THE TRUMP ERA IS OVER
And it was pointless
FLATBUSH—If there was one thing that united the delegates, politicians, lobbyists, consultants, journalists, and other hacks at the Democratic Convention last month in Chicago, it was that we (sorry) were all once the sort of schoolchildren who were keen to know all the states of the Union and perhaps be able to rattle off a series of facts about them. On the second night of the convention the roll call of states was held backed by a DJ playing songs that occasionally were matched to the states casting their votes for Harris and Walz (or ‘uncommitted’ in the case of delegates won by protest votes against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza). The songs were sort of goofy and sometimes either eye-rolling selections (the Dropkick Murphys song from the Departed soundtrack for my home commonwealth of Massachusetts, instead of Aerosmith) or bands assigned to the wrong state (Modest Mouse for Oregon rather than Washington, which got something generic and not Nirvana or Screaming Trees). Politicians or prominent citizens uttered some trivia, usually to do with progress (occasionally surprising in the case of Deep South states or, say, Wyoming, hotbeds of radicalism in the olden days), and pledged the delegates. Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, got the biggest applause, and Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, was booed, because she called New York ‘the best state ever’, something most people who live here don’t even believe. In any case, the whole ritual raised in me only the feeling of wanting to go on a road trip and get as far away from the Windy City as I could, though my notebook was full of the playlist and the state trivia.