The Democratic National Convention Unfolds – Like A Pesticide-Soaked Rose

By Jim Weller
28 July 2004

There’s not a lot of democracy happening at the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week. Not that there’s any at all, in the Republican fortress in Washington, D.C. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hades any progressive with his or her head screwed on straight is going to do other than to vote for the Kerry/Edwards ticket, no matter what. Unless it becomes so clear we would bet our lives by Election Day that Bush is burnt toast. Then some of us might relax and vote our consciences, like for Nader or Camejo. But that’s an unlikely eventuality. It looks like it’s going to be a knock-down, drag-out contest between the Bushites and the People, all the way to November 2, and maybe beyond, if the 2000 election fraud is any indication.

John Kerry has said that under his leadership, the United States will never go to war because it wants to, but only because it has to. Well, that’s a change from Bush’s hell-bent-for-war doctrine. But will Kerry immediately withdraw U.S. military forces from Iraq? No, he’s not saying that. And the Democratic Party management doesn’t want anybody saying anything like that at the Convention, either. The former California Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, Medea Benjamin, was dragged off the Convention floor kicking and screaming by police, at the behest of Democratic Party bosses, for trying to display an antiwar banner. All the pre-nomination speakers have been leaned on, hard, to tone down the rhetoric against the Bush war in Iraq. Even Ted Kennedy, the Senate’s boldest antiwar antagonist of late, held himself in reserve.

These are stomach-turning shades of the cowardly 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when angry voices of dissent were kept outside, while the “Happy Warrior” Hubert Humphrey’s loins were girt with Democratic Centrism for the battle against Richard Nixon. In those days, the fearless antiwar protestors of my generation were out on the loose raising Cain in Chicago’s streets. In 2004, the Boston police have made a razor-wire fenced internment center under an abandoned elevated train track to pen them in. The Convention Center is cordoned off by an impenetrable military guard. At least Ted Kennedy was able to address the Convention. By the time the Democrats convened in 1968, his brother Robert was already dead, assassinated for his antiwar threat to the Republican military-industrial establishment. Humphrey happy-talked his way to political defeat that year, instead of confronting the elephant in the living room. It took something completely different, beginning with a bungled break-and-enter job, to bring Nixon down six years later.

We’re all going to have to get behind John Kerry and John Edwards this year in order to beat the, er, tar out of Bush and Cheney. But we sure as, er, shootin’ can’t stop there. We’re going to have to keep organizing and keep on pushing to elect a progressive mid-term majority to Congress in 2006. Republican governors have got to go, too. That’s where the Empire gets its stooges to run for President, as often as not. But that’s not all, no. In some ways, I think Karl Marx was right. We, the People are going to have a house-to-house, street-by-street struggle on our hands for the rest of our lives, and for generations to come, to sweep back the historic forces of Mammon in our communities and our nation.

We’re not alone. People worldwide are engaged in national liberation struggles, as they have been for decades, against the same forces. Some of the freedom fighters are more advanced – or their oppressors are less deeply entrenched – than we are here. Our domestic Imperialists are by far the biggest, baddest foreign aggressors in the world. That’s our cross to bear. It’s high time we began to throw them off our collective backs – and our children’s children’s.

So sign on for the long march, friends. The only good Republican is a disempowered one. They’re everywhere and they’ve got a whole lot of money, pawns, privilege, and vassals on their side. They’ll stop at nothing to stay in power. But we’ve got one thing those sons-of-Bushes haven’t got: The truth. And we’ve got the sedated giant, the democratic body politic, beginning to awaken. Defeat them we must. Then we’d better start getting the Democrats into shape – and re-shape the system while we’re at it – so the Imperial hyenas can no longer hide behind them, and fool some of the People all the time, or all of the People even some of the time, any more.

We all have our work cut out for us. As my former pastor, the Rev. Rachel Anderson once said, we have to “Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and let go of the outcome,” if we are to do God’s work in the world, and do it well and wisely.