In the weeks and months before the Democratic National Convention, nursing staff at Chicago’s Rush Hospital used VR headsets to prepare for mass casualty events, tending to 3D burn victims with floating gloves. Patients with non-life-threatening illnesses and therapy appointments were redirected to Zoom care, ambulance and medical supply truck drivers given security clearance within the Red Zone perimeter.
Secret service agents canvassed neighborhood taquerias, distributing maps and telephone numbers to be called in case of emergency. The convention territory was “geofenced” to allow Uber drivers to enter and exit, and the surrounding streets encased in metal barricades.
Food delivery services, cyclists, and CTA riders could all expect delays; Amazon, trash pickup, and mail service as well. Cook County criminal court closed, and judges moved the cases to Rolling Meadows. A defunct courtroom was reopened on Western Avenue to handle group arrests.
Police officers drilled for the eventuality, forming phalanxes in the hangar-sized rooms at McCormick Place and swinging fiberglass batons. Out-of-state police, recruited to protect vital infrastructure, slept in glamorous dorm rooms at the University of Chicago. They were later introduced to the public as “mutual aid officers”—an odd détournement on an activist term. 15,000 journalists would soon arrive.
The police, press, and politicos would break the curse of 1968 and replace the persistent image of the city as a den of homicide and police riots with something more safe and appealing. Chicago would be clean; the CPD wouldn’t smash people’s heads in; it would be the “most diverse, most sustainable DNC in history.” The organizers began a composting program for all the hot dogs sold in the stadium and encouraged delegates flying in to offset their flights by utilizing discount codes on rentable scooters.
City workers also cleared brush along the Lincoln Park lagoon. The Venezuelan migrant encampment in the near west side was also cleared away. The homeless encampment on 1100 Des Plaines was also cleared away, along with the camp on the east bank of the Dan Ryan. The Des Plaines residents were rehoused in the Tremont Hotel until nine days after the convention ended, and then for another three weeks after that.
A former resident of the migrant camp said he had not crossed seven countries to be treated this way. A man named William from the Des Plaines camp said, on the other hand, that “it was about time” the tents came down. Asked whether the DNC had changed his life William said it had not. Asked whether the camps had been cleared because of the convention city spokespeople said they had not.
The tents, backpacks, shirts, bottles, food, formula and diapers had not been thrown away, the shoes and blankets not carted into dumpsters, and the ten-foot-tall, powder-coated “ornamental iron fence” constructed around the encampment, because of the Democratic National Convention. The occurrence of the political gathering and the destruction and enclosure of informal settlements for immigrants and homeless people were not related, the city said.
“I don’t really do politics,” William said.
“Let’s stop talking about 1968,” Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling said, in various interviews.
Nonetheless, a 1968 role-playing board game was rolled out at Revolution Tap Room and an experimental play about ’68 premiered at Co-Prosperity Sphere. Medium Cool, a locally famous movie about the ’68 DNC, played in multiple venues.
At one screening an anarchist seated next to me said, “If it happened on the campuses, it will happen in the streets.”
We started talking, and I told him a story my mom had recounted to me earlier in the day about visiting the ’68 DNC as a 7-year-old child.
“I went with my grandmother,” my mom had said. “She took me and my brother along as a sort of civics lesson. She dressed us up in church clothes. I remember it so clearly—we took the bus there, and while we were going, Nini explained how elections worked. And then we arrived, and everything was very tense.
“We walked around for a while, saw thousands of people seated in the grass, and a young man, a hippie, standing by himself, chanting ‘No More War. No More War.’ He had sewn the American flag onto a vest. Which, you know, is illegal.
“The cops surrounded him and shouted at him, screaming ‘You defaced the flag!’ But he just stood there, and he kept chanting, and then they started beating him with their clubs, he wouldn’t go silent, until they beat him in the head and he collapsed on the ground. He went limp. They laid him up against a tree.
“They were screaming at Nini: ‘What are you doing here with children! Get out of here! What were you thinking!’ Nini had already started to drag us away, as soon as the beating had begun.
“Then tear gas came out, and we all started crying. Through the smoke, another cop appeared. What was he doing? He was handing out Kleenexes. Really. ‘Kleenexes, ma’am. A Kleenex for your children.’ I kept my Kleenex pack for fifteen years. I wish I still had it, but I lost it when we moved.”
The anarchist nodded along with my retelling of this story, replying, “Good civics lesson after all!”
The theater went dark and the film began. In the first scene two TV journalists film a dead body hanging from a crashed car, and in the last scene one nearly dies in a car crash of his own. A child in a passing car photographs the wreckage and then a film camera turns straight to us in the audience, accusingly.
In between these bookended indictments of the society of the spectacle an actress wanders around the real ’68 DNC protests in search of her fictional son while real cops and real protestors roam around her. After a time, real tear gas is thrown onto her fiction, and a camera aide shouts to the director, “Watch out Haskell! It’s real!”
In retrospect this intrusion of history onto the set seems like an inversion of what transpired at this year’s DNC, when a large stage set intruded upon and successfully stamped out real history. My fear and dubious hope for a rupture of the 1968 variety came to nothing. In the weeks before the convention, I felt as if I wanted to break into my television, to shake history—like the phantom accelerator reaction one makes with incompetent drivers, I mouthed words for the president during the June debate, trying to influence him from afar. In off moments weird shame would seize his features, unclear if an expression of his inner state or one of those inchoate looks that pass across the faces of newborns, and which merely resembles an emotion.
Not long before the DNC I went to a sermon in Palos Heights, close to the long commercial strip of Arab-owned businesses in Bridgeview. The Palestinian pastor Dr. Rev Munther Isaac had flown in from Bethlehem to address the congregation.
Before his sermon a local mother of two started the youth sermon, carrying children’s liturgical materials onstage in a reusable My Little Pony bag, and reading aloud from Horton Hears a Who.
“Imagine a tiny person on a tiny speck of dust,” the woman began, “a tiny person, calling for help, for his little world”—Rev. Dr. Isaac sat in the back, with a serious look somewhat at odds with the feeling of the morning, the bouncy castle inflating outside, and Polish smorgasbord that had been laid out for an unrelated cultural festival. “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” the woman concluded.
Then Rev. Dr. Isaac began to speak. “Today I will take you on a journey alternating between Jesus’s world and what is happening today, in Gaza.”
“All of you know the Parable of the Good Samaritan. All of you know it. An expert in the law, a lawyer, perhaps, stood up to test Jesus. The lawyer said he knew that he was supposed to love his neighbor as himself. But then he asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’”
“He is drawing a circle,” the Reverend said. “He who is inside of the circle I am obligated to love. He who is outside I am not obligated to love. The world, like this lawyer, has tragically mastered the art of drawing circles.
“We in our naivete thought the Christian world would sympathize with us, would count us inside the circle. But Christian preachers are saying ‘Turn Gaza into a parking lot’—they, obviously, have not heeded the command, which after all is very simple. Everyone is our neighbor. Jesus didn’t give ten points about who the neighbor is! He didn’t provide a dictionary definition! Jesus abolished the circle! What does Matthew 25 say?
“Well. Here is what it does not say.
I was hungry and you formed a nonprofit to discuss my hunger
I was thirsty and you investigated new water filtration systems.
I was a stranger and you sympathized with my plight from afar.
I needed clothes and you photographed me.
I was sick and you looked at your hands.
I was a prisoner and you crept off to the chapel to pray for me.
I was alone and you left me alone, to pray by myself.
“Matthew 25 does not say that, my friends. Jesus does not say that. What does Jesus say? Jesus says, ‘Love thy neighbor.’ And that’s all he says.”
Following his speech the donation basket was passed around, and then we took communion; Dr. Isaac said a blessing in Arabic, holding a loaf of bread aloft, and then volunteers came up and down the aisles distributing hermetically sealed, hourglass-shaped vessels for those wishing to take a Covid-safe communion. One end of the hourglass contained grape juice, and the other a communion wafer.
The juice was easy to access—I broke the seal, and drank—but the wafer was stuck, lodged so solidly in its chamber that I could not remove God’s body by shaking or scraping at its side but instead had to partake by breaking Him into pieces.
I also attended an event for the Jewish day of mourning, Tisha B’av, organized by a progressive Jewish organization from the north side. They had decided to meet in Federal Plaza under the Alexander Calder “Flamingo” statue. The place was full of young skateboarders that evening, and someone was reading the mourner’s kaddish using a camper’s headlamp. I sat next to a man wearing a Jewish Currents hat featuring a sad, frowning magazine. He suggested I download a Torah app to follow along on my phone. The cantor read from the Book of Lamentations.
Alas! Lonely sits the city once great with people!
Jerusalem has greatly sinned,
Therefore she is become a mockery.
All who admired her despise her,
For they have seen her disgraced.
…Zion’s roads are in mourning,
Empty of festival pilgrims;
All her gates are deserted.
Her priests sigh,
Her maidens are unhappy—
She is utterly disconsolate!
…Her uncleanness clings to her skirts.
She gave no thought to her future;
She has sunk appallingly,
With none to comfort her.—
…When she settled among the nations,
She found no rest;
All her pursuers overtook her
In the narrow places.
…She has seen her Sanctuary
Invaded by nations
Which You have denied admission
Into Your community.
…All her inhabitants sigh
As they search for bread;
…Jerusalem has become among them
A thing unclean.
….Slaves are ruling over us,
With none to rescue us from them.
We get our bread at the peril of our lives,
Because of the sword of the wilderness.
The text continues in this vein, with Jerusalem the victim and Jerusalem the killer alternating places just as the city itself straddles both countries and occupies both roles, just as some Israelis were at one time victims and others are now and overwhelmingly murderers. The text’s symbolism is so powerful and so immediate that it ceases to seem symbolic and instead becomes a direct representation of a transhistorical cycle of violence and grief. There were tears in the eyes of another man beside me, who dovened alone beneath an orange girder.
I rode south one day on my ebike, past Navy Pier, past Columbus Drive and McCormick Place, past some guys holding MAGA signs and pictures of Trump’s bleeding ear, on the turbo setting. The lake passed by quickly, the waves almost flat. Then the deafening Blue Angels flew overhead, four Air Force pilots practicing for the annual military-sponsored Air & Water Show.
Further south four Blackhawk helicopters passed over Guaranteed Rate Field in formation. Volunteers from the Democratic Socialists of America were already there, handing out flyers before the White Sox game, encouraging attendees to march on the DNC for Palestine.
I joined them, and for a couple hours we asked the same question to everyone who passed by: “Do you support a free Palestine?”
An old man carrying an electric blues guitar approached, doffed his bowler, and told us he supported Jews in the Holy Land of Zion. He said he would support them forever, but that he would think of us, and pray for us later that evening.
Then a group of boys approached, two of them wasted, one of them sober, all arm in arm with girls in “South Side Irish” uniforms. I asked the group, “Do you support a free Palestine?” and the sober one said, “Bro, I’m from Palestine, outside Ramallah.” And he then began hugging me and kissing me and telling me he loved me, and the other one said, “God bless you. I don’t do enough for my country.”
Then the third boy stumbled up, very drunk, and said, “Are you a fucking Jew?” And I said I was. His friends stopped him and said, “Don’t be like that bro! That’s all wrong. You got it all wrong.” Then the boy apologized and also tried to kiss me and stumbled off.
After that a teenager asked me what I was doing in a very earnest voice. When I handed him a flyer he snatched his hand away and said “Psyyyyyche!”
A lot of other people said they did not want a free Palestine, or said nothing, and went off to play cornhole in a parking lot. A man said to me, “Hell no, I fucking love Israel. They should do whatever they gotta do.”
Then the helicopters—named after an indigenous Sauk warrior who fought US soldiers in the war of 1812, who was captured and paraded through eastern cities, made to sit for portraits in prison, burned in effigy by crowds in Detroit, and who, at rest in his home in Illinois, was at last “buried upright inside a small mausoleum of logs,” only to have his grave robbed and his skeleton deposited in an Iowa museum, a museum that later burned down—flew overhead again. Then a plane pulling an advertisement for Stella Rose Chardonnay appeared in the sky.
Then an ancient woman approached our little group and my canvassing partner asked, as usual, “Do you support a free Palestine?” And the woman, who must have been deaf, replied, “If it’s free, I’ll take it.”
There were Palestine marches every day of the week of the convention. Monday morning a delegation in transparent mourning shrouds arrived, then various socialist and anarchist and Palestinian groups, and a small delegation of rabbis and Hasidic Jews. Along the fringes was a Lebowski impersonator and independent presidential candidate encouraging people to attend a non-partisan cops-and-protestors soccer match at Buckingham Fountain, as well as a man with a dirty, flag-and-sparkle-covered terrier, which tramped through the grass, running over a long red ribbon representing the size of the US military budget.
Other anti-imperial groups spoke, or carried signs: US out of the Philippines, US out of Okinawa, US out of Puerto Rico, US Out of Korea. The local Filipino radical group, Anakbayan, carried a puppet hydra with Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Bongbong Marcos as three fanged and bleeding heads.
The march began just west of the new Flats development, where the lobby sold “Coconut Brat” lattes; then into the Henry Horner Homes, one of the primary low-income housing projects built following the demolition of Cabrini Green; then a playground, where we settled for the remainder of the day.
A line of officers knocked down an old woman, an encampment was made and then demolished by police, and an interdenominational anarchist folk band sang, with a banjo player and flutist and a singer wearing the collar of an ordained priest. Late in the day Muslims prayed on the lawns of the projects near a satellite dish and a group shook one of the barriers until it fell—about half of those who crossed appeared to be journalists.
Much of the protests I spent talking to two friends about their opinions on the proceedings. One of them, who was listening to an AI voice read Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” on 1.5x speed, said he had largely abandoned hope at reforming the state via mass anti-imperial movement-building. The majority of Americans, in his understanding, could not be persuaded to meaningfully care about atrocities the US committed elsewhere in the world because it was simply in our material interest to maintain global hegemony.
The current Pro-Palestine movement was, in his view, unwittingly repeating the same tactical debates surrounding opposition to the Vietnam War, debates that are brought to the fore whenever a group tries and fails to end senseless mass slaughter.
History had by no means resolved the question of mass movements in either direction, he said. Small group–led direct action vs. large groups and electoralism—neither of these options had proven decisive on their own, my friend said.
My other friend would respond to this friend with mild alarm at his seeming certainty, his citation of game theory and escalation ladders, and would point him to the gains of the civil rights movement. So much could be recovered from this, so much still remained possible, he said.
I asked the more militant friend what the origin of his political views were, what text lay at the base, or what experiences. In addition to voluminous reading, in addition to bitter experience, he said it was the simple fact that in America you can live free from war and eat hamburgers whenever you like—whereas in the rest of the world you cannot.
Following the Monday march the three of us went to the Billy Goat Bar to debate strategy for a little longer and watch the DNC on TV. It was very crowded. On WGN News, a number of short segments about the city played before the convention itself began, one of which concerned the bar we were in. When the segment came on, the Billy Goat fell silent as it watched itself inside itself.
The two men currently flipping burgers appeared on TV flipping burgers, and calling out the restaurant’s motto “Cheezborger Cheezborger Cheezborger,” made famous by Saturday Night Live. When the two men called it out on television the same fry cooks called it out in real life, and then someone else chimed in, until the whole bar was filled with people chanting “Cheezborger Cheezborger Cheezborger,” applauding the men on TV and the men in real life working that evening.
Inside the DNC, the major television networks were arranged opposite center stage in studio booths, the pundits’ backs to the audience. Fox had the only double-wide studio while the radio and smaller networks had no suites at all. TikTokers stood on an elevated dais directly facing the stage, while print journalists were seated in a corner of the stands illuminated in dim purgatorial lights—a banished, dying race.
Volunteers ran through the aisles distributing signs and pendants timed to coincide with what was happening onstage. I <3 Joe, JILL, Coach Walz, Doug for First Mensch, and Kamala appeared as if by magic first on the ground floor, and then higher and higher up.
An amazing number of politicians and ordinary people appeared: Tim Walz’s football team; a mother of children with lead poisoning; the mother and father of the kidnapped American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose son was found dead by Israeli soldiers days after his parents called for a ceasefire on the national stage. Then Stevie Wonder, his backup dancers shaking violently.
Obama made a joke about Donald Trump’s penis on the second night, his hands tracing a large and then a small arc in reference to crowd sizes. Pretending to accidentally notice this well-rehearsed slippage he made a gesture of surprise that received riotous applause. These and other controlled deviations from decorum—such as Lil Jon’s “Shots” roll call—offered a quasi-libidinal thrill, like a small but naughty sip of wine, like the rush to be felt from saying “crap” after a long time without cursing.
The people sitting near me in the stadium kept commenting that the speeches represented “a brilliant choice” or that someone had said something “really smart,” responding to everything with a pundit’s meta-enthusiasm. Here politics was not appreciated for its content but for the impression one imagines it has on that almost unimaginable creature, the undecided voter. The spectral presence of that figure conditioned every moment of the proceedings, with its insistent soldier worship, its homages to small business and the joys of homeownership.
In the big-tent parade of identity categories that appeared in service of securing each conceivable human type was a Filipino AV tech, a lesbian lawyer, a low-income diabetic, a self-espoused “Redditor, gamer, entrepreneur, and Swiftie from the free state of Colorado,” and countless other kinds, save of course for Palestinian or Palestinian American.
At the DNC’s offsite building at McCormick Place, the Uncommitted Delegation had arranged a low-key event where a group of nurses, doctors, and trauma surgeons spoke of their time in Gaza. They addressed a small crowd in a tawdry, carpeted room, speaking about their shock at seeing children shot in the head every day.
Feroze Sidwah, a surgeon from California who presented in the offsite room, later discussed operating on a Gazan orthopedic nurse with me. “He looked like he was dying, like he was 70 even though he was 25,” Feroze said.
The man had been captured and tortured by the Israeli Defense Forces, starved, and punched in the head repeatedly, until at last he was dumped, naked, into the road, on which he crawled, with his eye dangling from his head, to the European Hospital of Gaza, where Feroze was working. “If you care about Israel and the United States, you shouldn’t want us to participate in things like this,” Feroze said.
In his speech he likened the United States’ culpability in the genocide to the inversion of morals that prevailed in the south following the abolition of slavery, when groups of thugs and assassins helped to re-enslave liberated persons and intimidate judges while society clung to a form of life that had been legally banned and which everyone knew to be an abomination.
Outside the convention center, a delegate with a rainbow wristband plugged her ears as she passed the small delegation of protestors reading the names of dead Gazans aloud. Another delegate passing began imitating their patient enumeration in a mocking, childish, na na na na boo boo tone. Inside, a man used his We <3 Joe pendant to hit a woman on the head after she had unfurled a banner that read: Stop Arming Israel.
While all of this was going on, Antony Blinken was in Israel, telling reporters that Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted a ‘bridging proposal’’ for a ceasefire deal. News of this acceptance was broadcast the first day of the convention. On the same day Israeli forces, armed with American weapons, reportedly killed 35 people in Gaza, 9 of them via airstrike in the Shati Refugee camp.
On the second day of the convention, Blinken visited Egypt and Qatar, saying that Hamas must accept the “bridging proposal” that he said Israel had already accepted. On the same day Benjamin Netanyahu said that he was “not sure” there would be a deal or proposal. Israeli forces, armed with American weapons, bombed a school, a family home, a crowded area near a market, and a mobile phone charging station, killing 52 people.
On the third day of the convention, Middle East Eye, citing unnamed Israeli sources, reported that Blinken “seriously undermined the negotiations and demonstrated a lack of understanding” when he claimed that Netanyahu had accepted the “bridging proposal.” The same day, Israeli forces, armed with American weapons, killed at least 50 Palestinians. A Gazan grave digger interviewed in Al Jazeera said, “The difficulty is that there’s no space left to dig graves, so I’ve stacked graves on top of each other. This place isn’t just one or two, but three layers of graves.”
On the fourth day of the convention, the US ambassador to the UN told the Security Council that a ceasefire deal was “in sight.” The same day, Israeli forces, equipped with American bombs and dollars, killed at least 47 more Palestinians. An official quoted in the Times of Israel said, “So long as Hamas doesn’t agree to a deal, we will continue fighting. Even if they do, the war will continue. Of course, if there is a deal, there will be a lull in the fighting in the first stage. But we will continue fighting until we achieve all of our war aims.”
In her final speech Harris mentioned other things: her “unshakable dream,” “laughter and music,” “kindness, respect and compassion,” her desire to build “the most lethal fighting force in the world.” She spoke well, with precision and competence, her conflicting imperatives just barely manifest in a strained smile. Thousands and thousands of balloons had been tied to the ceiling, to be released when Harris finished her speech. All together they resembled a roast tenderloin wrapped tightly in twine—over-buoyant, almost grotesque.
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