World - To Denver with Mailer

Award-winning author and novelist, AMITAVA KUMAR presents a ringside view of the recently-concluded Democratic National Convention, looking at events as they happened. Taking a leaf out of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago that created a new language of writing journalism which privileged subjective impressions, he notes that while the hardnosed realpolitik happened behind closed doors, nobody seemed to be asking the questions that really mattered.
Mailer would have relished the chance to report on the calculations and compromises that have thrown up Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Instead of seeing only a shining symbol of racial achievement…It occurred to me that Mailer had understood what had been ignored by the pundits on CNN. Like the inhabitants of the great city of Chicago, he hadn’t turned away from the unpleasantness of power and money.
Photo: AP The show goes on: Fireworks explode over Invesco Field at the end of the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Just as a traveller on his way to the southernmost tip of South America carries with him Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, or arrives in Delhi with William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, or, having decided to visit Kabul, picks up at an airport bookstore Rory Stewart’s best-selling The Places in Between — just like that, I went to Denver’s Democratic National Convention last month with a copy of Norman Mailer’s classic report on the tumultuous political conventions of 1968, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
I had never been to an event like this before. Denver, the mile-high city, was unknown to me, but so was the culture of televised jamborees. My closest brush with a large political rally had been in India, when I had trouble claiming my berth on a train from Patna to Delhi, the supporters of Lalu Yadav crowding into every inch of breathable space. What did I know of massive gatherings inside air-conditioned spaces, with people wearing buttons instead of turbans? Distinctive voice
So, Mailer was going to be more like a travel guide, telling me, as it were, what to look for, the places to avoid, and where to find pizza. And yet, when I began reading Miami and the Siege of Chicago, recently republished by New York Review of Books, I realised that I had made a mistake. From the first page it was clear that what was most striking about the book was its voice. This was no ordinary introduction to a place or event: instead, it was proof of a new way of writing journalism.
Norman Mailer, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and others, was a practitioner of what in the 1970s came to be called New Journalism. These writers wanted journalism to be factual but, at the same time, use the techniques of fiction. Among the salient aspects of this style of writing were the use of a first-person narrative viewpoint, the use of scenes rather than a linear or historical narrative, the use of conversational speech and a delight in dialogue, and a full engagement in the everyday details of a person’s life as if he or she were a character in a novel.
I knew all this from before but was still knocked over by Mailer’s boldness, painting with a sure voice the very air before him, giving the reader a quick and vivid sense of his own partial perspective. In Miami, playing host to that year’s Republican Convention, Mailer catches sight of the candidate Nixon surrounded by cameras held over his head: “Just a glimpse: he has a sunburn — his forehead is bright pink…. The crowd has been enthusiastic without real hurly-burly or hint of pandemonium. More in a state of respectable enthusiasm, and the hot patriotic cupidity to get near the man who is going to be the next American President.”
There is no reason for Mailer to hide his dislike for his subject. Goodbye, journalistic objectivity. What matters is that the writer be truthful. Mailer, writing of himself in the third person, admits that he is obsessed with Nixon and adds, “He has never written anything nice about Nixon.” A little later, he goes on, “Nixon’s presence on television had inspired emotions close to nausea.”
What is this candour in the interest of? It is intended as a corrective to the blindness of mainstream journalism.
For our benefit, Mailer quotes a New York Times report about a demonstration that he missed because he was having lunch. The report described a group of blacks that appeared inside the lobby of a hotel to protest. The delegates crowded around them. The Times report briefly mentioned “two white girls dressed in red and blue tights” who sang “When Ronnie Reagan comes marching in.” But they couldn’t interrupt the black protesters. “I may be black,” their leader shouted. “But I am somebody,” was the response. “I may be poor.” “But I am somebody.”
Mailer was contrite. This was not a confrontation he should have missed. But he also had questions: “Were the Reagan girls livid or triumphant? Were the Negro demonstrators dignified or raucous or self-satisfied?” The answers weren’t to be found in the report that Mailer was quoting from and he didn’t hesitate to explain why: “It was a good story but the Times was not ready to encourage its reporters in the thought that there is no history without nuance.”
On my first day in Denver, I saw that rickshaws were being used to ferry delegates from one meeting to another. They were painted a bright yellow, and looked more like the limousine line of rickshaws. Still, the main difference was in the appearance of the drivers. The rickshaw-pullers, all men but also one woman, were lean and muscular, and looked like protein-bar-eating athletes. Gone was the vision of the underfed, tubercular, bidi-smoking men I was familiar with from Patna.Part of the mela
“How much?” I asked one of the men on a rickshaw. He was wearing dark shades and khaki shorts, and had bicyclist’s boots on his feet. “Two dollars for a block,” he said. That would make it 40 dollars for a mile. Plus a tip. Fantastic. I could engage in a fantasy that with that kind of money, the rickshaw puller in my hometown could also look and behave like Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Behind closed doors

During the day, there were caucus meetings inside the Colorado Convention Center and in hotel rooms. The important business of planning and fund-raising went on behind closed doors. One could see delegates who wore green badges that said “Finance Guest.” These were the money people. But in the afternoon, for prime time action, the spectacle would shift to the huge Pepsi Center. The candidates as well as their supporters performed for the television cameras. Mailer had foreseen all this, because the change had already begun to come in 1968. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, he notes that politicians “rushed forward to TV men, and shouldered notepads aside.” He adds, “soon they would hold conventions in TV studios.”
Despite the awareness that they were on TV, the politicians were often dull and, one afternoon, to preserve my sanity I watched a pirated DVD of Satyajit Ray’s “Enemy of the People” on my laptop. That night, on my way back to my hotel room, I stopped to observe an open-air discussion that was being broadcast live by CNN. The TV pundits sat on the brightly-lit stage at the side of the road while just a few feet away people and cars slowed down to gape at the proceedings. All the talk on stage was about the performance of the speakers that night, Hillary Clinton chief among them. Had Hillary got past her bitterness and would she have persuaded viewers in places like Peoria?
But, surely, more difficult issues could be discussed?
A report in July from the Campaign Finance Institute had revealed that out of the 146 corporate donors to both party conventions, only 31 had disclosed information about their contributions. Could the other donors not be pressured to reveal the amount they had given, and couldn’t the commentators have found reason to scrutinise the connection between donations and political access?Who was paying for it all?
According to the report, Qwest Communications has given six million dollars to host both conventions. Comcast has pledged five million dollars to the Democratic Convention; Xcel Energy, owner of several nuclear plants, has given more than a million dollars to both parties; the telecom giant AT&T, whose logo appeared on every bag given to delegates, has also donated a large amount to the DNC, and financial support has come from other corporations like Motorola, Coca Cola and Google. The report charged that since 2005 these companies have spent more than 1.1 billion dollars on federal lobbying to influence legislation and regulations. The combined amount of corporate donor support for this year’s two conventions comes to about 112 million dollars.
Under those bright television lights, why was no one asking a single question about who was paying for the show?
After writing about Nixon’s triumph in Miami, Mailer makes his way to Chicago to attend the Democratic Convention. The year is 1968 and the country is caught in an ugly upheaval. Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated outside a motel in Memphis, and then Bobby Kennedy shot dead after winning the California primary. There has been rioting all over the country. Lyndon Johnson is in office; there are loud and violent protests over Vietnam.
At the convention, Johnson’s deputy Hubert Humphrey will wrest the nomination from the antiwar Eugene McCarthy. There will be antiwar protesters on the street who will be beaten to pulp by the Chicago police. But we don’t know this yet. When we start reading Mailer’s report from Chicago, he begins with a long, gory description of the slaughterhouses in the city. The description of the grisly deaths that befall the cattle and sheep and pigs gives off steam and a smell that seems to rise off the page. Mailer writes, “Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.” Because Chicago is where one unavoidably breathed “the last agonies of beasts,” the people are open to suffering and also honest. So, this is how our Norman prepares us for the unflinching brutality of the cops and their beastly, unapologetic Mayor, Richard Daley.
Photo: AP No doubts about where her loyalties lie: An Obama supporter at the convention.
A young delegate from New York tells the writer, “Politics is property.” And this becomes Mailer’s mantra. In those three words resides the magic that will release the secret of the convention. Those words confirm a system of exchange governed by property holders. Mailer writes, “A delegate’s vote is his holding — he will give it up without return no more than a man will sign over his house entire to a worthy cause.”
When I read those words in Denver, I tried to use them to understand what was happening around me. It occurred to me that Mailer had understood what had been ignored by the pundits on CNN. Like the inhabitants of the great city of Chicago, he hadn’t turned away from the unpleasantness of power and money. And it appeared to me that if he were alive today and reporting from Denver, he would have relished the chance to report on the calculations and compromises that have thrown up Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Instead of seeing only a shining symbol of racial achievement, Mailer would not flinch from looking at Obama also as a pure political animal. What’s missing today...
But more than anything else, his prose made me wonder if anyone today, apart from often-wretched bloggers, ever wrote with such keenness and stylistic verve? In this respect alone, he is a writer worth emulating. Here, in closing, is his description of the people assembled on the convention floor: “Cancer jostled elbows with acromegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcoholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis players communicated with the estate holders, the Mob talked about bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.”
This passage is as fresh today, and as real an accounting as possible, as when it was written 40 years ago.