DeLillo: "They Have to Walk Slowly to Accommodate Their Awe"

Strangely, it appears that Don DeLillo blogged from the Democratic and Republican conventions for The Onion. Some excerpts (posted 9/26/2008):

He speaks in your voice, American, and he's blogging right next to me, as I type my own blog, in this our blogging age. Our faces fixated with vigorous purpose on glowing rectangular screens, measured in centimeters. In the air, invisible information. Uploads, downloads. Waves and radiation. Surrounding us both, on every side of the lobby, dozens more do exactly the same, typing with their thumbs into tiny silver death machines.

From across America, they come to Minneapolis, to Denver, in herds, teaming hordes filled with sounds, smells. In great tidal flows of seething humanity they ease around the I-beam sculptures and move into the sports arenas. They are loaded down with noisemakers and paper and special hats.

The crowds are a slowly spreading ripple and moan. They heave and surge with some unexplainable animal intelligence. They have to walk slowly to accommodate their awe. Snatches of unattributed dialogue—absurdist, yet paradoxically naturalistic—come out of the mass of pressing bodies:

"You cannot state categorically?"

"Not at the present moment."

"So that's that?"

"As far as we are aware."

"So the general consensus seems to be that we don't know enough at this time to be sure of anything."

"Let me put it to you like this: if I were a rat, I wouldn't want to be within a 200 mile radius of Minneapolis right now."

"What if you were a human?"

[....]

We've witnessed these spectacles every fourth September, every four years. The volunteers stand handshake-dazed near their supervisors, seeing images of themselves in every direction. Staffers greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. In Denver there were vendors nearby when we ate breakfast. Stretch limos outfitted with powerful communications technology stalled in murderous crosstown traffic. Helicopters shine searchlights down at the buildings, the crowd. Chanted rhymes emerge like a collective tribal memory. Allegations are advanced concerning faked pregnancies. "This is one of those moments." There is a meet-and-greet with the guy from the Doobie Brothers.

A voice from the subconscious: Toyota Corola.

Here in Minneapolis, a woman with a clipboard, frazzled, efficient. She reads from a printout to a group of staffers a change in schedule from the coordinating committee: the station wagons arrive at noon. In the Free Speech Zone, a man dangles from a wire, the famous performance artist from New York. Everywhere, security: badges, metal detectors, small plastic cards with magnetic stripes. Police, silent in riot gear, truncheons like humming, efficient software. Someone says: "So she was technically never the actual Miss Alaska?"

They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women, crisp and alert, knowing people's names. Their husbands in little hats shaped like elephant heads, something about them suggesting massive health insurance coverage.