A Modest Proposal For Political Conventions

I have always lived in obscure, unimportant American cities or suburbs, never in "international-class" cities like New York, Chicago or Boston. This is mainly for economic reasons; all my life -- or at least, all my life when I was old enough to have a good idea of what things cost and what money was worth -- those cities have been hellishly expensive, too expensive for me to live there on whatever lower-middle-class income I had.

But living in smaller cities doesn't merely save money; it saves aggravation as well. For example, I don't have to worry about Chicago turning into a prison camp to keep a few VIPs safe and happy during the upcoming NATO summit. Nor need I worry about my city hosting the Olympics, or a Democratic or Republican convention. I won't be late to work because traffic stopped in all directions to spare the presidential limousine the indignity of waiting at a red light like some (pardon my French) ordinary American citizen. Eeew.

I say to NATO the same thing I say to political party conventions: there's a LOT of empty space in America, including a lot of empty space already set up with plumbing, fiber-optic and electrical connections. Go build a tent city in a fairground or campground rather than tie up traffic in a major city and make life miserable for its residents. (I'm still annoyed by the time my partner and his colleagues were forbidden from going on the rooftop break area of their own office building because His Highness President Obama was in town, and the time before that when my colleague's husband found a good chunk of Manhattan off-limits to ordinary people because His Highness President Bush came to town. Or was it His Highness the Wannabe Presidential Candidate who never got elected but still qualified for Secret Service protection? I disremember; all I know is, I'm getting damned tired of the constant idea that millions of ordinary workers in a city must be inconvenienced whenever a few VIPs deign to come to town.)

At least when Britain pulls stunts like this, turning London into an Orwellian hellhole for the upcoming Olympics or whatnot, they're honest about it: "We have a hereditary aristocracy of people who are legally superior to you because they were squeezed out of aristocratic vaginas rather than proletarian twats, so of course we'll inconvenience a whole city full of worthless twatspawn to let a few aristocrats party down. It's not like we subscribe to any notions of equality before the law."

And it's not like America subscribes to such notions anymore, either. We only pretend to.

P.S. Not that anyone's counting, but according to Blogger software, this is my six-hundredth blog post.