THE MIKE DOUGLAS DEMOCRATS
PODHORETZ, JOHN
THE MIKE DOUGLAS DEMOCRATS by John Podhoretz Chicago IF THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION’S endless parade of America’s most wounded was Oprah Winfrey for conservatives, the Democratic convention...
...If there is one thing the characters in Rent share, it is a loathing for middle-class life...
...Opera grande dame Jessye Norman...
...The Macarena, Kenny G, and Rent are all part of the same goo—a goo that softens their edges and makes them fi t for mass consumption...
...It was a great favorite of pre-liberated stay-at-home women and retirees everywhere...
...it’s the most radical aspects of the ’60s counterculture transposed to the ’90s...
...John Lennon served as Mike’s sidekick for an entire week in the early 1970s...
...The Douglas show was taped in Philly...
...It was routine for this plain-vanilla variety program to feature guest appearances by hilariously inapposite stars...
...Rent is another matter altogether...
...They include the following characters: Angel, a drag queen who dies of AIDS...
...And, for a special treat, the cast of the Pulitzer-prize-winning Broadway musical Rent will perform the show-stopping ‘Seasons of Love...
...there’s only one big pop culture slopping all over itself...
...By booking Rent and giving it such a choice slot, convention organizers evoked another aspect of The Mike Douglas Show: the fact that while it was designed to appeal to the most middle of middle-American audiences, it often featured entertainment of the most decidedly anti-bourgeois nature...
...Mark, a straight nerdy Jewish fi lmmaker...
...THE MIKE DOUGLAS DEMOCRATS by John Podhoretz Chicago IF THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION’S endless parade of America’s most wounded was Oprah Winfrey for conservatives, the Democratic convention was Mike Douglas for liberals...
...Last week’s gathering in Chicago was a six-hour-aday Mike Douglas Show, interrupted not by commercials for Geritol and DentuCreme but by testimonials to the Democratic party and its candidates...
...Angel’s lover Tom, a one-time Marxist professor who is now homeless...
...Bluegrass legend Emmylou Harris...
...Roger, an ex-junkie with AIDS who lives as a squatter...
...Roger’s girlfriend Mimi, an HIV-positive teenager who dances in an S&M club...
...That en croachment is represented by a real-estate developer to whom Roger and Mark refuse to proffer the title emolument, an act of civil disobedience celebrated in the opening number: “We’re not gonna pay/We’re not gonna pay/We’re not gonna pay/Last year’s rent, this year’s rent, next year’s rent...
...This isn’t mere lifestyle liberalism...
...There is no counterculture anymore...
...For if someone had recommended the convention stage a number from Hair (which was being revived in Chicago last week, by the way), Fowler and Dodd would have taken turns fi ring the guy...
...Not very New Democrat, if you ask me...
...That process was at work 20 years ago, when The Mike Douglas Show turned hippie America-hating misfi ts into cheerful sidekicks who helped with cooking demonstrations...
...The Democratic party may be in retreat from the politics of the ’60s counterculture, but not from the counterculture itself...
...For Rent is a salute to commies, druggies, pornographers, admitted sexual deviants— people who, to put it mildly, don’t work hard and don’t play by the rules...
...Saxophonist Kenny G! Singer-trumpeter Phil Driscoll...
...There was lots of audience participation, most famously a daily clinic in the arm-folding dance craze called the Macarena...
...David Bowie did too, a few years after...
...It is, therefore, quite amazing that convention major-domos Don Fowler and Chris Dodd allowed it to receive the imprimatur of a Democratic party on a years-long mission to convince middle America that it is not the leftist, countercultural, homeless-loving, anti-bourgeois force it seemed to be at the San Francisco convention in 1984...
...Indeed, Rent’s theme is the encroachment of a vapid middleclass life upon these grave and wondrous souls who are living a bohemian downtown existence...
...Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen, who has just left him for another woman...
...Retired baseball superstar Ernie Banks and legendary baseball announcer Harry Caray, who’ll lead the delegates in a stirring rendition of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game...
...I remember watching Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane singing the drug anthem “White Rabbit” to a typical Douglas studio audience—Philadelphians with lots of hair spray...
...There were fi lm clips to entertain them: gauzy tributes to Clinton and Gore, a goopy roll call of administration offi cials killed in the line of duty, and a fast-paced video promotion of the city of Chicago that ran twice in the convention’s four days...
...If America were to think that Rent represented the Democratic party—and that would not entirely be a crazy thing to think, considering the fact that the show got a fi ve-minute free commercial from the party —Bob Dole would win 70 percent of the vote and Republicans would gain a hundred seats in the House and 25 in the Senate...
...Another show-stopper, “La Vie Boh?me,” is a rhythmic recitation of a heroic left-wing pantheon, from Pablo Neruda to Frantz Fanon...
...The eclectic and amazingly long list of liveandin-person performers was comparable to what you would have gotten by watching The Mike Douglas Show over the course of a week: “On the show this week we have Aretha Franklin...
...Seasons of Love” was scheduled to air in primetime on the convention’s fi rst night (and would have if things had run as smoothly as they did for the Republicans in San Diego...
...As both conventions showed, that same ooze now drips over on American politics and washes it clean of meaning in exactly the same way...
...Country-music sensation Billy Ray Cyrus...
...The impossible dream these characters dream is not having a good job at good wages, or feeding and educating their children, but opening a restaurant in chi-chi Santa Fe...
...Not for nothing did New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley describe Rent as Hair for the ’90s...
...The cast of that hit review Forever Plaid will be with us...
...It may be about gay, drugusing AIDS patients, but it has been granted cultural gravitas because it was awarded a Pulitzer this year— and because its original-cast album is being brought out by billionaire David Geffen, one of the most important Democratic moneymen...
...You remember Mike Douglas, surely, the host of The Mike Douglas Show, a daily afternoon variety program of the 1960s and ’70s...
...Go fi gure...
...When delegates weren’t folding and unfolding their arms, they were swaying back and forth to recorded versions of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” the Village People’s “YMCA,” Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and Chicago’s “Only the Beginning...
Vol. 1 • September 1996 • No. 50
