The worst thing that ever could happen happened after the worst thing that ever could happen happened after the worst thing that ever could happen happened.

Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, AKA Chuck D

So after a miserable couple of weeks for everyone who gives a damn about peace, love and understanding, and with more bad news shortly on the way from Baton Rouge, the word came down in Cleveland: no tennis balls.

For the sake of public safety and national security, no tennis balls would be allowed in the cordon sanitaire around the Quicken Loans Arena, site of the Republican national convention, nor would water guns, toy guns, knives, rope, tape, umbrellas with metal tips, light bulbs, gas masks or several dozen other items. Guns, however, were authorized. Guns were OK, a pronouncement that was quickly taken up by groups as divergent in their orientations as Bikers For Trump and the New Black Panthers, among others.



Barely a week after five police officers were shot dead in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter march, Cleveland was duty-bound to follow Ohio’s open-carry statute. “Our intent is to follow the law,” said a stiff-lipped mayor Frank G Jackson. “And the law says you can have open carry, that’s what it says. Whether I agree with it or not is another issue.”

Guns allowed, but no tennis balls. It’s the sort of garishly insane proposition that’s just another normal day in America, the kind of stunt that a bunch of latter-day Dadaists might pull to highlight societal derangement and degradation. Let the word go forth: America has lost its mind! Or maybe dementia serves as a better metaphor, the country shuffling around like a bonkers senior citizen with a Depends on his head and Kleenex boxes for shoes. Walking down Euclid Avenue on the second day of the convention, along a raucous urban stretch of bars and tourist joints and overheated sidewalk peddlers pushing T-shirts and Trump-related campaign junk, I came upon a street preacher raging at the heathen through an amplifier rigged to his God-truck, an apocalypse on wheels decorated with photos of aborted fetuses, starving Africans, scrawl-painted Bible verses and similar visual aids. But that wasn’t God talking back at him from above, no, but a heavyset black woman leaning out her second-storey window bellowing “Preach love! Preach love! Preach love!” and “You don’t know nothin’ about being a woman in this world!” A debate between prophets, while right around the corner MSNBC was broadcasting live from a mobile studio, political blather booming up and down Fourth Street.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protester holds up signs outside the Republican national convention arena. Photograph: ZUMA Wire/REX//Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

What is it about America, where every public happening becomes a carnival of the weird and surreal? Merciful shards of sanity occasionally cut through. When the Art of Rap concert in Dallas was cancelled in the wake of the police shootings, Chuck D, frontman for Public Enemy, had this to say for the Dallas Morning News:

“It’s understandable,” said the man who wrote Fight the Power in 1989. “Those officers were out there securing a Black Lives Matter protest.”

He paused.

“There’s nothing can be said here. We have to let it rest for a while … To go in there Saturday? That would be inappropriate.”

But America can’t shut up or slow down for a second, and so we rolled past Dallas, past black lives and blue lives and Baton Rouge on Sunday morning with three cops dead and three more wounded, this only days after more than 80 dead in France, bombings in Baghdad, Isis attacks in Bangladesh, and an attempted coup in Turkey with hundreds of casualties. Welcome to Cleveland! Where the Trump movement arrived on a rumbling tidal surge (nothing so crisp or cleansing as a tidal wave), a molasses-thick swash carrying all manner of bottom sludge, along with 37 primary and caucus wins, 1,543 delegates amassed, gazillions of dollars worth of “free media coverage”, and the shattered wreckage and random personal effects of what was once the GOP establishment. It all washed up on the shores of Lake Erie and backed into the channel of the Cuyahoga river that so famously burned in 1969, emblem of Rust Belt decline when Cleveland was the butt and punchline of a thousand jokes.

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Nobody laughs at Cleveland anymore. It has a spiff downtown, a happening hipster population, and royalty – and an NBA championship – to its name. King James lives here, James as in LeBron, and now another aspirant to a different sort of throne was squalling into town. Trump, one imagines, doesn’t really want to be president; only king will do, and it’s worth trying to picture the American Majesty’s style, the ne plus ultra piss-elegance of a Trump presidency with its slathers of gold-gilt and reflective glass, the aesthetic of, say, a 1970s mid-level mobster from Buffalo, with Real Housewives updates of high-tech and glitz. Richard Nixon, raised a Quaker, went hard for royal pomp, with the presidential seal stamped on everything from cufflinks to golf carts, and toy-soldier trumpeters to announce his entrance and exit. Nixon came within a whisker of madness – is imperial style a marker of mental instability? Safe to say Trump’s would not be a modest presidency.

Norman Mailer, writing in 1968 of Nixon’s nomination in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, had this prophecy for the Republican party:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Norman Mailer. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous ruminating gut of every cow-like Democratic administration, an insane Republican minority with vast powers of negation and control, a minority who ran the economy, and half the finances of the world, and all too much of the internal affairs of four or five continents, and the Pentagon, and the technology of the land, and most of the secret police, and nearly every policeman in every small town, and yet finally they did not run the land, they did not comprehend it, the country was loose from them, ahead of them, the life style of the country kept denying their effort, the lives of the best Americans kept accelerating out of their reach. They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick.

Mailer missed it by little: instead of an island we have a wall, the wall that’s as close to a defining principle as the Trump campaign has. In Cleveland it was hard to distinguish between the mob rhetoric on the streets and the official, presumably vetted verbiage one heard inside the Quicken Loans Arena. “Build that wall! Build that wall!” could break out anywhere, anytime, and jackboot chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump.” And Chris Christie’s Tuesday night speech to the convention – a sort of rump-court indictment of Hillary Clinton, the acting out of what is surely a pet fantasy of the governor, and an audition for the post of attorney general should a Trump administration come to pass – inspired gleeful outbursts of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”, the voices of the faithful loud, full-throated, blood-lusty, much as the Romans must have sounded as the lions were turned loose on representatives of some poor damned minority.

The same spirit was on display Monday at an “America First Unity Rally” on the banks of the Cuyahoga, an event hosted by, among others, Citizens for Trump, Tea Partiers for Trump, Bikers for Trump, Christians for Trump, Women United for Trump, Vets for Trump, Millennials for Trump, Truckers for Trump … you get the idea. More than once this year I’ve heard the Trump phenomenon described as a peasants’ revolt. Well, here they were, and they were mightily pissed, their anger, however much of it was justified – and much was – matched by their evident inability to manage even the most basic vocabulary of American political life.

The mistress of ceremonies, one Trish Cunningham, a blond, florid woman in a short coral-orange dress who was described as the “godmother of the Pennsylvania Tea Party”, seemed not to understand the difference between a state and US senator. The national anthem was grievously mangled, the soloist missing about every third word (“the rockets’ red flare”). One of the speakers, a former first sergeant in the marines and currently a New Hampshire state rep, insisted that this year the GOP would “take back the hill,” by which I think he meant, Capitol Hill? Congress? Where the Republicans currently hold majorities in both houses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Attendee Wes Nakagiri wears a Hillary Clinton mask while walking the floor prior to the start on the fourth day of the Republican national convention. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

There on the grassy slopes of Settler’s Landing Park I was informed by my fellow rally-goers that 9/11 was “false”, that Israel “arranged” Barack Obama’s election, that “we’ve got to take our country back” and that “the liberal media is portraying Trump as a racist for wanting to secure our borders, and it’s not right and totally unfair”. In other words: people know when they’re being screwed. They may not know exactly how or by whom or on which end, but sooner or later the signal makes its way up the spinal cord, and is eventually acted upon. For 30 years Republican voters have dutifully nominated every establishment favorite put before them, refusing the primal temptations of a Pat Buchanan, a Rick Santorum, a Michele Bachmann, but on Monday, the first afternoon of the convention, we watched as the last of the last-ditch anti-Trump efforts died a loud and sloppy death. That evening I wandered out for a walk, and taking a seat in Public Square I noted the massive police presence, a wild-eyed pilgrim dragging around an 8ft cross, two fake nuns on stilts advocating a sin tax on meat, and happy kids soaking themselves in surface level fountains. Nearby a sort of anarchist-improv group did a skit satirizing the Trump phenomenon, which ended with this ditty:

If I can get you to fear,

I can get you to hate,

If I can get you to hate,

You won’t think straight,

If you don’t think straight,

That’ll make you a chump,

And then you’ll wind up with Trump.

Well, there’s nothing new about that. Fear has been the driving force of the GOP since the start of the cold war – fear of Commies, fear of black people, fear of Mexicans, gay people, feminists, Muslims, terrorists, feds and so forth, the fear-mongering cultivated to a high art form in the years since 9/11. The difference this time around is economic. The Republican establishment told the base to do one thing, and the base, at long last, did the opposite. “Pluck the chicken but don’t make it scream,” a long-ago New World dictator once told his cronies, but in America in the year 2016, after 35 years of supply-side economics, wholesale globalization, and the biggest redistribution of wealth – not trickle down, but vacuum up – in history, the chicken is screaming.

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“The Bush family – while we would love to have them – are part of the past,” Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, declared at a morning press briefing during convention week. “We are dealing with the future.” But as it’s played out in the 13 months since Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy, “Make America Great Again” looks a lot like the idealized Wasp past whose realest incarnation was seated somewhere in Ronald Reagan’s brain, a social order designed to appeal nicely to white males of authoritarian inclination. And as for everyone else – women, “the negroes” and, ah, latins? – well, wasn’t it all very nice for them too?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest US senator and nominee for president Barry Goldwater at a rally in Madison Square Garden, New York City, in October 1964. Photograph: William Lovelace/Getty Images

Here’s some news: we don’t live in that world anymore. On Wednesday night Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan gave fine-sounding speeches extolling the GOP as the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and civil rights, when the fact of the matter is Republicans haven’t been that party since 1964. In July of that year, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the party chose as its presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater, who just a few short weeks before had voted loudly and proudly against the Civil Rights Act. The GOP has worked a sliding scale of racism ever since; for proof, one need only look to the long and twisted history of the Southern Strategy, or voting patterns of the past 50 years, or the coalition of state attorneys general who successfully sued to gut the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

Trump’s genius, particularly suited to a time of financial stress for much of the working and middle class, lies in the way he’s mainstreamed the far end of that sliding scale, forcing blatantly racist propositions onto center stage. He was embraced early by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the like, and he embraced them back in the form of Mussolini quotes, retweets of white supremacists, and foot-dragging, nod-and-a-wink disavowals of support from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Any doubts as to whether a critical mass of the Republican leadership would also embrace its nominee vaporized over the course of convention week, and by Thursday evening Trump could truthfully claim that the party was unified. Or unified enough to make the claim without being struck by lightning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest New York delegate David DiPietro reacts during the third day session of the Republican national convention. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Twice in its history the United States has been forced to re-create itself, both times in the face of existential crises. The abolition of slavery was the first such re-creation, born out of the crisis of the civil war. The New Deal was the second, the formation of the modern welfare state in response to the crisis of the Great Depression; had Roosevelt acted any less radically, the profound unrest that in certain places had already flared into outright insurrection – an episode of US history that’s largely forgotten, or ignored – might well have morphed into re-creation by other means. Now we find ourselves in dire need of a third re-creation, a revolution in the psyche as well as the structure of the country that takes account of realities that are already upon us. A broadening beyond the psychic island, the insane castle, the encircling wall of the Wasp that Norman Mailer wrote about nearly a half-century ago. It has to happen; the country’s changing demographics, and the sheer weight of human experience they represent, demand it. The only way it won’t happen is by the outright subversion of democracy, which by definition would constitute a very different sort of re-creation.

A few years ago I read Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and I recall being struck by his description of the political tensions in his native Colombia in the late 1940s, just prior to the outbreak of the country’s decades-long civil war. What seemed to begin as more or less professional hardline posturing by liberals and conservatives developed over time into something rawer, hotter, and, ultimately, intractable. I kept making the same note in the margins: US now. US now. US now. It’s worth praying to all the gods we have that it won’t come to that – that the third American re-creation will come by gentler means.