THROUGH THE HIBISCUS, DIMLY

A little after 8 o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 11, John W. McCormack came before the Democratic Convention of 1972. He stood at the rostrum like an aging heron on a cypress stump, white-haired, gaunteyed. Behind him, at eighty, were sixty years of distinguished service to his party; before him, a sea of indifference. So might the last of the pterodactyls have surveyed the primeval swamps.

One thought in this amber moment of how it would have been in the bad old days, a couple of conventions ago. It would have meant something then, the farewell appearance of a Grand Old Man. The Massachusetts delegation would have led the hall in a boozy parade, the standards dipping and the hokum rising, while an Irish tenor bellowed and two chiefs from the plasterers’ union performed a clog in the aisles. Such a demonstration would have wound up, maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it started, in one of those fortissimo finales that a trumpet player lives for, but the time would not have been wasted: Down below the rostrum, untouched by the smarmy sentiment above, the party chieftains would have been rigging the very next vote.

JJ

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James Jackson Kilpatrick

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A little after 8 o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 11, John W. McCormack came before the Democratic Convention of 1972. He stood at the rostrum like an aging heron on a cypress stump, white-haired, gaunteyed. Behind him, at eighty, were sixty years of distinguished service to his party; before him, a sea of indifference. So might the last of the pterodactyls have surveyed the primeval swamps.

One thought in this amber moment of how it would have been in the bad old days, a couple of conventions ago. It would have meant something then, the farewell appearance of a Grand Old Man. The Massachusetts delegation would have led the hall in a boozy parade, the standards dipping and the hokum rising, while an Irish tenor bellowed and two chiefs from the plasterers’ union performed a clog in the aisles. Such a demonstration would have wound up, maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it started, in one of those fortissimo finales that a trumpet player lives for, but the time would not have been wasted: Down below the rostrum, untouched by the smarmy sentiment above, the party chieftains would have been rigging the very next vote.