The Marketing of "Mamala"

She's a tough prosecutor who will eat Donald Trump for lunch!

No, wait. She's also the fairy godmother who will swoop into our lives to rescue us, the same way she swooped into her now-husband Doug Emhoff's lfe to rescue him, his kids, and even his ex-wife. That is exactly what he told us Tuesday night, anyway.

In other words, she is the authoritaran "strong Black woman" stereotype who balances strict discipline with loving-kindness.  These are just the qualities that the consumers/spectators making up the US electorate apparently crave in a leader. Someone who can bomb Palestinian mothers and babies to death while at the same time projecting an empathetic maternal persona.

 Barack Obama gave a speech Tuesday night with that same implicit theme. He made a big gallant show of allowing himself to be upstaged by wife Michelle, who totally eviscerated Donald Trump in her own barnstorming performance. Obama even pretended to cower behind the ghost of his late mother-in-law, in a cartoonish effort to show that only the strong matriarch of the family could protect him from being regularly hen-pecked by her daughter and his wife.

Taking the emasculation trope  a step farther, Obama mocked Trump's obsession with the size of his crowds, making a hand gesture to hint that Trump's manhood will absolutely shrink once he is faced by the candidate whom  Mrs. Obama called "my girl  Kamala." 

The crowd in the arena was already "all fired up and ready to go" before the Obamas took the stage.

No matter that Kamala Harris already had clinched the nomination withou ever winning a single primary. They staged a ceremonial roll call vote anyway, just for the spectacular fun of it. 

Lacking, as it did, the suspense of an actually democratic and competitive roll call in an open convention, it was staged as a glitzy game show, complete with strobe lights and even a professional D.J. to provide musical entertainment as a substitute for democracy. This forced the reps of the states and the occupied territories to scream their support for Kamala into the microphones. Sure, there was a handful of "present" votes in the mix to mar the joyful forced unanimity, but those results were uttered in comparative cowed whispers.

The fake roll call culminated with the arena going completely dark. And then came a  mystical cascade of thousands of tiny floating lights. It was fairy dust, the all-encompassing presence of the Fairy Godmother herself, whose actual corporal body was off campaigning in Wisconsin. Even so, her image magically appeared on the screen, even better than Glinda in Oz in her floating bubble.

This spectacle carried a  vibe creepily similar to what the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch observed in an essay titled "Dust," about pre-Hitler Germany in the 1920s:

"Even those who are not listening take notice of the bourgeois  conversations of the conformist; so propping up the table remains the gossip, the visitors, the false laughter and the real poison they strew amongst each other. The close, stale air greets even those who are not breathing it. It seeps down to the young man, and up to the beautiful people. Keeps him good and quiet, them good and deaf."

Thankfully, though, the propaganda fairy dust has not infiltrated every brain. Goodness and quietude are not universal. Anti-genocide protesters have mostly be barred from the DNC arena,  but they did succeed in interrupting a live televised interview between Stephen Colbert and Nancy Pelosi at a different venue a few miles away.

The 84-year-old Democratic matriarch was there to pump sales of her new book on "The Art of Power" - despite the mosty artless power she wielded in the ouster of Joe Biden. All she could lamely tell Colbert was that Israel has a right to defend itself... presumably against all those dangerous mothers and infants. 

Her party's definition of reproductive rights for Palestinian women is to keep the American weapons flowing. Bombs are  such a foolproof method of birth control that even Republicans can accept their use as population control of those they deem undesirable and less than human.

Despite all the angst about Trumpian hatred for women, misogyny is absolutely and disgustingly bipartisan.