All the speechifying, delegate traffic, and media oversaturation — What Does It All Mean? For an answer on the convention floor, we gingerly approached the man who brought new meaninglessness to the word “meaning” when he coined the phrase “the politics of meaning” — yes, Michael Lerner himself, the editor of Tikkun, who was right there on the floor.
Once thought to be Hillary’s guru and now thought to be good for nothing, Lerner seemed like just the man to help us understand what exactly singer/saxophonist Phil Driscoll was doing on stage the first night. Performing an homage to Ray Charles’s voice? To Joe Cocker’s aneurysms? And indeed he did; the misty-eyed Lerner showed us that sometimes intellectuals must stop intellectualizing and simply emote. When we asked him what it all meant, he brushed us back: “I’m in the middle of a sort of moment here,” quoth Rabbi Lerner. Thank you, O Sage of West 100th Street!
Speaking of sages, a lone figure in a loud stars- and-stripes tie walked the length of the United Center that same night looking for a concession stand with a manageable line. Nobody seemed to know that the man was Ira Magaziner, who once tried to take over the American health-care system.
