The circus is in town—or, I should say, circuses: one inside the big hotels and down at the convention center, and another surrounding them. The one inside is absurd and silly and filled with self-congratulatory babble and nearly every imaginable version of idiocy and vanity. They’re all glad-handing and lying through their teeth, making empty promises and striking poses. Doing the work of politics, in other words.

But these are just the normal human absurdities, and I’m not writing this to condemn them. Because, after all, as bad as these things are in themselves, they’re also inevitable, and, as it were, “all too human.” And while it might be amusing to write a piece dissecting the foibles and inanities one would find behind the security fence, where the Republican elites and dealmakers are currently circulating, the kind of humor I’d have to employ wouldn’t yield much beside a little light laughter.

Because—sure, the Republicans are, in many ways, self-deluded buffoons, and purveyors of reductive, ideological snake oil (they’re a political party, after all). And yet… compared to what’s outside the convention, just beyond the security perimeter… Well, the Republicans suddenly look like Ciceronian statesman. When you hold them up to the psychotic infants parading around nearby, chanting and banging their drums, the Republicans seem positively balanced, sane, and capable of genuine leadership! It’s a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid. Well, of Kafka, anyway.

But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a diatribe against the Democrats any more than a panegyric for the Republicans. Have no fear of that! But I do want to take a look at the shrieking maniacs soiling this nice little park with their body odor and ressentiment. With their sour expressions and unjustifiable anger. Their projection of every human evil and weakness onto… well, onto the other guys, of course!

Look, I’m an inquisitive man. And I’m fascinated by human behavior. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have the slightest inclination to be standing here under the hot July sun, getting my bald head burned in the early morning when I should be at home in front of a fan, with my feet up and an iced coffee near to hand… I should be scratching my sweaty balls in peace and quiet, is what I’m saying—not scrutinizing these mentally unbalanced weirdos as they screech about their impossible daydreams or condemn their own misunderstandings (what their moderate wing would probably call “moral intuitions”). Or, at the very least, I should be in the airconditioned hotel room, hoping they send up the housekeeper with the giant ass to clean up after me. I throw another sweaty towel on the floor of my mind and dream…

But even this pleasant little daydream is destroyed by the sound of their “speeches.” They come up to the mic, one after another, all of them repeating basically the same litany of nonsense. It’s the inane prattling of infants who want to change a world they can’t begin to understand.  They’ve conjured up every boogeyman imaginable and projected them on to the Republicans—nazis, murderous homophobes, genocidal dictators… I try to figure out how to categorize the absurdity as I listen. But it’s rough going. It’s all just variations on the same theme: children demonstrating against their own sick nightmares…  Even if some of them are quite a bit older than I am…

Yes, here we are in Milwaukee, protesting against “injustice!” Trump is supposed to have called the city a shithole—and it is, fundamentally. Like most American cities, it’s divided into several sections: the nice, historic area that you can barely afford, the not-quite-a-slum working class area—now mainly Hispanic—and the area with a crime rate so high no one ventures in unless they have to—this area, let’s just be honest, is mostly black. And of course each area shades into the others, and there are admixtures and so on… But fundamentally, this is the pattern. Here, the nice areas are all along Lake Michigan, on the east side of the city. These are not the neighborhoods Trump was talking about (if indeed the media was even accurate in reporting his claims—a dubious proposition these days). Whenever anyone suggests that Milwaukee is a shithole, they’re probably talking about the murder rate above all else—and the way those numbers explode in the areas that also appear entirely run down, as if no one has even tried to maintain them for half a century now. Yeah… as if…

They’re also thinking of all the car thefts and carjackings in recent years, especially of Kias and Hyundais. Gangs of teenage thugs boost these cars so they can take video of themselves joyriding around, crashing them on purpose, then laughing at the clean-up crews, and other such laudable behavior. Or they do it as gang initiation. But in the minds of the demented type down here protesting, such beasts are really just like heroic Jean Valjean, stealing bread to feed the hungry! And so of course one of their first speeches was a pandering defense of Milwaukee! Milwaukee, where, reflecting longstanding policy of doing the defense’s work for it, the D.A.’s office not three years ago let a violent felon out on some insanely lowball bail—a man who went on several days later to plow into the nearby Waukesha Christmas parade, killing five people and injuring forty-eight others. Milwaukee, one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Yet it was of the utmost importance for those gathered to defend the City. Well… they had to—when conservatives criticize something, the only possible response is to defend it uncritically… isn’t it?

This isn’t quite radical chic. Or anyway it’s the short-bus version. Because it lacks even the stated intention of the idolized to be radicals—i.e. as cover for their barbarism. The 60s had that in spades. What we have is something that might appropriately be called lumpen aspirations—which I would define as the tendency to idolize gutter criminals by portraying them as something higher. Do you see the difference? The white activist, in this case, has to step in and, in the most patronizing way, elevate the behavior of gutter trash to the status of radical hero. They have to imbue it with some kind of radical meaning never intended by the original. The canonization of long-time criminal and drug addict George Floyd would be the paradigmatic example. In the 60s, the criminals were canny enough to pose as revolutionaries. In our day they are supposed to be so broken by “oppression” and “the legacy of slavery” that they can’t even fake it. And so it’s left to the heroic white activist to reconceptualize their lives as somehow unconsciously revolutionary, progressive, etc. They give meaning to vile behavior and, in so doing, find their own.

There’s a lot of that on display here. And it stands alongside a variety of other outlandish, astroturfed “ideas” taken up in earnest by badly groomed and purposefully unattractive young women, desperate for purpose, alongside purposefully weak and effete young men desperate for… well, mostly for the young women with all the metal coming out of their nostrils. They are at least girls (most of them)—even if they don’t want to admit it. Close enough, anyway. In fact, I think I feel a tingle in my own already cramped underpants as I assess one of the more feminine bluehairs across the street. She’s screeching and bleating and repeating slogans. It’s awful, of course. But if she’d learn to shut up and let her natural hair color grow in, and take out some of the hardware from her face…

They’re not all ugly, these feminists, I think, as I fart into the heat of the day. No, and we’re all young at some point, too. Usually near the beginning. Ahh, maybe this one will grow out of it and make some man happy someday. Maybe she’ll swing all the way around and become one of those “tradwives” I’ve been hearing so much about. This is probably its own kind of wretchedness, to be sure—as is anything that exists primarily as a nostalgic imitation. Such behavior is always-already parody. Though there are worse types of parody. Like these sad souls imitating the Woodstock generation. It must be exhausting to be “on the right side of history.” I fart again, more thoughtfully this time, as I lust after the transition point between these strange cults of ours…

Did I say circus? It’s really more like a zoo… And like a zoo, there are all kinds of primitive noises to be heard. They’re chanting slogans, jeering at the mention of Trump (on cue, since they’re freethinkers), and echoing the indignant shouts of the speakers who all shuffle up and repeat the same boilerplate rhetoric one sees already on the placards everyone seems to be holding. Things like: “No borders in the worker’s struggle,” “We can no longer afford the rich,” “Lock him up” and “Expand undocumented immigrant rights!”

Now, one might point out that, properly speaking, as non-citizens, it’s meaningless to talk about “rights” in any case—but let’s not get pedantic! The goal here is not to think about the claims, but rather to intone them. Like some deranged and unintentionally satiric antistrophe, they all spit them out in unison, attesting to their membership in the group. Every inane platitude recycled through decades of ineffectual “activism” is repeated as if part of a holy liturgy. And it is—modern leftism functions like a religion for its practitioners, creating a group identity and focusing the chaos of the weak into ritual boundaries and recitals.

Words like wafers… a ritual feeding at the zoo. Also zoo-like is the decay of the organism. Leftists are over-socialized, as my uncle Ted used to say. They see themselves as rebels but in actuality they are broken, submissive, creatures of the flock. This mob is a sickly herd. Everything healthy, normal, functional is absent. Leftism is a celebration of the weak, deformed and resentful. We ought to face the possibility that the ideology is window dressing, gives such people something to hang on to—is a rationalization after the fact.

So I wander over to the crowd, trying to blend in—but I’m fit and basically well dressed, so suspicions are raised immediately. I refuse a sign with a slogan on it, written in what looks like crayon—they’re on to me. I decide to cycle through the carnival.

But it’s hot and I need to piss. And while there is a row of rubber commodes lined up just past the glowering throng of “queer antifa,” I decide against subjecting my nostrils to that. So I go east a few blocks, back to my hotel—a beautiful and well-maintained century-old art deco building featuring a gorgeous and period appropriate café. I’m a snob, let’s be honest. And I’d rather sit at the counter and drink cold-brew coffee than stay out in the sun with the lower orders.

Later I do wander back, and I trail the mindless retinue as they march around in circles wielding their carboard signs like useless clubs. Imagine their crusade in the rain! They move like a cartoon religious procession. Happy to be contained and pressed into a throng, they march in unison, chant in unison, are reduced to something not quite human—a slithering ouroboros, the tidal liquidity from which this primitive nightmare began…

At this point I really can’t take it anymore, so I duck into a bookstore, buy a volume of Wallace Stevens, and use the bathroom. I want to flirt with the girl who rings me up, but she’s got a few tattoos, and the same kind of dull scowl hiding in her cheeks that I saw in activated form earlier at the demonstration. So I go across the street instead, and have a pita of some kind in the air conditioning.

The whole thing was disappointing. I had hoped for self-destructive idiocy, riot, mayhem… but the life seems sucked out of their foolish “movement.” It’s become a strange therapeutic gathering, a self-help circle for women with leg hair, septum piercings and anger issues. It’s where pudgy men gather to get points on easy virtue, since self-control and fitness are too much for them. When these gatherings broke out in violence during the “racial reckoning” a few years ago, it was mostly because the police were unprepared and the children knew they could get away with it. Dad wasn’t home. So they had a party. Now police from multiple states are everywhere, on horseback, in groups, at the barriers to the convention. It’s all risk and no reward. So they just chant a few more feeble chants and disperse.

It’s sad, really. The whole “protest” thing is just group therapy for stunted, unhealthy people. An outing for the mentally deranged. A short-bus day trip for the wretched. I might even feel sorry for them if they stopped the self-righteous screeching for even five minutes.

In any case, if you’re waiting for a moral, or anyhow some takeaway, here it is I guess: Wherever possible, such people should just be ignored. Ignore them to death (they’re trapped in a living death already). Ignore them because they don’t deserve to be looked at like enemies. Don’t ennoble them. They’re too pathetic. They’re mental patients out on a day pass and little more. It was hardly even worth mocking them with this tepid little essay. Though it did pass the time more or less pleasantly between that subpar pita and happy hour.

And that bad taste in mouth? Well… it might be from the pita and it might be from the crowd, I can’t say. Either way, I’m happy to be back in my air conditioned room, converting both to little more than unpleasant memories. Maybe indigestion is just the price you pay for your curiosity.