Unconventional, or: "John Chancellor, you dirty bastard!"

It's 1948, 1972, 1988; the editor at the Baltimore Sun, Rolling Stone, the New York Review, assigns you to do a story on "The Conventions."   But what exactly does "The Conventions" mean?  According to the editors at ABC, NBC, CBS, or at almost any other mainstream newspaper, magazine, or review, it probably means the message delivered from the lectern, maybe a paragraph or two about the response from the crowd.  That may have been what the editors at the Sun, the Stone, and the Review had in mind as well - but it is not what H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion gave them.  When they were assigned to "The Conventions," that is what they heard and that is what they pursued, in it's entirety.  For Didion, it meant a look into the incestual (sic) exclusivity of a "process" which ignored the very citizens it claimed to champion.  For Thompson, it meant exposing the organization that went into producing a spectacle of "spontaneous" political fervor.  For Mencken, highlighting the excessive emphasis on lights and camera that produced no action.  All three of them, recognizing the pitiful obedience of the other political hacks, turned their backs to the stage in order to observe the crowd, the organization, the sham.  They kept their ears to the speakers, to be sure, because there was a sham going on there as well, but their story was offstage: Mencken's "female politicos" looking for the appropriate television makeup, "sopranos, crooners and choirs" giving the mundane a false air of jubilance; Thompson's "Nixon Youth's," defending their individual agency while an organizer screamed orders through a megaphone; Didion's celebrity scribbler's eagerly awaiting the opportunity to be little more than mouthpieces, a privileged few given backstage passes who wouldn't be bothered to take a moments notice of the ropes.  The message: the election is being framed.  To that, Mencken adds his ironic wit; Thompson his comic fear and loathing.  It is only Didion who addresses outright the true gravity of the circumstances: the election no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the media.  And the media belongs to Washington.

- Dylan Byers