
Actor John Malkovich (Courtesy Andreas Tai, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)
The reporter’s people had been good citizens over the centuries, fought in the wars, built businesses, practiced law, founded a town, held office, shaped some policy, bought houses, taught school. But if he traced out their efforts and sacrifices, looking for lasting significance, he lost the trail every time, usually instantly, except for the genetic line. His own inheritance had been some cash in a Bunny Bread sack in his mother’s dresser drawer.
Real power was the ability to gather more power and protect it. The political convention was a reminder of that. Those with real power said they would care for all the children in the nation, just as they loved their own, if elected. For some reason, despite their promises, security was higher at the event than the reporter had ever seen. Every road and gate in the arena perimeter was manned by police and federal agents armed with automatic weapons. Every door had a half-dozen staff and volunteers to check and re-check identification and access. The reporter knew his place and made a routine.
One night he was given a pass to walk around the delegate floor for half an hour, with threats that if he did not return his pass on time he might be banned. It was a scrum down there. Always punctual, he pushed through the delegates to go return his pass, and several ushers waved him through a door. He found himself unexpectedly in some lower ring of the arena, where food-service workers, production assistants for the show, and federal agents with long hair and jeans were the only ones making passage in the concrete tunnels around the stage.
It was suddenly authentic down there, and he kept walking, hoping to find a door quickly that would lead back to the observers’ floors. The reporter stopped to take a quick photo of some workers at a table and got yelled at. He felt bad for causing a problem, but knowing he did not belong there made him start walking funny. He tried to stop looking suspicious and realized he probably looked like the actor John Malkovich in an action movie, trying not to look suspicious while doing something bad.
The reporter was the same height as John Malkovich, also baldheaded, and got a similar pissy look on his face when he was tired. (Malkovich grew up 15 miles from where the reporter grew up.) The reporter felt as if he looked like John Malkovich in that movie where he was walking through the crowd in a station, trying to look normal, but doing it so obviously that Bruce Willis just had to laugh.
Like when federal agent John Cusack could see John Malkovich—he was right there—and Malkovich tried to practice that Zen warrior trick of believing he was invisible, but John Cusack shouted, There he goes! and all the agents ran to overtake John Malkovich. (When they turned the corner, Malkovich was nowhere to be seen; only the camera could see him blended with the crowd, wearing a red cloche and matching shawl he had found somewhere, and the feds never questioned why that ugly lady kept looking back at them teasingly.)
A federal agent in a vest passed carrying an HK MP5, and the reporter felt it was like when Clint Eastwood squinted and squinted, using his Secret Service trick of focusing up close then far away, close then far, to scan the crowd, and Eastwood saw something and thought, squinting harder, What is that? and just then John Malkovich ducked his head and ran, knocking people down so they would trip up all the president’s men like fallen barrels.
The reporter thought he had better stop thinking about being like John Malkovich and ducked up some stairs to emerge in the convention audience where everyone was meant to join their power to what was happening on stage.