Day Four at the RNC: What I Saw at the Toilet Fire
Wait, we need to wrap up what happened at that other convention!
You guys missed the best part of Thursday night’s big speech. The balloon-popping part. I traveled down to the convention floor to witness the rubber carnage and take artsy balloon and confetti porn photography. It was simultaneously fun and also weirdly scary. Fun because balloons! And confetti! In the shapes of stars. Red, white and blue!
Balloons were kicked into the air as people walked and collected in bunches in the chairs and corners. The kids on the stage did a pretty great job collecting them against the clear aquarium glass that was on the sides of the stage in front of the white stairs. Kids popping balloons — I could watch that all day.
Quicken Loans Arena housekeeping had these broomsticks with sharp things on the front. They diligently poked and poked. The time between balloons falling and balloons having to be popped was like 30 minutes. It’s strange to have them hanging in the rafters all week, prepared to fall. Only to then fall in about a minute. The sad life of popped balloons! But so fun in the popping!
Scary because the popping sound was sometimes a little too bullet-like. The popping from the top deck sounded at times like machine guns going off. A few times when I was on the convention floor and one of the larger balloon popped people jumped. It was a jumpy crowd, made jumpy by Donald Trump’s apocalyptic vision of America.
It had been a long week of dodging dudes dressed as a wall, dudes squirting each other with squirt guns full of urine, dudes preaching the creepiest gospel ever, dudes in police uniforms from all over the country. Expecting shots to come from God-knows-where. The RNC in Cleveland had been built up in numerous articles as some kind of OK Corral for all who dared attend. There would be blood in the streets. There would be noroviruses to catch. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world.
And even if it wasn’t the end of the world it definitely felt like we were losing something just by watching everything that was happening. As Trump speeched, the upper decks where I sat were conflicted. Two or three people were way into it, giving an affirmative reaction to almost every scary line. Like “I alone can fix it.” Or “I am the law and order candidate.” Others stood and applauded frequently enough, as is custom. Most seemed to choose their standing and applauding when there was overlap between Mr. Trump’s ideas and theirs. The appointment of Supreme Court justices and protecting the Second Amendment evoked the most overlap. I was led to believe there was no cheering in the press box. I didn’t have a box, just the seat closest to the outlet all the way in the very last row.
Did Trump’s speech make the stars on the flag wave dimmer, the stripes seem a little meaner? Sure. The progression of Republican politics over the last thirty years has revealed the gears behind the mechanism: what once was covered by all polish and charm had slowly eroded so that one could come to see exactly how the Republican sausage was made. It’s become all shout and no poetry. They haven’t won the Presidency in a while, so they’ve gone shrill warning Americans just how dangerous it is out there to practically even try to live. Illegal immigrants are trying to kill us in anecdotal numbers that do not merit serious consideration. It’s like the number of people who die every year and are eaten by their cats. Who are these aloof invaders who eat their owner’s eyes out? How can we stop them from mauling us after death?
It’s been a few days since the end of the convention and I’ve had three long bus rides to think about what it all means. And it means nothing. Surely you’ve read an article by now about how Trump is an authoritarian and his vision for America is dark and bleak and terrifying. It doesn’t matter. There are 100 million moments between now and election day where he could win it or blow it. America certainly seems open to his style of American Fascism to cure whatever queasy, upset feeling in their stomachs they’re feeling about the direction of political leadership in America. And over the next four days, Hillary Clinton will have a chance to make her case, although with the big DNC email hack as a precursor, it’s already a mess.
Was it a toilet fire? No, it was long and most boring and at times a little scary. But maybe not a toilet fire. I mean, a toilet fire would be a fascinating thing to watch, and this was only fascinating in brief moments. America is probably just as screwed as it was before the convention.
What were my take-aways from Cleveland? I liked the city a lot. The Public Square park is a nice addition to the city. The cops were nice. All law enforcement acted in a restrained way that allowed the silliness of “protesters” win the day. No one mentioned young Tamir Rice, shot by police in a park while carrying a toy gun. I came to enjoy the chicken fingers and curly fries of the Quicken Loans Arena quite a bit. Would I like to cover one of these again in 4 years? Ask me in 4 years. Until then I will attempt to enjoy every day Donald Trump isn’t President of the United States as if they were my last days, as if they were the very last days of the Republic. America was a pretty cool experiment and it was going to eventually end anyway. Maybe now is the time, after much talk of the end of the world, to just embrace it. We spend so much time worrying about how things will end up if politics don’t go our way. Maybe we should just find out whether it’s worth worrying about.