Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Center
Milwaukee was eerily and unexpectedly quiet Sunday morning, with none of the typical traffic associated with a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game or Wisconsin State Fair that normally occur in steamy August. The site of the 2020 Democratic National Convention this week, Milwaukee also was not busting with protesters working to get their message across to an international audience or bustling with crazy convention delegates drinking Milwaukee’s famous brews and munching down bratwurst in Downtown bars.
As I sat at a lovely wooded grove in the expansive, historic Lake Park overlooking a stunning Lake Michigan under unusually cloudless blue skies, as joggers, hikers, bicyclists and families with picnic baskets and coolers meandered by, I pondered the 1,000-mile road trip from Colorado I just completed to be in my hometown during its big moment in the media spotlight. It was supposed to be a big deal—with thousands of delegates, journalists, protesters and assorted other politically interested spectators wandering Wisconsin Avenue, strolling the beautiful lakefront, visiting the marvelous Santiago Calatrava-designed addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Hotels, restaurants, bars, stores were ready to make millions of dollars, and political leaders were looking to promote Milwaukee’s image as a great city on a great lake.
Now, that’s all been messed up by the pandemic.
So, instead of talking to all the visiting journalists and political hacks, I instead visit with friends and family, drive along the lake, wander beaches, and even eat a luscious fat- and sugar-filled Wisconsin State Fair cream puff that I picked up from the sad and lonely fairgrounds, on what would have been the 2020 fair’s last day, if not for this dastardly pandemic. Offering drive-thru cream puffs was the fair’s attempt to rescue a bit of the lost summer for Wisconsinites who do so love their summer festivals, however briefly before the snow starts flying again.
Virtual Affair
COVID-19, of course, sparked the cancellation of fairs, concerts, parades, and other summer activities this season, and it turned the DNC into a nearly completely virtual affair. No Joe Biden. No Kamala Harris. Not even a Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to hang with. Sure, there will be a few journalists, from the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, CNN, NPR and others, but they will likely be watching the speeches all week from their laptops—a few of them undoubtedly will find something to attend at the actual host site, the Wisconsin Center, a much smaller venue than the planned Fiserv Forum, the sparkling home of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team.
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Oh well. 2020 happened. And life is now dramatically different.
Still, I wasn’t about to let 2020 deter my plans to return to my hometown, which I usually visit anyway during Summerfest, the world’s largest music festival that attracts 900,000 people to drink beer and listen to great bands for 11 days every summer on Milwaukee’s lakefront. Alas, 2020 cancelled that, too. So, when the DNC was delayed a month, I still held out hope that there would be something to salvage of a research project I wanted to do related to the image of Milwaukee. But when the convention became largely virtual, I decided to just plow ahead and see what Milwaukee would be like for an unconventional political convention. Now, at least, I won’t have to breathe in the same air as all those journalists and delegates all week.
Instead, I just have to protect myself from a few of my family members who believe the pandemic hubbub is all part of a Democratic hoax and that wearing a face mask is an affront to their civil liberties. Yes, on Saturday, I met up with a few of them.
Blue Line of Defense
A few days earlier, as I was driving toward Wisconsin through the plains of Nebraska and corn fields of Iowa, punctuated by Trump-Pence signs, I thought about what I would soon be facing. Wisconsin was one of the blue lines of defense—Michigan and Pennsylvania being the other ones—that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. It is a deeply divided state. My friends and family are great examples. I have a sister and brother-in-law who religiously believe everything they hear on Fox News and see Democrats as Communists who want to take people’s guns and religion and civil liberties, while I have a brother and sister-in-law who can’t believe how the country has been devastated in the past three years by incompetence and corruption, and worry that democracy is on the verge of collapse. I have friends who also are equally splintered. A doctor who thinks Trump is the best thing since cheese curds, for example, and a retired schoolteacher who recovered after a desperate battle with COVID-19 who knocks Trump and his supporters every chance he gets.
As the miles rolled by, I thought about how politics plays out in Wisconsin these days. Trump is masterful at creating division—not many people would dispute that. Academics, journalists, and others have argued that politicians have sown resentment among white, working-class individuals who feel left behind in a globalized economy. I can see that in some of my own friends and family members in Wisconsin, who are quick to blame others who themselves are struggling to make ends meet. I often try to explain how people often are manipulated into voting against their own economic self-interests, but those friends and family want no part of that deeper conversation.
Amazingly, my friends and I will still go for beers and enjoy some heated, yet politically superficial, discussion and remain friends. As far as family, we keep the topics away from politics. Although at our small get-together Saturday at a farmer’s market at South Shore Park in the city’s picturesque Bay View neighborhood, we avoided politics. Sometimes that’s best. The lack of masks by the two Trump supporters, however, was a bit disconcerting, particularly when they coughed every few minutes. “It’s just a little tickle I’ve had for a couple of weeks,” my sister said, as I increased my social distance in spite of my mask and our outside venue.
No One is Undecided
Wisconsin once again will be a battleground state this November, so politics is omnipresent, as it is in most states as the election rapidly approaches. On my journey through Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, I saw huge banners supporting Trump in rural areas but also lots of Biden signs in urban areas. Battle lines have been drawn. I don’t believe anyone is undecided at this point.
Listening to conservative AM radio in the car, I heard hosts talk about how Biden is too old, too liberal. They made untrue statements about vote-by-mail being corrupt and how Democrats will steal the election. As someone who lives in Colorado, where all voting is done by mail without any complications, I laugh out loud at all the misinformation I’m listening to. At best, as they spout various conspiracy theories, the radio hosts will provide vague qualifiers like “I’ve heard this,” and “Somebody told me.” One talk-show host said Democrats “are quarantining healthy people as never before in our country’s history in order to control the vote.”
I switch to NPR, where they are covering Joe Biden introducing his vice-presidential pick of Kamala Harris and I listen to the new Democratic ticket make their case. I gleefully note their bluntness. When Harris said Trump “inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground,” I muttered to myself, “Oh she’s good.”
As I wound my way through Iowa, I began seeing devastating scenes of destruction from a storm that hit much of the region a few days earlier with hurricane-force winds. I saw barns toppled, silos crushed, houses spit in half by toppled trees, highway signs completely bent by the force of the winds. For about 100 miles, I saw destruction. As I pulled off a highway to get gas in Cedar Rapids, streets were blocked, traffic lights destroyed, vehicles toppled, as relief workers passed out food and water. The phrase “American carnage” popped into my head as I recalled President Trump’s inaugural speech on January 20, 2017.
The devastation before my eyes was that of nature. Trump can’t be blamed for that, of course. But then I thought about his ineffective response to the pandemic. I thought about the devastated economy. The racial divisions. The corruption. The lies. His blatant attempts to manipulate the November election. This is truly American carnage.
So, as I explored the beauty of Lake Park, planned by the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York City’s Central Park, I prepared to listen to some virtual political speeches this week, and experience remnants of a political convention in Milwaukee. I couldn’t help but wonder how intact our nation will be after 2020.
Perhaps while drinking a socially distanced beer or two with my Democratic and Republican friends and family this week, things may start to look up. Certainly, as I enjoyed the peaceful Lake Park setting overlooking a beautiful lakefront, where young people were playing volleyball on an expansive, sandy beach, things already seemed not quite so desperate.
Kris Kodrich is a journalism professor at Colorado State University. A longtime journalist in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Kris grew up in Milwaukee and returns every summer, pandemic or not.
To read more about the 2020 Democratic National Convention, click here.
