s I watched - occasionally - the Super Bowl halftime show of the Republican Convention and braced myself for another glitzy bore presented by the Democrats in Los Angeles, I remembered another time.
It was 1940, and I was 16 years old, and I was finally taking part in the political talk that swirled through our house at convention or election time. There were no political arguments, since every one in our home was a right-wing Christian Republican, but the discussions were fervid and the politicians were saviors or destroyers.
I remember my shock at what I was hearing - and my delight that I was understanding - the only dirty joke I ever heard my Baptist deacon father tell.
It was about Franklin and Eleanor, and it achieved levels of bad taste that few of the Clinton jokes attained.
I committed one of my first significant acts of family rebellion when I lay awake after bedtime and thrilled to the chants from the balcony at the Republican Convention: ''We want Willkie. We want Willkie. We want Willkie.''
It seems hilarious now that I believed so ardently in Wendell L. Willkie, a Wall Street lawyer my father thought too liberal. He seemed to me the hope of the future, and I was excited as he defeated Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft, after six roll-call votes.
I remember the suspense as the votes were taken, the chants that meant to me that democracy worked and that the people were literally being heard. I can still feel the surge of pride I felt the American political system and the hope Willkie would lead us where I know longer remember.
Through the years, I moved to the center, still a radical position in our family, and more often than not voted Democratic, but I maintained my passionate interest in both parties, reading about politics, at times even reporting and writing about politics, and always listening, then watching every moment of both conventions.
As knowledge increased, naivete decreased. I had less and less faith in what the politicians promised, but I was always fascinated by the game of politics, the deals, the maneuvers, those who won and how, those who lost and how.
But this year, an old man, I reread Shakespeare's ''King Lear'':
''So we'll live
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
A s if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones
T hat ebb and flow by th' moon.''
There is a vast cynicism in the land. It used to be that we had to be careful what we said to relatives, friends, and co-workers about their candidate.
Now, we can say anything we want. My acquaintances on the far right, far left and all the way in between are equally skeptical of about every candidate. They will vote as I will, against one candidate, not for the other. And more of us will not vote at all.
We have significant problems that demand solving and the resources to attempt solutions, but we have a system in which the nomination is bought by corporate dollars in both parties and leaders who know image is all.
I feel a not-so-comforting comradeship with Lear and the cynical wisdom of his crazed ranting.
