In eight illustrated books, elegantly held together in a single beribboned case, McSweeney's Issue 28 explores the state of the fable. For the next two days, it's $5 off. - - - - |
ABOUT "PHILADELPHIA: INTO THE MAW" It was the steamy cusp of Monday noon, the first day of the Republican National Convention, and some guy was yelling about something that had nothing to do with anything else. A struggle developed, which seemed to involve the guy and several other guys, who might have been undercover cops, or might have been his friends, or maybe they just disagreed with him. The assembled hordes looked on in fear or bewilderment, but most ignored the situation altogether, since they had other concerns. The protesters were worried that the cops would bust open their heads, like so much ripe produce at the 9th Street Market. The cops were worried that anarchists and other invisible marauding threats would lay waste to Broad Street and beyond. The journalists, who were so numerous that they appeared to be emerging from the sewer grates, simply worried, and all of us stewed at the base of Philadelphia's Gothic monstrosity of a City Hall. The occasion for this sloppy three-pronged opera was a protest march, without permit, being thrown by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a North Philly organization that makes a lot of trouble, helps a lot of people, and drives the city's government completely insane. Let me quote from a KWRU press release so I may explain the purpose of our Monday duty dance, as I could not put it better myself: "The Kensington Welfare Rights Union is leading the March for Economic Human Rights to call attention to the fact that poor people have been made to disappear from the political debates, the media, and discussions about the so-called 'economic boom.' Both parties-Republicans and Democrats-have abandoned the poor people of this nation." "You ain't gonna knock me down!" the guy screamed. That did it. The television cameras and the men attached to them were upon the melee. Dozens of boom mikes appeared to soar toward the guy. Digicams were thrust between people's legs. What had once been a shouting man was now a centrifuge of human confusion, blindly whirling down the street. I made the mistake of placing myself on the fringe, an inessential cog. From the right, a heavy, evil-looking camera whipped toward my head. I ducked and feinted, and tripped over a photographer who was scurrying, beetle-like, close to the ground. I went sprawling onto my ass, toward the middle of the unholy scrum. As many people moved to photograph me as did to pick me up, and one man tried to do both. Soon I was righted, and, befitting my heroic stature, completely unshaken. But the crazed pinwheel clusterfuck had spun away without me ever finding out how or why it had gone down. A woman handed me her card. "Call me if you need anything," she said. "I'm a legal observer." Didn't they used to be called lawyers? I thought. Meanwhile, a much larger mass of people surged behind me. They were, in the parlance of my profession, "hoisting banners and chanting colorful slogans." The hour of the march was upon us. And so I plunged, deep into the festering maw of the Great American Hoo-Hah. - - - - My experiences started slowly, but engagingly. At 10:30 on the Saturday night before the convention, my wife and I, each four drinks to the wind, encountered an Abraham Lincoln impersonator waiting for his train at the Market East station. His name was Les Carlton, and he looked almost exactly like what one imagines Lincoln must have looked like. He had just returned from the Seaport Museum, where he had been entertaining a group called the New Majority Republicans. But that was it for the week for Les, other than a Wednesday gig in King of Prussia. Apparently, the city's Democratic establishment had booked all the entertainment for the RNC, and had given the prime Lincoln spots over to some guy who usually plays Ethan Allen and Nathan Hale. "I thought the fact that the Republican leadership knew me would help," Les said. "But I was never offered a contract. I finally found out two weeks ago that the people who were running the convention didn't have the power. All they were in charge of was putting up the stage. I was planning to go to the airport at least. Of course, Abe Lincoln really didn't have much to do with Philadelphia." Les went on to tell us that he was pro-choice, because Lincoln would have been. "I'm the original compassionate conservative," he said. It was hard, said Les, since he had been a registered Republican for 51 years, and now there was no place for Abraham Lincoln in today's Republican Party. "I'm not exactly like him," he said. "I like to have a beer now and then and he was a teetotaler." A man came up to Les and shook his hand. "Nice to see you again," he said. Les sighed. People always said that to him. On the train, we encountered the inheritors of Lincoln's great emancipatory tradition: Five recent high-school graduates who were in town to protest the scheduled execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. One kid had flown in from Hawaii. Another was from Vancouver. The rest were from Hyde Park, in Chicago, and had recently graduated from the University of Chicago's Lab School. One of the girls looked at my wife. "Hey," she said. "I know you. You came into Mr. Janus' class to talk to us about art." "Yep," said Regina. "That was me." "Right on," said the girl. She then asked me, with all sincerity, what I thought about Mumia. With all sincerity, I told her that I thought he had probably killed that policeman, but didn't get a fair trial, and anyway, I'm opposed to the death penalty. "Right on," she said. The kids told us to watch out for Tuesday, which was the scheduled day of "direct action" against the "criminal injustice system." "What's going on?" I asked. "Where you gonna be?" "We don't know," said the guy from Hawaii. "Our leaders won't tell us exactly." "Yeah," said another kid, "there are gonna be like three hundred thousand people there." "Probably not that many," said the guy from Hawaii, sanely. They were sweet kids. I didn't see them on Tuesday. I really hope they didn't end up going to jail and getting held for five days on $500,000 bail with no phone calls, little food and water, and constant threats of police beating. Because that's what ended up happening to a lot of their friends. NEXT INSTALLMENT
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