Shadows in the Sunlight

Just about everything to be said about last week’s Democratic convention has already been said and all of the pictures shown, so what am I doing here?

We’ve heard the LAPD applaud its restraint, the protesters applaud their restraint, television applaud its restraint and the Democrats applaud their restraint.

We’ve seen all the pictures of the protesters shaking their fists, and Al Gore kissing Tipper like he’s about to drag her behind the podium, and the two candidates hugging and everyone weeping with happiness.

All the “p” people--politicians, protesters and police--have managed to strut their stuff across the media stage and emerge relatively undamaged. An apocalyptic prediction of L.A. in ruins was, like the anticipated millennium disaster, an empty forecast.

Riordanville has pretty much returned to a normal, mattress-in-the-fast-lane existence, so I ask again what am I doing here inside Staples Center and inside the outside protest enclosure on the Friday after the convention?

Well, I’m listening. That may sound a little esoteric to you and as a matter of fact it does to me, too, but I have this theory that when big events, or at least noisy events, occur, they leave lingering echoes and shadows in their wake.

So I guess I came looking and listening.

*

There’s a strange and forlorn feeling to the interior of Staples on the day after the convention, like a haunted house after the ghosts have gone.

It’s made all the eerier by a silvery facade around a television camera stage that reflects back distorted images of its surroundings, making you think of mirrors in a fun house.

There are people in the place cleaning up and milling about, so it doesn’t quite have the abandoned feeling of a haunted mansion, but the emotional currents that had sizzled in the rafters are gone.

Among those remaining are groups of young people who’d been staffers during the convention. They hug and say their goodbyes like kids on the last day of summer camp, gathering signs and souvenirs to someday recall their brush with this confetti-drenched American tradition of the year 2000.

One of them kicks a red balloon and sends it bouncing lazily across the vast expanse of the arena, its drift and color summarizing both the glitz and ennui that characterized the Hollywoodian holiday of the people’s party.

Another staffer carries a sign that says, “Feel the Jew Love.” It startles me at first, but then 20-year-old Lindsay Berman, the daughter of congressman Howard Berman, says she made the sign. “I’m Jewish,” she says. “And this is a proud moment for us.” She’s talking about the nomination of Joseph Lieberman to be Al Gore’s running mate, and her pride is palpable in a room given over to cleaners and dismantlers. But already I’m hearing from anti-Semites on the Internet, and I shudder at what’s to come for a good, decent man facing Hitler’s twisted children.

*

Outside, the cleaning crews have been there and gone. Little is left in the enclosure that had caged a multiplicity of protests, only the litter of human emotions and human dreams.

Here we heard shouts and whispers of demands so diverse and entangled that none seized the moment, none emerged as the cold, clear call for social change. End Corporate Greed battled End Government for attention. Save the animals, save the redwoods, save the children, save the wetlands, save the janitors, save the ACLU and God save the 1st Amendment.

I stand in the center of the enclosure and walk the streets that the protesters had marched. I can hear their anger resounding in the overheated air, tempered by unyielding police batons and by temperatures that could wilt the deepest rage.

It was too often noise without passion, protest organized by e-mail, cell phone and fax machine, lacking the soul-deep commitment that fires revolutions. It was a dot-com assemblage, as rigid as data, as programmed as a computer game.

But at least the hordes were there, the signs were hoisted, and the outside protests, mingling with the inside promises, did provide theater for a week. All told, it was better than a car chase on television.

As I leave Staples, I stop to pick up a political tract. On it is a freehand drawing of a raised fist with little feet. It says, “Resist! Protest the politics of cruelty!” I toss it into a trash can and leave behind the ghosts of promises and protests, melting like butter under a relentless August sun.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.