Our reporter meanders inside and outside the convention hall.
For example, the 2004 convention featured as a star performer the African American gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, which was a perfect dog whistle, in that I only found his performance mentioned once in any news report, in one of those articles that are also requisite every four years about how obscure the entertainers the Republicans manage to draw to perform are, because all the truly famous singers are Democrats. No one outside the tribe for whom this dog whistle was intended heard it. None of the media bigfoots knew or are to point out that McClurkin was not obscure at all among evangelicals, who revered him for testifying two years earlier to how the scourge of pornography had “turned” him gay; or that not long before this performance he had gone on The 700 Club to reveal how homosexuals are “trying to kill our children.” There were no mainstream TV commentators explaining to the folks at home who just thought they were hearing a Black man with a decent voice surrounded by a clutch of children dressed in blindingly pure white that this was a symbol of the semiotics, then, of McClurkin’s crusade to protect the purity of all the little children from the diabolical snares of the homosexual recruiters. (“The gloves are off,” he had told The 700 Club. “And if there’s going to be a war, there’s going to be a war.”)
