(2 of 2)
His kindred spirits, people in similarly funny hats, are once again descending on Chicago. The conventioneers, like La Salle, are looking for something for nothing and, probably, a good time at which they cannot get caught. We welcome them.
The stunning puerility of a political convention--a circus in everything but reason, to rape Oscar Wilde--makes some sense in Chicago. For we know politics is a sham, that public officials either are or are training to be corrupt and that the Cubs will break your heart in August.
The life of a more civilized town might make the convention seem tawdry and pointless--otherwise presumably rational men and women frothing over the possibility of their particular blackguard getting in for a while. In Chicago we might philosophize that it is, more likely, the day-to-day appearance of constraint and reason that's the sham.
Tenzing and Hillary climbed Everest because it was there. That's why the cops flayed the tar out of the '68 demonstrators, and that is why we welcome back the conventioneers. We take neither the approved view nor the iconoclastic view--we know the two are harnessmates--the second isn't going anywhere the first ain't going.
We take the brash view: Welcome, Champions of Freedom. Hello, Suckers.
David Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross, about a Chicago real estate business