Acceptance and the Rubes

The candidate's acceptance speech was soaring, and the VP's was sufficiently Rocky like to really hit home with the credulous bambi who lives inside me. At heart, working on campaigns like these comes home when big soaring speeches happen; you put in the hours, live unpleasantly, because in your heart there is still an innocent that believes there is something bigger worth working for. Despite the compromises, there's the hope that something true can come out of it all.

Conventions and the like, and even most political speeches, are where the politicians themselves, the pointy end of the spear, put on the lipstick and kiss the pig. They try and speak to the optimist that still lives inside a lot of us. We'll go back to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic tomorrow.

Digression in the Naked City

Switching busses through the Port Authority, and various other stations within NYC. My first time in the place as an adult.

More people of all nationalities, then I've ever seen anywhere else. More shops, selling more things of indiscriminate shape and size. More of everything.

This place looks fun.

Disasters...

Over the past three weeks:

In FL, we discovered that a director had failed to turn in voter reg forms for months and had been lying to me about it. Thought for a little while I was going to lose my job over it, but did manage to get all the forms in to the office. The fine for doing so, which I originally thought was $50/form, is actually capped at $1000. Not good, but not the end.

While I was in Boston training idealistic youths, I got a call from my Philadelphia director that we were on the verge of being evicted. I had short-sightedly placed our office in a building downtown full of lawyers, software designers, real estate agents, and assorted yuppies. For good measure, I placed them across the hall from the property manager.

They turned out to be less then excited that we had 60 uneducated, loud, crass black people working for us registering voters, and coming back to the office space every day. The call I got had been the culmination in a slow-building game of intimidation and white guilt.

So I hopped a couple of buses. Karp picked me up and took me in. We watched Olympics together, like a couple of nancies, and then it was off to bed for the big day tomorrow. Upon my arrival, I immediately worked out a plan to have our people coalesce in the nearby fancy food court. Then, I spent some time looking for new office space.

The conversations went something like "Hi, I'm looking for a space to run a voter registration drive out of. My budget's pretty limited, and I'm looking for a one month lease..." Click. The following morning, hat in hand and in my groveling clothes, I went and threw myself on the mercy of the property manager, who was dandied right up in a tattersall suit, powderblue shirt with white collar, and pink tie. He walked me around the place, detailing the horrors of our staff, then told me my money still spent if I could keep the people out of the place, and just had our directors there making voter confirmation calls.

I had a sandwich, scouted out the park in front of City Hall, turned our operation in to an entirely outdoor enterprise, had a sandwich, then hopped the bus back to Boston.

Training...

After a sojourn in Seattle, (where my friends agreed that if they saw a black person they would hold them down until I got there to register them), it was off to Boston, to train a new crop of young directors. They are nervous, excitable, drunk, liberal in the limp wrist, let's all hold hands and march together way, and overall a pleasant bunch.

The training began with two days of basic skills, during which time I spend some time breaking people of the habit of treating this like college (i.e. show up hungover, don't do the thing very well, think that no-one's going to call you out on it).

It's funny. I did the same thing when I was in my first training. The first time someone sat me down and told me "Imagine telling the person you're raising money from at the door that their check, which you've just told them is going to pass good legislation, is being used for a training that you're planning to show up to hungover and wing it. It's probably not going to go that well" it hit me pretty hard.

That being said, I was just off of a week in Seattle where I was drunk enough to call off for a day. But a little hypocracy is par for the course when mixed in with the dogma.

Anyway, the training was cool, in that folks learned the skills to recruit train and manage people, as well as some of the organizing principles behind the skills. The trainees varied in enthusiasm level, but for the most part, a certain gravitas had decended by the end, and folks were ready to go out on their own.

And go out on their own they will. The majority of the upper managment layer is taking a leave of absence to go and work on electoral politics as opposed to issue based stuff. Trial by fire for the new folks. The last time we did this was in '04, when an entire staff of newbies run by one experienced staff person nationally broke all the records. Probably something to keeping things really simple.

Vegas: America's last honest city

I spent last week in Las Vegas, and the weekend vacationing with M. First Vegas, then other notes.

There are good people here. Most of them want to leave. Organizing here is unpleasant. Each person who walks through the door is beaten at the end of a long string of bad luck; no-one cares here about any greater good around the campaign. Even our director here is a pretty serious partisan hack; it’s all she can do to pay lipservice to the need to have a more representative democracy, because to her it’s all about the candidate.

Coalition partners here don’t even make a symbolic show of respect; they are emblematic of the city itself, zoned in hard on their own grift with no room for others. We are told to stay away from any sites that they might be at or be shown ‘shock and awe’ organizing.

I offered a longterm job to the one good person I worked with here, in Austin. She was excited about the opportunity to leave, and excepted on the spot.

Vegas has been caricatured and written about ad nauseum, it seems there is little left to say. So, ideas on the intrinsic nature of Vegas then.

The city itself is perpetually in the process of being built. There is no coherency or theme to what one is presented with, but the idolatry itself is uniform. Everything within viewing distance, wherever you go, is a come on. The city wants your money or your sex. All venues are laid out as vulnerable, ripe for the taking.

The casinos advertise themselves as the loosest slots, or the most fun; indeed, from the promotion it is hard to see how anyone makes any money from Vegas whatsoever. All and sundry advertise the best of whatever they have to offer: the comedian that I have never heard of is the best of the year, the show is the best this season, etc. There are few laws stopping the adverts from lauding themselves in words that might come as a surprise should they ever be read by their purported sources; the LA Times may not have known that they’re calling ‘Bite’ the best show of the year, but there it is up in lights for all to see.

Women are on display and for sale in this city. It is a male fantasy, meant to appeal to the base brain with little interference from the cortex.

None of which avers to Vegas’s largest inherent truth: it is a gigantic disappointment. Nothing is or can be as good as it is advertised. The slots are not ‘loose’, the women aren’t as lithe as promised, nor are they even interested in puerilie desires. The casino interiors are nothing as compared to the exteriors, all cheap veneer, tired barkers, garish stained ultrasuede. The accomodations are cramped, and everything costs an arm and a leg.

The main stage show really isn’t very good at all.

The whole city seems to be set up to engage living breathing adults of all ages to behave as though they are the children the night before Christmas, keyed up on advertising, sugar, and booze to believe that tomorrow, through the offices of some unknown and unseen benefactor, all of their wishes are going to be met. They are surrendering their vulnerability, allowing themselves to believe in the possibility of the good, despite their best instincts.

Everywhere you go you see the adults losing whatever cohesion they possess, but without the familial bonding to hold it all together. Spouses turn on each other, people yell at their kids, the aura of both disappointment in particular, and in general disabusement with the whole thing are on clear display. This is why the whole shebang has to be relentlessly sold. The purveyors of Vegas must continually overcome that disappointment and disabusement, to draw the people back in to the process of being relieved of their ready cash and their vulnerability.

To hear the people around you in the midst of being fleeced, you’d believe that everyone is having the best time of their life. Those in mid process are selling the thing to themselves, coming down from the sugar rush as they watch the fake money spill through their fingers but believing still that all they need is one last catch. They make jokes with each other that are desperate and unfunny as they throw away whatever they’ve brought with them. The hardest are those beyond humor, who no longer believe, but cannot conceive of another way. They are peopled throughout each of the lower level casinos, the human detritus.

And now imagine a whole city of people who have come here with dreams to have the vulnerability beaten out of them. Who no longer trust themselves to tell a good thing from a bad thing, let alone trust anyone else. They people the city and their hard carapace decends over everything. They are indifferent to a fault, desperate to the hilt, and each and the other grinding away at whatever the last angle is they can come up with.

Outside of the Strip, the city looks like a rundown suburb of one of the less affluent California cities, a San Jose, or a Sacramento. Few buildings are higher then a single story, the paint chips off their walls in the 105 degree heat. There is a general feeling of shabbiness, and disrepair. Everywhere are strip malls, and even here a more dressed down version of the dream is being sold, “Our slots are loosest, 264 ways to take advantage of us!” screams the casino across the way from the office.

City planning appears to be based mostly around sprawl and resource allocation for the well off; lawns are status symbols here.

The winners are brazen, the moreso because every way they turn there is clear evidence for what loss looks like, a crazy clown mirror image of themselves at the other end of the wrong roll of the dice. They strut and spend opulently, continuing to sell the process to the rubes because they have to believe in it too, believe that they are somehow chosen by Lady Luck, Chance, God, to be the winners they are, to believe that they are somehow better and different from those on the outside of the wrong bet.