Their highest praise, though, is reserved for the man in the Big House, who will arrive triumphant at the end of the convention. Oh, yes, we are grateful to President Bush, crows Mr. Rich to a clutch of reporters. “Never before has one man done so much for so few at the expense of so many!”
A few New Yorkers are genuinely celebrating the novel presence of so many Republicans in their midst. More than sixty-five corporations and a dozen wealthy party members are throwing fund-raisers around town, adding the take to more than $245 million already in the chest, including $64 million for the convention (some of this fund-raising, according toBusiness Standard, was outsourced to call centers in Noida and Gurgaon, India). Four percent of the convention funds, a reported $7 billion, was raised personally by New York’s own billionaire mayor, who last night joined the governor and the CEO of Pfizer Inc. in hosting an event at the Rainbow Room.
No donor to either party pretends to attend these soirées for the gravlax. The corporate guests this week will use them “as relationship-building vehicles with committee chairs and others who have oversight over their business,” says one lobbyist. “It’s a very practical view of the political world.”
Or, as the faux oligarchs of Billionaires for Bush put it, “Buy your own president.”
I arrived last night from Vermont to do my part in making the opposite point: I don’t want my country and everything in it to be sold to the highest bidder. I don’t want my government to be a plutocracy, or my presidency to be a consumer product.
Saturday evening, I joined the Ring-Out, a bell concert organized by a downtown composer featuring a thousand impromptu musicians stretched around Ground Zero in a single line. I stood with friends on the north side, facing a wall traced by the faint memory of an escalator. We rang and rang. The ringing was slow and measured, mournful and hopeful. Including dead-silent intervals, it lasted more than two hours. The event invited many questions, as well as many interpretations. But aside from one or two local cable-news reporters, few but the ghosts witnessed it. And those who could have witnessed it did not witness it. As we tolled, workers and tourists strode past on the makeshift walkway between Broadway and the New Jersey PATH train station to the west. Almost aggressively incurious, they kept their eyes forward, their cell phones to their ears. Many carried bags from Century 21, a huge designer-clothing discount store directly across from the tower site. While the retailer recovered with remarkable speed after September 11, the trade center itself is still a massive hole surrounded by concertina wire and cement barricades. Some lost things cannot be bought again, our bells rang out.
SEPTEMBER 1
With a half-million converging on the city for a week of protests, Mayor Bloomberg is hoping to distract them from angry thoughts or attention-getting acts with—what else?—shopping. His administration is distributing lapel buttons printed with a picture of a cute Statue of Liberty and the words “Peaceful Political Activist.” The button entitles the wearer to discounts at museums, restaurants, and other businesses (including such local mom-and-pop operations as Applebee’s).
Showing neither fear nor favor (besides that little seven mil boost), the mayor is offering discounts to the 4,000-plus RNC delegates and alternates, as well. Differences of taste and income have been considered. The protesters get $5 off admission to the Museum of Sex and may purchase cards and toys at the Pokémon Center store with a 10 percent discount. The delegates may enjoy the family-friendly American Museum of Natural History’s space show at $3 off; Tourneau, the jeweler, is offering them discounts on $100 gift certificates. Unlike the protesters, the conventioneers are not required to wear buttons.
Inside Madison Square Garden, convention organizers are also doing their best to assuage crankiness. Unable to bar potential critics, as they have done at all Bush campaign events, the committee is offering free facials and massages to overworked, maybe hostile, members of the press corps.
SEPTEMBER 2
Three days ago, half a million people danced, strolled, and shouted their way up Seventh Avenue in the killing heat. They carried a thousand flag-draped mock coffins to mark the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Papier-mâché heads of Bush, Pinocchio noses jutting, bobbed above the crowd on sticks. Massive paper dragons and cardboard tanks lumbered forward, the Cowboy perched atop them.
“Bush + Dick = We’re Fucked.” “What Would Jesus Bomb?” “It’s NU-CLE-AR, you idiot!” the hand-lettered placards declared. A group of kids with Rasta hair and plastic bucket drums chanted the sentiment that summed up the march’s message: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ war! And do we even have to mention? We don’t want your damn convention!”
Despite this massive (if not exactly friendly) acknowledgment of the conventioneers’ presence, the courtesy has not been returned. Not once has the protest been mentioned from the podium of the Garden. And tonight, when the president delivers his nomination acceptance speech, it is as if the whole world adores George W. Bush.
The president starts by invoking September 11 and his own role in keeping the world safe. He flits briefly through a domestic agenda—Medicare and Social Security overhauls, education, and tax cuts. “I believe in the energy and innovative spirit of America’s workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and ranchers—so we unleashed that energy with the largest tax relief in a generation,” he declares. “Because we acted, our economy is growing again, and creating jobs.” Then he returns to the “war on terror,” which will be as fierce and as long as necessary, he says. If necessary, it will go on forever.
The cameras scan the ecstatic crowds, dressed in red, white, and blue sequined cowboy vests; red, white, and blue cowboy hats; red, white, and blue cowboy boots. “Nothing will hold us back,” Bush calls out. Over their heads, the delegates wave identical “homemade” posters, provided by the party in a choice of four telegenic models.
The Democrats have so far gathered $153 million, far less than the Republicans, but they are hardly finished amassing the fortune needed to market their own presidential product. This weekend, not to be outdone by the folksy show in New York, John Kerry is demonstrating his own plebeian tastes by being photographed in what look like his boxer shorts, windsurfing off Nantucket.
SEPTEMBER 3
In the e-mail today I receive an article by Andrew Hacker, arguing that employment statistics mask the “powerful evidence”—data on employment instability, wage volatility, and corporate and government benefits cuts—“that middle-class families are at massively increased risk of going over the precipice” into poverty. This morning, starting at 8:15, a symbolic unemployment line stretches from Wall Street to the convention site, a distance of three miles. Organized by People for the American Way and several labor unions, the walkers hold up bright pink fliers reading “The next PINK SLIP might be yours.”
SEPTEMBER 4
In spite of virtually no protestor rowdiness, much less violence, more than 1,500 people have been arrested this week. Thanks to “the police presence” (11,000 officers), Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly proudly tells reporters, “a number of anti-RNC activities failed to materialize.”
For taxpayers uneasy about the $65 million the feds and the city have spent to keep the barbarians from the Garden gates, it may be a comfort to note the high productivity of the police in making arrests. Rather than inefficiently waiting around for an individual to break the law before taking him or her into custody, new tactics call for several officers to unfurl a spool of orange plastic snow fence, trot around a large group of people, then preemptively corral protestors, reporters, and unlucky passersby in one swoop. On Wednesday the police fenced in some 300 pacifists from the War Resisters League, numbers of whom were over eighty, and, in short order, arrested 227.
The move is more than quick and elegant; it is also inexpensive. The “crowd control fence” sells for less than $50 for a hundred-foot roll and forestalls the use of billy clubs, tear gas, or hand-to-hand combat, saving the city potential millions in police
brutality claims. Rather than old-fashioned steel handcuffs, the department also uses plastic disposable cuffs, which resemble the cinch strap you’d use to tie up a garbage bag. These “flex cuffs” can be easily carried, dangling in multiples from the belt or pant leg of an officer. And a package of ten costs $11 from NEXGEN Tactical & Law Enforcement Supply Inc., half the price of just one pair of conventional steel cuffs.
New York’s local economy stands to turn a profit this week of as much as $250 million, city officials predict.New York magazine reports that similar optimism preceding the Democrats’ gathering in Boston last month was not rewarded, however. There, predictions put the convention windfall at $154 million. The actual take was $14.8 million.
The official tally will show a net gain of about $163 million to New York, but it’s hard to say whose pockets that money will end up in. Besides the delegates, who stayed safely inside Madison Square Garden, and the protesters, who were on the whole not big spenders, there is no one around to buy anything. Commuter transit officials are reporting ridership down 40 percent. Shopkeepers complain that closed streets and subway stations and a general siege atmosphere are cutting into business. Lap dancers have never seen a slower week.
Meanwhile, as delegates organized by the GOP’s “Compassion Across America” campaign show up at soup kitchens around town, homeless residents of the streets of Manhattan have been evicted from their outposts and exiled to the outer boroughs.
SEPTEMBER 5
Today’s Peanuts Classics comic: Linus hands in a composition entitled “On Returning to School After Summer Vacation.” “The true joy lies in returning to our halls of learning,” he writes, and wins a compliment from the teacher. He leans back suavely on the desk of Charlie Brown, who is seated behind him, and comments, “As the years go by, you learn what sells.”
SEPTEMBER 11
Terror sells. On this quiet third anniversary, that is the one lesson America has most demonstrably learned, and some of the best students are those whose job is to sell a new president. Kerry’s convention also projected him as a macho warrior, which gave him a bump in the polls. After the Republicans’ war rally, where September 11 was evoked by almost every speaker and the opponent was portrayed as a terrorist-placating traitor, the newspapers report that Bush is pulling beside, or past, Kerry.
But the political arena is not the only place where terror is Product Number 1. This week’s biggest opening film isResident Evil 2: Apocalypse.
I’m back in Hardwick, where fear is mounting, too. Wendell Shepard, would-be cell-tower landlord, writes theGazette about getting caught in a hurricane while visiting his daughter in Florida. He describes a terrible scene—doors, roofs, small trees flying—and then gets to the point. “Unfortunately, many people died, but it’s amazing under these conditions that the numbers were not worse. Until I had this experience, I was not really appreciative of the need or value of the ‘cell’ phone link in communications.” Wendell prays that Hardwick will never see such a disaster, but hopes the Zoning Board will “look at the ‘whole picture’ and allow this tower to be built and serve the common good of this area!”
The police chief also weighs in with a letter. “Due to the concern of inadequate dispatch communication as an ‘officer safety’ and ‘public safety’ issue within the Hardwick-Greensboro Police Department patrol area,” the department has procured money from the Department of Homeland Security to hook into the state’s public-safety communications system. This can’t be done without “tower space currently not available within the police department’s patrol area,” he writes.
Steve Gorelick has written in response to these letters. “To hear some people talk,” he says, “you’d think children in Hardwick were bleeding to death, houses are being reduced to ashes, and police cruisers are being lost in the wilds of Greensboro,” all for the lack of a tall enough antenna. He wonders why no one has ever complained about our emergency services before.
This is an excellent point. Because believe me, they would have complained. TheGazette, a large tabloid-format weekly, routinely runs three or more pages of letters. Usually, at least half of these communiqués voice complaints: bicycle-riding juvenile delinquents on Main Street, bovine growth hormone, excessive property taxes. Letters in the following issues rebut the complaints or complain about the complainers. Among the things people have complained about for years are the police, who have committed every sin from costing too much to running off with teenage girls. But one problem never before heard about the police, or the volunteer firefighters or ambulance team, is that they could not be reached due to inadequate communications technology.
Before Karl Rinker showed up, the lack of cell phones (which is general in the Northeast Kingdom) was an inconvenience of living in an otherwise fine community that had a few things wrong with it. Then Rinker arrived, brandishing his three-ring binder like a prophet with the banner of the new Christ aloft. His tower was the quintessential late-capitalist product: the solution to a problem people only vaguely knew they had (not unlike the weather-related foot comfort problems my SmartWool socks addressed). Fantasies of the tower turned an inconvenience into a dissatisfaction, a dissatisfaction into a desire, a desire into a need, and a need into a matter of life and death.
In the event of a hurricane or terrorist attack, Hardwick’s survival balances on the tip of Karl Rinker’s tower.
And in the event of another terrorist attack…well, let us just say that since September 11, 2001, disaster has been a boon not only to the Bush administration but also to the economy on which its popularity depends.TechNews has been transmitting elated bulletins since the planes hit the towers. “The entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork,” Richard Veleta, director of loss-control services at Dolle Risk Management Inc. of Cincinnati, crowed in the trade journal in 2002. By now, these capitalists have spawned products from advanced biometric iris identification technology to anti-shattering window film ($8 a square foot), part of a fast-growing merchandise segment that its maker, 3M Corp., refers to as “bomb-blast mitigation.”
Insurance companies have sold about $10 million of antiterrorism liability and property policies this year. Private-sector antiterrorism and other security measures may amount to as much as $40 billion to $50 billion, three times the annual outlay before 9/11, according toCQ Homeland Security, an online newsletter put out byCongressional Quarterly. A grant of $100 million will help Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems develop an electronic shield to be mounted on commercial airplanes to “defend them against shoulder-fired missiles.” And $12 million for the data-mining tool Matrix is only a fraction of what the Justice and Homeland Security departments will disperse to private companies for computer-aided surveillance of ordinary citizens.
I clip an ad screaming, “ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEXT EMERGENCY?” I’m not sure I am. Might I need an Etón plug-in or crank radio with built-in flashlight and blackout alert ($29.99 and $39.99, respectively)? Or perhaps something stronger? I find my way to the Web merchant Terrorbusters Inc., which purveys a substance called EasyDECON 200, from Envirofoam Technologies, a “nanoemulsive decontaminator” that, “used as directed…has proven to neutralize all known chemical and biological warfare agents, while at the same time is non-corrosive and adds no environmental load to the appropriate clean-up operation.” If I had kids I might consider a new line of “night vision” bedding and bedroom accessories from JC Penney, including World War II–era jet- and tank-shaped pillows complete with “sound chip[s] for special effects.” Everything comes in camouflage pattern, including window coverings, which I assume can double as blackout curtains.
SEPTEMBER 12
The brilliant thing about all this terrorism mitigation is that it does nothing to assuage anxiety or its close cousin, depression. In fact, the marketing of terror mitigation may actually exacerbate those feelings, which are themselves excellent promoters of commerce.
A piece in the paper today reports that on Wall Street, depression is rampant, and
I don’t mean the economic kind. According to one recent survey, 23 percent of male brokers and traders suffered clinical depression, compared with 7 percent of men generally. A patient of the researcher, psychologist Alden M. Cass, was raking in $250,000 a year during the dot-com boom, only to see his income drop to $75,000. “It’s just so hard to make a living on Wall Street,” the patient laments. The shrink is sympathetic. “Brokers have little control over their jobs or the outcomes of their trades,” he tells the reporter. “These frustrations can lead to a form of learned helplessness.” (I suppose this distinguishes Wall Street stockbrokers from Wal-Mart shelf-stockers, whose work lives are flush with a sense of control.)
As president of Catalyst Strategies Group, Dr. Cass purveys profit-enhancing psychotherapies, including anger management, to arbitrageurs and lawyers. His patented advice: “Think bullish thoughts.” The psychologist himself, like the antiterrorism entrepreneurs, is thinking a bullish thought: identify lemons, sell lemonade.
The financial services company AIG is also reaping the fruits of personal insecurity, sown not by jihadists but by the Bush administration’s own domestic social policies. The company’s ad shows a handsome elderly black couple embracing. “Social Security is in question,” it reads. “Personal security doesn’t have to be.” Should Social Security be privatized, AIG stands to make out like a one-armed bandit.
I keep thinking of an interview I saw, in which a Cantor Fitzgerald trader who survived the Twin Towers attacks admits to a journalist that the instant the first plane hit, he thought,What’s this going to do to the price of gold? In fact, gold went up. Notes the trader, “In devastation there is opportunity.”
Not Buying It Page 17