m ball watches the DNC - the Bill Clinton Speech and . . .

. . . more great, in-depth coverage from CNN:

      Bill and Gloria share a moment.

m ball watches the DNC - "First Night"

m ball watches the Democratic National Convention - assemblages and drawings

Budweiser's can for the Democratic National Convention.

Again: InBev didn’t ask, but lack of corporate sponsorship has never stopped us. We asked Go Around Back and The Ambiguities’ artist-in-residence melchior ball to design Budweiser cans for the Republican and Democratic conventions. Here is mel's tribute to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 

mel’s tribute to the Republican nominee Donald Trump, Brownshirt Beer, may be found here.

"Point of personal privilege"

Many years ago, when Gaspar Stephens and I were teaching on the same faculty (of one of those Universities of Name of State at Name of Town), we had a colleague – in economics, if I’m remember correctly – that interrupted every faculty meeting at least once with a “point of order” to move the discussion from substance to procedure or a “point of personal privilege” to explain how things ought to, though they probably never could, be – I think. Because: He’d rise, “Point of personal privilege, Mr. Chairman!” and he’d launch off into a tangent that only the most tortured reasoning could relate to the business at hand. Experts, however, in tortured reasoning, Gaspar and I would discuss the point of privilege after the meeting, and we almost always made the connection; moreover, there was usually a principle involved, if only one that an economist would recognize.

I listened to as much of the-next-president-of-the-united-states Donald J. Trump’s speech last night as I could, then I scanned the transcript of the rest and went to bed. Donald J. Trump’s “dark speech,” as more than one pundit has characterized it. But I slept well.

     It’s not that I don’t also believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But I don’t expect – at least not immediately – a bloody apocalypse. I’m not sanguine enough to believe civilization will die so quickly and painlessly; we won’t get that kind of one-breath release. Instead, in the West at any rate, we’ll smother each other in cant. It won’t be rapid-fire guns in the hands of dark-skinned young aliens that will destroy our republic but hypocrisy and smuggery in the wheezing throats of old white men – like me!

I wish I could say that knowing that I am part of the problem would shut me up. It won’t. Like most old white men, I am – at the deepest level of my waning intellect* - convinced that I know best, for everyone.

On the other hand: Truth be known, I’d be surprised if any of us knows what is best for us, as a community, as a nation, as a Western alliance, as a planet – or individually. But that’s a truth we can’t believe; it makes sense, but it goes too much against our innards. Besides, as the truth, it might set us free. Even from cant.

     Nobody really wants that.

_______________

* I am 68 years old, and I know I am not as smart as I was when I was 38 years old. Then I also know that we will be making a mistake to elect a president that is as old or older than I am.