Christian Lorentzen

The Republican National Convention’s first day was cancelled out of deference to tropical storm Isaac, but for most of Monday Tampa was rainless. At around 4 p.m. I was standing a block from the convention centre, next to Charles O. Perry’s 1985 sculpture Solstice, which looks a bit like a space age Christmas tree ornament, or a pair of Slinkys copulating, beneath the Bank of America Tower. On a Saturday in January 2002 a 15-year-old-boy called Charles Bishop crashed a stolen Cessna into the tower, killing himself and nobody else, because, as on Monday because of the storm scare, there were few people downtown. ‘Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9-11,’ Bishop wrote in his suicide note. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees! God blesses him and the others who helped make September 11th happen. The US will have to face the consequences for its horrific actions against the Palestinian people and [illegible] by its allegiance with the monstrous Israelis who want nothing short of world domination! You will pay – God help you – and I will make you pay! His parents at first blamed the incident on acne medicine-induced psychosis but before long dropped their $70 million lawsuit against its manufacturers. On Monday the skies were protected by helicopters. ‘Here comes a mob,’ a pedestrian said. At the corner of Kennedy Boulevard and Tampa Street beige-clad policemen in riot gear formed a line to meet a protest march. The ‘mob’ turned out to be the Poor Man’s March, a permitless echo of a demonstration earlier in the day that had resulted in one protester being arrested after getting tackled by a cop for wearing a mask. Leading the crowd was a man on a bike pulling a trailer with an upside-down Stars and Stripes waving on a pole. Several marchers were carrying pizza boxes. ‘I don’t know about the pizza theme,’ one said. A man with a megaphone addressed the cops: ‘I’m an anarchist. I hope you’re not scared of me because I’m not scary. They’ve got you dressed up like turtles.’ He was wearing a black plastic boot on his head, had a rat-face toy gas mask dangling from his neck, and is apparently called Vermin Supreme. ‘Read my op-ed, it’s an open letter to the city to provide you with corn starch to prevent chafing in your riot gear.’ The signs – ‘Capitalism Is Cannibalism’, ‘Dump Both Parties of Wall Street’, ‘Food Not Bombs’ – were more standard-issue than the chants. ‘We are the proletariat, we are the pizza resistance!’ ‘The pizza ignited will never be reheated!’ ‘Fuck Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney is a fuckin’ asshole!’ ‘What does $50 billion look like? This is what $50 billion looks like’ – i.e., like a bunch of turtles in beige.

‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ We were on Ashley Drive, where the Tuesday night convention crowd was being funnelled out through a hole in the fence. There were five men holding ‘Mr 1%’ signs and calling at the delegates. ‘How’s the middle class doing?’ The occasional delegate answered either ‘just fine’ or ‘terribly because of Obama’. Obama’s ‘all-out assault on free enterprise’ had been the evening’s relentlessly hammered theme. The assault had two elements: ‘an environment of regulatory uncertainty’ and his remark in July at Roanoke, Virginia, ‘If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.’ This was evidence of his scorn for the American Dream. The Dream, which can usually be reduced to home ownership, was in the hall reduced to being ‘a small business owner’. Trotted out on stage were a metal worker, a designer of trade show exhibits, and a sign maker. The metal worker doubted Obama’s ability to maintain an adequate supply chain, and the sign maker was bitter that Obama altered federal procurement policies for signage. (He still makes signs for the Forest Service and the State of New Mexico ‘thanks to Governor Susana Martinez’.)

If you sit long enough in the company of jolly Republicans, you will hear that the president’s problem is that he’s a ‘pansy-ass’, that he wouldn’t come to Israel’s aid against Iran because he’s ‘too Muslim himself’, that he’s trying to hide his family from the country because he’s ‘not a real American’, that it would be easy for him to prove everything with some ‘microfiche’ from the hospital where he was born, that the best thing about America is our defence, and that Obamacare is ‘full of terrible, terrible things’ called ‘entitlements’. I have heard this stuff in Tampa, not, it should be said, from delegates or officials, but from nice people who believe things if they hear them repeated enough times. I’ve also heard that the best years ever were the ones between 1983 and 1987, that no one ever did as much for American women as the dynamic duo of Ronald Reagan and the personal computer, that the parties at the RNC have never been as good as they were for Goldwater in San Francisco in 1964, that New York is a bad place to live because of rapists, and that the hottest guys at the convention are the officers of the Secret Service. I saw a woman swoon as she said the words ‘tax cut’.

On the drive downtown from the Charlotte airport you ride the Billy Graham Parkway and are greeted by a billboard that says: ‘Don’t Believe the Liberal Media.’ I went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The TV was tuned to CNN. Aaron Black from Occupy Wall Street, who’d taken me to Romneyville in Tampa, was walking his bike down the street in Sunday’s March on Wall Street South. He said that some of the OWS protesters from Tampa hadn’t come north for the DNC: ‘A lot of our people are not interested in protesting Obama.’ Yestersday around noon I was walking to the Planned Parenthood rally at the Nascar Hall of Fame when I came across the tent encampment in Marshall Park. There were a couple of dozen tents and signs spread out across the ground: ‘Obama Is a Fucking Traitor!’; ‘Avoid Corptards’ with anarchy symbols for the As; Obama riding in a flying saucer, looking a bit like Mr Spock, launching drones from above a row of ‘sheeple’, one of whom had woken up to say ‘Holy crap’, only to have his ‘dissent’ float up to be stifled by ‘weapons of mass distraction’.

Mitt Romney said last week that his wife would have been successful at anything she might have done. Michelle Obama on Tuesday elided her actual success as a corporate lawyer to dwell on her role as ‘mom-in-chief’. And she converted her emotional life into a talking point attuned to the day’s news cycle. The headlines were covering the parties’ contest over whether Americans were or weren’t better off than four years ago. The first lady assured the convention that she loved her husband more now than she did four years ago. Despite the disagreements over whether or not to include God and Jerusalemin the party platform, the Time Warner Cable Arena is a house full of true believers this week. I heard a corporate lawyer in her mid-thirties say that she still thought Michelle Obama was a ‘ninja killer’, whatever her omissions. She was wearing a blue dress, like many of the young women at the DNC. I didn’t see an equivalent trend last week in Tampa. But then I didn’t see many young women there. Just as there weren’t many hipsters who weren’t in the media, or delegates who weren’t white, or people who were missing a limb.