Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Jay Rosen:

Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right for it, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual—and if "contempt" is too strong, then the difficulty the press has in understanding the conventions as ritual—was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?

And that's what leads me to the forum now happening at The Revealer ... If a religion writer covered the presidential campaign, would campaign coverage be any different? My reasons for asking this months ago, when we started planning the forum, were vague. Now they're much clearer.

As a convention blogger, I was asked recently how I plan to "cover the convention." After striking the part of the answer that quibbled with "cover" (since I will cover the convention the way a bed bug covers a bed), I replied:

I'm there as a citizen: A thick smear of hope on top of a graham cracker of cynicism. I'm particularly interested in the event as a traffic accident where ritual and passion run into media manipulation. What do the absurdity and grandeur of this event say about the state of our democracy?

This got me thinking about how the word "ritual" doesn't really fit very well, unless you mean by it "reptitive compulsive behavior." Some things always happen at a Convention; speeches and roll calls, for example. But they are mere, and not true, rituals if they don't accomplish something more than what they seem to be accomplishing. I'd like to reserve the term "ritual" for actions that connect us to something larger and more meaningful than us individuals.

So, is the Convention a ritual? From the outside — and from the way it gets covered — it seems to be a mere ritual, going through motions because the motions used to mean something. Is a roll call vote anything more than a chance to elbow your way into your 15 seconds? The voting itself merely makes official a decision that was made in the primaries. Or does the shell of action somehow invigorate the spirit? I don't know, but I'm suspecting it does because, no matter how ordinary we want to make our public lives, it seems we can't quite keep the extraordinary out of it.

Hence my new bumper sticker: