened and loosened about him simultaneously. He no longer resembles a boy wearing a man's suit; no longer has the sophomoric stiffness. He says something and then the rear-screen TV goes blank and William Jefferson Clinton takes stage.

The audience explodes in display. White college pennants with Blue letters saying CLINTON wave in a tumult. Whistles, cheers, and stamping feet send walls of sound cascading over the stage. It is tribal. Close your eyes pal, except for the rock and roll, it could be Morocco. He thanks Al Gore, Hillary ("the love of my life"), Chelsea, and his thank-yous are solid as the blows of a hammer. I am liking this man despite having railed against the majority of his policies and decisions for the last four years.

Beginning with "I accept" he runs down a litany of his accomplishments, "the lowest combined rates of inflation, interest, and mortgage rates in 29 years. Deficit down 60 percent on the way to zero." It is what I would have expected, but it is a long and impressive list. So long and impressive that I begin to wonder what anyone might ever complain about. He takes the high ground, refuses to attack Dole and Kemp and reminds the audience that it is not, "who to blame, but what to do. This must be a campaign of ideas not insults."

He lists nearly forty specific proposals, many tax credits for education, a million volunteer tutors to combat illiteracy, and again, it is an impressive list. He challenges any businessman who has ever complained about welfare to hire someone to help them get off welfare. But I cannot help asking myself: How will tax credits diminish class size? How will tax credits revise and refine curriculum or amplify the salaries of teachers?

The Kennedy/Kassebaum bill is offered as a triumph, protecting the health insurance for fired workers for six months, but what about the seventh month, or the tenth month after they have lost their jobs? Why are people so happy, so quick to block further thought or possibility? Is it so necessary to feel good at any cost. It is not a triumph to me, barely a beginning, but I am obviously in the minority here.

The speech goes on, and now as the Rico Act is invoked as a way to fight gangs, and wire-tap powers are to be extended to catch "bad guys" and terrorists -- I am unaccountably sad. All the anti-drug talk; anti-crime talk is top-down imposition which at the end of the day will multiply the flow of dollars, power, and influence to the police who never seem to want for funds. It is not the act of genius I expect from this man and I am restive and irritable again, and yet, in the next instant, he is off the subject and stirring me hypnotically, attempting to bring me together with the old, the young, the straight, the gay, the healthy, the blighted, and all those who believe in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, Freedom of Speech. Those who work hard and play by the rules and "show up to work tomorrow to begin building the bridge to the 21st century." The crowd roars its appreciation of all of it -- the man, the ideas, the proposal, the fact that he is their leader. Am I the only one looking into the shadows -- picking up the stones and turning them over, wondering where the wounded have been hidden?

The speech is over and the room explodes. Jillions of pieces of tinsel are released from the ceiling, jillions of pieces of red, white, and blue crepe paper, and then jillions of balloons. Light is bouncing off everything, and looking up it appears as if the universe has been reduced to its molecular constituent parts; electrons, whizzing in every random direction, flicking light multi-dimensionally so that it is hard to see the stage. A country anthem to working people, a little ditty about working people actually creating the wealth is playing and the whole room is partying. The President is joined by Al Gore and then they are joined by their two wives. I turn to Martha Whetstone, my guide through the shoals of this convention during the last week and say, without irony, "They're hipper, they're smarter, they're younger and they're prettier." I cannot conceive of America rejecting such people.

It is an impenetrable blizzard of particulate matter, choking the space, hiding the floor. Balloons are bursting like gunshots, making the Secret Service men edgy. The song is over, and trumpets are bleating, blaring, amelodically. The stage is filling up with hot-shots and VIPS, pressing ever closer to one another to bask in the limelight and adoration of the crowd. Sam Farr, a congressman from Monterey stops by my seat and asks me what I think. "It's the Academy Awards of politics," he offers, and then is swallowed by the crowd.

I stop for a while at a party at a sports bar and say my good-byes. I am curiously lonely. Feeling like a traveler who has been left on the train platform with only a suitcase, and no one to greet him. People are dancing and eating finger-food, wrapped in the victory of their chief. Perhaps I'm too tired. Paul Berry recounts to me that this morning he bumped into James Carville who admitted that he was so tired he "didn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his butt." I leave the party and come home to write my notes.

It's all over but the overtones. The fat lady sang and sang magnificently. My expectations proved to be true, but meant less than I thought they would. It was all here, the slick suits (including mine) and the food, the hype and whoring, the self-congratulating and back-slapping, the canned distancing and slick packaging; but somehow there were other elements I hadn't anticipated. The inclusion of black people and gay people and handicapped people was pleasing to me. The conviviality and hopefulness was pleasant to participate in and the sense of strength and continuity which grows out of a community of people that knows one another well made an impression on me that will last a lifetime.

It may be that the imperfections I find in myself, in Bill Clinton, and in the nation are all part of a larger process towards which I should develop more patience and less urgency. My disappointment and anger is really the flip side of high expectations; a desire to extend the definitions of inclusion, broaden the ideas of compassion so that I can satisfy myself and feel truly proud, and not that I am simply making the best of a tough situation. Standing beside the anger, equally powerful, is a love for this childish, raucous, clever, impatient, impetuous group of people I am part of. The ambiguity I am cleaved by is the nature, I'm afraid, of my own soul.