#54: THE TRUMP CARD

Hi Guys !(not forgetting you foxy ladies too......as if). Howyadoin'? Forget that, HowmIdoin'?  Great, yeah?

I've got it sussed now: just have to turn up at the Oval Office Office around 4.30 for the photoshoot, read the little summary of what I'm going to sign that the boys have prepared, rub out their little jokey pictures and explanations, and there, it's done, I can go back to the Playboy Channel.

Bannon was telling me I've invented a new kind of democracy. He calls it demoncracy but he never could spell so good. What you do is you put up some big-shot showman like me, media type, so all the don't knows vote for the only one they do know - that cleans up about 25 % of the vote, right off. Then you get him to say a lot of wild and outrageous things for the publicity, and to wind up audiences at rallies. You get the votes, you get in - and then you DO IT, all of it - and worse. And you don't fanny around with a lot of know-nothing expenses-frauds in Congress and Senate, you do a DIY job, by Executive Order.

Of course you have to have the help of your advisers, otherwise you'd have to read all those presidential briefings yourself  - unbelievable, and they're boring as shit, so I'm nodding of during the second paragraph; and so many long words, that the Ordinary Joe can't understand. I'm used to reading stroke-books and 50 shades one-handed, but the spare hand never had a Dictionary in it. Hell no.

Just a word on my advisers: they're a heavy mob, but they'll get the job done. Sure, some of them are as rich as me, but they know who's Boss. Admittedly we've had to erase a few criminal records and have a word with some Parole Boards, but forgiveness is a noble thing. Anyway, it was a good exercise in staking out the territory and giving the finger to those demented citizens who doubted my worth. One appointment was just GREAT:   Scott Pruitt, the ace climate change denier as head of the Environmental Protection agency! So FAB, a master-stroke.  When I thought of it I nearly pissed my pants with sheer joy. I may as well have appointed the Jolly Green Giant, on secondment from General Mills - we're going to liquidise it anyway. What's so funny? We are going to incrementally disappear it, and secure lifetime donations from BigPower at the same time, coincidentally. But the best part is that it is so blatantly in yer face, two fingers to all my opponents. I love it, it's pure eye-for-an-eye revenge and it says  "Vengefulness, this is what I do, this is what I do best. So live with it, and shut the fuck up, or I'm coming for your wife, or your boyfriend more likely...

Finally, guys and gals, today's Executive Order: I have commandeered TWITTER: it is now the official Government Communication Channel. No more, press conferences with Marxist terrorist reporters from CNN and the other Muslim agents, embarrassing my spokespersons. Just tweets from this office. We've already abolished the 140 character thing - stoopid having such a low limit on what you can say, when I have so much to share with you. And it drove me mad doin' all that counting and remembering to count the spaces - what's that about? Spaces are spaces, they ain't fuckin' words or letters, not when I last looked. And how do their numbers work? That little figure that totals up all your words actually goes down the more you type - that can't be right, can it? No, that can go to Hell.

We're now going to have postcard tweets. A box will come up on your screen, the size of a standard postcard, and you can fill it right up, with whatever you want, words, banners, slogans – you can even send naked pictures, if you want - I'm broadminded (that could mean I think about broads a lot - see what I did there!?!)

And so I'll send y'all a weekly tweetcard, and you can tweet me back: instant demoncracy! Cut out the middle man in the voting booth - anyway, they're all rigged, I hear.

Honest Donald, what you see is what you get. They call that WYSiWYG (and the first person who refers to me in public as Wizard Wig gets a one-way ticket to Guantanamo. And guys, don't pack your surfboard we have everything there you need for waterboarding - on tap). Have such a great week everyone, and don't worry, I'll look after you all: they may be tiny hands but they're a safe pair, and they've never ever grabbed a little kitten - that was just locker-room talk. G'Night America, I Love You and one day, I pray (cos prayin' is kinda my thing, too) you will say those Three Little Words to me, and mean them. You will. I promise you, Bigtime...it'll be the biggest love-in since the 60s, Really YUGE, trust me...

The Don

As the decade of the 1950s drew to a close, there was a leap, like an athlete diving and dipping for the tape. We wanted that era gone, yearned for change. Harold MacMillan, as Prime Minister, had talked about the 'winds of change' blowing through Southern Africa: we wanted them here, now. We were ringing in The New, as hard as we could, but our parents' generation clung on to The Old, tenaciously.

They had certainly had very hard lives. Many of them had lost parents in the Great War, endured the financial chaos of the 1920's, the Depression of the 1930's, that decade of poverty and unemployment (or its constant threat) capped off by all the fear and trauma and hardship of World War 2, and its austere aftermath.

The current austerity of the Osborne Mob has been terrible for some, but it's Austerity-lite for the majority, compared to the post-War equivalent: I was born just after the war, but even now I can remember hand-me-down clothes, rationing and always feeling hungry. Small portions, few sweets, very few treats, home-made everything (which was great, for everything except sweaters, so bad they had to be 'lost' on the way home from school). Nothing was thrown away, left-overs (a rare event) appeared for the next few days in other guises. Clothes were passed from child to child, sweaters unravelled and re-knitted, allotments dug and planted. It was accepted as the price we had to pay for winning the war, though envious glances were cast at the US which seemed to be thriving and even Germany whose industry was being rebuilt by the mighty dollar while much of ours, the 'victors', was crumbling.

But there was peace at last, and stability and hope. So it was not surprising that people feared change, wanted to conserve what they now had. Most people were conservative in that, lower case, sense. The older generation were wedded to the status quo as the limit of their ambitions: something to do with re-establishing the country and its culture in the image of pre-war Britain, perhaps.

But nothing remains the same, everything changes; and through the 50s there was an upswell beneath the surface, of opposition - of oppositeness to these archaic values and attitudes. As always it was led by The Left and The Young. Working class people were beginning to demand more of the cake, through their trade unions and their voice was articulated not only by Labour politicians but authors and playwrights who were sick of frivolous theatre and frothy dialogue enunciated by perfectly elocuted actresses, for middle and upper middle class audiences. In the plays and novels of John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and others, 'Angry Young Men' played out 'kitchen sink' dramas, grounded in gritty realism.

Unlike today, music was slow to reflect, still less reinforce, this cultural change. Our popular music diet hadn't really changed for 20 years. 'Standards', sung by 'crooners' was the staple fare. Bing Cosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, really more of a jazz artiste: Ella Fitzgerald who could rescue a murderous pun from a lyric and cover it in honey: in The Man I Love she sang "Maybe Toosday could be my good-noosday:'. (Note:  other days of the week are available); a host of wannabe duplicates dominated the airwaves, including our own Frankie Vaughan, Matt Monro, even Max Bygraves: every comic closed his act with a good croon, or more often a mediocre one.



Songs from the great musicals, Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, and  My Fair Lady completed the picture. As kids we liked them well enough, because we had no choice, there was nothing else - until West Side Story came along, the Romeo & Juliet story set in ethnic New York, which changed the game: there was a glimmer of hope, for something that the under 20s could identify with.  Now, please, give yourself a treat and watch the whole of this video clip from the film of the show. It's pure pleasure, a Trumpian nightmare as the immigrants bite back and tell it like it was/is, about immigrant life in America. Rita Moreno and George Shakiris both won Oscars for their performances.




Media music was almost entirely conventional. Pop records could only be heard on Pick of the Pops, (TOTP on TV) and some request programmes, and Radio Luxembourg, only to be visited under the bedclothes, on a new-fangled transistor radio. It crackled and faded but it played 100% pop music, only interrupted every 15 minutes by Horace Bachelor advertising his famous Infradraw method for winning the football pools, from his his house near Bristol. For those of a certain age, I ask: how do you spell Keynsham? Why, '"K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, that's Keynsham, Bristol". One night in November 1963 I tuned in to Fabulous 208, only to hear classical music, not the Beatles. Had the station been taken over? Was this the Day the Music Died?  No, it was the day that Lee Harvey Oswald and an accomplice on 'the grassy knoll' in Dallas, Texas, assassinated President Jack Kennedy with a volley of bullets from assault rifles.

There had always been a kind of alt-Music, called Jazz but neither form, Modern or Traditional enjoyed a huge following. In the mid-50's a weird hybrid emerged: skiffle A mixture of folk, jazz and a bit of a percussive beat, some accessible instruments like guitar and washboard and homemade string bass, and a small industry of DIY music sprang up - and was popular because it was rhythmic and different. Most of all, the older generation didn't like it very much therefore we did...


Lonnie Donegan

Skiffle groups sprang up all over the country, practising in garages, the tentative roots of 'Garage bands'. Hot on its heels came American Imperialism, in the form of Bill Haley and his Comets,  Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, plus endless one-hit wonders recording bubblegum music; and the rest is history:








And then came the Fab Four, the Scousers who conquered the entire world and made it the second British Empire, of music. Rebels then, they assimilated later, but led a revolution in popular music which still bears their imprint 50 years later.




Perhaps this should be part of a different post, but I think that I belong to the most privileged generation ever. Yes, we had to put up with undreamed-of austerity but we did not know anything better, then. And the other side of that coin is that, of necessity, we learned some values which were not only intrinsically good, but will serve us well in the future: how to live cheaply, within your means, not in debt, no credit cards, only able to spend what you had saved,  not surrounded by advertising and pressure to want, to consume; consuming little beyond food,  valuing home-grown, home-made food, which was not laced with huge quantities of sugar, additives and e-numbers; playing games and sports rather than gaming, outside not inside; improvising activities, not buying them in electronic form; not being obsessed with what other people had or what was modish (exceptions: Davy Crockett hats, hula hoops, and later, drainpipe jeans and 'winkle-picker' shoes, etc etc. I could go on). We hadn't heard of conservation or Greenness - we just did them.

(But our privilege goes much further than this: the best of the NHS, free primary, secondary and higher education education (both fees and maintenance grants) free Legal Aid, the pick of the Pension Pot, and not forgetting Free Love in the 1960s/70s, courtesy of the pill, and freedom of fear from HIV/AIDS, as yet unknown.)

In addition to all of this, we were perfectly in  position to surf the waves of the revolution in music which raced around the globe in the 60s. It was a flood tide which swept away our parents' music, relegating it for a long time to a kind of musical residential care home. Oh how we enjoyed it, not just the music, but the fact of its new dominance and ubiquity: it was everywhere and it was ours. It was shocking to the older generation, and how we revelled in their discomfiture.



When Dylan sang "The Times are a' Changin' it was a warning to the older generation and a positive encouragement to the youth. That younger generation is now old, but the song could be re-released to herald the  Trump/May era, with very little change of lyrics, just substituting pessimism for optimism. An anthem for the New Barbarism, The Trump Involuntary, an uptempo funereal dirge for democracy, everywhere in the chains of the media and their pet despots. Retrograde, regressive, repressive steps are the keynotes of the new times.

 

                                                         

This extract from FESS recalls the period where politics dawned in my consciousness, and like a time-lapse sunrise, rapidly rose and illuminated everything else. CND was arguably the first mass protest movement since the Suffragettes. It was also a cultural phenomenon which heralded social change, intergenerational conflict and a new politics of the street: direct action. The protest song was the soundtrack to this movement: pioneered earlier by Woody Guthrie in the States and taken up by his acolyte, Bob Dylan; it even nudged its way into the Charts from time to time. The UK equivalent of Dylan was Donovan, who was quite talented, but only ever looked like Dylan's shadow, his double-denim outfit suspiciously new. When they met for the first time, Donovan said "You don't know me, but...", and Dylan cut in with "Yeah, let's keep it that way", allegedly. I'm sure this is apocryphal. With protests against Trump breaking out all over the U.S. like an angry rash it seems right to re-visit the British branch of their roots.

CND

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a crusade against nuclear weapons which, since the detonation of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had grown in sophistication, destructive power and number to a point where, should both sides in a conflict manage to loose off their bombs and missiles before being destroyed themselves, the future of the species on this planet would be seriously threatened. CND was born in the late 50s a left-leaning coalition of Labour, Liberals, communists and other political factions, Quakers, Christians of all stripes, Pacifists, conscientious objectors, anti-war organisations, but most of all individuals with no allegiance to anything except their social conscience.

It was a noble organisation. It was composed of people who were selfless, who cared deeply about the issues, had a vision of unbelievably horrific death and destruction that could come about not just through the machinations of the Superpowers in the Cold War, but eventually through the self-aggrandising empire-building of minor dictators, despots and terrorists, if these weapons were allowed to proliferate. And always there would be the possibility of war by accident, some over-stressed military personnel who cracked and pressed the button, or another who read the shape of a flight of birds on a radar screen as a Russian missile headed for The Pentagon. Until weapons were mutually reduced and destroyed we would always be standing at the very edge of the top diving board with a leg tremor, and no water in the pool.    And so CND members were prepared to work, demonstrate, march, sit-down or commit other acts of civil disobedience, all the while being spat on by some of the public and vilified by the Mail/Express axis of the Press who depicted them as cowardly, unpatriotic communists who wanted to leave Great Britain defenceless in the face of supposed Communist aggression. Of course, we have to allow that this was scarcely more than a decade after World War 2. The rhetoric of patriotism and our magnificent defence of our little-but-great country still played to large audiences. And it also has to be acknowledged that our opposition to the mutual deterrence theory was an article of faith but not provable, whereas another 50 years without nuclear war gives the balance of power argument more weight.

The Cuba Crisis in 1962 argued for both sides: yes, we were arguably hours away from a nuclear holocaust as the Russian ships approached Cuba; no, there wasn’t a nuclear conflict because as the crunch approached, neither side wanted it, and Krushchev, to his eternal credit, backed down. I do remember the atmosphere in the country in those few days as the countdown progressed and some people laid in stocks of canned food, and looked for guidance as to how they might protect themselves and their families.

They would have been very comforted if they consulted the Government/Civil Defence publication on the subject.  Apparently looking directly at the nuclear blast was not a good idea (unless you had a ready-trained guide dog, and could shield their eyes). Getting under the kitchen table was a good idea (crikey, the speed of technological innovation since WW2). Sticking brown paper to all window panes would be very helpful, though possibly logistically problematic within the 4 minutes between official warning signals and the nuclear fission (warning sounds included sirens in a few places, the banging of dust bin lids on street corners, and the ringing of church bells (nothing too mournful, I hope).

Not everyone would have this busy, busy time waiting for immediate extinction or a lingering death from their wounds, or radiation poisoning without nursing, medicines, dressings, food or water. No, some people, perhaps by virtue of their superior status as, say, The Chief Fire Office of Berkshire, rather than helping to organise fire-fighting, would be chauffeured off to an RSG, or Regional Seat of Government.   This emerged in 1963 when the so-called Spies for Peace, investigated a strange, unguarded, subterranean structure which turned out to be a bomb-proof fallout shelter (one of many across the country), fully equipped to accommodate a large number of local dignitaries indefinitely. This did not include healthy young men and women who might start to regenerate the decimated society.

A little while after the 1963 CND Aldermaston march there were local elections. Members of Southgate CND were giving out leaflets describing the RSG system near a polling station. It wasn’t a local issue, but then nuclear weapons have the ability to become local to everyone, everywhere. Three police cars dramatically screamed to a halt (they do love that, don’t they, especially when they can use the sirens and the blue lights). We were bundled into them and then locked in the cells under the police station.  Two hours later we were released without charge. I sauntered home not that keen to start the telling-off for being late on a school night. I’d forgotten my key and my sister let me in.  “Oh boy, are you in for it this time”.

My mother and sister had been out. My father had been convalescing from his second heart attack, had answered the door, only to be thrust aside by 3 uniformed and two plain clothes ‘policemen’ who turned out to be Special Branch, on the scent of the Spies for Peace. They turned over every room in the house like a manic burglar, and all the while the whole road was locked down (again). I really did feel very sorry for my father having to deal with this on his own, and while still rather fragile.

On the other hand, it’s an ill wind: locked up in police cells, house searched by Special Branch, my radical cred was going to go off the scale!  So glad I joined CND and not Hazelwood Tennis Club.

PS The Special Branch never found anything: it was all in the garden shed under a seed tray. Haha.


Anti-nuclear/Vietnam March,  Oxford St, 1965:                 

                            How did I get to march with the celebs? Sharp elbows and chutzpah!

 

         


My dear friend Trudy Robins died on Friday night. It had come to be expected, but not then, not soon. We had planned a trip to the zoo only a few  weeks ago. There was plenty of time to say our goodbyes, let's not be mournful before we have to, we said. Wrong, so we never said them, no closure. 

I met Trudy in 1993 in her antiques and bric-a-brac market in Southgate. I went in, saw her serving a dithering customer and she gave me a big wink, and her eyes almost disappeared upwards: she  mouthed something: it might have been "silly old fool" or possibly worse. 

When we finally spoke, about 2.5 cigarettes later, she asked me what my work was. I had just been made a Professor and gave her one of the cards the University had printed for us. "Oh, you've got an -ology" she said. Another big wink. It was topical, because of Maureen Lipman's current BT ad, – quick, sharp and perfectly appropriate. That was Trudy's sense of humour, at its best. I knew instantly that we would be friends, but never guessed how close we would become. 

We had a platonic relationship, but always a demonstrative, affectionate one: if either of us said, for any reason "Hey, I need a cuddle" the other obliged without hesitation, welcoming the contact. I will miss that, amongst many other things: her warmth, her understanding of when someone needed to talk or didn't want to go there, her openness with me, her great sense of humour which always found my funny-bone. We talked a lot, frequently, but equally we could be silent together: for me a sign of true, deep affection and mutual respect. She was a great talker, and an even better listener: she listened to you, thought about it, and then gave something back. Giving was her thing: 'endlessly generous' would be a good epitaph for Trudy. If there were Nobel Prizes for these things, her mantelpiece would be cluttered. And she was a noble person.

We had our differences, politically.  I think she was a bit of a maverick, though not exactly a 'don't know':  once I quoted Spike Milligan to her "One of these days the don't knows will get into power, and then what will we do?".  She replied "I don't know". Recently we had a interesting discussion as to whether Donald Trump. should be banned, orchestrated (like me, she was nostalgic for the old, well-worn gags).  

Whatever her politics were, her values were unimpeachable: family, love and loyalty to friends, doing as she would be done by, unfailing good humour and the ability to turn tragedy into comedy, if it was at her own expense. Trude, I will miss you badly, as I do already, but we had great times and nothing can change that: you have left everyone an indelible legacy: that wicked smile, the wink and the XXXL heart.          David.

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PS  For the sake of balance, the only thing I can really say against her is that she liked Barry Manilow........
So this one is for you Trudy, an audience of one. (I have no idea which one would be your favourite: for me it's a bit like choosing whether to be run over by a bus or a car) but I'll try and find an appropriate one. This works: