What's Happening Here?

I’m not sure I’ve been able to get any real sense of what this convention is for.

I understand its role in history, and I understand its formal role in the presidential campaign. Which is to say that I understand that “there is a convention because there’s always been a convention.”

But I’ve been hard-pressed to find anything that comes close to resembling the kind of participatory democracy that I, perhaps naively, expected to find here.

This is not a national town hall meeting; it’s more akin to a televised debutante ball. I’m afraid that politics here in America is so abstracted from reality that it is, in fact, impossible to understand on a level other than the superficial.

Perhaps this is inevitable in a country as large, complex, and diverse as this. But I’ve a vague, depressing feeling that there may not actually anything of interest here. The convention, despite all appearances to the contrary, might not be newsworthy, if one takes that to mean that to be news something has to be more than simply self-reverential.