Managing Anger and Democracy at the Democratic Convention

By Ginan Rauf

“I am in a cage,” says Emma Lang, a nineteen-year-old organizer of the Black Tea Society, in an article that appears in Mother Jones. Palestine too is in a cage, concrete walls and all. The life of the masses is easily disrupted and infinitely disruptable for the armored motorcades. The free speech zone is a cage, a visual embodiment of the rapacious contempt for rogue populations and the practitioners of democracy.

Space expands to make way for the theft of space. Spatial mobility is the mark of privilege, confinement that of diminishing liberties.

The protester is by definition deemed unruly and confined to the playpen adjoining the convention center. The playpen reeks of the urban ghetto; abandoned train tracks, steel fences and all in a desolate urban landscape.

Who would want to get stuck out there and risk being identified with rogue populations? Confinement is the mark of a humiliated population. That stigmatizing space is enough to deter respectable protest and erode the respectability of protest.

Razor wire adorns the skyline in liberal Massachusetts. Gee I can hardly wait for the other convention in Ashcroft land.

But hey democracy works. A federal judge gave us a reassuring ruling. The conditions in the cage were deemed a “festering boil” and an “affront to free expression” but nothing can be done to alter the intolerable conditions. This is the inevitability of tolerating the intolerable. It induces the passivity of reasonable surrender in the face of escalating security threats.

Security is the new God before whom nobody dares speak out. Bush is the new bogeyman before whom no progressive dares dissent.

We are in a cage of diminishing choices and lowered expectations.

Crowd control means crowds must get used to the idea of being caged in and out.

Reasonable citizens learn to muzzle dissent and swallow their anger for the sake of greater unity. Unseemly rage is exiled from what Arianna Huffington has characterized as “The Platform of Managed Anger.” She informs us that democratic feistiness has morphed into “hotel envy.” If that is the case, then this bodes ill for the growing number of captives inside the ever expanding planetary internment site.

Reasonable citizens learn a new tolerance for scripted events inside the luxury zone.

Are we exporting democracy to Iraq or consolidating autocracy here at home?

Security, of course, is secured for fortress America and the unfolding spectacle of democracy. Inside this zone of conformist privilege, speech is carefully monitored but widely disseminated for maximum effect.

The methods bear an uncanny resemblance to the mission-accomplished debacle associated with the greater bogeyman.
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Residents of this liberal city must bear some minor inconveniences, expect delays, accept the inevitability of Kerry, and vote for a gentler kinder imperialism abroad accompanied by heightened security at home or simply shove it and get back in the pen.

Meanwhile, the New York Times informs us that the Clintons return to the Democratic National Convention as royalty. The convention itself is likened to a boisterous high school reunion replete with a prom queen and king otherwise known as the former first family. The adolescent language barely disguises an infatuation with royal personages and imperial pageantry.

Now who would want to ruin such a triumphant comeback with unseemly talk of the war dead?

Democratic dissent on the other hand is associated with bleak urban landscapes rather than triumphant coronations in the land not so much of the free as the wildly successful and glamorously seductive. Big personalities occupy space in the choked city. The Times kindly informs us that the Clintons and their entourage are staying at the Charles, a hotel owned by a family friend. Let the readers get a vicarious peek at the life of the rich and famous.

The convention begins to look like the political equivalent of America's night out at the Oscars minus the dramatic speech of one outspoken filmmaker exiled to the other side of town.

Serious political debate takes a back seat to performance and artistry. The contempt for “audiences” is so deeply entrenched that the Times doesn't even bother concealing the manipulative artistry of Clinton's electrifying speech: “Carefully scripted applause lines that he made sound as spontaneous as kitchen table talk.” So inured have we become to the construction of authenticity that passionate politicians are only electable when passion is visibly contrived.

In the zone of controlled speech real debate is disruptive. The Anger Management zone betrays a deeply embedded contempt for democratic debate and a blasé acceptance for democracy as spectator sport.

The free speech zone is really a grim exclusion zone where speech is allowable precisely to the extent that it perpetuates the illusion of freedom among those whose speech hardly matters. It is the zone where isolated protest breaks off from meaningful debate.

Speak but only in designated areas where you may not be heard, are easily discredited or viciously vilified. I am mad as hell and I am going to hold it in some more.

Boston maybe the place where “democracy was founded in lots of ways” as Lang puts it, but today it looks like an occupied city where the contemptuous assault on democracy and spontaneous speech has become painfully apparent. If a picture paints a thousand words, then the cage says it all.

Keep the anti-war protestors out on the street where they belong. Even the unfurling of anti-war banners warrants ignoble expulsions as Medea Benjamin learned. Is this Kerry’s new vision for America or a return to normalcy?

Ginan Rauf is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University currently completing a dissertation in comparative literature focusing on Arab migrant communities, including the Mizrahim. She is an Arab-American worried about the direction of her country.