Let me borrow the words of a favorite author, Saul Bellow. He opened his novel Augie March this way: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city―and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
Unlike Augie, I grew up in a wealthy Chicago and its suburbs, living a pretty innocent life, finding it hard to knock on doors and understand a world delimited by stern Republican boundaries. It took the McCarthy era to open my eyes to the incontestable conservative authority that then moved the world. Chicago was its capitol. Trump is its debased inheritor who puts the old party to shame.
The history of Chicago political conventions will not be lost on some of you. Now we have the “Happy Days Are Here Again” Kamala revelry which we can’t help but treasure and enjoy. Yet, for us oldsters, 1968 won’t go away. Vietnam split the party irrevocably, and there are still echoes of that in the dissent over the war in Gaza, which simmers in the background. Thousands of protesters are kept under wraps by Chicago’s good cops.
Party heavyweights have rightly kept the celebration going but there will have to be a reckoning. How Kamala handles this knottiest of issues, whether and how she will break with Biden’s wretched policy of arming Israel will be her biggest challenge. I have a hunch she will be up for it. Everything in her history predicts it.
I guess you were watching! H
I hear what you’re saying but I worry that Iran will flatten Israel if we don’t arm them. What is the answer for that?