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i don't think the sporting-event of the campaign--which is different from the campaign itself, which is rather it's televised duplicate, which obeys an entirely different dynamic than the actually existing campaign even as it references the actually existing campaign to provide itself with motion by way of rotating contents---i dont think the sporting-event campaign has anything to do with anything except the needs of television to legitimate itself and the broader political context of which it is, to my ongoing horror, central, by providing the illusion of continuity for its own sake.
the convention probably needs to have a certain degree of drama to it so that the actually existing campaign can becomes intertwined for a while with the sporting-event duplicate campaign. without some kind of drama, the illusory campaign, built around the substitution of video images that enable a sense of "being-there" as over against "being-informed" (pace virilio), the closed-off self-referential pseudo-present of television-land will entirely swamp the actually existing campaign, as it has these past months.
it is within the context of the sporting-event campaign that illusions on the order of "hillary clinton is too far to the left" can have currency. people will vote for hair styles and manly cadences while the spectral "candidate" strides into or out of buildings.
so i'm rather hoping for theater for its own sake.
i have no particular expectations for or even interest in the content of that theater.
i would just prefer to be able to imagine that this election is going to be decided on the basis of something more substantial than what the reactionary televisual talking-head set tells you that you think.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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