To april fools joke posters...

[jpm]

Yall suckers .. plain simple .. this is just so wack .. makin a thread sayin april joke motherfuckers .. ok.... thanks for the "joke" assholes

[davida.b.]

APRIL FOOLS

[411]

POOP

[Machiavelli]

APRIL FOOLS

[411]

Move this to the G-Spot this Lil Geezy doesnt know where it belongs...... [/size]

[ecrazy]

Yall suckers .. plain simple .. this is just so wack .. makin a thread sayin april joke motherfuckers .. ok.... thanks for the "joke" assholes

Who The Fuck Are You? Your A Newbie, Shut The fuck up with your whinin blockhead

[Leggy Hendrix]

Yall suckers .. plain simple .. this is just so wack .. makin a thread sayin april joke motherfuckers .. ok.... thanks for the "joke" assholes

Who The Fuck Are You? Your A Newbie, Shut The fuck up with your whinin blockhead

RIP JpM 

[jpm]

lol @ the newbie shit

fuck you. keep on makin retarded threads about aprils fools its very fun and entertaining

[Leggy Hendrix]

glad you feel that way...you get a diss from me cos your boring with your newbie moans...take your shit back to d12world or wherever the fuck you belong...

[West Coast Veteran]

No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing. The blogs come at this fresh. I'm going.
Just heard today that I have been credentialed to report on the Democratic Party's nominating convention in Boston, July 26-9. So PressThink will be there, working. There will be 15,000 other media people (journalists, producers, and support staff) in Boston and 35 or so approved webloggers, all trying to make sense of the event, and tell the world what happens at it.

And what a puzzle that is. As far as I know, no one has a convincing notion of what a political convention is, anymore, or why 15,000 people are there to cover it. A giant incoherence has overtaken both the event and everything reported outward from it. Two successive regimes for making sense of a party convention have collapsed--meaning, they no longer explain anything to the nation--and I am not aware of a third that has risen or even declared itself. But this, perhaps, is where the bloggers come in.

The first regime held that a convention is a political event of major consequence, where big news happens. There the parties conduct important business. They set themselves on a course before the eyes of the nation, and a candidate emerges to lead them into the election. That's news.
The second regime held that a convention is a media event, but with consequence in politics. There the parties try to impress us, and get their message across. Above all they play to the cameras in a manner that is calculated to "work" on the largest number of people. These are the things a disillusioned but savvy news tribe informs us about. For they are, in a sense, news.
Thus the successor regime has tried to govern not with politics or news so much as irony about politics, irony about newslessness, and irony on TV about TV. That is where we are marooned today. But the irony ("one big infomercial, folks") no longer instructs or inspires anyone, professional ironizers included. It's a big dead zone in the narrative of presidential politics, to which 15,000 flock every four years, so they can be there when the parties pound the message home and try with all their might to make zero mistakes.

Long ago, conventions were actually a time when the big parties came together and chose a candidate. Forces could be set in motion that might lead to a suspenseful outcome-- in the classic case, a floor vote. You can hear reporters reflect on the old narrative, and introduce its echo, when they mention "the last time there was a floor flight," or "the last time a convention actually decided anything."

They might also refer, just as the history books refer, to Chicago 1968, with its epic battle between the cops and the New Left on the streets of the city. A general impression of "chaos" came through the lens, the awareness of which swept the convention floor, upsetting everything. Richard Nixon ran against chaos and won. Some say the Democrats never recovered. After Chicago, the city that hosted the convention was understood to be part of the party's message, a kind of background character at the proceedings. After Chicago, angry petitioners outside would threaten to become part of the story. Both posed severe problems of control for organizers.

By general agreement the "live" convention came to an end no later than 1976, where there was almost a ticket pairing Gerald Ford with Ronald Regan as Vice President. So to understand the party conventions today (and I warn you, this may not be possible) we should remember, especially if you weren't born yet: there was once a real time event there. The politicians were in control, more or less, the party was doing something real--picking leadership and a direction for the campaign--and press coverage was justified on traditional, "new information revealed" grounds. But that regime ended 28 years ago, and began crumbling well before that.

In with the rise of television as substitute national stage came candidate-centered politics, made possible by the primary system, which starting in 1972 decided the nomination before the convention began. It also opened the nomination to anyone who could raise money, gather momentum, and win some crucal primaries. The primary system depended on the broadcasting system, which gave birth to a new group of experts, strategists and players-- the pros with their savvy take on how to get elected in the one-to-many media age.

In a fateful move, which was more like a drift, political journalism developed in imitation and celebration of these pros, as the two groups shared an insider's fascination with behaviorist accounts of how the public might react, how the electorate may vote, and, derived from this data, a dialect that I call inside baseball, sometimes termed "analysis" by the press. (See PressThink's "Die Strategy News.")

By 1976, then, a second regime had overtaken the narrative emerging from convention hall. Its powers began with television's powers over the political, specifically live network television; and that meant TV journalists-- stars in the skybox like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Roger Mudd, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and the executives who planned the broadcast behind them, along with the reporters who walked the floor below them.

These folks, it was widely said, were the forces in charge. Here's the Museum of Broadcasting summarizing what happened to create a second regime:

Party officials condensed the length of the convention, created uniform campaign themes for each party, adorned convention halls with banners and patriotic decorations, placed television crews in positions with flattering views of the proceedings, dropped daytime sessions, limited welcoming speeches and parliamentary organization procedures, scheduled sessions to reach a maximum audience in prime time, and eliminated seconding speeches for vice presidential candidates. Additionally, the presence of television cameras encouraged parties to conceal intra-party battling and choose geographic host cities amenable to their party. (See also this review from former CBS News executive Martin Plissner.)
That's recognition of a new power in place. The convention changed to completely predictable when it became televisual itself, rather than a self-standing political event able to be televised. For journalists, this posed an immediate problem. If information is a measure of uncertainty reduced, then a political event without uncertainty crashes the old regime of newsworthiness.

Poof. There goes the major rationale for why the networks are there in the first place, why many thousands of journalists congregate at the conventions, why politics and public life is dominated for three days by several thousand people getting together in a hall to hail their candidate and hear speeches about him.

Now let us grant that with speeches still on the schedule there remained the dim but not impossible hope that one or two orators might break with routine, step forward and say something urgent, important, artfully divisive, newly clarifying, memorable or charismatically real. There was also the possibility that some new voice could "emerge," someone barely known to the nation but a brilliant performer under pressure, the way some NBA players do if their team makes the finals.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is said to have done that with her 1976 keynote address. And Bill Clinton had this outcome in mind when, by all accounts, he bombed during his debut on the national stage in Atlanta, 1988: ("... a long and rambling keynote address that received its loudest applause from the restless convention crowd when he uttered the phrase: In conclusion...")

There were problems with these residual possibilities: the powerful political speech by a key figure that triggers a response, creating "action" in politics; the debut speech on the national stage, which is also a kind of action, since it introduces to the narrative of politics a new player, who may figure in later, as Clinton indeed did. Both are suited for the television regime, and could make it worthwhile to watch the conventions.

But they also play havoc with a bigger imperative, enforced by the candidate's people and by party officials, which is to test, design and control every single detail of the presentation in prime time, seen now not as a national stage where politics could happen within the party and before the public (the old regime's definition) but as an advertising window, free for the claiming, that would be "there" for a few dwindling, precious, make-or-break prime-time hours.

For once the parties agreed, in a practical way, that the convention equalled the program the networks televised, they handed over to television the power to shrink the convention, re-frame and re-title it, leaving the party desperate to make a good showing in the tense hours that were left. Bit-by-bit the parties abandoned politics and its symbols in favor of national marketing and televised entertainment-- with its symbols. This is like getting on a bus that has only one stop.

The re-definition of what the hours during a convention meant--away from political time before a national public, toward prime time before a captive, and target audience-- actually failed on its own terms, a fact that no one talks about today. The parties were unsuccessful in keeping the big national audience tuned in during an era of viewer choice, but the new script worked in one sense. It allowed for high-stakes professional practice in control-the-message politics: the ultimate high for the handler class.

In fact, the whole culture of command and control that developed to such a high point during the era of media politics came to its dramatic hour during convention week. And if anyone doubted the necessity of this grip from above, there stood some reminders-- not only Bill Clinton's individual flop in '88, but the Republicans' 1992 adventure in Houston, when in the words of one observer, Paul Starr of the liberal journal American Prospect:

the Republicans proclaimed a "cultural divide" (Dan Quayle), and even a "religious war" (Patrick Buchanan), trying to stoke the embers of old antagonisms into a roaring blaze that would consume the Democrats.
There was enough truth in Starr's hostile description that the Houston convention was widely seen as a public relations disaster that contributed to the elder Bush's defeat-- an instance of "lost" control. And so by means of the keep control thesis the conventions were plunged into news-less absurdity. Nothing happens except the unfolding of a promotional plot. This created a crisis in narration, as well as information-- to which the press accomodated itself by means of hyper-informed irony. The eclipse of dramatic content was summed up in the word "scripted," as in: "the conventions have become scripted affairs," an observation made many thousands of times from the 1970s on.

What's fascinating to me is that journalists will still offer this observation today, at least twenty years after its SELL BY date, as if it they were tuned to something the rest of us did not grasp: it's a show, folks... On Tuesday, July 6, the Washington Post disclosed news that had been out for months: "Parties to Allow Bloggers to Cover Conventions for First Time." This strange article on page A4, which contained no new information, reminded us: "The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public."

Carefully staged, we have learned, means no floor fights, no major decisions, no votes that mean anything, no confusion-- except on minor platform matters where losing factions could expend themselves and claim a moral victory. The reason was obvious: with the cameras watching and journalists--the narrators-- ready to seize on any conflict in hopes of generating a

[davida.b.]

APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS

[411]

No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing. The blogs come at this fresh. I'm going.
Just heard today that I have been credentialed to report on the Democratic Party's nominating convention in Boston, July 26-9. So PressThink will be there, working. There will be 15,000 other media people (journalists, producers, and support staff) in Boston and 35 or so approved webloggers, all trying to make sense of the event, and tell the world what happens at it.

And what a puzzle that is. As far as I know, no one has a convincing notion of what a political convention is, anymore, or why 15,000 people are there to cover it. A giant incoherence has overtaken both the event and everything reported outward from it. Two successive regimes for making sense of a party convention have collapsed--meaning, they no longer explain anything to the nation--and I am not aware of a third that has risen or even declared itself. But this, perhaps, is where the bloggers come in.

The first regime held that a convention is a political event of major consequence, where big news happens. There the parties conduct important business. They set themselves on a course before the eyes of the nation, and a candidate emerges to lead them into the election. That's news.
The second regime held that a convention is a media event, but with consequence in politics. There the parties try to impress us, and get their message across. Above all they play to the cameras in a manner that is calculated to "work" on the largest number of people. These are the things a disillusioned but savvy news tribe informs us about. For they are, in a sense, news.
Thus the successor regime has tried to govern not with politics or news so much as irony about politics, irony about newslessness, and irony on TV about TV. That is where we are marooned today. But the irony ("one big infomercial, folks") no longer instructs or inspires anyone, professional ironizers included. It's a big dead zone in the narrative of presidential politics, to which 15,000 flock every four years, so they can be there when the parties pound the message home and try with all their might to make zero mistakes.

Long ago, conventions were actually a time when the big parties came together and chose a candidate. Forces could be set in motion that might lead to a suspenseful outcome-- in the classic case, a floor vote. You can hear reporters reflect on the old narrative, and introduce its echo, when they mention "the last time there was a floor flight," or "the last time a convention actually decided anything."

They might also refer, just as the history books refer, to Chicago 1968, with its epic battle between the cops and the New Left on the streets of the city. A general impression of "chaos" came through the lens, the awareness of which swept the convention floor, upsetting everything. Richard Nixon ran against chaos and won. Some say the Democrats never recovered. After Chicago, the city that hosted the convention was understood to be part of the party's message, a kind of background character at the proceedings. After Chicago, angry petitioners outside would threaten to become part of the story. Both posed severe problems of control for organizers.

By general agreement the "live" convention came to an end no later than 1976, where there was almost a ticket pairing Gerald Ford with Ronald Regan as Vice President. So to understand the party conventions today (and I warn you, this may not be possible) we should remember, especially if you weren't born yet: there was once a real time event there. The politicians were in control, more or less, the party was doing something real--picking leadership and a direction for the campaign--and press coverage was justified on traditional, "new information revealed" grounds. But that regime ended 28 years ago, and began crumbling well before that.

In with the rise of television as substitute national stage came candidate-centered politics, made possible by the primary system, which starting in 1972 decided the nomination before the convention began. It also opened the nomination to anyone who could raise money, gather momentum, and win some crucal primaries. The primary system depended on the broadcasting system, which gave birth to a new group of experts, strategists and players-- the pros with their savvy take on how to get elected in the one-to-many media age.

In a fateful move, which was more like a drift, political journalism developed in imitation and celebration of these pros, as the two groups shared an insider's fascination with behaviorist accounts of how the public might react, how the electorate may vote, and, derived from this data, a dialect that I call inside baseball, sometimes termed "analysis" by the press. (See PressThink's "Die Strategy News.")

By 1976, then, a second regime had overtaken the narrative emerging from convention hall. Its powers began with television's powers over the political, specifically live network television; and that meant TV journalists-- stars in the skybox like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Roger Mudd, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and the executives who planned the broadcast behind them, along with the reporters who walked the floor below them.

These folks, it was widely said, were the forces in charge. Here's the Museum of Broadcasting summarizing what happened to create a second regime:

Party officials condensed the length of the convention, created uniform campaign themes for each party, adorned convention halls with banners and patriotic decorations, placed television crews in positions with flattering views of the proceedings, dropped daytime sessions, limited welcoming speeches and parliamentary organization procedures, scheduled sessions to reach a maximum audience in prime time, and eliminated seconding speeches for vice presidential candidates. Additionally, the presence of television cameras encouraged parties to conceal intra-party battling and choose geographic host cities amenable to their party. (See also this review from former CBS News executive Martin Plissner.)
That's recognition of a new power in place. The convention changed to completely predictable when it became televisual itself, rather than a self-standing political event able to be televised. For journalists, this posed an immediate problem. If information is a measure of uncertainty reduced, then a political event without uncertainty crashes the old regime of newsworthiness.

Poof. There goes the major rationale for why the networks are there in the first place, why many thousands of journalists congregate at the conventions, why politics and public life is dominated for three days by several thousand people getting together in a hall to hail their candidate and hear speeches about him.

Now let us grant that with speeches still on the schedule there remained the dim but not impossible hope that one or two orators might break with routine, step forward and say something urgent, important, artfully divisive, newly clarifying, memorable or charismatically real. There was also the possibility that some new voice could "emerge," someone barely known to the nation but a brilliant performer under pressure, the way some NBA players do if their team makes the finals.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is said to have done that with her 1976 keynote address. And Bill Clinton had this outcome in mind when, by all accounts, he bombed during his debut on the national stage in Atlanta, 1988: ("... a long and rambling keynote address that received its loudest applause from the restless convention crowd when he uttered the phrase: In conclusion...")

There were problems with these residual possibilities: the powerful political speech by a key figure that triggers a response, creating "action" in politics; the debut speech on the national stage, which is also a kind of action, since it introduces to the narrative of politics a new player, who may figure in later, as Clinton indeed did. Both are suited for the television regime, and could make it worthwhile to watch the conventions.

But they also play havoc with a bigger imperative, enforced by the candidate's people and by party officials, which is to test, design and control every single detail of the presentation in prime time, seen now not as a national stage where politics could happen within the party and before the public (the old regime's definition) but as an advertising window, free for the claiming, that would be "there" for a few dwindling, precious, make-or-break prime-time hours.

For once the parties agreed, in a practical way, that the convention equalled the program the networks televised, they handed over to television the power to shrink the convention, re-frame and re-title it, leaving the party desperate to make a good showing in the tense hours that were left. Bit-by-bit the parties abandoned politics and its symbols in favor of national marketing and televised entertainment-- with its symbols. This is like getting on a bus that has only one stop.

The re-definition of what the hours during a convention meant--away from political time before a national public, toward prime time before a captive, and target audience-- actually failed on its own terms, a fact that no one talks about today. The parties were unsuccessful in keeping the big national audience tuned in during an era of viewer choice, but the new script worked in one sense. It allowed for high-stakes professional practice in control-the-message politics: the ultimate high for the handler class.

In fact, the whole culture of command and control that developed to such a high point during the era of media politics came to its dramatic hour during convention week. And if anyone doubted the necessity of this grip from above, there stood some reminders-- not only Bill Clinton's individual flop in '88, but the Republicans' 1992 adventure in Houston, when in the words of one observer, Paul Starr of the liberal journal American Prospect:

the Republicans proclaimed a "cultural divide" (Dan Quayle), and even a "religious war" (Patrick Buchanan), trying to stoke the embers of old antagonisms into a roaring blaze that would consume the Democrats.
There was enough truth in Starr's hostile description that the Houston convention was widely seen as a public relations disaster that contributed to the elder Bush's defeat-- an instance of "lost" control. And so by means of the keep control thesis the conventions were plunged into news-less absurdity. Nothing happens except the unfolding of a promotional plot. This created a crisis in narration, as well as information-- to which the press accomodated itself by means of hyper-informed irony. The eclipse of dramatic content was summed up in the word "scripted," as in: "the conventions have become scripted affairs," an observation made many thousands of times from the 1970s on.

What's fascinating to me is that journalists will still offer this observation today, at least twenty years after its SELL BY date, as if it they were tuned to something the rest of us did not grasp: it's a show, folks... On Tuesday, July 6, the Washington Post disclosed news that had been out for months: "Parties to Allow Bloggers to Cover Conventions for First Time." This strange article on page A4, which contained no new information, reminded us: "The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public."

Carefully staged, we have learned, means no floor fights, no major decisions, no votes that mean anything, no confusion-- except on minor platform matters where losing factions could expend themselves and claim a moral victory. The reason was obvious: with the cameras watching and journalists--the narrators-- ready to seize on any conflict in hopes of generating a
 
 

[Leggy Hendrix]

No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing. The blogs come at this fresh. I'm going.
Just heard today that I have been credentialed to report on the Democratic Party's nominating convention in Boston, July 26-9. So PressThink will be there, working. There will be 15,000 other media people (journalists, producers, and support staff) in Boston and 35 or so approved webloggers, all trying to make sense of the event, and tell the world what happens at it.

And what a puzzle that is. As far as I know, no one has a convincing notion of what a political convention is, anymore, or why 15,000 people are there to cover it. A giant incoherence has overtaken both the event and everything reported outward from it. Two successive regimes for making sense of a party convention have collapsed--meaning, they no longer explain anything to the nation--and I am not aware of a third that has risen or even declared itself. But this, perhaps, is where the bloggers come in.

The first regime held that a convention is a political event of major consequence, where big news happens. There the parties conduct important business. They set themselves on a course before the eyes of the nation, and a candidate emerges to lead them into the election. That's news.
The second regime held that a convention is a media event, but with consequence in politics. There the parties try to impress us, and get their message across. Above all they play to the cameras in a manner that is calculated to "work" on the largest number of people. These are the things a disillusioned but savvy news tribe informs us about. For they are, in a sense, news.
Thus the successor regime has tried to govern not with politics or news so much as irony about politics, irony about newslessness, and irony on TV about TV. That is where we are marooned today. But the irony ("one big infomercial, folks") no longer instructs or inspires anyone, professional ironizers included. It's a big dead zone in the narrative of presidential politics, to which 15,000 flock every four years, so they can be there when the parties pound the message home and try with all their might to make zero mistakes.

Long ago, conventions were actually a time when the big parties came together and chose a candidate. Forces could be set in motion that might lead to a suspenseful outcome-- in the classic case, a floor vote. You can hear reporters reflect on the old narrative, and introduce its echo, when they mention "the last time there was a floor flight," or "the last time a convention actually decided anything."

They might also refer, just as the history books refer, to Chicago 1968, with its epic battle between the cops and the New Left on the streets of the city. A general impression of "chaos" came through the lens, the awareness of which swept the convention floor, upsetting everything. Richard Nixon ran against chaos and won. Some say the Democrats never recovered. After Chicago, the city that hosted the convention was understood to be part of the party's message, a kind of background character at the proceedings. After Chicago, angry petitioners outside would threaten to become part of the story. Both posed severe problems of control for organizers.

By general agreement the "live" convention came to an end no later than 1976, where there was almost a ticket pairing Gerald Ford with Ronald Regan as Vice President. So to understand the party conventions today (and I warn you, this may not be possible) we should remember, especially if you weren't born yet: there was once a real time event there. The politicians were in control, more or less, the party was doing something real--picking leadership and a direction for the campaign--and press coverage was justified on traditional, "new information revealed" grounds. But that regime ended 28 years ago, and began crumbling well before that.

In with the rise of television as substitute national stage came candidate-centered politics, made possible by the primary system, which starting in 1972 decided the nomination before the convention began. It also opened the nomination to anyone who could raise money, gather momentum, and win some crucal primaries. The primary system depended on the broadcasting system, which gave birth to a new group of experts, strategists and players-- the pros with their savvy take on how to get elected in the one-to-many media age.

In a fateful move, which was more like a drift, political journalism developed in imitation and celebration of these pros, as the two groups shared an insider's fascination with behaviorist accounts of how the public might react, how the electorate may vote, and, derived from this data, a dialect that I call inside baseball, sometimes termed "analysis" by the press. (See PressThink's "Die Strategy News.")

By 1976, then, a second regime had overtaken the narrative emerging from convention hall. Its powers began with television's powers over the political, specifically live network television; and that meant TV journalists-- stars in the skybox like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Roger Mudd, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and the executives who planned the broadcast behind them, along with the reporters who walked the floor below them.

These folks, it was widely said, were the forces in charge. Here's the Museum of Broadcasting summarizing what happened to create a second regime:

Party officials condensed the length of the convention, created uniform campaign themes for each party, adorned convention halls with banners and patriotic decorations, placed television crews in positions with flattering views of the proceedings, dropped daytime sessions, limited welcoming speeches and parliamentary organization procedures, scheduled sessions to reach a maximum audience in prime time, and eliminated seconding speeches for vice presidential candidates. Additionally, the presence of television cameras encouraged parties to conceal intra-party battling and choose geographic host cities amenable to their party. (See also this review from former CBS News executive Martin Plissner.)
That's recognition of a new power in place. The convention changed to completely predictable when it became televisual itself, rather than a self-standing political event able to be televised. For journalists, this posed an immediate problem. If information is a measure of uncertainty reduced, then a political event without uncertainty crashes the old regime of newsworthiness.

Poof. There goes the major rationale for why the networks are there in the first place, why many thousands of journalists congregate at the conventions, why politics and public life is dominated for three days by several thousand people getting together in a hall to hail their candidate and hear speeches about him.

Now let us grant that with speeches still on the schedule there remained the dim but not impossible hope that one or two orators might break with routine, step forward and say something urgent, important, artfully divisive, newly clarifying, memorable or charismatically real. There was also the possibility that some new voice could "emerge," someone barely known to the nation but a brilliant performer under pressure, the way some NBA players do if their team makes the finals.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is said to have done that with her 1976 keynote address. And Bill Clinton had this outcome in mind when, by all accounts, he bombed during his debut on the national stage in Atlanta, 1988: ("... a long and rambling keynote address that received its loudest applause from the restless convention crowd when he uttered the phrase: In conclusion...")

There were problems with these residual possibilities: the powerful political speech by a key figure that triggers a response, creating "action" in politics; the debut speech on the national stage, which is also a kind of action, since it introduces to the narrative of politics a new player, who may figure in later, as Clinton indeed did. Both are suited for the television regime, and could make it worthwhile to watch the conventions.

But they also play havoc with a bigger imperative, enforced by the candidate's people and by party officials, which is to test, design and control every single detail of the presentation in prime time, seen now not as a national stage where politics could happen within the party and before the public (the old regime's definition) but as an advertising window, free for the claiming, that would be "there" for a few dwindling, precious, make-or-break prime-time hours.

For once the parties agreed, in a practical way, that the convention equalled the program the networks televised, they handed over to television the power to shrink the convention, re-frame and re-title it, leaving the party desperate to make a good showing in the tense hours that were left. Bit-by-bit the parties abandoned politics and its symbols in favor of national marketing and televised entertainment-- with its symbols. This is like getting on a bus that has only one stop.

The re-definition of what the hours during a convention meant--away from political time before a national public, toward prime time before a captive, and target audience-- actually failed on its own terms, a fact that no one talks about today. The parties were unsuccessful in keeping the big national audience tuned in during an era of viewer choice, but the new script worked in one sense. It allowed for high-stakes professional practice in control-the-message politics: the ultimate high for the handler class.

In fact, the whole culture of command and control that developed to such a high point during the era of media politics came to its dramatic hour during convention week. And if anyone doubted the necessity of this grip from above, there stood some reminders-- not only Bill Clinton's individual flop in '88, but the Republicans' 1992 adventure in Houston, when in the words of one observer, Paul Starr of the liberal journal American Prospect:

the Republicans proclaimed a "cultural divide" (Dan Quayle), and even a "religious war" (Patrick Buchanan), trying to stoke the embers of old antagonisms into a roaring blaze that would consume the Democrats.
There was enough truth in Starr's hostile description that the Houston convention was widely seen as a public relations disaster that contributed to the elder Bush's defeat-- an instance of "lost" control. And so by means of the keep control thesis the conventions were plunged into news-less absurdity. Nothing happens except the unfolding of a promotional plot. This created a crisis in narration, as well as information-- to which the press accomodated itself by means of hyper-informed irony. The eclipse of dramatic content was summed up in the word "scripted," as in: "the conventions have become scripted affairs," an observation made many thousands of times from the 1970s on.

What's fascinating to me is that journalists will still offer this observation today, at least twenty years after its SELL BY date, as if it they were tuned to something the rest of us did not grasp: it's a show, folks... On Tuesday, July 6, the Washington Post disclosed news that had been out for months: "Parties to Allow Bloggers to Cover Conventions for First Time." This strange article on page A4, which contained no new information, reminded us: "The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public."

Carefully staged, we have learned, means no floor fights, no major decisions, no votes that mean anything, no confusion-- except on minor platform matters where losing factions could expend themselves and claim a moral victory. The reason was obvious: with the cameras watching and journalists--the narrators-- ready to seize on any conflict in hopes of generating a
 
 

thats tighter than a bowl of grits

[Nima - Dubcnn.com]

^^ LMAO!!

[-CaliKid-]

lol
fuck, im not even gonna try to read that shit