Battersea Power Station from Pimlico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
One morning last week I headed out to the local newsagents in what had rapidly become an overexcitable land. The sun was warm on my face. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The local butcher shop was being gutted for refurbishment. The nearby Turkish food store was not quite open yet. The optician was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, a stranger in shorts and t-shirt sat alone outside the local cafe drinking coffee. He pointed at his skull, tapping it aggressively, saying he could not think straight. We shook hands and I continued walking.
In the newsagents, the proprietor sat on a raised stool surveying all who entered, his loud electronic bell above the door louder than usual. Our children went to the same local primary school and I knew it was a tense time for him and his family. Like many, he was upset. A Brit like me, he was from a Muslim background. He feared most of all that if politicians did not sort the violence out very soon, more and more people would be taking things into their own hands. ‘Which would be a disaster,’ he said. There was no mention of the divisive Bond villain running a social media company across the pond.
The following day I was walking in another part of the city when a man came flying through the air. This was from an alcohol store to my left. He landed with a thud on the pavement right in front of me. The deliverer of the punch, the store owner, appeared with his fist still presented. The receiver of the punch, a possible plunderer, struggled to find his feet. This was just as other store owners suddenly appeared—as if a button had been pressed—offering physical as well as moral back-up, before dragging the man back inside the store. Was this the type of self-policing the newsagent had in mind?
I had my hair cut last week. No politics, warned the barber, who had not cut my hair before. To be fair to myself, I had not even mentioned politics. Then he proceeded to talk about a gig he attended on the Kent coast. The band were too political, he complained. Anti-Royalist. No politics, I reminded him with a smile. I asked about the rival Turkish barbers across the road. I don’t care, he said. About what, I said. Them, he said. They seemed very friendly to me, I said. I was determined to find something he liked. Electronic music, he finally said. On that note, I took him to be more of a Yazoo fan than Neu! or Tangerine Dream.
Most people in the capital were gearing up for trouble that night. Mysteriously, the number of predicted hotspots across the country went from 30 to 100 in minutes. Family members’ routes across London were changed. In the end, thousands amassed for various anti-racism demonstrations at the same time as guarding vulnerable addresses. Tightly wound violins had relaxed their strings. Fists had been uncoiled. Baseball bats were returned to cupboards. ‘Nans Against Nazis,’ declared one placard. Though the tide had indeed appeared to turn, one Labour councilor was arrested for telling protesters that fascists needed their throats cut.
The last time I felt such unease in London I visited New York for two weeks and stayed five years. I was remembering how in Manhattan I would rarely examine the sky—not like I did over a dozen years earlier as a boy by the sea. There is a bench close to where I live here in London. Its skies above the capital are vast and eventful. We had one small chapter of rain last week during which they began to show off. It was like the only movie in town. They were doing all sorts of things I had not seen them do before. At one point in the distance, it looked as though an oil painter, having already rendered everything in perfect detail, suddenly lost it, becoming impetuous, behaving like a child, scratching a dirty great big dry brush through it all.
Strangely, I kept stumbling upon F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes last week—the last person I expected to see during a period of so much violence. He still had that melancholic, curiously charitable, vibe about him. Jonathan Rauch in one essay reminded everyone of Fitzgerald’s famous line about how only a first-rate intelligence can function while holding two opposed ideas at the same time. This seemed apt somehow when watching a country see everything in such absolutist terms. Or maybe James Baldwin would have been better: ‘It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.’
There are a lot of grey skies in the Danish film The Promised Land (Danish title: Bastarden) in which the central character Ludwig Kahlen is played so effortlessly by Mads Mikkelsen. It is set in eighteenth century Jutland on largely ungiving moorland not dissimilar to where my Danish family on my father’s side struggled for generations to grow crops before eventually becoming politicians. There is a key moment when Mikkelsen’s character is suddenly confronted with a member of the landed gentry who really is the personification of all evil. Everything in the tale is so suddenly simplified at this moment and the film becomes a simple battle between good and evil. How much happier people seem with something to hate.
I notice the garbage bins in this part of London remain unemptied. Even the foxes have grown bored of them. Normally they pile straight into them but with everyone tightening their belt, maybe there is less food waste available. I dip on foot into the Clockwork Orange underpass and resurface on the other side like a swimmer in a pool. The traffic to my right is going great guns but people’s expressions are still numb. At least the local library has sets of young people sat by the windows exploring the piles of books in front of them.
In the post office the usual woman in the elegant hijab is absent but another woman in a long trailing purple shawl stands at the till. We greet each other in that way that people do at the moment—by first establishing they come in peace. Even after the recent peaceful gatherings, people in London remain on guard. The sight of citizens trying to burn migrants out of hotels is now scratched into most people’s psyches. Will it be as Dickens described a nearby Greenwich festival by calling it ‘three day’s fever, which cools the blood for six months afterwards’?
Or will it be like Graham Peebles wrote in CounterPunch last week when he said ‘the Labour government needs to address the frustrations and ingrained social issues that these poisonous groups have exploited, and demonstrate, as it has pledged to do, that politics can actually be a force for good’?
I must admit, it was not until I watched a documentary at the weekend about the gassing of Kurds in Halabja that I found true perspective. We have to assume we won’t be stooping to that.
Peter Bach lives in London.
