Author: Steve Bowbrick

Bus drivers, bus conductors and the spirit of Tobruk in Sloane Square

Loyalty, respect and transgression on the number 10s.

Black and white photo taken through the window of a London bus showing part of an older open-platform Routemaster bus in the background, a passenger visible through the smeary glass

I’ve been reluctant to share this story over the years because I’ve always suspected it’s a bit too perfect and that it might be an urban myth or bus crew folklore or something – a story passed around by bus conductors – but, thinking about it, my mum didn’t do that sort of thing, so here it is…

In the 1950s my mum and dad were both London bus conductors. It’s how they met – at Vauxhall bus garage. My mother, Bridie, from Ireland and not long out of her ATS uniform and my dad, George, from South London, between the river and the Elephant. He was a young lad, three years younger than her but they were both in their twenties.

Black and white photo of a young George Bowbrick, wearing his London bus conductor's uniform and Brylcreme in his hair, sitting in the driver's seat of a bus - in the early fifties
George Bowbrick, bus conductor, apparently pretending to be a driver. This is not his story

There were so many stories from that period. I imagine working on the buses is all stories, even now. My dad was the storyteller in the family so most of them were his but mum used to tell this one story that I always felt was so rich in meaning – about the period, about the people she worked with, about London and working life and all that.

My parents worked on the 10s and the 73s, both long routes that ran right through town. I’m pretty sure the number 10 went from Vauxhall to Kings Cross (via Victoria) and then out into the Eastern suburbs – Wanstead, Woodford and so on (bus nerds, correct me).

Black and white photo of a young Bridget (Bridie) Bowbrick in the early fifties, wearing a spotted party dress and a cardigan, handbag hooked over her right arm, smiling quizzically
Bridie Bowbrick, née Quirke, bus conductor. This is her story

Along the busy bit of the route – through the West End – the buses were crowded almost the whole time and they ran frequently – at the busiest times of day they’d leave the garage every 90 seconds or two minutes. London’s population had peaked in 1939 but even in 1951 it was still above eight million. It was teeming with working people day and night.

A lot of mum and dad’s stories centred on the strange, sometimes quite intense relationships the conductors had with their drivers. It was a partnership and a hierarchy. The driver was the boss, captain of the ship, sometimes a father figure, and the conductor was a kind of apprentice – often younger and less experienced. The war had thrown everything in the air, of course, as it had before. Women had entered the bus service to cover for conscripted men and then, afterwards, many men brought the driving skills they’d acquired in the forces back to the buses. Drivers, consequently, in this period, were often literally battle-hardened military men. They’d driven tanks and ambulances and trucks in theatres of war all around the world.

According to mum, these men were fascinating and charismatic – fearless and sometimes a bit unhinged. The way my mum put it, if you’ve been chased by Nazis across the Libyan desert you probably feel a bit less concern for what you’re told to do by a man with a notebook and a peaked cap. Managers and inspectors deferred to these men, left them to it.

So this story takes place on a number 10 going approximately North, in the early evening. The route’s still busy with commuters, it’s dark and it’s raining. My mother’s on the platform. Behind her, bunched up by traffic and rain, she can see five other 10s, in a line going back down the Kings Road. This is the worst-case scenario. Her bus is at the front of a convoy of others, during rush hour and in the pouring rain.

Bus conductors hate this. If you’re at the front of the convoy, all the crews behind you will make it their business to keep you there – that way you get to every stop first and have to pick up all the passengers and, of course, take all the fares, fold all the pushchairs, shove all the luggage into that space under the stairs, help all the pensioners into their seats by the platform…

Meanwhile, if they’re lucky, the buses behind won’t have to pick up more than a handful of passengers and their conductors can continue to lounge at the back of their half-empty buses all the way through town, watching the city go by. There are various strategies for dealing with this terrible situation if you’re the crew at the front – you can stall and wait a bit longer at each stop or try to persuade passengers to hang on for the next one – “the one behind’s empty!”

But ultimately it’s not up to you. The drivers behind will make a superhuman effort not to pass you – it is, after all, their duty to their conductors. And these are very loyal men, as I’ve already explained, men schooled by war, by years in the cabin of an armoured car or at the wheel of an ammo truck. They will not yield.

A London Transport RTL1125 bus waiting for a new crew from Gillingham Street, probably in the 1950s
This number 10 is of the right vintage – it could even be the one in Bridie’s story. It’s from London Bus Route Histories.

So, my mother and her driver – I’m pretty sure his name was Len, a Desert Rat – communicating through the bus crew’s code of taps with the conductor’s budget key or by banging on the roof of the cab – are resigned to their fate. The whole schlepp through the West End will be a nightmare and it will not ease up till the quieter roads beyond when the drivers behind might finally give up their stations in the convoy and generously overtake, waving sarcastically as they go.

But, on this occasion, on this cold and rainy night, Bridie’s driver has a better idea. Sloane Square is coming up and he has a plan to get out of this bind. All six buses are now in a tightly-packed convoy with no gaps. The scene is set for an audacious escape. Our driver is going to do something so bold, so wrong (so in contravention of the rules in the drivers’ handbook) that he will be remembered for it for years afterwards – and quite possibly disciplined for it, if anyone can pluck up the courage to do so.

Map of Sloane Square area in London with the route of the No 10 bus (now defunct), from Kings Road, through the square and along Eaton Square shown overlaid
Pretty sure this is the correct route through Sloane Square

He doesn’t tell Bridie about his plan – there’s no code he could use to communicate this kind of transgression anyway – he just does it. The bus enters Sloane Square and proceeds clockwise around the oblong, past Peter Jones but then, instead of exiting the square in the prescribed manner, through Eaton Square and up to Victoria, he does the unthinkable and continues round the square, past the Royal Court, past the tube station and on round. You’ve already guessed it. His plan is to join the back of the convoy, escaping from the bind in one brilliant, incisive move, bold like he’s back at Tobruk. And this is a bold move. In the code of the buses there’s really no greater transgression that diverging from your route (or even getting out of timetable order). It’s right at the top of the list. If they were seen they’d be in real trouble, and the driver might even be dismissed. And it’s worse – there are very often inspectors at Sloane Square. This is high risk.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t work. Our driver doesn’t break out. He doesn’t break out because driver number two sees the first one dodge the exit from the square, instantly divines his plan and – I told you they were bold – follows! So now two buses have broken the rules and two have headed back round the square. And, obviously, the third bus follows too. And it goes on, no one backs down. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth – they all follow!

They don’t stop at one circuit either. The whole convoy is now, like a big, red fairground ride, going round and round Sloane Square. And this is now a game of chicken. The first driver to lose his cool and turn off the square will inherit all the passengers for the rest of the journey across town. He will dump his conductor right in it and there will be hell to pay. It’s a matter of honour.

This is now all a bit wild, unprecedented, a thrill for all involved. The conductors are all hysterical – shouting to each other as they circle the square. The way my mum put it, this was a career high and the absolute peak of naughtiness in her whole respectable working life. She was giddy with excitement, giggling on the platform, swinging out as the bus took the corners of the square. She told me they made several circuits – passengers beginning to yell and complain, ringing the bell – before one of the drivers gave it up and turned North.

But the thing is, it wasn’t Len! It was one of the other drivers and Bridie was liberated, relegated to third or fourth place in the line of buses. Her heroic driver had taken an enormous, bold chance to save her a bit of work on a miserable Winter’s night. You can imagine what this did for their bond.

  • I’d love to have met Len – mum and dad stayed friends with a lot of their old friends from the buses – but my mother told me he died not long after this.
  • If you ever jumped onto the second or third bus in a convoy like this you’ll remember the disorienting experience of getting the bottom deck to yourself while the bus in front is so full it’s popping rivets.

A visionary work of art, a hateful apologia for slavery and Jim Crow… and a really bad film

The Birth of a Nation was the top-grossing film of 1915…

Actress Lillian Gish is at the head of a huge group of hooded KKK men in D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic film The Birth of a Nation

THE BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. GRIFFITHS, DAVID W. GRIFFITH CORP., 1915

So I did it, I watched the whole thing. I felt obliged to, as part of my project to watch every top-grossing film since 1913 – 110 years of Summer blockbusters.

This one’s obviously different from the other films on the list. A cause célèbre, a landmark in the emergence of a new, assertive, 20th Century racism, perhaps the most famous revisionist text in history. Everything I’d ever read about The Birth of a Nation led me to believe that it was a brilliant work of art that happened to be ugly and immoral, but that’s not quite it – the film’s certainly an appalling document but, I’m now persuaded, it’s a second-rate film too.

The Birth of a Nation is obviously and in many ways a groundbreaking work – it’s the first 12-reeler (over three hours in length), it’s a complex multi-threaded narrative that sets a family drama against the epic of a country’s self-creation, it’s ambitious, self-confident and totalising.

The back-and-forth between claustrophobic living room and battlefield, rural shack and columned state capitol, tense close-up and chaotic crowd scene – is expansive and grandiloquent. The canvas is the whole history of the United States, the whole of the post-emancipation era. Griffith obviously saw himself as a Tolstoy or a Victor Hugo for the civil war and the reconstruction.

An example of the vignette technique used by D.W. Griffith in his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation - a close-up of man is seen inside an oval vignette against a black background

And the film is certainly packed with new storytelling techniques. Griffith obviously had a kind of technical intuition that’s hardly been matched since. The list of techniques we see for the first time here is long: deep-focus shots where action takes place at different depths; huge scenes in which an enormous cast is choreographed with precision; close-ups that expose character and explain motive. Montages that alternate intimate and overwhelming scale. Sets and locations are used cleverly and there’s an extraordinary sensitivity to mise-en-scène – scenes that are constructed with elaborate care at every scale.

There are breakneck moving cameras, multi-camera shots, aerial shots, mind-bending vignettes that isolate action and emotion, superimpositions and double-exposures (the bewildering final sequence that features the devil and Jesus in quick succession depends on several techniques that I feel certain are brand new).

But other aspects of the film – before we even get to its irredeemable nastiness – are odd, old-fashioned, clumsy, maddening even. Acting is uneven, stagey, 19th-Century. Performers sometimes look like they’re barely directed (especially in the big scenes). And before you argue that this is 1915, before the conventions of screen performance had solidified, contrast this film with the sophistication and subtlety of Traffic in Souls, a six-reeler that was 1913’s top grossing movie.

Still from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation - a scene recreating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Interleaved with the narrative, there are some fascinating and awkward tableaux, in which scenes from the history of the period – including Lincoln’s assassination – are carefully re-staged, with actors holding static poses for an achingly long time, before the action proceeds, absurdly. These odd, static scenes – reminiscent of tuppenny fairground dioramas – are introduced with portentous intertitles (and every card bears the prominent brand of the Griffith Studio and a big logotype, just in case we forget the source of this brilliance).

And then there’s the nastiness. Beyond the grotesque and unrelieved racism that seems almost impossible to account for even from over 100 years later, we encounter an incoherent and parochial morality, a grim misanthropy masquerading as love of people and nation. The nearest thing to politics here is a kind of domestic-scale feudalism – desperate, scrabbling, landowner revanchism. Some have tried to characterise the Ku Klux Klan idealised in the Birth of a Nation as embodying some kind of benign collectivism; community volunteers turned bad – but this theory is weak and excuses the self-conscious brutality of the group and its programmatic suppression of black people. Their Christianity – which is prominent – is a deformed, dehumanised settler creed.

And, necessarily perhaps, there’s not a single sympathetic character – no one you could think of as the film’s hero or heroine. The hundreds of black actors and extras never escape caricature – they are universally monsters or idiots. The dozens of black-face actors – some made-up in paler tones to represent ‘mulattos’, most required to produce debased or retarded or violent – form a kind of shameful battalion. Lillian Gish, one of Hollywood’s first huge stars, never less than 100% committed to the drama, is asked to yell and howl and make terrifying gestures of fear and hysteria – to embody hatred.

Silent actress Lillian Gish screams at a window in D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of the Nation. In the background an actor in black-face grimaces

Griffith gives us multiple close-ups in this new style, bringing the camera as close as the optics of the period would permit – and uses vignettes to take us even closer – but the faces he asks us to contemplate are in almost every case bizarrely twisted and tormented – gurning, hysterical, weirdly sexualised, hate-filled, terrified. It’s a bizarre detail, and one I initially doubted (am I over-reading this?). Silent movies obviously require some degree of mugging, emoting, swooning, declaiming – but actors’ faces in this film are either mild and expressionless or wildly over-producing, often animalistic.

Actors are asked to make faces from a mediaeval tableau of hell. It’s one of the most striking aspects of the film, an unavoidable difficulty. The characters we come so close to and spend so much time with repel us. We leave the film indifferent to or hating Griffith’s many principle characters – even the children, even the luminous Gish.

The Birth of a Nation has spawned a whole industry of film analysis, hundreds of books and dissertations and a never-ending stream of newspaper op-eds and features, right up to the present day. When you hear a ‘debate’ about whether slavery was really that bad you’re hearing the continued influence of Griffith’s inversion of antebellum reality.

Worse, its remarkable, out-of-proportion contribution to the culture of Jim Crow reinforced segregation and probably lengthened the battle for black civil rights. At the fringes, the film continues, preposterously, to provide cover for the KKK and its culture of permanent terror. And, as a film, I want to confirm, it does not come close to redeeming itself or its creator and, in fact, is never less than horrifying and infuriating.

An organised crime drama with a dramatic police raid and an ultra-modern remote surveillance storyline

It’s called Traffic in Souls and it’s an extraordinarily modern movie – a prototype for a whole new category

Still from 1913 film Traffic in Souls, showing criminals and victims gathered at the police station after the raid
Bang to rights – the pimps and crims face their accusers down at the precinct
TRAFFIC IN SOULS: WHILE NEW YORK SLEEPS, GEORGE LOANE TUCKER, UNIVERSAL, 1913

Here’s my latest Quixotic project. I’m going to watch the top-grossing film from every year since 1913, which is when they started recording that sort of thing. I say Quixotic because this is the kind of thing I do all the time and my grand plans don’t usually come to much… I’ve got a list on Letterboxd.

Anyway, the first film is essentially a pre-code exploitation flick: kidnapping, pimps and prostitutes, corruption and hypocrisy in high places. The theme capitalises on the popular dread in this period of ‘white slavery’, what we would now call human trafficking.

This film’s got everything: almost thirty years before the first recognised film noir, fifty years before all those gritty 1970s studio explorations of urban crime and degradation. There’s cross-border organised crime, the kidnapping and trafficking of vulnerable immigrants (Ellis Island is an early location), prostitution, money-laundering, high-level corruption, the hypocrisy of the urban elite, the tense meeting of old and new money (and a fancy sweetshop that turns out to be a front for the crime gang).

Advertising poster for 1913 film Traffic in Souls. Stylised, brightly coloured, comic-book illustration shows a man in a suit wielding a long whip which snakes around the frame, terrorising a group of four young women: "A powerful photo-drama of today! 6 reels, 700 scenes, 600 players. White slave trade of New York!"
6 reels, 700 scenes, 600 players

The film has a terrific remote surveillance storyline (surely the first?) that features an audio relay between offices, a not-very-well-concealed mic, wax cylinders, a kind of recording tablet that looks a lot like an iPad. Our boyfriend-girlfriend heroes work as a team, set up their kit – laying cable, hiding bugs, swapping recording cylinders – like they’re from CSI – it’s kind of disorienting to see this ease with modern tech in a film from years before the electronic mic and the tape recorder. A wireless ship-to-shore telegram also makes an important appearance (I can imagine the producers demanding more cool tech for the younger crowd). We really are at the birth of the communication revolution – the critical evidence in the case against our villain is a wax cylinder (although there’s no evidence of a warrant so I’m worried the case might not have held up at appeal).

There’s an ‘invalid inventor’ (the heroine’s father) who is essentially a sketch for Harry Caul from The Conversation and a dramatic police raid that’s close in scale and execution to the SWAT raids of contemporary police drama. Dozens of coppers, armed with night-sticks and axes, crowd into a room at the precinct where they’re briefed by their captain about the infamy they’re about to uncover (if he actually says “be safe out there” it doesn’t make it into the intertitles). They then stream down the steps out of the station purposefully and pile into a convoy of cars. Watches are synchronised, the operation is triggered by a rooftop lookout (although he just blows his whistle, really). The raid’s denouement is dramatic (no spoilers here).

A big cast includes every possible archetype of disreputable America – the procurer, the blowsy madame, the shifty pimp, the enforcer, the hard-working immigrant, the fallen innocent, the unscrupulous middle-man, the courageous cop working on a hunch. The procurers wear nice suits and straw boaters, the enforcers trilbys or, in one case, a splendid squashed pork-pie hat. Respectable ladies and whorehouse Madames wear the same, high-Edwardian corsetry and big feather hats. Men and women alike count big wads of ill-gotten cash ostentatiously, like Scarface, and move between street corners, brothels and fancy offices with the confidence of generations of movie hoodlums.

The villain here is a wealthy man, William Trubus, a morally-bankrupt confectionery mogul whose candy business is a front for prostitution on a grand scale. If his administrative workforce is anything to go by it’s a huge enterprise. We visit a bustling office and two brothels and assume the existence of more. Nothing backstreet about this operation.

In America this is the era of the plutocrat, the robber baron and the money trust. The year of release is right at the peak of the antitrust era, the year of AT&T’s first run-in with government. In the following year the Clayton Act came into force. President Taft , who had just left office when the film came out, was an antitrust President and action against the monopolists was central to Wilson’s post-war platform too. The popular press is alive with stories about their malfeasance and their comeuppance. Trubus may be a self-made entrepreneur (there’s a storyline about the family’s introduction to society via the daughter’s marriage to “the greatest society catch of the season” – a monocled gent with no personality) but he’s uncomplicatedly wicked. Are there any sympathetic movie portrayals of businessmen from this period?

Mary and Larry, the central couple, are sweethearts – shopgirl and cop – the kind of civilian-police pairing that went on to be central to dozens of movie narratives, although this is more of a loving collaboration than the kind of messed-up marriages of more recent cop movies, where plots turn on the damage done by the pressures of being a police, by the single-minded, round-the-clock pursuit of evil, by late-night stake-outs and compulsory bourbon (see Die Hard, Heat, Mall Cop, Thunder Road, a thousand TV cop dramas). The lesson from Traffic in Souls is that the couple that polices together stays together.

There’s a very visible absence in the film, though. The figure we don’t meet is the punter. Not a single John appears. The seedy rooms and bleak hallways of the various brothels are busy with maids, pimps and prostitutes but not a customer is to be seen. Was it too much for even a pre-code feature to include the actual purchaser of sex? Would it have spoilt the neat two-sided narrative to introduce a complicating third?

Traffic in Souls is a splendid, complex, big-hearted action movie, an essentially perfect 88 minutes of entertainment from a director who, if we’re honest, didn’t really break through in his other work. When I mentioned the film on Twitter, film composer and historian Neil Brand called it “a bona fide one-off masterpiece” and used the hashtag #BetterThanDWGriffith, which is intriguing, because 1915’s biggest-grossing movie was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, so I’ll be watching it soon.

It’s on Amazon Prime and you’ll find it on DVD here and there.

  • I don’t have a good reason for this but I like the fact that there are two Irish immigrants in the cast: William H. Turner (the invalid inventor) who was from Cork and appeared in 46 motion pictures between 1913 and 1938, and Matt Moore (the cop) from Mayo, 221 pictures, between 1912 and 1958.

Music that satisfies completely

From music we get all sorts of things. And one of them is completion.

Jazz musicians Abdullah Ibrahm, Noah Jackson and Cleave Guyton - the Abdullah Ibrahim Trio, performing in the main auditorium at the Barbican in London on 15 July 2023
Ibrahim, Jackson and Guyton

I love jazz but even after decades of exposure to every different genre I’m still basically an ignoramus. I can’t speak with any authority about the music or the culture. I share Spotify links with my jazz pal Paul, I accumulate books about jazz. I wonder at the richness and endurance of the form, at its eccentric presence, right at the join of ‘serious’ and ‘pop’ and ‘folk’ cultures.

I mean I love the probing of the free jazz experiment, the radical groove of the whole post-bop flowering, the crunching hip-hop mash-ups of the newest jazz generation, the grandeur and range of the golden age. I love it all but I can barely converse about the form. So I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about jazz.

Anyway, there’s a first time for everything. I went to a fancy jazz gig last weekend – not the sweaty basement kind. This was the kind that happens in a big Central London auditorium with a lot of nicely-dressed older hipsters in comfortable seating (decent number of berets and cravats and denim fisherman’s smocks present).

We were all there for Abdullah Ibrahim – a survivor, a sixty-year veteran, a unique figure in the music and the culture but also an outsider, from right at the heart of the tradition but with an African inflection – with a Cape Town inflection to be precise – that’s so closely identified with him and his work that we might as well call it his own.

I was expecting to enjoy it. I’d last seen him play in the 1980s, when the music of South African exiles like Ibrahim was enjoying a bit of prominence (and even some chart hits), largely thanks to the cruelty and venality of the apartheid regime.

But it was more than enjoyable. It was miraculous, I think I’d say. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It was in some ways slight – not a riot of big solos and enormous tunes, not a party, not a three-hour celebration – but miraculous anyway. I’ve settled on three reasons, three factors that aren’t always present in a performance of any kind but were joined here to make this one of the most affecting, satisfying concerts I’ve ever seen. My attempt to organise these miraculous elements follows.

They’re artists. To state the obvious. The glorious, uncannily coherent, entirely satisfying groove of the Abdullah Ibrahim Trio is unarguable. I don’t know how else to put this. It’s a spellbinding wholeness. And the three musicians involved are from that class of human beings – the one I envy most – that has made of their art a kind of jewel, worked until perfect.

Watching Cleave Guyton on flute, piccolo and clarinet (his alto sax stood on its stand throughout, unplayed, hinting at some spontaneity in the set list), Noah Jackson on bass and cello, and Ibrahim himself at the shiny Fazioli grand, is a perfectly satisfying experience, a kind of completion. You just smile.

They’re a unity. All three musicians are fully present in this enterprise. Ibrahim, the unquestioned master, Ellington’s protegé, Monk’s friend, plays sparingly and is sometimes silent for an achingly long time – almost a whole number – while the others solo in the accepted small band manner. And because all this is so subtle the audience doesn’t know exactly how to respond – the conventional round of applause at the end of a solo doesn’t happen. These transitions are different, slightly disorienting.

When Ibrahim rejoins it’s often to provide ornament or a kind of musical comment to the other players. Then he’ll play alone for several minutes, spare and elemental – his famous, rolling, big-hearted tunes hardly present – hinted at, indicated. His solos are less complete than those of his band, more sketchy, as if they’ve thinned out over the decades, reduced to a kind of degree zero, the minimum necessary – sometimes he plays with one hand.

Small bands are like this, of course, held in tension by the awkward balance of soaring individual musicianship and mutual dependence, ego and love for others. It’s as if Ibrahim’s old showmanship has been sacrificed here for connection. Humility and respect for each other circulate in this band. It’s almost visible.

They’re a hierarchy. Guyton and Jackson are evidently superlative musicians, but they’re not leaders. They observe the protocols of the jazz lifer – their brilliance, their ease, their spontaneity is evident. Switching instruments as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to set aside an upright bass and sit to play the cello or to put down your flute and pick up a clarinet and then a piccolo. But these musicians exhibit, throughout the concert, a deference to the boss that’s fascinating and touching but never demeaning. Ibrahim, from his keyboard, is unquestioned – a leader, a patriarch, to his band.

Two or three times, at an almost invisible signal from him, the other two musicians move to the back of the stage and sit quietly in the shadows while he plays, then, at another, they return. This voluntary retreat into the darkness is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in jazz. A kind of embodiment of respect for Ibrahim’s artistry and his seniority. It was profoundly moving.

At one point we see some confusion – Jackson and Guyton aren’t certain where they should be, there’s a miscommunication, some touching hesitation, some glances exchanged. Should they go to the back again? Jackson asks Ibrahim, humbly, “are we playing?” Another signal – a smile – confirms that they are. And we all sigh, as the groove reassembles itself.

Trump’s epic disdain

Trump the innovator is back on the campaign trail, diagnosing and mocking his audiences. And they love it.

I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a random tiny clip from a much (much) longer one. One of Trump’s fund-raising dinners. People at tables in a school gym or a hotel ballroom in Greensboro, North Carolina.

He starts by setting up a culture wars segment with something that sounds like it’s from his regular script (the clip starts in the middle of a sentence):

…critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children…

Speech at North Carolina Republican Party Convention, 11 June 2023

He’s reading this part from what might be an autocue. But then he does an interesting thing, something he does all the time. He stops the speech to reflect on its reception:

It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that [mimes polite clapping], I’m talking about transgender, everybody goes crazy.

There’s something disarming about this. He’s stopped to share an insight he’s acquired while making these speeches – that the culture wars material does better than the tax cuts material. That’s interesting in its own right, of course, but there’s more to this. There’s something in his mode of address.

It’s remarkable, and it must tell us something about his charm for the MAGA crowds. I can’t think of another political speaker who can manage this kind of easy switching between levels of address. It may be unschooled – of course it’s unschooled – but it’s a profound skill. To be able to step in and out of role in this way, to turn on a dime, to offer a kind of simultaneous commentary on his own speech. It’s high rhetoric – and no wonder it’s hard to counter.

Still from a video of Donald Trump's speech at North Carolina Republican Party Convention, 11 June 2023. In the audience in the foreground there is cheering and waving and one person is waving a walking stick
Trump’s audience cheers – one person is apparently waving a walking stick

But there’s more to this. Something about Trump’s relationship to his audience revealed in his manner. He’s showing them a kind of disdain. He goes on to say, as they’re sitting down after the big ‘transgender insanity’ moment, “…five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was” and it’s an observation on the speed of contemporary politics, on the rotation of issues in and out of salience, but it’s also a put-down. The audience responds. There’s a hesitation, a murmur of uncertainty in the crowd (watch it again, it’s amazing). They’re absorbing Trump’s verdict, as if he’d just said: “you guys, you’re so shallow, I understand you better than you understand yourselves.”

And it’s another fascinating, uniquely Trump moment. He offers the audience nothing. He’s literally mocking them. They take a second to absorb it and they come back for more. It’s gripping, but quite hard to watch. You feel for the audience, you wonder how they’ll adjust to this tough message about their own motivations. But of course we know how they adjust – they soak it up and they keep coming back for more. But to do this I feel sure they have to somehow swallow or suppress what must be an instinctive rejection. It seems almost like the dynamic of bullying – where the bullied has to shrug off the insult, to show no injury, to laugh and proceed as if unhurt. Does Trump bully his audiences?

As a lesson in political speech-making, in campaigning more generally, it’s bewildering, disorienting. It’s probably ungeneralisable, uniquely Trump. What could another politician learn from this? Could a Sunak or a Starmer try this? Can you imagine it? Sunak pausing one of those odd, sixth-form lectures he gives to reflect on the contingent passions of his audience? “You know, two years ago, you didn’t give a damn about the boats. Now you’re all over it.” You know the answer.

There may be other politicians who use this approach, this chaotic, provocative mode of address but I can’t think of any. It exists in sharp contrast to the obsequious mode available to other contemporary politicians when speaking even to the most supportive audiences. These conventional politicians – even the populists – try perfectly to reflect the room’s mood, to offer nothing that does not confirm or reinforce, to build approval. Persuasion for these more ordinary speakers proceeds via recognition, identification. The politician must visibly connect, understand, share the audience’s feelings. Politicians can be lofty, inspiring, even a bit cool but there can be no distance. And certainly no disdain.

Trump’s genius is to have somehow short-circuited this standard, careful way of speaking, the “I’m just one of you” mode. He seems to give so little – there’s no generosity, no concession of any kind in this speech. He’s connecting directly with some some other part of the brain, a rarely-spoken-to part of his audience’s psyche. I’m beyond diagnosing this. But I’m intrigued. It’s bleakly impressive – undimmed by nearly a decade of exposure and now we’ve got another opportunity to see it deployed, in earnest, in the 2024 Presidential campaign. Conventional politicians, weak rhetoricians, pay attention!

I am as a poet, apparently

Front cover of a poetry pamphlet called 'Royal' by Steve Bowbrick, published in June 2023

UPDATE: it’s finished. Here’s the PDF (it should be accessible to screen-readers and so on – let me know if you see any problems with the format).

Or is it a chapbook? Anyway, it’s a tabloid-sized, 12-page, newsprint (thank you Newspaper Club) sequence of poems (19 in all). The poems are in the not-entirely-forgotten rhyme royal form which is a kind of turbo-sonnet, probably brought to English poetry by Chaucer – everything’s packed into seven lines. Boom. And, although the poems in Royal are not thematically linked – they are chained together by rhyme (the last line of each poem rhymes with the first line of the next) to make a sequence. I’ve been obsessed with rhyme royal since I met one in a Zoom poetry class a couple of years ago – although I can’t remember who wrote it. Lots of famous poets have had a go, usually in a longer poem (Auden and Yeats, for instance). This poem by Wordsworth has 20 rhyme royal stanzas. They don’t usually stand alone. Anyway, I’m hoping I’ve now got rhyme royal out of my system and there will soon be a pile of these things in my house (I’ve even got an ISBN for it). And for help with this project I must thank my poetry pals and especially Christina Hill, who runs a brilliant Zoom poetry class/workshop that I’ve been attending since the pandemic.

I don’t really know what to do with these things but do leave a comment if you’d like one and I’ll put one in the post.

An endless round of perfectly-formed gotchas

Some people can’t tell the difference between advertising billboards and politics.

Mock-up photograph by the protest group Led By Donkeys showing a billboard with Nigel Farage's face and a quote that says "Brexit has failed - BBC Newsnight, 15th May 2023"
“We don’t have much in the way of politics but wait till you see these gotchas”

What is it that’s so contemptible about these stupid stunts? This shallow, patronising bollocks?

For liberals, this kind of smart ‘gotcha’ has now almost entirely replaced politics. For these billboard warriors, if you hone your clever message, tighten up the creative, select the perfect damning quote from your target, no politics is required.

Shaky animated gif of three power station cooling towers collapsing in a controlled demolition

But a gotcha, let’s be real – a clever communication of any kind, no matter how smart, witty or penetratingly devastating – *loud fx of power station collapsing* – cannot stand in for politics.

Once you’ve done your amazing, super-persuasive take-down, once your killer billboard is out there in the cities and towns, it must be easy to convince yourself that you’ve done your politics and can now take the rest of the day off. Kettle on.

I’m not a historian or a political scientist (or anything really) so I don’t know if this is something to do with Gramsci or the cultural turn or the final triumph of the Mad Men advertising and marketing pop culture culture thing (it’s certainly got something to do with the inflated opinion of their own work that advertising people have).

But I suspect it’s actually about a terrible lack of ambition, an almost total loss of anything even slightly utopian in our shared dreams. A really solid take-down or a killer clap-back is now, in the post-political era, essentially all we can hope for.

It’s not the fault, vaguely, of social media or of collapsing attention spans or, I don’t know, narcissism or influencer culture or woke or any of that stuff. It’s the fault of the collapsing horizon of radical possiblity.

Cut off from both ends – by the steady, forty-year decline of democratic institutions in the liberal states we live in and by the ever darker, pre-modern urges of the authoritarian right, radicals can now only dream of definitively winning the argument on Twitter.

Improving lives, changing circumstances, transcending the grim stasis of neoliberalism and marketisation and precaritisation – all off the agenda. We might win the meme wars, though.

Still from the end of Independence Day: Resurgance showing the explosion of the alien space ship

What’s worse – perhaps the most irritating thing about these stupid ads – is that they don’t actually say anything. There’s no message at all. No proposition, no offer. No suggestion of anything better or even different – just a dumb quote from the dumb golf club demagogue himself. A quote that, presented in isolation, is meant to act like a kind of rhetorical hand grenade. The idea is that the quote, in some way sufficient unto itself, will cause the man and his whole tribe to implode satisfyingly – like the giant explosion at the end of an alien invasion that neatly disposes of the entire threat in one big bang.

There’s a perfect, hermetic circularity to this: a weakness is identified (preferably hypocricy – hypocricy is usually best); a clever ad or post or column is written; the ad goes into circulation and goes viral; much celebratory nodding and celebrity retweeting; campaign complete. Repeat.

And, obviously, the whole thing depends on a perfect, patrician contempt for the people targeted by the ad, for the mainly working class men and women in whose neighbourhoods these billboards are put up (modelled, in the mock-up photo, by the two people walking their dog, staring slow-wittedly at the billboard, reaching for the truth).

These posters are a kind of happy, crowdfunded ‘fuck you’ from the metropolis – a ‘fuck you’ for the low-information leavers’ gullibility or their xenophobia. “Look, we found this quote! It proves you were taken in! Confirms you’re a mug, a retard – and probably a mouth-breathing racist! Wake up! Join us!”

The bankruptcy of the growth mindset

Screenshot of a promo for a LinkedIn Live 'Business Connect' event in which UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak answers questions from a carefully selected group of sympathetic business people and students.

Of course he’s on LinkedIn

I shouldn’t be surprised that the British Prime Minister – any contemporary national leader, really – is on LinkedIn. It’s supposed to say “I live in the real world, I know about the grind, about the exigencies of business and office life and the ugly necessity of self-promotion.” Maybe also “look, I got to the very top of British public life just by keeping my LinkedIn notifications on.”

But should I be happy that our head of government’s own LinkedIn bio apparently puts the word ‘influencer’ before ‘Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’? Or that this Prime Minister would happily, not to say chirpily, in the manner of a children’s TV presenter, show up at 8.30 on a Monday morning to answer a string of banal questions from friendly business big-wigs on a LinkedIn live?

Google search result for 'Rishi Sunak LinkedIn' - Rishi Sunak is an influencer. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Leader of the Conservative Party. Member of Parliament for Richmond (Yorks).

Should it actually scare me to learn that someone apparently so taken in by the promise of the hustle economy and by the bleak, one-dimensional glamour of the entrepreneur could possibly be asked to lead an actual economy. And to lead it, somehow, out of the long, sad, immiserating experiment of financialisation, marketisation, privatisation and the rest?

And anyway, of course he’s on LinkedIn (all the thrusting, young political innovators at the end of politics are there: Justin, Jacinda, Leo, Emmanuel, Pedro, Kyriakos…), of course he’s animated by the idea of the entrepreneur, the avatar of the shallowest and least productive version of capitalism – the capitalism of personal growth, ‘disruption’, of self-reliance and self-actualisation.

And here also lives the potent myth of the mysteriously gifted individual who can apparently turn around businesses, industries and whole national economies as an expression of will, of impatient, pathological brilliance.

This is the delusional political economy of LinkedIn and the other miserable, alienating institutions of the growth mindset – of the unicorn and the decacorn and the hectocorn and the other mythic creatures in the menagerie of money.

As we’re learning now, of course, the whole teetering, upside-down pyramid of the entrepreurial economy, of 10x and 100x and the profitless tech leviathan depended almost entirely on the long period of cheap money and the epic flow of unanchored capital from the owner class that are both now grinding to a nasty end and on the cruelty of the idea that anyone can join this club, despite what we know about the carefully hidden advantages of the entrepreneur class.

It’s like an episode of the Simpsons in which an actual country is led by an airhead who’s spent his whole working life cheerfully clicking on LinkedIn requests, shamelessly asking strangers for ‘endorsements’ and congratulating other strangers on their inexplicable promotions. Get a life, Rishi.

Slow progress

It is possible for geniuses to explain things in ways that non-geniuses can understand but sometimes they need to switch formats to do it.

Karl Marx
This guy

I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand politics and political science. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it’s too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting people on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I’m all over it. But to be honest it’s not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other. The best I get is a very gradual – almost undetectable in fact – improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I’m seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I’ve also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books.

This has go to do with my age obvs but also, it’s clear, to do with the fact that I’m doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist. My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I’m an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I’m still here, trying to figure it all out.

This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my disorganised attention last year when he co-wrote an influential piece – with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) – about the emergence of something they call ‘political capitalism’.

It’s a very persuasive idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism. A kind of breakthrough for cloistered Marxists.

Anyway, the piece – and the other stuff he’s written that I’ve dug out since then – is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you’d expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote – in longhand in an actual notebook – during the pandemic. To be clear, these are not the shopping lists (“400 rolls toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti”) and reminders (“stay indoors”) that I was writing during the pandemic, they’re notes about the genius stuff – and in particular they’re reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on.

So I thought “that’s going to be right up my street, it’s going to be accessible stuff that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren’t going to put me off and make me feel stupid.” I always jump on texts that promise to make the abstruse and theoretical transparent to me (in the same way I occasionally buy the latest ‘Quantum Physics for Know-Nothings’ from the table at the front of Waterstones).

And it is right up my street. I mean it’s still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader’s understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it’s also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights – aphorisms, I guess – that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing – but also Trump, Biden’s green programme, lockdowns, Trump’s announcements, music education, the economics of slavery, utopias, illness…

Riley’s language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. I’m going to say that he’s a pretty orthodox Marxist. He has no time for ‘IDPol’ or for ‘liberal hand-wringing’ in general. In his writing he never doesn’t take himself seriously. And this is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.

Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:

To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality.

Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:

The state is an object of struggle among competing political-capitalist cliques. In antiquity two models emerged: the universal monarchy, which to some extent disciplined these groups; and the unstable republic, which allowed them to run rampant. Are there not analogues in the current period? Putin’s Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, and the United States the unstable republican form.

Dylan Riley. microverses

That kind of thing.

And it’s one of those books that make you think “come on, geniuses, why don’t you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can’t you do it when you’re filling a big, fat book?” There’s obviously something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them, that explicitly excludes them.

Anyway, Riley’s book is a jewel – and it’s so short you’ll read it in a couple of days – or, since it’s not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.

  • Robert Brenner wrote another piece (free PDF from the Internet Archive) earlier in the pandemic which also crossed over a bit and was picked up in the wider debate about bail-outs and support for ordinary people. He called it ‘Escalating Plunder’ and the phrase has become a kind of shorthand for the enormously lucrative raid on the public finances staged by big business during Covid.
  • Top book buying tip. You can buy the book in all the usual locations but if you buy it from the publisher, Verso you get the eBook for nothing along with the print edition (and, in fact, the eBook on its own is only £1.50, as against £7.99 at Amazon and, because it’s not copy-protected, you can read it on any device). This, in fact, applies to everything you buy from Verso, so might constitute a good reason for you to get started with your own hopeless effort to learn about Marxism. Not that there’s necessarily anything hopeless about it but you know what I mean.