The Spectacle in Chicago in 2024 TCR at the DNC and a homage to Norman Mailer

“Watching the animals be slaughtered, one knows the human case—no matter how close to angel we may come, the butcher is equally there. […] Yes, Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made.”

—Norman Mailer, “The Siege of Chicago” (735, Library of America ed.)

Norman Mailer had a thing for the definitively-present over the blank page. Culture! Work! Moral Action! Violence! Sex! Booze! Famous Names! Better to throw oneself into it, whatever it is, than risk feeling you are not living.

When writing of the stockyards, the controlling metaphor in his long essay “The Siege of Chicago,” on the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Mailer points out that Chicago, like other cities, could “have found technologies to silence the beasts with needles, quarter them with machines, lull them with Muzak, and have stainless steel for floors, aluminum beds to take over the old overhead trolley—animals would be given a shot of vitamin-enrichment before they took the last ride.”

This comes after three pages of vivid description of shock, spatter, and slash—“a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War”—and a death stench that rose north to the suburb of Evanston “to remind the polite that inter faeces et urinam are we born….”

He follows with the judgement that “in Chicago, they did it straight, they cut the animals right out of their hearts—which is why it was the last of the great American cities, and people had great faces, carnal as blood, greedy, direct, too impatient for hypocrisy, in love with honest plunder.”

“Only a great city provides honest spectacle,” he writes, “for that is the salvation of the schizophrenic soul. Chicago may have beasts on the street, it may have a giant of fortitude for Mayor who grew into a beast—a man with the very face of Chicago—but it is an honest town, it does not look to incubate psychotics along an air-conditioned corridor with a vinyl floor.”

Mailer needed Chicago to be worthy of the chaos at the DNC that year, and he (a Brooklyn kid) was unsettled by the midwestern blankness he saw just to the west of the city. “[N]ot five miles from the Loop were areas as empty, deserted, enormous and mournful by night as the outer freight yards of Omaha,” he says. Even the relative quiet of the stockyards each night (“empty as the railroad sidings of the moon”) seemed more disturbing to him than the gory handwork of its days.

Chicago was indeed a tough town with a long history of mob activity, patronage, and organized labor, and Mayor Richard J. Daley would rule it (and the Cook County Democratic Party) like an old-school boss for more than two decades. Daley inflamed tensions during the convention that led to more violence.

But there is an awful lot of romanticized admiration in Mailer’s essay, especially for what is “old” and “19^th-century.” His trope of stockyard Chicago borrows heavily from Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” (1914), with its image of “Hog Butcher for the World,” and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905). “One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe,” Sinclair writes, sounding like Mailer’s forefather.

The times were changing, or had already changed. The Union Stock Yards closed for good three years after Mailer wrote his paean, and Chicago was never so “straight” or “direct” (with the supposed class-authenticity of its abattoirs and “old burlesque houses”) as not to be a corporate town too, with eyes for that honest plunder. The stockyards were run by huge companies such as Armour, which was selling on the Chicago Stock Exchange in 1968 as conglomerate Armour-Dial, Inc. Sears, Roebuck had been in the city since 1906; by 1969 it was the world’s biggest retailer and had 350,000 employees. The Sears Tower, for a time the tallest building in the world by roof height, began to be writ on the city’s skyline the year after that. Was corporate Chicago less great than slaughterhouse Chicago? What would that mean for the city’s spectacles?

In the decades after Mailer’s visit (only his second), Chicagoland became a megalopolis sprawling halfway across northern Illinois and well into neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin. Its population grew by 38 percent, to almost 10 million. Boeing chose to move its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 so corporate management could distance themselves from the mechanical realities their engineers insisted on. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s office announced this year that Chicagoland was named the top metro area in the country for corporate expansion and relocation for the eleventh year in a row.

Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.

But Chicago ranks eleventh in the world for the most skyscrapers. (It has 138.) What visitor to the city can explain the work (much of it digital) that gets done behind their darkened glass? Psychosis-incubating or not, Mailer’s “air-conditioned corridor with [marble] floor” might be just the thing.

Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show interviews a DNC attendee. (Photo by John Griswold)

Except for the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, the 1968 DNC was the last “open” convention for either party. Since then, nominees have been chosen ahead of time to prevent the public spectacle of that year from happening again. And for the first time since 1968, a nonincumbent (Kamala Harris) won a major-party nomination without a primary challenge. That decision was made “for the people,” as her campaign likes to say in different context, without public input. (This is the reason Black Lives Matter gives for not endorsing her.)

The 2024 DNC was definitely a spectacle, in a great world city, but “honest,” as Mailer would have it, was always an odd notion. This year’s spectacle was the type Guy Debord defined in Society as Spectacle: “[T]he total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals…the opposite of dialogue…the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself.”

•  •  •

The two sites for the 2024 DNC were McCormick Place, used for enormous trade shows; and the United Center, the sports and entertainment arena. The reporter from The Common Reader would need to pick up his press credentials at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, a couple of miles as the surveillance chopper flies from the old Union Stock Yards.

The Uber driver that picked him up from his Chinatown hotel was sour on tax dollars being spent for the massive security needs of the convention. His GPS tried to adapt to the half-mile perimeters enforced around the venues and sent him all the way down to 33^rd Street, thirteen blocks off course. He drove back north and tried several times to find a way into a Green Zone surrounded by high barrier fences and staffed every few feet by cops from all over the metro area, Secret Service, Capitol Police, and DHS. Their SUVs and cars lined the streets, nose-to-tail on some blocks. Helicopters orbited overhead, and city snowplows filled with landfill blocked access from the main streets. But no cars were being allowed through checkpoints, and the reporter finally had to insist the man let him out so he could hoof it.

How weirdly empty the neighborhood was around the hotel, despite caucus and committee meetings being held there. One could walk into the security zone without credentials, but few did. A T-shirt vendor reclining in a chair at Michigan and Cermak, smoking her cig, had had no customers. She was cheerfully sure it would pick up. Biden had dropped out so suddenly the DNC had not had time to order Kamala shirts for their geedunk shop in the conference center, but this woman had a few to sell. Nobody wanted Joe shirts.

Further up, a small pro-Israeli group engaged with an older man who claimed he was media but wanted to express his support.

“If somebody kidnapped my kid,” he said loudly, “I’m gonna blow ’em all the fuck up until I get my kid back or there’s nobody left.”

The high-tech police state outside the hotel and conference center could have withstood any small-arms attack on foot or by vehicle. It could have survived a truck bomb. Flight restrictions for aircraft during the convention ranged from three to ten nautical miles away from the venues, and the FAA had prohibited “flight training, practice instrument approaches, aerobatic flight, glider operations, parachute operations, ultralight, hang gliding, balloon operations, agriculture/crop dusting, animal population control flight operations, banner towing operations, sightseeing operations, maintenance test flights, model aircraft operations, model rocketry, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), and utility and pipeline survey operations.” Tech existed to jam or shoot down UAS’s (drones) that might carry explosives.

It was strange and a little frightening to be at a civilian destination in an American city that had decided to protect itself from anything, including, no doubt, a hand-carried nuclear bomb. (FEMA was in charge of disaster recovery, should it be necessary.) This was done largely by emptying things out. The sky was empty, the security zone was empty, and inside the Hyatt and its conference center, air-conditioned corridors were mostly empty except for law enforcement wearing complicated tactical vests and weapons. It reminded the reporter of the first time he seen men with automatic weapons in public—in the early ’80s in what was then Omar Torrijos International Airport in Panama. It had been startling. That did not happen in the America he grew up in. It had now, for years.

The reporter was directed to a lower then an upper floor to a staffed table not for his purpose, and across a skybridge. He went through a Secret Service ID checkpoint and metal detector, was sent down another hallway to locked meeting rooms, and in the end could not say who or what was responsible for him not receiving credentials that day. The process felt sterile by design, like when you could not reach a human on a corporate helpline. He would not be listening to Biden in person at the United Center that evening.

That was fine with him. Local news showed protests and marches elsewhere in the city, some scuffles and barrier breaches, and he wanted to have a look. One little urp of the mind’s discontent with “The Siege of Chicago” was how Mailer, despite his bullying macho, avoided the fray. He had watched the violence on Michigan Avenue and in Grant Park from an upper floor of the Hilton, declined to join marches and protests, cogitated over his choices and did some handwringing, but at one point chose to booze it with friends and ended at the Playboy mansion instead. It was the sanest choice, by a WWII vet. The Common Reader reporter was far older than Mailer had been at the convention, but he was a Cold War vet and did not mind getting lightly tear-gassed. If it got any rougher, well, that was what jogging on the bike trail had been for.

The closest gathering of protestors to the United Center, the TV said, was Union Park, two blocks east. The Uber driver said nothing through 40 minutes of rush hour and convention traffic. They stopped for minutes at a time on the Dan Ryan alone, not far from where his friend had an art studio in a former chicken-plucking factory from the meatpacking days. The summer night was cool and clear, and the air smelled warm, like engine coolant and laundered clothes. Skyscrapers gleamed in the sun.

The reporter had never seen so many police in one place, and as he got out of the car, hundreds—maybe a thousand—more were marching into Union Park in formation. Police formed up around the backstop of the softball diamond were watching, not without good humor, an older Black man in a wheelchair give a Black police sergeant holy hell over something more immediately personal than the pro-Palestinian cause. Nearby, other police in different uniforms had made a skirmish line with no visible antagonist and held signs that read, “You are ordered to disperse by order of the Chicago Police Department.” Everyone ignored them to their faces.

Chicago police argue with a protestor in Union Park, two blocks east of the United Center. (Photo by John Griswold)

The park was loud, not with bullhorns or sirens or shouting, but with the voices of talkative protestors standing in groups and pairs as if they were in a busy bar in Logan Square. Some wore bike helmets for protection against billy clubs, or carried gas masks (the reporter had bought an Israeli mask in 2016 at American Science & Surplus in Park Ridge and had not even thought to bring it), tactical bongo drums, and signs that said, “End US aid to Israel stand with Palestine.” Two middle-aged news photographers huddled to admire a very nice shot, displayed on one of their phones, of a young White kid whose left cheek had been busted open, presumably when protestors had breached a security fence between the park and the United Center earlier.

Organizers had hoped to see 20,000 protestors on the streets during the convention, but Chicago police would later put the number at only 4,000-6,000. A similar thing happened in 1968, when organizers hoped for 100,000 attendees, as had gathered before the 1967 March on the Pentagon, the subject of Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968). Despite the worldwide attention the chaos of the 1968 DNC received, only perhaps 7,000-10,000 protestors had attended.

NBC did report that protestors came to the 2024 DNC “in far greater numbers than they had during last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.” The reporter found that interesting. Chicago police had trained for a year, for the DNC, in “constitutional policing” and “de-escalation.” Only 74 arrests of protestors would be made from Monday through Thursday during the convention.

“We are trying to get away from the old image of the Chicago Police Department,” an official would tell NBC News later.

A young man wearing a Soviet army-style cap and holding a Soviet flag posed, for a Japanese photographer, at the head of a long line of cops that stretched to the other side of the park. His moustache and goatee were Lenin’s. He told the reporter he was from a soon-to-be organized group already called The Committee for the Formation of an American Labor Party. The group included—or comprised—him and his three friends, one of them in a black balaclava, who stood under a nearby tree. They were there to protest the DNC and support the Palestinian cause, the young man said, because they felt that “the American political system no longer represents the genuine American person.” They wanted to form a party “for real working-class beliefs and real working-class values.”

“You could say we’re in the Marxist tradition,” he said carefully. “We take from various different schools of thought.”

The reporter asked if he wanted to give his name. “It’s going to be Luka,” he said. The reporter thought it was probably Luke or Lucas. His friends’ dog started sniffing a passerby’s dog, and the two parties got their leashes tangled in the encounter.

Luka said there were so many police in the park because “the American political establishment does fear people coming together behind a cause that is fundamentally anti-establishment.” He had a non-kooky theory about US and Israeli politicians and corporate elites passing money and other support around in ways that enforced the established order.

The reporter asked one last question: If Gaza was resolved today, and the U.S. ended all support for Israel, would his group consider supporting either U.S. main political party?

“No, we would not be in favor of either standing political party,” Luka said. “The state of Israel is just one piece—a large piece—of a greater problem we have here in America. Fundamentally our system disenfranchises the people that it’s supposed to represent.”

“Luka” holds a Soviet flag at the head of a long column of Chicago police. (Photo by John Griswold)

On the west edge of the park, stacks of protest signs had been gathered and stacked and were being loaded into three U-Hauls at the curb. Some said, “Defend and expand immigrant rights,” or “Victory to the Palestinian resistance.” Others had multiple messages mixed together: “Stand with Palestine: Defend LGBTQIA+ & reproductive rights!” or “Stand with Palestine: Stop police crimes! Community control of the police now! End US aid to Israel!”

Nick Sous, 32, was helping work on the pile. He said this day’s rally had been hosted by the Coalition to March on the DNC, to which 270 organizations had signed-on. His own group was part of the Coalition for Justice in Palestine, “all of the Palestinian orgs in Chicago,” and had another event planned for later in the week.

The reporter mentioned to him that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel at that moment, reportedly trying to work some things out. If the war ended, Israel withdrew, and the U.S. ended aid to Israel, would his group ever vote for the Democratic Party?

“For me personally,” he said, “too many people have died with our tax dollars for me to feel comfortable ever voting for Kamala or Biden or anybody in the Democratic Party. We recognize that it doesn’t matter who’s in the office, whether it be the Republicans or the Democrats, that they’re going to continue to support Israel unconditionally. So that’s why we came out here today, is to call them out on their bull crap and make it clear to them that we see them for what they are: They’re genocide backers.”

His organization was a 501(c)(3) and would not endorse candidates, even third-party ones, but privately, he said, he intended to write-in his vote.

On the south side of the park, a young woman stood next to a long line of buses and trucks at the curb. Cari, 20, worked for the Black Males Challenge (Team Black Males Winning) and said there were just five in their group, but the team was slowly building. They were from Dallas, had been at the Republican National Convention, and “came to the DNC to balance out the two.” She said they were “just trying to restore the image of the Black man,” salvaging it from tropes of the absent father and the face of crime. Through polls and fundraising they hoped to find out which of the two political parties would show their organization the most support.

Cari, 20, works for the Black Males Challenge, out of Dallas. (Photo by John Griswold)

“I don’t know if you know,” she said. “They both pander to the Black folk. And I know that the Democrat Party knows that without the Black folk they wouldn’t win. I mean, you guys want our vote so bad, show us why we should give you our vote.”

AP had reported that week: “Black male voters are traditionally one of the most consistently Democratic-leaning demographics in the nation. This year, however, both major parties view Black men, especially those under the age of 40, as attainable voters. Whether Black men turn out in high numbers and to what degree they maintain traditional support for Democratic candidates may prove decisive in November.”

Cari pointed out that of course there were other political issues: abortion, immigrants, LGBTQ rights, she said, but “Black people have been at the bottom for years. We’re the most overlooked, I’d say have the most stereotypes against us.”

The reporter said the Harris team was hitting race hard on the first day of the convention, and it seemed possible that a majority of those speaking on the main stage were Black. How would Cari’s organization know they could sign on with a party?

“Once they show that they care,” she said. “Not just saying that you’re going to do something, then when it comes down to it, you never do it. Or at least that’s how I feel with the Democrats, you know. I mean, even a lot of the stuff that [Harris] says she’ll be doing: you had the power to do it while you were VP. Why didn’t you do it? … It’s no different for Trump either. I just want them to stop pandering for our votes.”

The thousand extra police marched out in two columns to wherever they came from. This left dozens of police who were dressed in the infamous blue helmets of 1968, and many more in neon green traffic vests. Dust lifted off the softball field in the dusk. A Capitol Police special unit got out of an unmarked minivan, threw their plexiglass shields down on the grass, and dressed out fully. They looked like Transformers when they were done. They walked in that uptight-robot way of the heavily armored into the Warren Apartments across the street, which was already guarded by two lines of police out front.

The reporter stayed long past dark, in case, but there was nothing to it. The police, a grotesque anti-abortion performer, and the protestors he had talked to all had their stances, and there would not even be nods to solutions, other than to share the park without violence, this time. It was an absence—of connection, good and bad.

Later it was disorienting to be back in the hotel, watching the first night of speeches in HD, and to slowly realize he was behind with the streaming and therefore out of real time, so the speeches ran until 2 am.

Anti-abortion protestors at the corner of Ashland and Warren, in Chicago, near the United Center. (Photo by John Griswold)

•  •  •

The next morning the reporter got his badges from the Secret Service and the DNC. Each of the next three days he covered council meetings at McCormick and walked the expo hall, asking vendors questions. In the mornings and afternoons he walked from or to Chinatown and asked people how they felt having the convention in town. Every night he sat, five or six hours in a stadium seat, watching the stage show live from the unassigned media section inside the United Center.

It was a show like he had never seen before and would probably never see again. That was fine with him. The Dems were doing great, they had gotten help from Steven Spielberg. The speeches were competently written, tightly timed, teleprompted, and delivered quite well. The worst that could be said was that they were sometimes redundant or otherwise boring. The studio band or the DJ played guests on and off.

Famous figures—both the Obamas, both the Clintons, both the Bidens, both the Walzs, both Harris and Emhoff, both Stevie Wonder and Lil Jon, both Pink and Oprah—and others performed, variously, competence, normality, excitement, insight, and professional cheesiness. It was a variety show that had gone extinct years before, and the reporter half-expected to see John Wayne waddle out on stage in a blue bunny suit, accept his applause, and say in his famous drawl, “I guess it could have been worse. They could have asked me to dress up like a liberal!” Leon Panetta came out instead. Leon Panetta!

The DNC was a marketing campaign without the danger of questions. It was not as if anyone would need to provide specific answers about America’s original sin, inflation, environmental disaster, nuclear war, or how half the country hated anything the other half stood for.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) gives an impromptu interview in a hallway at McCormick Place. (Photo by John Griswold)

Moments of grace occurred, though others might not have seen the ones the reporter did. US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, introduced oddly on the third day of the convention as “former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg,” always presented as pleasant, calm, and straightforward. The reporter had heard him speak at a veterans council meeting that week; he was good.

But touched that night by the god of honest spectacle, Buttigieg said, “Yes, politics at its worst can be ugly, crushing, demeaning. But it doesn’t have to be….it can even be a kind of soul craft.” What came in the ellipses (something about empowerment) was cheese, but “soul craft” was intense for that stage, and the rest of it, coming from nice-guy Pete, was scary and exciting because it was a glimpse of reality. The reporter would have gone to another week-long convention if it had more moments like that.

Before the convention the media had said the show’s main benefit would be to give Harris the chance to tell her story. She told it, and it was told for her, over and over: “childhood, her mother, IVF and abortion, busting gangs, collecting guns, getting the banks to give California $20 billion. She [had] done a lot, but with enough repetition in a short time those achievements began to sound like someone padding a résumé.” Her personal story (the pure role of women in her life) began to sound thin as a generality. What of women such as Margaret Thatcher, Aung San Suu Kyi, Marine Le Pen, Marjorie Taylor Green?

The right-wing was saying that Harris (who was polling at three percent when she dropped out of the 2020 primary) was popular now only because she was Black, a woman, and anti-Trump. But Harris seemed likely to govern as a standard moderate Democrat who would probably work on reproductive rights, propping up minimal social-safety nets, the economy, and alliances abroad. She had strong corporate and tech-industry ties and would, like Obama, no doubt be prepared to use the state to bail out the mistakes (greed) of corporate America. There were plenty of opportunities for conflicting demands.

In her acceptance speech she said, “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” That word “lethal” hit as hard as when she told Oprah later that she would shoot somebody if they broke into her house. Peacetime Democrats traditionally often liked to portray the U.S. military providing aid in humanitarian crises. In the absence of a traditional conservative party, the Democrats intended to be the preservers of a society capable of business-as-usual.

Meanwhile, a 2024 poll of 154 scholars ranked her opponent as the worst U.S. president in history. Kamala Harris called him, in her acceptance speech, “an unserious man.”

The reporter watched the Harris team hug and wave during the balloon-drop. The crowd was going crazy. Maybe, the reporter thought, there was no literal language. Mailer’s “straight,” “direct,” “honest,” and “impatient with hypocrisy” were as figurative as every word in “joy comes in the morning” and “Make America Great Again.” All you could do was try to be serious in defining your project and serving your role in it.

A week after the end of the convention, the DNC press office sent a news release that said the convention had energized Democrats across the country and “accomplished its goal of reaching new audiences and bringing the story of the Harris-Walz ticket directly to the American people. The convention pulled in massive viewership across all four days of programming and reached millions more in print, online, and on the airwaves.”

According to the first polls after the DNC, the convention gave Harris no bump, despite its innovative reach. A month after the DNC, the country was still divided almost exactly in two, with Harris leading Trump on average by only 2.7 points, despite a favorable performance by Harris in their debate on September 10. There were 42 days to the election, which, no matter the outcome, promised not to leave a blank page anywhere.