Winter Solstice
Welcome to the shortest day of the year
The heart of the long, dark winter of the soul
When you don’t feel whole,
When the bowl is empty and the bole is bare
And a bear roars up at the stars somewhere
In deepest memories
That arc through the blood
Reigniting fear
As the year burns out and the world spins on
And the purpose of light is forgotten in the night.
Amanda Kendal 21 December 2021
Photo: DreamyPixel
It has already upset Deborah Ross, who writes in Tory fan mag, The Spectator, that: “The original brought together Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics, RIP), Jerome Robbins (choreography), Ernest Lehman (screenplay) and Robert Wise (director), while this has Spielberg and a new screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner. (Look! Another Jewish conspiracy!)”
What? WHAT? REALLY? Okay, we’ll come back to this. Because like me, now you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
After opening with asking why anyone would want to “remake” it, she grudgingly acknowledges that this film is “more authentic” than its 1961 predecessor. That’s in part the casting she’s referring to, where the Latino characters are actually played by Latino actors – and not with darkened skin to better match the much darker faces of the white cast members playing Puerto Ricans and heavily made up.
Perhaps it’s also that Kushner’s new book makes much clearer the racism at the core of the story, the grinding poverty and the way that these communities are being pushed out to make way for gleaming new developments for the well-to-do.
The presence of Rita Moreno in the new film – she won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Anita in the first film (and could be up for the same gong in the spring) – as repurposed character, Valentina, is damned patronisingly as “neat”.
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| Valentina |
But, as she concludes her opening paragraph, Ms Ross feels that, “in being more so it is also peculiarly less so. Plus there is an elephant in the room. Two, actually”.
This is when she goes on to point readers to the ethnicity of the creative team/s, with the implication that that is one of the aforementioned elephants.
I’m not linking to the review – if you want to verify this, you can find it yourself, though I have the screengrabs.
“Apologies for always going back to the original ...” she notes further on in the review. But she didn’t, given that “the original” was the Broadway show and not the Robert Wise film.
Which was a missed opportunity, really, because it would have given her the chance to point out that Arthur Laurents, who wrote the original book for the original stage show, was Jewish too. And it’s a wonder too that she didn’t bother to note that he – and the majority of those mentioned above – were gay or bisexual.
One can argue that the fact of being Jewish – and gay or bisexual – actually is relevant in that it can provide the artists in question with an understanding of being an ‘outsider’ – of being ‘othered’ and even reviled; an comprehension that is clear on a number of levels in this show/film.
And nor was West Side Story the first musical that had social themes to it. Showboat, which premiered in 1927, highlighted racism too. It was created by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, from Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. All the creative talents mentioned in this paragraph were also Jewish.
Hammerstein went on to work with Richard Rogers (Jewish), creating, among other works, South Pacific (1949), which also had themes about racism. As did The King and I (1944), by the same duo.
This is a mere skate over the subjects. But it is worth noting that, in Aspects of Wagner (1968), Bryan Magee notes of the composer’s antisemitism, that he had recognised a “Jewish renaissance” that happened a while after the ghettos had opened. And the creative arts were one area where ‘outsiders’ were freer to get on.
One could perhaps similarly say we’re seeing an LGBT+ renaissance now, for comparable reasons and particularly in the creative industries. Or think of how some sports have given black people opportunities where other vocations might still be more closed (and then there’s the inherent racism in seeing black athletes as being uniformally suitable for strength and power events)
In Spielberg and Kushner’s West Side Story, the ‘ghetto’ is the slums; the Puerto Ricans are working their way up and out of it, while the white (mostly Polish) gang members are those left behind when the more ambitious members of their parents’ generation moved up and out.
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| America, with Maria and Bernardo |
But back to (apologies) Ms Ross. “I suppose you could say that, whatever else, Spielberg has redefined West Side Story for a new generation, but the older generation? We’re allowed to be a bit grumpy about it,” she intones.
In the interest of clarity, she is apparently 49. I, on the other hand, turned 59 the day I saw the film at the weekend, so I think that I can fairly say that she’s spouting sphericals when she invokes the “older generation”.
Reading further (I did it so that you don’t have to) it seems that actually, her “elephants” are the two leads, Rachel Zegler as Maria and Ansel Elgort as Tony, who she doesn’t think are really up to it. Now, it’s absolutely fine to think that, and to write it in a review – but she should have linked it to the “elephants” comment to make clear that’s what she meant.
Further, according to the Cambridge Dictionary: “If you say there is an elephant in the room, you mean that there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about.”
Given that a number of critics have already queried the performances by the central pair – here is ‘lefty’ critic Mark Kermode casting doubt on the quality of Elgort’s performance in discussion with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5, so pretty mainstream as just a single example, and uploaded here the day before Ms Ross’s review went live online – it’s difficult to conclude that she’s somehow the only one who wants to mention it.
Let’s be generous and assume that this is all just sloppy writing and the Speccie doesn’t employ any actual sub editors to tidy up the dross. I can only see four other explanations, otherwise. Perhaps the real ‘elephant in the room’ is that:
• it’s intended as a dig at some sort of cohort of people who shout about ‘Jewish conspiracies’ while still loving musicals, perhaps without knowing that many of the creatives behind them are (whisper it) Jewish;
• it’s intended as a dig at ‘lefty-liberal types, who like this sort of thing, with its lefty-liberal ethos, even though they probably all hate Israel – and therefore, all Jewish people – except when liking works by lefty-liberal Jews’. Which intended meaning would be antisemitic itself anyway;
• it really is a “Jewish conspiracy”, because it wouldn’t have been made otherwise;
• it’s a straightforward, antisemitic dog whistle.
Now, I’m possibly overthinking this, but I’ve never seen anything like it in a review before. It shouldn’t be ignored.
A last little point of pedantry: “You will thrill as the overture strikes up,” she trills. Except you won’t. Because there is no overture. There is a prologue. Facts, eh?
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| Anybodys, from 1961 (left) and 2021 (right) |
But it’s not just in the UK. On the other side of The Pond, one US Twitter user, @LethalityJane, shared two tweets from users (IDs blanked out), with some facts to skewer them.
The first tweet responded to had claimed: “I will never understand Steven Spielberg’s obsession with wanting to remake West Side Story – a legit American classic – into some woke bullshit. As if the original could ever be improved on. I hope it’s a massive failure.”
Another tweet from someone else said: “As I recall West side [sic] Story never had a trans character. One more bow to the woke class not going to see it” [sic].
In the interests of showing that gammons are not the brightest, it’s a joy to report that, as Lethality Jane points out, the first film had a character called Anybodys (and think about that name), played by Susan Oakes, a ‘tomboy’ who wanted to run with the Jets.
Discussing this with The Other Half, he observed that the whole ‘tomboy’ thing is a trope where such incorrect behaviour will be corrected once the girl meets a real man and is ...
Well, indeed – straight romance as a form of conversion therapy.
There’s even a 1965 UK musical that works on this precise premise – Charlie Girl – which I saw with my parents and sister in a 1986 revival, when my father got very enthusiastic over Cyd Charisse’s legs.
The new film doesn’t say the word ‘trans’, but it doesn’t need to because more people today are more aware of what a ‘tomboy’ could really mean, which has come with a concomitant development and broadening of language usage – even for gammons.
A further note of interest is that Anybodys is based on Balthasar in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet(that play being part of the inspiration for West Side Story), who is a servant of and informant for Romeo. Now there was a writer who liked to play with gender ...
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| Maria and Tony |
As to the film itself – it’s outstanding. Not just because Kushner’s new book does add the grit and clarity to the themes that would have been harder to make so clear in the original Broadway (and Hollywood) versions. The music and lyrics of Bernstein and Sondheim shine through powerfully and the choreography from Justin Peck, which nods toward Robbins’s work, is excellent.
Of the cast, I initially had doubts about Elgort’s Tony, but once he hit the first real big note on Maria, my eyes pricked and I had goosebumps everywhere. Zegler makes an angelically pretty Maria, but a feisty one too. And there’s a sense here of the character having much more agency than previously.
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| Riff |
Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo (leader of the Sharks) and Mike Faist as Riff (leader of the Jets), give really top-notch performances, while Ezra Menas combines grit and vulnerability as Anybodys.
But if you don’t well up when Rita Moreno sings Somewhere, there’s probably little hope for you.
The camerawork is stunning – the haunting opening simply incredible. The whole is a thing of brooding danger and energy; at once both dark and a blaze of light. It’s been said by some to be Spielberg’s best work in two decades – personally, I think it’s one of the finest things he’s ever achieved throughout his entire career.
And if it upsets a few gammons? Well, that’s the chocolate glaze on top of the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.
Penguin
When I started to voluntarily read poetry in the very late 1980s, it was via the Mersey Sound poets I was pointed toward and whose work I discovered I loved. Poetry, before then, had been the absolute worst pat of my English literature studies at school!
Lord love a duck – I ended up, for my sin of not understanding how to revise properly – having to study Keats three times! Even now, I can only bear part of that poet's Sonnet to Autumn – and that is all of his work that I can stand!
Before our actual O’ level studies began at my (state) girls’ grammar school in Manchester, we had briefly been introduced to something or other by Seamus Heaney, and that had piqued my interest at least a little, but I had no opportunity to follow it through.
I wrote a couple of quite lengthy poems in my late teens, including one that was a Lancashire spoof of Romeo and Juliet ... “Archibald, Archibald, wherefore art thou, Archibald” ... which might say something. Juvenilia, eh?
But while I dabbled over the subsequent decades – dabbled in terms of reading verse, not in terms of writing it – that was exclusively in terms of occasional forays into the world of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, whether individually or collectively as the mainstays of the Liverpool poets.
Then, right at the start of the first UK lockdown, I suddenly took up my computer again and started poeting. Out of the blue, it became a way to express myself – about lockdown and the pandemic itself, and aboutr some pretty big Life Events that had occurred in the few years immediately beforehand. I didn't expect it or look for it, but that was what happened.
This might seem like a long sell, but I’m penning (keyboarding?) a blog, not writing a newspaper piece, so ... bear with, bear with. Or if you don't want to, then fine – farewell.
But in early lockdown No1, I started consuming poetry in previously unknown amounts – what does a poetry overdose look like?
Anyway, when Penguin’s new edition of Liverpool poet Roger McGough’s verse, Safety in Numbers, was advertised for pre-order, I leapt to do just that.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a collective experience on a rare scale. McGough himself is 84 (looking good on it, though, judging by his social media avatar ... I can only hope for similar for myself).
But if you imagine that the age thing is irrelevant, it’s not. Divided into age – and healthy/unhealthy – older people have been massively affected by this virus. Yet as this collection illustrates ... ‘old people’ are not ‘dead or nearly dead’ people.
And what is age anyway?
It’s a brilliant collection. McGough creates remarkably easy verse to read, but don’t assume that that means it’s either easy or sloppy intellectually speaking. It’s neither. This is brilliant challenge for all of us in these harrowing times.
It borrows from some of his previous poems, twisting them to make new points. It deals with the sense of one’s own impending mortality – not least in the wonderful Pascal’s wager-like In My Corner.
Advice on Writing a Poem suggests don’t! Don’t write any poetry ... but then cites some of those who have ignored such advice, up to and including Amanda Gorman. He’s bang up to date and still self-deprecatory in the best possible way – and don't treat him as someone who has the final word.
There are threads running through the collection about ageing ... about memory and the dread fear of memory loss (see Norse mythology and Odin – this is old stuff), which he tackles apparently lightly, yet with great heft. He touches on climate change and the despair at politicians globally doing little.
There’s the fear of the pandemic – and the unspoken, for many of us – question of whether we will ever see ‘normal’ again and even, what was ‘normal’ in the first place?
Throughout, there is a rhythm that makes this a sublimely easy collection to read. But do not be deceived: while hugely enjoyable and accessible, McGough has serious things to say to us all today.
This really is a superb collection and well, well worth spending time over.
With little pocket money – and a mother reluctant to buy ‘pop’ music for her daughters at birthdays or Christmas – musical presents tended to be classical.
My parents were – but were not – music snobs: they had a relatively small collection themselves, including at most, a handful of genuine classical albums, plus my father’s aspirational acquisitions of several boxed sets of Readers’ Digest ‘greatest ever classic tunes’, which I have little memory of ever spinning on the deck.
Indeed, as a family, we listened to little music, though I remember my mother listening to Ed Stewpot on the radio at the weekends in the kitchen. Memory can be unreliable – not least as the decades move on – but my only memory of hearing classical music at home was at Christmas, when helping my mother decorate the house as she played her boxed set of Solti’s Messiah.
Beyond that, there were occasional spurts of my father’s beloved Johann Strauss II, together with an album of the very poor man’s Waltz King, Waldteufel.
That I was studying music in 1981 was down to the lucky accident of having been introduced to classical music, via Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, at my first (state) girls’ grammar school some years earlier.
To invoke Sondheim, I’ve been through Cassidy, the Rollers and more (and already loved lots of show music enough that I could sing almost entire scores from memory), but Kijé made a big difference to my life.
If I was listening to something more contemporary – I couldn’t cope with most 20th classical music until relatively recently – then it was the likes of Kraftwerk, Ultravox and OMD.
And yet, and yet ... when my Abba-loving sister ditched her one Abba recording, a seven-inch Chiquitita, guess whose collection it ended up in? It was a number of years before I actually bought any Abba – and then it was Gold, on CD. In recent years, as The Other Half and I have actually invested in a quality record deck, amp etc, I have bought a number of works on vinyl by Ultravox, Kraftwerk and OMD – and Abba Gold.
Yet as my love and appreciation and knowledge of classical music has grown over the decades, so has my love of Abba.
In crossover mode, I also bought Benny’s Deutsche Grammophon piano album on CD. Because ... if Deutsche Grammophon think it’s worth being connected with ...
I left it until late, but I did actually pre-order the new album. And then our needle broke – just before it arrived. So today, I have had the chance to listen.
First up, and most important, this is Abba. It sounds like Abba because it is Abba! No ... 40 years haven’t seen the band morph into something different. And honestly, if you want Abba influenced by all the trends in pop music over the last four decades, then really ... you don’t want Abba!
So, a few notes on the album itself – to note, I have the blue 180g vinyl release.
I’ll start with the concluding track on side one, Just a Notion, which was first recorded in 1978, but never released. This has a deliciously punchy disco beat, great piano line and just the right number of minor chords to be a classic Abba track.
I absolutely love it. I have it playing digitally as I’m writing and I’m basically dancing in my seat. Bittersweet, as with so much of Abba – both melodically and lyrically – really superior, feelgood pop. It is fab!
That’s my track of the album – but that’s not to say the rest is poor. Far from it. I Still Have Faith has similar qualities.
Don’t Shut Me Down is a fine track and, as with so much of Abba’s oeuvre, it’s deceptively bright music to accompany lyrics that reflect less-than-perfect grown-up lives.
Some have whinged about Little Things, the Christmas track, but really, while it’s not stunning, but it’s nowhere near as offensive as some are pretending. No ... it is NOT worse that execrable St Winnifred’s School Choir and Grandma, I love You. And if you think it is, then you should seek help.
The album concludes with Ode to Freedom, another contemplative track, that, the more you listen to it, grows with you.
Indeed, this is all typically deceptive Abba – it’s candy floss but it's not; it's far more than that and, I suspect, people will still be listening to and discussing this in another 40 years when I will likely be long gone.
Or at least, some members of the Conservative and Unionist Party care about some people.
Unfortunately, if you fall outside the select band, then it really is a case of ‘screw you’.
And the past few weeks have offered two perfect examples of that.
At the end of September, I received an email, ostensibly from the secretary of state for health, Sajid Javid MP, on the basis that I had been advised to shield last year, when the pandemic got into full swing.
Let’s be entirely clear: I had cancer in 2018. “Had”, in that I am currently still free of it after major surgery – and a massive thank you to my GP practice and my local hospital for ensuring that checks have continued throughout the pandemic – though it could still come back.
I have high blood pressure (only diagnosed in 2019, so I’m going to blame the bleedin’ Tories) and I’m overweight.
But not exactly being at death’s door. I have had just two days off sick during the pandemic, continuing to work full time throughout, from home – and indeed, being part of a very small team that has won an external award for the work that we have done during that same pandemic.
Though of course, if you read the Express, Mail, Sun, Telegraph or other such publications, you’ve probably been told that nothing like that has happened and that anyone working from home hasn’t been ... well, working.
For more clarity: although I live in a very small flat, I’m fortunate enough to be able to work at home with a decent physical set up, as I’ve previously been a freelance journalist, self-employed. The OH, though never freelance, was also in the same position in terms of his ability to work from home, prior to his retirement in June 2020, which was planned 12 months before.
But let’s consider Javid’s email advice to those who had been shielding – in other words, those who had been described by their own GPs as “extremely clinically vulnerable” to COVID-19.
“You should continue to follow the same general guidance as everyone else,” it declares. This can be found at https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. But “in addition to any condition specific advice you may have been given by your specialist in recent weeks ... as someone with a health condition you might also want to think about extra things you can do to keep yourself and others safe.”
Okay ... so what might those be?
“This could include:
So, these are things to “consider”, right?
To start with, there is no mention of clinically vulnerable people – or members of their family – being expected to travel to workplaces.
There is a sense that those who are ‘genuinely’ clinically vulnerable will be old, retired and not with members of their household expected to attend an external workplace.
Still, I suppose it made a change from the paper snail-mail letters ‘signed’ by “Matt” [Hancock] and Robert Jenrick.
However, it is a total abrogation of any responsibility for public health from the health secretary.
A couple of weeks ago, having been informed that I must be in the physical workplace at least two days a week, I sat in a room for a hybrid meeting, where the social distancing was not what it should have been. Given my personal circumstances, I was very close to freaking, walking away from the physical meeting and joining it online.
I have heard the argument that I need to learn to live with the risks. Yet this seems to assume that I need to learn to live with me increasing the risks to my partner too. That is ethically appalling.
And all it would have taken was for the UK government to say that, if you had shielded last year, then if remotely (there's obviously a joke here) possible, it would be best to continue working from home.
Instead, people have been put into an invidious situation whereby employers can demand they do something that increases the risk – not only to themselves, but to others in their household who don't get to make that choice.
And of course, at the time of writing, COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths are rising.
And nobody saw this coming as a consequence of ‘Freedom Day’.
However, this is not the only example of the state of the UK’s government. Just before the start of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was challenged in a television interview on how to measure his promised ‘levelling up’ between the country’s regions.
“Wage growth is now being experienced faster by those on lower incomes. It hasn’t happened for 10 years or more. That is what I mean by levelling up.”
As it happens, the claim about wage growth is a lie – but then again, his lips were moving – but what a thing to openly state: that life expectancy, falling in the UK for those not as well-to-do as the prime minister, and cancer outcomes* don’t matter.
It’s almost like the Conservatives ... some Conservatives ... really don’t give a flying one about the masses.
* Just a note to say, let’s not forget that, while his then wife was being treated for cancer, Boris Johnson was busy shagging another woman.
** And another note to say that the cartoon used above is from @chrisriddell50, and I hope he forgives me for using it here.
So much so, indeed, that I pre-ordered the Waterstones exclusive signed edition of the second book. Which landed on the doormat a week ago yesterday and which I finished at the weekend.
As it happens, having been reminded that the second book was due, I’d re-read the first – and I believe it’s unique for me to read a book twice within a year, if not for school purposes.
Returning to it though, even after such a short time, saw me laughing. Again. And crying. Again.
And with The Man Who Died Twice, it was a similar experience.
We return to meet once more in the jigsaw room (very shortly after the first book) a group of pensioner friends living in a luxury retirement village: former intelligence agent Elizabeth, former trade union leader and firebrand Ron, former nurse Joyce and not-entirely former psychiatrist Ibrahim.
All are members of an informal club at the village that pores over cold murder cases. Except when the cases in question are not very cold at all.
Stephen Spielberg has bought the rights to both the first two novels – and a third. Apparently, Osman himself gets told in the street about casting options. There’s a popular vote for Helen Mirren to play Elizabeth, apparently ... and to be frank, I wouldn’t disagree.
I also rather like the idea of Judi Dench as Joyce. The Great Gambon would be perfect as Ron and maybe Art Malik as Ibrahim?
The books are good enough to demand such talents.
Oh ... but this book, now.
This time, one of Elizabeth’s exes appeals to her for help after getting in trouble with the secret service and, worse yet, the mafia.
Did he really steal some diamonds ...or not? And if he did, where are they?
As with the first instalment, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, but also makes you cry in places, because the characters are believable and, while flawed, you care about them.
There is moral complexity – and the characters themselves are also complex, never ducking thoughts of impending mortality or the dreadful toll of dementia. The author never lets such threads dominate his story, but they are present and dealt with gently and respectfully.
This is a brilliant second take from Osman and I heartily recommend it – and bear in mind that that comes from a crime fic fan who worships Chandler, Simenon and Mankell. It is no mean praise at all.
I can hardly wait for the third instalment – as I can hardly was it to spend more time with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron.
Well, most of the players worked for a living, in the mills and pits. To play rugby competitively, they had to forgo some of their wage.
The northern clubs wanted to make this up to them in the form of what were called broken-time payments. In other words, not some sort of profit, but compensation for wages lost.
However, the RFU was having none of it and in 1893, voted against a move to allow such payments.
Two years before that, Leeds president James Miller had noted: “It is unreasonable to expect the same ‘amateurism’ from the wage-earning classes as from public school men. It is unfair to expect working men to break time to play football without their being remunerated.”
But the cult of amateurism remained in place in rugby union until 1995 – a century of spiteful, vindictive, petty behaviour that saw players barred from union for as much as playing a single, unpaid game for an amateur rugby league club.
For instance, if someone had played the game recreationally in the north of England, while working as a doctor, and then moved to the south west of the country, they wouldn’t be allowed to play recreational rugby union.
I recall, from my own days as a sports editor (so pre-1999), a pompous ass of an ex-British Army officer defending this, intoning that if someone with such a past wanted to play recreational RU, they could jolly well ‘join the armed services’.
But the point of mentioning this now is that we find ourselves suddenly hearing the cries of ‘keep politics out of football!’ – including from, err, politicians trying to whip up a culture war in the UK.
The cult of amateurism was a political one, because class is political.
To be a successful amateur athlete, you needed time to train – and working-class people didn’t have that luxury since they had to do actual jobs in order, as old Charlie Marx might point out, to keep a roof over their (and their families’) heads and food in their bellies.
Amateurism was not exclusive to rugby. It was dominant in the UK (particularly England) in many sports. For instance, in rowing, Steve Redgrave’s achievements are all the more remarkable given that he came from a working-class background and didn’t go to public school.
In 1882, the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA) was founded and, a year later, it set out a definition of an amateur. To give just a single example of its exclusionary criteria, anyone who had ever been “employed in or around boats, or in manual labour for money or wages, was not an amateur”.
So you couldn’t row in ARA competitions if, for instance, you were a Thames lighterman as your job.
The issue around class and sport still features in the life of the UK today. How often do you see snotty newspaper stories about rugby union players or golfers or tennis players or F1 drivers – unless, in the case of the penultimate one, it’s snotty English stories about dodgy Scot Andy Murray or, in the last one, the rather non-white Lewis Hamilton?
Those sports are – in England at least (it’s particularly a different case in Scotland around golf) – seen as being for A Slightly Better Class of People. In other words, you probably need a bit of dosh and time to participate.
And goodness, look back at cricket and the entire concept of 'gentlemen and players' – amateurs and pros: the snobbery – and the politics – are enshrined in the language.
Football, however, remains culturally working class – for all the money coming into the English game from some exceptionally wealthy sources.
Think of the many times have there been negative stories about ‘wealthy footballers’ – the only group the UK’s Conservative government ever suggested should give up some of their pay because of COVID-19 – and also a group that routinely sees negative stories about them in the press.
And square that if the player in question is black – see the contrast between the Daily Mail’s reporting of how Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden have spent some of the money they have been paid by their employer.
Today, the Sun, which has rubbished Sterling more than once for being 'flashy', 'unethical' etc, lauded him on its cover of Monday's edition for scoring the winning goal against Croatia in the European Championships. Glass houses spring to mind
Let’s be quite clear – racism and politics are interconnected.
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden and – of course – PM Boris Johnson are currently fannying around complaining about ‘politicising sport’. In the former’s case, commenting on the reaction of his employer to historic, racist tweets by an England cricketer, and about England players taking the knee, in the latter.
It took a passionate yet calm article from England’s football manager Gareth Southgate on the subject – and the reaction to it – to persuade Johnson that, oops-a-daisy, he should actually condemn those who were booing England players taking the knee.
Now, as Kenan Malik pointed out in today’s Observer, taking the knee might mean little – and it might mean virtue signalling – but the England team is not a bunch of Marxist anti-capitalists who want to end our way of life, blah blah blah.
Though to be fair, I doubt that anyone applauding the suggestion that they are, whichever cretinous Tory MP or shock jock suggests as much, actually has a great deal of a clue as to what ‘Marxism’ actually is.
But there you go – that’s the constituency that this Conservative government’s culture war is being aimed at.
The reality is, that as long as sport has existed, politics has been entwined with it – and Malik’s article gives other examples.
Of course Dowden has dived in – this is an individual who now has himself pictured in his office, with a whopping big Union flag, much smaller flags of the constituent nations of the UK (watch out Ollie – your leader won’t like that) and a large portrait of the queen – presumably for the simple reason that he believes it to be convenient for his career.
He also has a similar relationship with facts as The Dear Leader. Apropos his tweet at the weekend – subsequently deleted – falsely claiming that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall (which hosted a G7 partners’ event) had received government financial aid during the pandemic.
It hadn’t. And he hasn’t apologised or made a correction. Just deleted the tweet.
But hey – taking the knee is ‘politics’.
For my parents, politics in sport was people trying to stop cricket tours to apartheid South Africa. Because somewhere along the line, they'd missed the idea that apartheid itself was ... ‘political’.
But that highlights a point: while the German Nobel literature laureate and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann said that “everything is politics”, for many, it doesn’t become so unless and until it challenges their view of the world.
It’s only ‘politics’ when women challenge the privileged role men have in society.
It’s only ‘politics’ when LGBT+ people dare to raise their heads about the parapet and demand equality.
It’s only ‘politics’ when black people call for meaningfully equal treatment.
It’s only ‘politics’ when disabled people dare to suggest that they might have their needs considered.
It’s only ‘politics’ when a museum wants to take down an external statue of an individual who profited from slavery.
But of course, it’s not ‘politics’ when the secretary of state responsible threatens the museum in question over that issue.
The status quo is never ‘politics’.
So, if you think that removing the statues of those who profited from selling other human beings for profit is ‘politics’, you probably don’t want to really think about the history of this country.
If you think that England players taking the knee is ‘politics’, you probably don't want to spend time learning about the actual, real history of this country.
You want to stay in a history comfort zone – because you perhaps need, for the sake of your own sense of self, to feel that the country of the accident of your birth, is brilliant and far superior to other countries, making you superior to lots of other people.
And if you think that, if some statues are removed, history will end, then you might need help.
If this is the case, then the NHS can still get you counselling – even in this time of COVID.
• The photo at the top is of protestors dumping a statue of Bristolian slave trade Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020, from Kier Gravil – ksagphotos.