On the Distortions and Distractions of the Democratic National Circus

I suffered through much of the three nights of non-reality programming called the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I watched nearly the whole fucking thing—the jugglers, acrobats, gladiator contests, cock fighting, and the dancers too. I sat mesmerized by an unlimited bounty of bread and circus offerings—lions and Christians, tight-rope walkers and card tricks—I might have been the only person on Earth to view pretty much the entire presentation.

Not exactly the whole thing—I walked my dog, checked baseball scores, spaced out and thought strange things, leafed through my brand new copy of The Complete Poems of EmilyDickinson—but I came back to the DNC like a musician circling back to a particular theme or motif. And what a spectacular and awful show it was!

It resembled an extended commercial, an infomercial, perhaps, but it also seemed a bit like a funeral where people shuffle to the podium to convey memories that have been denuded of objective content—at a funeral no one wants to hear about DUI arrests and domestic battery, we only want the good stuff about how the departed climbed a tree and saved a kitten.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was given a magnificent send off to the land beyond the sun. We walked away knowing that she is a saintly woman at worst, and the daughter of God sent to save us at best. We heard not mere praise, but blessings, confessions, tears, and astonishment interspersed with tunes from Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, and Sheila E! But what kind of funeral concludes with the deceased in the flesh, telling her own story? And what a story she told, being born into the almost Calcutta-style poverty of the Berkeley flats.

I know something about the mean streets of West Berkeley myself, having lived on Channing Way between Bonar and Browning for over a decade. On the flat plains of Berkeley homes now can be purchased—if you are goddamn lucky—for a hair under a million dollars. But I lived there in the 80s and 90s and Kamala would have been long gone by the time my wife and I moved to the west coast.

The Berkeley flats (as I experienced them 40 years ago) cannot be placed in the usual system of class categories, for Berkeley existed just outside the normal boundaries of our four-dimensional universe. It simultaneously exhibited working class, middle class, and upper-middle class features in some bizarre overlapping glitch of the matrix. On our block lived two doctors, a factory foreman, a preschool teacher, a single grandmother on public assistance, and the proprietor of a crack house. Kamala, in her DNC acceptance speech, attempted to pass herself off as a onetime lower-middle class child oppressed by the disrespect endured by her parents—two immigrants of color.

Kamala wowed us all with social class contortions in which a family headed by two academics with doctorates can be passed off as the embodiment of disadvantage. In the DNC rhetoric of the day, we heard nothing of class, but only about race and immigration status. We were expected to be shocked that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, somehow, against all odds, excelled in school and went on to elite law schools.

Of course, this is the American myth that corrupts our national soul—the idea that we live in a meritocratic democracy in which all the layers of status reflect pure work ethic, and privilege has no part in the outcome (you know—the meritocracy in which Donald Trump became a self-made man). I would have had so much more respect for Kamala Harris if she had looked the nation in the eye and said:

I was born with two silver spoons in my mouth and you probably were not. My parents each held doctorates and high positions in the worlds of research and academia, and yours most likely have less than a bachelor’s diploma. Still, despite having had encouragement to study hard and succeed every day of my childhood, I do my best to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a family that owned no books, and I try to put myself in the shoes of someone forced to muddle through school with no guidance and no expectations. Of course, that is not easy for me, because my hyper educated parents made it almost impossible to envision what it might be like to feel that you are a stranger in school. But I will do my best to step outside myself and wear your five-year-old Nikes.

In the fun-house mirrors of American political theater, one has to know that every moment of election programming amounts to a pile of bullshit. In the crazy, refracted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration sending billions of dollars of weaponry to the IDF, and also grieve for those tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands according to The Lancet) of innocents crushed under Gazan rubble. In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change.

With all the trapeze artists, ballet dancers, and magicians beguiling us with feats of virtuosity, two things remained conspicuously absent at the DNC convention—a voice representing the agony of Palestinians and Kamala’s father. I had assumed that professor of economics, Donald Harris, must be long dead, but a quick run to Wikipedia proved that he still resides on our planet. Is Dr. Harris Kamala’s Mary Trump—the alienated family member in charge of family skeletons? If so, he bears witness oddly in silence and does not forcefully deposit his obscure secrets in public as does Dr. Mary Trump. Does his absence speak of something ominous? Mary Trump lets loose her family secrets with no inhibition and little enlightenment. She tells us nothing about her putrid uncle that we don’t already know.

But even more concerning, in a circus promising to lift all of humanity out of the muck of discouragement and horror, the failure of the directors and producers of the DNC extravaganza to produce a solitary, sympathetic Palestinian voice cannot be dismissed as an oversight. The blue honchos who must have meticulously agonized about a Palestinian speaker willing to say a reassuring word to amputate Kamala Harris from our doubts about her role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza—they all somehow came up with bupkis.

In an affair of mass manipulation, that must have cost the price of a nuclear delivery system, the DNC could not clear the one very low bar that absolutely needed to be stepped over. Millions of people waited futilely to hear that Kamala Harris would depart from President Joe Biden over the matter of supplying bombs to continue a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians.

The great fear that many potential voters have is this: Behind the opaque curtain, the Wizard of Oz wears a Donald Trump puppet on one hand, and a Kamala Harris puppet on the other. A vote for either is a vote for more war, beefed up police spending, a military budget big enough to attack every inhabited planet within a hundred light years, and a vote to burn every drop of fossil fuel still buried in the lithosphere. Every vote is a vote for Oz.

There is another narrative, that I can’t completely dismiss—that Donald Trump is a monster that makes every run-of-the-mill genocidaire into a comparative Fred Rogers. It may be that we have a choice between something murderously cold hearted and destructive and something much, much worse. Trump gives me the creeps in a way that Kamala Harris does not, but that may just be my own paranoid distortions. I worry about falling into a pond and coming face to face with a basking salt water crocodile wearing an orange wig.

Noam Chomsky called Trump the most dangerous person in human history, or something to that effect. How much longer do we kick the can down the road with the right-wing Democrats wearing their FDR masks, knowing that we get no universal healthcare, no safety net, endless war and CO2? Most of the people that I know agree with Chomsky and will be voting for Harris. I don’t hold that against them. Trump scares the shit out of most people with an intact set of wits.

We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.

Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America.