When Death and Grief Become Part of an Arena Spectacular
CLEVELAND, OHIO-There are no available intellectual metrics to measure what was thrown across the stage in Cleveland Monday night.
I'm not talking about Scott Baio or whatever Duck Dynasty guy that was. I'm not talking about Marcus Luttrell, or the meretricious Benghazi video, or the two 13 Hours guys, whose account of the attack went on slightly longer than does the Iliad. Or even the rapturous ovation that greeted David Clarke, the gun-nutty Democratic sheriff from Milwaukee. ("I'd like to make something very clear. Blue Lives Matter in America!") Or even the loud applause that greeted his invocation of the acquittal of another one of the Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. That's the kind of thing that happens at every convention, at certain times louder than at others.
(For comic relief, there was Wisconsin's fun couple, Congressman Sean Duffy and his wife, Rachel, who pointed out that their grandparents had come to America to escape the socialist hellholes of…Mexico and Ireland. No, I don't know, either.)
No, what I'm talking about is the shameless exploitation of weaponized grief, presented on behalf of a man whose entire public life has been devoid of any evidence of empathy, except when it could be worked to his personal advantage. And that is what happened on Monday night, on Make America Safe Again Night at the Republican National Convention. The testimony from the podium was heartbreaking. The use to which that testimony was put was positively indecent.
Widows. Gold Star mothers. Poignant stories of love and loss, the emotional truth of them unarguable. But coined into tribute to someone who wouldn't have given any of them a second look if he'd tripped over them before this year. Their grief and lost loved ones are simply grist for his ambition. They were the contestants in his greatest performance piece of all. It was a profoundly depressing spectacle.
I am fully aware that all of them signed up for this. Nobody dragooned them into giving speeches to this audience. Nobody fooled them into being part of this. Nobody can say they were used. But that didn't make the spectacle any more edifying or the purpose any more uplifting. If you didn't feel for these people, you have no heart. If you thought it had anything to do with any issue facing the next president, you have no brain.
This all came to me as Rudy Giuliani bellowed like a man in search of a balcony, or a man in search of a Thorazine the size of a manhole cover. This was the real stuff, the strong medicine that this crowd had gathered to hear. His national ambitions snuffed out in gales of laughter back in the day, Giuliani did everything Monday night except guarantee that the trains would run on time.
"There's no next election. This is it. There's no time left for us to revive our great country!"
And I beheld a pale horse's ass and the name that sat upon him was Death, and hell followed after him.
That's what they wanted to hear. The Gold Star mothers were the sweeteners, and they deserved so much better than that.
The case in point-Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, a State Department employee who was one of the four people killed in the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That's personally," she said. She accused HRC of lying to her about the circumstances of her son's death.
"For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That's personally. She lied and then she accused me of being a liar."
Someone out in the crowd shouted, "Hillary For Prison!"
"Hillary for prison, that's right," said Pat Smith. "She should be wearing stripes."
At this point, I couldn't even muster the energy to get angry at the fact that, from the podium of a national convention, the opposing candidate was accused of being half a murderer. There was so much talk about dark betrayals coming from the stage all night that what Smith said got completely lost.
Later, I learned something else. That, during Pat Smith's speech, Trump called into Fox News and forced them to cut away. I learned this just about at the time that He, Trump and Melania were taking their final bows. I got angry then.
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