Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  The audience in Hove town hall resembled an almost ideological parade of domesticity: babies had tantrums; toddlers toddled, primary-schoolers kicked balls around the back with New Labour dads.

  Blunkett eschewed altogether the much-vaunted masochism strategy in favour of unapologetic balls-of-brass: ‘You know why they’re attacking Tony Blair?’ No, go on, tell us. ‘Because Tony Blair is the greatest asset the Labour party has.’ He even told a story against himself involving blindness and flirting, which somehow managed to make him endearing.

  The comedian, Jo Brand, warming up for Blair, was rather more equivocal. She gave him just one stick-on star for achievement, but two for effort. She would vote Labour, she conceded, but there were some, well, a lot of really, things she wasn’t too keen on – the small matter of a dodgy war, for instance. But, you know, you wouldn’t want Michael Howard, would you?

  Stateside, this less-than-ringing endorsement would be a cue for loud music and dimming of stage lights, while Brand was swiftly escorted from the podium and conveyed to a long and richly deserved vacation. Instead we got, by way of reminding us that someone in this outfit (Darth Campbell?) could play electoral hardball: a video evoking the Dark Side of the Tory leader; a brilliantly mixed little cocktail of malice (take one part Poll Tax and one part record unemployment, top with ice and shake) that could have had the campaign heavies in New York and Washington beaming with satisfaction that at last the Limeys have learned something about negative campaigning.

  But what would they have made of the Prime Minister, next up, irradiated with the fuchsia glow, in full The Passion of the Tony, go-on-give-it-to-me mode. Look, he understands the three Disses: as in -enchantment, -agreement and -illusion. But really, come on, that’s real life, not just politics. And there’s so much to be proud of. The faithful agreed. Two rather small ‘If you value it, vote for it’ banners waved back in puppyish salutation.

  But whatever elixir had been downed that night did the trick. By the Monday-morning press conference at, yes, a primary school, Blair was back in punchy, shoot-from-the-hip form, as he did what he likes doing best, pouring ridicule on the Tories’ inability to do the sums; Howard’s and Oliver Letwin’s fitness to be CEOs of Britannia, Inc. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor then went into their alto and tenor sax riffs, the bright and the baggy, Blair at his most engaging, the Chancellor at his most solidly Gladstonian. As Brown upbraided the Tories for being insufficiently faithful to Margaret Thatcher’s fiscal prudence, the map of Cuba on the classroom wall with its slogan of ‘Socialismo o Muerte’ drawn in the Caribbean seemed to turn redder by the minute. Or perhaps I just imagined it.

  Then followed questions from the press, the only feature of which that might have been recognisable to American reporters would have been the well-practised habit of leaders to disarm questioners by remembering their first names. In the White House press room (a calculatedly dismal prefab in the grounds) it might have the effect of defanging the journalists with mock camaraderie; but not in Wimbledon at nine in the morning. Even in the dress code of the press conference – jackets and ties for both party leaders (who’d suited up from the calculated, open-necked informality of the walkabouts) – there was the unspoken recognition of the ritualised, gladiatorial nature of the exchange. ‘Right, James (or Brendan or Andrew).’ ‘Yes, well, going on about the danger of letting the Tories in if you vote Lib-Dem, isn’t that the wife-beater sneering, “You’ll stay, you’ve got nowhere else to go”?’ To this kind of question, it’s safe to say, the famous Dubya lightness would not have responded well. Instead: the telltale dilation of nostrils, the giveaway smirk behind which plans for No Future Admission would already be being finalised. Instead, both Brown and Blair laughed and it was not at all the laugh of someone about to be sick.

  The ability to take this kind of take-no-prisoners irreverence on the chin; indeed, to expect it, is breathtaking to visiting reporters from the US, where oppositional politics (such as it is) is mired in a tar-pool of tepid glutinous reverence, where Democratic fury has been frightened into Milquetoast bleating by pre-emptive Republican accusations of ‘divisiveness’. If John Humphrys is thinking of a late career move across the pond, he should forget it.

  But then again, what must American observers make of the fact that it’s Blair and Brown who are given to evoking the New Deal (albeit vintage 1997, not 1932) rather than Democrats who, with Bush prosecuting a deeply unpopular ‘reform’ (gutting) of social security, ought to be rallying to defend what little is left of it with their last breath? The spectacle of all three parties (for Howard, pledged to abolish student fees, would be identified as well to the American left-of-centre) campaigning on their own particular approaches to fine-tuning the welfare state is enough to fill the neutered American opposition with envious despair. They look at a government standing on a record of economic success, committed to defend public services – the mere mention of which, in the US, would likely trigger the opening of a File in the Department of Homeland Security – and, even with the long trail of muck leading from dubious intelligence reports and suspiciously altered legal advice about Iraq, they listen to the ferocity of Blairophobia and scratch their heads. (At which point perhaps they should remember LBJ for whom no amount of virtue prosecuting the great society exonerated the sins of Vietnam.) But if Blair wakes one morning and feels one prick of the pincushion too many, he might well consider a career move across the pond where he’d be a shoo-in for the next governor of New York. We’re already assuming Mayor Clinton. The dynamic duo, then, reborn on the Hudson! Can’t wait.

  Most wondrous of all, perhaps, is the conspicuous absence in British hustings rhetoric of the one campaign helper without whose assistance no American candidate can possibly hope to prevail, namely God. But then the election is being held in a country where, unlike the US, it is assumed that Darwinian evolution is actually incontestable scientific fact, rather than just a wild hunch that has to compete with Creationism for space in textbooks and lessons. The G word finally got uttered in the Lib-Dems’ last press conference before the election. ‘So, Charles, do you think you’ll be making another run as leader in 2009?’ ‘God – and my colleagues and constituents – willing,’ Kennedy cheerfully replied, invoking the deity with no more theological conviction than if someone had sneezed and he’d said, ‘God bless you.’ And he would, wouldn’t he? On parade at the press conference were all the virtues of his party and leadership: disarming honesty, cornflake-crisp optimism; milk-of-human-kindness concern for, inter alia, pensioners, students, the landscape of Britain and doubtless the Scotties and red deer that roam it.

  Was I – after only a few days impersonating a political reporter – becoming, perish the thought, a tad cynical? Or was Kennedy’s niceness somehow worrying? Lust for power? Not a sniff. Killer instinct? I don’t think so. Even an attempt to congratulate him on the decapitation strategy provoked a denial that he’d ever thought of any term so brutal. If he doesn’t want to be confused with Robespierre, perhaps Kennedy ought to spend a little time with Machiavelli. At the press conference, I asked whether he was happy to go into the election positioned as the true centre-left party. He smiled and said well, yes, the Lib-Dems were indeed progressive. Progressive as in heirs to the great reforming post-war Labour government and the bitterly unrealised dreams of the Wilson years? Well, yes, he acknowledged, apparently quite happy to slip into history tutorial mode, but I should remember that those achievements were built on the foundation of the Liberal-party reforms of the people’s budget, old-age pensions, Lloyd-George/Churchill years before the First World War. Back to the future then with the Lib-Dems!

  It was fabulous, this sit-down chinwag as if we were both sipping pints. And perhaps that’s what Kennedy likes doing in his crofter fastness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have endorsed this pastoral version of politics, for he warned that while popular democracy was the only right and just political system, it could only prosper in republics of 25,000 or fewer – the size of eight
eenth-century Geneva. However low the turnout today, it will be rather more than that. But coming from America where the manipulation of the millions presupposes the priority of commodity marketing, massive up-front investment, saturation advertising, the reduction of politics to the soundbite and the photo-op, a British election looks rather closer to Rousseau’s ideal. In these few days I’ve heard colleagues say they’ve never seen an election more remote from the people, to which I can only reply: try coming to Baltimore or Minneapolis.

  There was, though, at least one big American-pie mob scene to sample: Howard’s monster rally out in Docklands. There, I met America’s most prolific and famous blogger, Markos Moulitsas, who has never seen British politics at first hand before. He marvelled at the absence from the proceedings, not just of the big campaigner in the sky, but also of flags, bands, the whole pumped-up operation of patriotic euphoria and snake-oil pitches, without which the business of American politics is just so much grey newsprint and paid-for televenom.

  Not that this event was low-key. Since Ashford, the SBL had had a slight but telling makeover. The shirt-cuffs now were definitely open; the shirt itself was pink; the tie had been banished. He was ACTION MAN with the ACTION PLAN! He was ready to be ACCOUNTABLE, and to prove it he announced a calendar of achievements, designed with wonderfully meaningless specificity. On 6 June 2006, mark my words and your diaries, the British Border Patrol WILL start patrolling! (What’s wrong with 5 June?)

  But this heady vision of a new Britain got the crowd on its feet, and, yes, they were cheering. For the new Britain turned out, in fact, to be the old Britain: cricket and courtesy, picnics and politeness, yob-free, swabs aplenty, and to prove it, as the SBL unburdened himself once more of a profession of love of country, there began the low rumble of unmistakably British Music. He ended unequivocally. The backroom boys had done their job. There will, after all, be a brighter tomorrow, starting Friday. The cheers got as riotous as English cheers can get. Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ powered up and Howard drank in the glory, rode the crescendo all the way to the exit, for one sovereign moment, elated, omnipotent and wholly unconditional.

  Virtual Annihilation: Anti-Semitism

  on the Web

  From Ron Rosenbaum, Those Who Forget the Past: The

  Question of Anti-Semitism, 2004

  How was your Mother’s Day this year? Mine didn’t go so well. Call mother. What’s up? 386 headstones is what’s up, she says: Plashet Cemetery, East Ham, yesterday. Perpetrators arrested. A shock, I say. I’m not shocked any more, she says. And she’s right.

  Why should we be surprised that the ancient paranoia – or, rather, the proper Jewish anxiety about anti-Semitism – should have survived both the reasonings of modernity and the testimony of history? This is, after all, a time (and a country) where, or so opinion polls tell us, more people than not reject the scientific validity of the theory of evolution. (In some quarters, Darwinism is regarded, along with secular humanism, as another conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.) But then America is not the only country in which children are made precociously knowing, while adults are made credulous. It was a French book, after all, that recently became a best-seller by asserting that the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon never happened and that photographs which suggested it happened had been digitally doctored by the CIA. Where once it was naively supposed that ‘images never lie’, the sovereign assumption of the digital age is that they never tell the truth. Truth morphs; Elvis is alive; there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

  The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page in which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to, say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.

  It is only in America that we imagine history as a series of cultural supercessions, each one comprehensively victorious in the totality of its effacements. Thus, in this processional view of the past, Native American society is supposed to have been obliterated by a colonialism which in turn yields to individualist and capitalist democracy. Except, of course, that it doesn’t, not entirely; and much time is spent, and blood oft times spilled, tidying up the inconvenient anachronisms. In Europe, on the other hand, especially at the end of the last century, so rigidly serial an approach to cultural alteration has been suspected to be not much more than textbook convenience.

  In Europe, ghosts have an impolite way of muscling their way into times and places where they are unexpected – which is why, for example, the cultural emblem of the first great industrial society in the world, Victorian Britain, imprinted on railway-station design and museums of arts, crafts and science, was the medieval pointed arch. It was, to be sure, an emblem of resistance as much as appreciation. So the pointiest of the champions of Christian Perpendicular England – Thomas Carlyle – unsurprisingly also turns out to be the fiercest in his hatred of (his words) Niggers and Jews. The great and the good of Victorian Britain could take both the friends and the enemies of the machine age in its stride. So the age that fetishised rootedness, while at the same time making fortunes by displacing mass populations, made the wilfully deracinated, the juif errant, the special target of its disingenuousness. Bonjour, M. Melmotte. Hello, Henry Ford.

  To grow up British and Jewish is, by definition, not to be especially confounded at the obstinacy of atavisms refusing to lie down in the tomb of their redundancy. The protean persistence of anti-Semitism came home to me early. I was just seven, I think, when I first saw the writing on the wall. The wall in question was one of those crumbling red-brick affairs blocking off a view of the tracks on the Fenchurch Street line connecting London with the Essex villages lining the north bank of the Thames estuary. They were not quite suburban, though Jewish businessmen like my father had moved there out of the burnt-out wreckage of the city and the East End where they still kept warehouses and offices. They were part fishing villages, part seaside towns, part dormitory cottages and mansions; yellow broom in the spring, blowsy cabbage roses in the summer; the smell of the unloading shrimp boats and the laden winkle carts dangerously, excitingly treif drifting over the tide. But every morning those Jewish businessmen would take the Fenchurch Street train, and one morning my father took me as far as the station. And there on that wall, in white letters, faint and fugitive, but, since the day was cloudy (as they often are in the Estuary), glaring in the grey morning light, two cryptic letters: ‘PJ’.

  Nothing more; no ‘PJ loves ST’; just the letters alone. So of course I asked my father about their meaning, and I remember him reddening briefly and telling me it was just some old khazarei – to forget about it, it didn’t matter any more. This, of course, made me determined to decode the crypt, and it was, I think, my cheder teacher Mrs Marks, the same teacher who got me to dress up in miniature tuxedo as Mr Shabba (the eight-year-old bride was Mrs Balabooster), who looked me in the eye and told me that it stood for ‘Perish Judah’; and that it was a relic of some bad old days in the 1930s when the fascists and Arnold Leese’s Britons had marched not just in Stepney and Whitechapel and Mile End, but right down to the end of the line, to where the Jews had dared penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of Englishness: pebble-dashed, herbaceous bordered, tea-pouring Westcliff and Leigh on Sea.

  ‘PJ’ scared the hell out of me not because it smelled faintly of Zyklon B (I’m not sure I knew much about that in 1952, despite the missing relatives on my mother’s side), but because my generation, born in the last years of the war, would only get their crash course on the Holocaust a little later in the London shul library, where Lord Russell of Liverpool’s Scourge of the Swastika, with i
ts obscenely unsparing photography of bulldozed naked bodies, opened and shut our eyes. But I had read Ivanhoe, indeed I had seen Elizabeth Taylor as Rebecca, and so the archaic, declamatory quality of the graffito spoke to me of the massacres at York, the canonisation of little St Hugh of Lincoln, Richard I’s coronation slaughter in London in 1199. The persistence of the uglier strain of medieval paranoia in my island culture seemed, while not exactly fish and chips, not something wholly alien from British tradition, notwithstanding Disraeli, Daniel Deronda, and the Victorian high hats and morning coats that for some reason marked the official Shabba morning dress of the notables of our synagogue. Some of the same writers I most enthusiastically read as a child – Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, John Buchan, all of them armoured warriors for holy tradition – turned out a bit later, on closer inspection, to be also the most relentless perpetuators of anti-Semitic demonologies.

  Still, there was a moment of innocence. It came in 1951, in the cheerfully technocratic Festival of Britain, which seemed to announce an exorcism of barbarian phantoms. Never mind that it coincided with the first panicky revival of racist fascism in Britain, mobilised against Caribbean immigration. We were told that technology – and especially new kinds of communications technology – would diffuse knowledge, and knowledge would chase away superstition, destitution and disease. It would fall to our generation, the most confidently booming of the Baby Boomers, to make good on the promises of the Enlightenment – of Voltaire, Franklin and above all Condorcet. Modernism’s start in the first half of the twentieth century had somehow fallen foul of red-fanged tribalism, but we were the children of techne, of the dream machines of the philosophes. I remember one of my history teachers, who, in fact, bore a startling resemblance to Voltaire, saying to our class of thirteen-year-olds, ‘Well, lads, we don’t know what the rest of the twentieth century has in store, but I guarantee that two of the old legacies are finally done for – revealed religion and ethnic nationalism.’ So much for history’s predictive power.