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player ready...It`s bad form for us inky wretches of the press to admit we`re excited by the prospects of attending a national nominating convention. Tends to make us sound less like the boulevardiers and femmes fatales we yearn to be, and more like the kids at the circus we are. But it`s happening again.
I can feel pulse rates picking up around the office, and ill-disguised excitement mounting among the press corps in general-if anything so disorganized could be called a corps. Cal Thomas, my stablemate with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, called the other day and his voice, usually as well modulated as any 1940ish radio announcer`s, sounded unrehearsed.
After all, for political junkies it`s the show of shows, the grand quadrennial carnival of American politics and maybe of American pop art. Eventually, even the most jaded of observers must get carried away by the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, or is it the other way `round?
Anyway, starting Monday the grandiloquence and basso-profundo pomp mixes with the theater of the absurd and there`s no telling what`s likely to result. Everett Dirksen, usually. Abe Lincoln, almost never. But all that high popalorum and low popahirum makes great theater, and those of us duty-bound to expose the false and shallow may be most delighted with it. We may not be strangers to the false and shallow ourselves.
Besides, there is always the faint possibility that something of importance and interest may actually occur at New York City this week, maybe even something serious-not serious in the sense of solemn, but serious in the sense of some event that might illuminate life in this 18th Century republic that has become a telegenocracy.
Radio Days: I listened to my first national political convention gavel-to-gavel while I was supposed to be tending my father`s dry-goods store at 838 Texas Ave. in Shreveport. It was 1952, and the occasional customer kept interfering with the roll calls. It was the year of Eisenhower and Stevenson, and I simply assumed that every four years the country got someone who would speak like Adlai Stevenson and lead like Ike. Never happened again. I was a Taft man in `52, or rather a Taft boy, having been thoroughly indoctrinated by the editorial page of the Shreveport Times, but I was mesmerized by Adlai`s words and Ike`s smile. To a 15-year-old, there were giants in the earth in those days. As a 55-year-old, Im not sure the boy was wrong.
National conventions are like that. Everybody seems to remember his first as unique, though they all have a similar script. They`re a bit like Westerns. All have similar themes but they can vary from ”High Noon” to Tom Mix. Even the worst may have some redeeming moment, even the best a touch of the sordid. All convention orations seem descendants of William Jennings Bryan`s ”Cross of Gold” speech in `96, and all the slogans variations on Woodrow Wilson`s
”He kept us out of war” in `16-preparatory to getting us in by `17.
This week`s grand-and-glorious confab doesn`t promise much suspense, but at least it may not go 17 days and 103 roll calls, as the Democrats did in `24 before settling on the forgettable John W. Davis. The party was so desperate by `28 that it chose as temporary chairman an editorial writer (Claude G. Bowers of the old New York World).
As unruly as New York City has become, surely it will beat Chicago in
`68, a Vietnam year, when police and protesters went at it clubs and heads. That was the riotous year Hizzoner Richard Daley the First explained:
”Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all. The policeman isn`t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” And they say American politics has no poets.
Even in the dullest, pre-planned convention, something will surely erupt. Maybe even something good. I know better than to get my hopes up, but it`s an occupational hazard and national characteristic of the species Americus. I`ve taken steps to guard against it. Others may bring along their cynicism pills; I`m carrying some Mencken, the way passengers on a cruise would put in a supply of Dramamine. I`ve already taken a precautionary dose before the opening speeches by reading a line or two about the ”virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”
Things haven`t changed much since the Sage of Baltimore was covering Henry Wallace`s comsymps in `48, the year they absconded with the honest name of Robert La Follette`s Progressives. Let`s see how much, if anything, has changed in New York circa `92. Downward and onward!