Conventional Folly

I'm of two minds about Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last night.  On the one hand, I am genuinely impressed with how she has risen to the occasion in the 4 or 5 weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside from the campaign and threw his endorsement  for his replacement behind his Vice President.  I don't think it can be a huge revelation that I did not know she had it in her.  It’s now clear to me she has it in her.  

On the other hand, what is the it that she has in her?  I'll admit, my optimism about the difference that she would make as President has not been perfectly cautious.  My hopes had been involuntarily raised.  In that spirit, I am taking it for granted that there may be divergences from the current admin that she might have to sit on until she is sitting in the Oval Office.  But if you take her speech at face value, there was a lot in it to dislike.  Too much to dislike to really leave a lot of room for any reveling in what there was to like.  I think she was effective in making a case for herself versus Trump from the perspective of “Trump’s a dangerous nut who will make your life worse and I’m not.”  But I was turned off by a few things (and I’m not even talking about the rest of the night/convention with its absence of a Palestinian and the presence of Republicans and military wackadoodles like Leon Panetta and that sheriff from Michigan).  

But just in Harris’s speech, I hated the formulation of economic policies around the middle class and opportunity and affordability.  I mean maybe my ears have been un-tuned from that kind of talk—I don’t hear it as sweet music for the masses, I hear it as fuck you if you’re not in the middle class or if you don’t have what it takes to be.  I’ll grant she’s trying to sing to people who get horny when you talk about that stuff including our punditry and too much of our Pavlovian electorate, but to me it sounds like garbage. The domestic stuff wasn’t all bad, it was just not good enough.  The international part of the speech just sucked pretty much from one end to the other.  Why are we still talking about NATO in 2024?  Even my CNN-watching wife said she threw Gazans under the bus with her comments about Israel.  That’s pretty bad.  But the rest of it sucked too.  I hated it.  Nevertheless, again you could argue she’s not performing for me.  

The thing is she thinks she’s got me.  She thinks “The left will hate this (including the snub of the Palestinians) but they’ll eat shit.  They always do.  The AIPAC wing?  Middle-America Independents?  Suburban Republican women unhappy with Trump?  They won’t eat shit, but the left will.”  Therefore, only the left are fed shit.  Our palate for it is not appreciated, it is taken for granted.  Meanwhile, even in 2024 after all we've been through, extreme care is taken to see that not a molecule of shit pollutes the feast laid out for the small but loud asshole wing of the Democratic Party.

I would have forgiven the pandering to straw dolts (is anybody who matters really impressed by that military and immigration bullshit?) if they had let the Palestinian speak. It was a calculated fuck you really.   A performative fuck you performed for the benefit of assholes.  The thing is if they had let the woman speak (Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian elected to the Georgia house who is on the record pro-Kamala and whose speech was perfectly palatable to all but the most sicko Zionist) it would have given a boost to the people they needed to boost.  Instead it’s now a problem that they have to either fix or let fester. As Sam Seder put it last night, finding room for a 2 minute speech “would have cost them nothing” and made a huge difference. It was a mistake.  Plain and simple.  They fucked up and made a bad choice.

Instead they chose to pander to a certain type of  Dem.  While they told those opposed to the genocide in Gaza to go to hell for a bit, the people they didn’t want to tell to go to hell are idiots who have to be told not to go to hell or else they’ll fucking do it.  I can’t help but think about a Matt Karp study of 2020 that basically confirms that they’re not wrong in a way.  The ficklest elements of the dem electorate have a thick stupid streak that responds to triggers, and yet they are needed in order for Dems to win.

Non sequitur alert: While thinking about this, my brother thirteen who has been looking for work for over a year sent me this infographic about candidates for employment:

I didn't see the point of comparing two lists nearly identical but for the ordering,  but my brother thirteen said that he discerned a decided shift away from autonomy and leadership skills in 2018 and toward obedience.  Probably requires experience with the job market in 2024 to pick up on that, but I see how he got that.  I do think a parallel can be drawn between that list and the menu of stuff at the DNC last night-- the showcase night.  The stuff that doesn't concern you except abstractly-- maintenance of American global dominance at any cost; mitigation of the fact that very poor people from the parts of the world our way of living is making uninhabitable are at our borders clamoring to do any shit work we have for them in order to live here-- we’re not really trying to sell you on, but by making it the centerpiece of our convention we are trying to emphasize that since it is the preoccupation of your government we want you to feel that we will be capable of continuing to carry it out better than the other guy.  And my point is, just as shifts in emphases on our resumes indicate our own acquiescence to losses of power in the workplace, the bar for our political support of a mainstream candidate / party might be getting lower and lower.