The smell of gunpowder

I'd forgotten the date. I didn't stay up late for the U.S. election results but went to sleep with the radio on and accepted a friend's offer to ring me when the outcome was clear. It made for a restless night and tired day. There were tired people everywhere, many exuberant with delight at news of Obama's victory. I was relieved - the thought of President Palin terrified me - but the news was shadowed by memories of 1997, when the election of Tony Blair felt like the lifting of a nightmare.

I stumbled through the day, giving way to clumsy mistakes. I was unsurprised to find that the train home would be half an hour late. All the trains were delayed after a fire alarm at St Pancras. Half an hour didn't seem too bad. It even gave me an opportunity to catch my breath and do some work in the station cafe (the waiting room was full).

I continued to work on the train, then swept everything into my bag as I reached my stop. And as I walked out into the dark drizzle, the smell reached me - gunpowder. "The fifth of November," I recalled, and a rush of thoughts and memories hit me. I couldn't reconcile them.

As an adult, I can't ignore the Guy Fawkes story: torture, fear, violence, orchestrated hatred. The bonfires once recalled that as clearly as any Chamber of Horrors. But it's all mutated into something both cosier and more anarchic: family participation in firework displays and celebrations. Fireworks Day is also bound up with childhood memories: the bonfire in the field, cold, gloved hands clasping the thin wire of sparklers, the small rocket placed carefully in a milk bottle, gasps of delight as the tiny catherine wheel sparks into a multi-coloured blur.

I love firework displays. I love the sudden blazing chrysanthemums that bloom for seconds then fade against a velvet-dark sky. I love the frisson of fear at the scream of swooping rockets - even the range of pops and earth-shaking thuds that recall tales of mud and anguish on the western front. I wanted to go to a firework display or party. But I couldn't. I was going fencing - and I didn't want to leave the cat for long.

Fortunately Joe doesn't seem too worried by fireworks - or not when he's indoors. Sometimes he sits up, alert, in case he's called on the defend the house - and he's not as settled as usual. He didn't like the early lock-in either. But instead of worrying, he curled up in one of his favourite places - the bathroom wash-basin - and settled down to sleep.

Incitement to murder

Last week I found myself listening to Billie Holiday on CD. She was singing "Strange Fruit," the song written by Abel Meeropol. It takes on a painful life in Billie Holiday's performance, sung by a woman who knew the daily cruelties of racism from direct experience.

I had to explain what the song was about and did this briefly, without details. The truth of lynchings in the former slave-states of America really is too horrible. Billie Holiday's voice recalls the way lynchings were experienced by the black descendants of slaves. And the photographs tell us how the white members of lynch mobs and their families experienced these occasions.

These days the photos are so upsetting that it takes me a while to ask the important question: who took the photographs and why? When I look at photographs of lynchings (it's hard to look - I flinch and look away after seeing one or two) I can't look at the dangling, disfigured corpses so I start to look at the people standing by.

Usually the white people are aware of the camera. They're posing - looking back at the photographer. Sometimes they are men, putting on a stern appearance. But often the crowds are a mixture of men and women, dressed in their good clothes for the occasion. Sometimes there's a party atmosphere. Often children are present - some quite small.

The pictures were taken as souvenirs, just like the pictures in Abu Ghraib. They were often sent as postcards and kept by the people who received them. That's why the evidence has survived. Looking at the pictures again - just a glimpse - and focussing on the white crowds, I see no evidence of anger or shame.

Watching the American elections from Britain, I'm strongly aware of this history of brutal, violent racism. It's not exclusive to the United States. Britons, with their colonial past, have no cause for smug self-congratulation. Many Britons were, like me, amazed and admiring to discover that the United States had moved so far from its past that a major political party could nominate a black man as a presidential candidate - and were impressed to see that Barack Obama was ahead in the polls. A country overcoming the racism of its past might be an example to the world.

Recent news from the McCain-Palin campaign has therefore come as a shock. At first John McCain's team were polite, aware of the dangers to their opponent and their country. There's a history of assassination in the United States and Barack Obama was given secret service protection early last year - before he'd secured the nomination .

But since the selection of Sarah Palin as vice-president, the Republican campaign has turned nasty.

At first, the selection of Sarah Palin seemed a brilliant move. She looked like a fighter against corruption as well as someone who would bring in the Christian evangelical voters who were suspicious of McCain. I didn't like her politics but I thought she might be honest. I worried about stories of attempted censorship in a public library but the truth was unclear. I thought I'd better give her the benefit of the doubt. Then I heard about her lies - even about Darfur - sickened me. But I assumed it was just politics as usual - and not in my country. While I think Obama would probably be preferable to McCain, I have doubts. I follow his campaign with interest but I'm not an Obama supporter.

Reports of recent Republican rallies are another matter. The stories are raging through the British press. Members of the audience are shouting out "Kill him!" "Terrorist!", "Treason!" and "Off with his head" when McCain, Palin and members of their team attack Barack Obama. No-one has disowned or condemned those comments - John McCain and Sarah Palin's team simply move to the next rally, repeat the same attacks and encourage the same responses. Defenders of the Republican campaign say that these calls come from isolated, unhinged individuals. But it's often isolated and unhinged individuals who become assassins.

From here, the latest Republican campaign speeches are beginning to sound like incitement to murder. And the smiling faces of supporters at Republican rallies - and the cheers that greet every fresh smear and innuendo - are beginning to recall those well-dressed, respectable families who brought their children to attend the lynchings of black youths - and smiled for for the camera.

Collateral Damage

[first posted 23rd April]

There are many useful phrases in war. "Collateral damage" is used quite a lot. It suggests that the death of civilians - old people, the ill, non-combatants, dissidents, men, women and children - was an unfortunate accident and that the dead simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Warmakers need such a phrase. It's illegal to target civilians and when civilians are targeted "as part of a plan or policy or large-scale commission of such crimes," the perpetrators can find themselves up before the International Criminal Court.

But some countries opt out. China and the United States of America refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The establishing Treaty was signed by President Clinton but George W. Bush "unsigned" the Treaty. One of the reasons the Bush administration gave was the protection of United States soldiers and officials who might be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. President Bush and his officials have thus made themselves immune from prosecution for torture, even though key members of Bush's administration met to discuss exactly what torture techniques could be used on suspects.

At least the Bush administration is coming to an end ... and that used to fill me with relief. I've been worried about John McCain's apparent willingness to continue a hundred-year occupation of Iraq, which sounds like a hundred year war to me. But the Democrats seem to have a chance, even though the continuing contest probably damages their chances. And that used to strike me as a good thing, whether the winner were Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

And then Hillary Clinton answered a question about Iran. What would she do as president if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. It says something about American politics that she wasn't asked what she would be if Israel launched a nuclear attack on Iran, although that's a more likely scenario. At the moment Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

Hillary Clinton's reply isn't entirely clear, though this useful blog from The Times includes a video clip of the interview. She said: “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them." Her words sound horribly as though she's considering a pre-emptive strike. And she doesn't bother to use the euphemism "collateral damage". She threatens a whole country and the 71 million people who live there with annihilation. That sounds like a war crime to me.

I'm in no position to campaign against Hillary Clinton. Although Britain feels increasingly like a United States colony, I can campaign only for and against my own elected representatives. But I'm angry that Hillary Clinton, whose supporters proclaim that she is the great hope of feminism, can advance such views.

Hillary's supporters often charge women who oppose her with betrayal of feminism. When I was involved in the Women's Movement, it was concerned with the rights of all women, not just Americans. I don't see how any feminist can vote for a candidate who threatens the "obliteration" of millions of women with their children and families.

The picture is of Nagasaki, by the way - before and after the single nuclear bomb was dropped. Nuclear weapons were smaller then.

Religion, guns and country lanes

(first posted 20th April)

Obama's "wobble" may be over now, though we shan't know until the Pennsylvania primary. It was strange to hear what he'd done wrong. He'd suggested that some small-town Americans were defending the values of gun-ownership and religion out of frustration and bitterness. It didn't seem an unusual or controversial statement. Of course people who see jobs vanish and communities under threat look for shared values, often rooted in an imagined past. And it's easier to place blame on outsiders and newcomers than to analyse the problems of global economics or the defects of big corporations.

But many United States citizens see small-town America as part of their essential identity. Small towns are the inheritors of the pioneers or the settler villages where, according to myth, the white inhabitants needed guns to fight off attacks from marauding natives. The barbarity with which native villages were destroyed and crops uprooted is less well known and I've never heard an American cite Washington's command to employ terror as a weapon against native men, women and children.

Obama didn't address the complexity of history. He certainly didn't talk about massacres and violence. He simply suggested that small-town Americans were not perfect - and was instantly accused of elitism. Columnists suggested that this might lose him the nomination or the election. He had offended against the vision America has of itself.

United States myth-making is potent and piecemeal. Hollywood contributes, and advertising, and the sonorous phrases of the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address and the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge, recited daily by schoolchildren facing the flag, was, like the others, adopted, defended and altered when the United States felt itself at risk. Until 1942 it could involve a salute with the right arm outstretched and raised slightly above the shoulder with the palm facing down. This pose ended only when the U.S. entered the Second World War. It was evidently awkward that American schoolchildren declaiming "One country! One language! One flag!" looked strikingly similar to little Nazis.

I learnt about Britain from biscuit tins and Quality Street boxes. Tudor houses and pretty villages meant England. So did the redcoated soldier standing just behind a woman in a purple bonnet and fancy dress. England was a stagecoach drawn up outside a country inn. Scotland was bright tartan, castles and bagpipes. It was highly improbable and soldiers were expected to die for it. "There'll always be an England/ While there's a country lane," the song went.

I'd never seen a country lane, though I knew the paths through Richmond Park. Nobody put bright modern council estates on biscuit tins. Perhaps the government would take more care of council estates and the people who live there if they saw them as essential England.

I wonder what bitterness is inspired by our myths of an England that never was.