A Very Short Review of the DNC
Everything comes together here: every race, every gender, every class (a literal billionaire speaks side-by-side Bernie Sanders). Even all the old movements, already disappeared, are here in spirit: the scattered protestors outside of the Convention are a parody of the massive riots of the 1968 DNC. And, of course, Lil Jon’s guttural energy ushers in the festivities.
The speeches contain a few repetitive leitmotifs, a predictable one being reproductive rights. But here they take on a new twist. Not only is the right to abortion being discussed, but also the right to IVF (in vitro fertilization). In the wake of sexual liberation, the right to sex without reproduction apparently leads to the right to reproduction without sex. As if the species were better off not having sex, reproducing like protozoa, engaging in the free meiosis of social relations — or, alternatively, having the most licentious sex, realizing our most perverse desires, and not having a single kid.
The Obamas also appear at this DNC, almost as otherworldly figures. They are living legends, living myths (there never was Barack Obama the person, only Barack Obama the idea, the concept, the image, the simulacrum). They themselves become one of the special effects. It’s fitting that this whole event is held at a fully-packed stadium: politics, as everyone knows, is a sporting event, a reality TV special.
At one point, Michelle Obama states “it’s up to us to be the anecdote!” As if to already understand that all of this is just a story, a narrative, and therefore a total non-event: something that doesn’t happen in reality, something completely non-existent, a fiction. This is the event in “real-time,” something which is reported to us immediately and therefore vanishes from our memory just as immediately. No past or future here, no history — just an infinite present.
Black fist in the air. The symbols of liberation always look ridiculous after liberation has been achieved (newly devoid of meaning, these gestures become simulations of themselves). It may not be up to white people to determine “when” black people have been liberated, but it can’t be up to black people either: if the liberated could determine “when” they were liberated, they would never be liberated as such. There would always be something more to be desired (but desired from whom? the very idea of “demanding” liberation already reveals an underlying enslavement to those who would fulfill the demand).
The boy who cried wolf: this is the most important election in our lives, the most important ever … just like all the other ones before it. An exponential increase in importance, trumpeting empty words to the tune of a Shepard tone. Lil Jon doesn’t cover up the fact that the whole country is now a network of Circle K parking lots at which you fight off the homeless in a bid to buy overpriced conveniences. Even the Obamas couldn’t deny, or cover up, that meaningless fact.
