Notes From a Convention by Butler Shaffer

Notes From a Convention by Butler Shaffer: "It had been forty-four years since I last attended a political convention. I was part of my state’s delegation to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, an experience that helped push me over the threshold in my abandonment of political action. But last week I found myself headed to Rochester to sit in – as an observer – on the Minnesota Republican State Convention. My Minnesota daughter and her husband have been very active Ron Paul supporters, with her husband serving as a delegate to this convention. Perhaps for the same reason that leads people to visit the site of a train-wreck, I decided to attend.
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Perhaps my greatest sympathy, however, went out to a man who wasn’t even in attendance: Jesus. I am not a religious person, but I do believe a man like this deserved far better treatment than he got from this crowd. Speaker after speaker expressed his or her love and devotion to Jesus, at the same time cheering on any and every expression of pro-war sentiment. When one delegate – presumably of Ron Paul’s persuasion – made a motion to allow those who opposed the Iraq War to be heard, he was greeted with a thunderous chorus of boos. I imagined what might have transpired had Jesus been a delegate and asked to address the convention on the essence of his message: love and peace. After the boos had subsided, I suspect the sergeant-at-arms would have been instructed to go to a hardware store for a box of nails!

It was telling that I did not once hear the word 'peace' expressed at this convention.

In the course of my numerous trips around the sun, I don’t know when I have previously witnessed such a collective insistence upon dishonesty, contradiction, and unprincipled direction, all held together by empty rhetoric. A group of people lusting for nothing greater than a pro-rata share of the power they envisioned trickling down to them was pathetic. That the convention ended on an address by Karl Rove – one of the principal architects of the catastrophe with which the GOP and the Democrats have infected America – is testimony to a party in a terminal state.

Various speakers told the delegates "we must get the Republican message out!" Here is a party that professes love for Jesus and respect for life even as it insists upon present and future wars that have thus far killed more than a million innocents; that babbles its bromides about "liberty" even as it expands police powers, surveillance, imprisonment without trial, and the use of torture; that speaks of the dangers of runaway government spending while pouring billions of dollars into war machinery and the pockets of corporations supplying it; and which, at one of its own state conventions, insists upon a disparate application of rules applicable to others in order to give preferential treatment to established officials. This is the "Republican message" – as well as the Democratic one – and the young adults who throng to Ron Paul in search of a different message are evidence that, among a growing number, it is being received and rejected."