Photo is of my porch petunias - a very Scandinavian red
In 2008 I was at the national Democratic Convention in Denver and disillusioned. I had taken a walk that morning and came upon the crew of Morning Joe setting up in a Denver coffee shop for their horrible four hours of punditry, which I knew would consist of vaguely racist speculation on whether Obama was or was not a Muslim (or an American at all) and how poor people have to tighten their belts so we can trim Medicaid. I just felt my face set in disgust and walked faster.
I felt the same unease in the convention hall. I watched Spike Lee do a star turn around the venue as a clearly unhappy Jim Webb sat scowling, his face all made up, waiting for his turn to do his “hit” on cable with the frighteningly thin cable news hosts. I got lost in the venue at one point and passed Anderson Cooper in a hallway and his skin was so perfect and expensively moisturized it looked lit from within. He smells rich, like vetiver and sandalwood. I was sitting with a retired Common Pleas judge and his wife, lovely earnest people, and the word that came to my mind for us was “frumpy”. We looked frumpy compared to The Pros. Somehow these people had taken our thing, the election of a President, and turned it into their content and their careers.
I got the same feeling this past month as the El-Sayed campaign picked up steam and national media swooped in. But not about cable news hosts or AP reporters or the Detroit paper. Instead, I was watching streamers like Hasan Piker and and You Tube and Tik Tok stars like the “I’ve had it” lady preening and strutting and speaking too loudly and too quickly, in memes. I felt like telling the young volunteers “don’t let Hasan Piker take this great thing you’re doing with other people like you, face to face and turn it into online content. Don’t make the same mistakes with your political media that we did with ours.”
Because new media are as voracious and career driven as old media. They will consume the whole process if we let them. We’ll start using their phrases and adopt their cynical views about optics and electability and cycles. They’ll turn us into performers in our own lives. They’re pros. We’re amateurs. Let’s protect our amateur status, value it, keep the pros at arm’s length, because all the pros are going to do is turn our civic work into a circus and make the people we’re trying to reach sour and hopeless, and we don’t want that. People are sad enough.
My youngest son lives in Detroit and is an affable, easy going ‘lil Lefty and he was enjoying riding his bike in and around this Senate primary spectacle. I told him my misgivings about it, how I wanted to tell El-Sayed’s campaign to stay local and keep the amateurs and voters front and center and sideline the influencers. He dismissed my concerns (what he said was “it was fun and you just hate fun”). Can’t argue with that. I do hate fun.
But I am going to try to get this message of mine to the campaign anyway, where they probably won’t listen to me anymore than more traditional Democrats did 20 years ago when I told them Morning Joe and multimillionaire pundits were poison and were ruining our thing, our politics, our government. Sideline the influencers. Push them back where they belong. They’re the observers. We’re the main event.
