#110 Advice To A Daughter Lamenting Her Late Father, Keith Lamont Scott

September 25, 2016

Occasions when your father saw the rising in your eyes

Watched you coming in to the light.

Reading it all like any canny kid

Caught him catching you coming up,

Coming on, coming into it

And the impression this made on you both.

Such are the contours; so is life handed on.

Maybe slower this year after his traumatic brain injury (car crash).

Slower and perhaps less often.

And all the while you’ve been raising your game:

Higher, faster, further.

Still, you and he; sometimes the stillness.

Camera’s in free-fall – you’re feeding to Facebook live.

Frenzy of shouting, screaming, shrieking

Did you ever have stand-up rows like this?

But here there’s no side to take

’Bout boys or clothes or staying out late

Only your shock and awe, hearing your father is no more –

No more than a parcel of flesh and as many police bullets

As failed to find their way out of his fat, black body.

Take all the noise you need for now, any number of decibels

To shield you from the quiet of the grave.

Only recall and return one day to the still of the light,

And the lively look in a father’s eyes, upon his daughter bright.

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

September 18, 2016

Phone video footage is circulating of an altercation between police and a young black male car driver in North London.

It’s ridiculous – the fresh-faced police officer acting like a juvenile delinquent, except the term itself’ s too old for his tender years.

First pulling at the car window then hitting it; stepping back screeching before taking his truncheon to the windscreen.

A dozen blows to smash about a quarter of the screen; a tantrum that shocks because it’s bathetic.

And all because the kid behind the wheel won’t get out of the car; ‘kid’ because the 25-year-old driver who’s locked in and refusing to come out, still contrives to speak youth so the grown-ups can’t comfortably understand.

He needn’t have bothered. On this showing, the adult world just isn’t there to hear him.

Never mind misread him.

#55 Letter To America

June 28, 2015

There was a white lady of Spokane

Who presented as African woman

The hurt she pretended

As if she had mended

Herself, herself, herself, herself, herself……
Self-proclaimed and self-obsessed, so where did the open-faced girl go – the middle class white kid with room to choose?

Gone away when the ugly world closed her down, perhaps. Or when Rachel Dolezal chose to resign and re-assign herself, signing up to the victimhood newly associated with the confines of the ‘hood, and blacking up to ensure no backing out.

But look at her eyes, mouth, lower jaw – it’s there in the rest of her face as much as thefrizzed up hair and sunbed skin.

All her features – both white and ‘black’ – jointly comprise the face of that general fatalism which now underlies even the most voracious appetite for particular advancement.

Whether for personal gain or the ‘advancement of colored people’, underneath theshrills of advocacy lies a recurring note of resignation.

The fatalist frame of mind is now as widespread as its euphemism, ‘resilience’. General fatalism was the officer in charge of Barack Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,the pastor gunned down in a Charleston church along with eight members of his congregation. It is the bass line underpinning the President’s second term as well as his rueful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.

Though they are not be identified as one and the same, the closure characterising this mindset is kith and kin to the dehumanising condition formerly known as oppression.

Sure, she was fakin’ the black thing. But Dolezal was truer than she knew to the stateof the nation; and closer to the rest of us than we choose to understand.

‘Hideously White’ – Ha, Ha! But That’s Only Half The Story

October 19, 2013

It’s tempting to say of Greg Dyke: hoist with his own petard. The former Director General who once complained that the BBC was ‘hideously white’, is now at risk of a white-out. The only man ever to put a Rat (Roland) on a sinking ship (TV AM: he turned it round and made a tidy profit), may be pushed out of his nearly new role as chair of the Football Association (FA) after complaints about his hideously white appointees to the FA Commission on the future of the English game.

In an open letter to his chief critic, ‘Greg’ (just don’t call me ‘Gregory’) even cites his ‘hideously white’ comment as proof of his bona fides.

Greg – I know you won’t mind me calling you that, ‘cos that’s the down to earth guy you are – have you never heard the saying: ‘those who live in glass houses’? Just glance at a looking-glass…..

But if it’s easy to have a go at Greg for being right-on, man of the people, down with the black and ethnic minority communities – only to have it blow back in his hideously white face, it’s hard to accept that this is what became of the generation which saw television as a genuinely popular medium; the people’s window on the world.

Their rise was imbued with widespread hope for the extension of social democracy; their demise represents its dramatic contraction.

Black and white David Frost, close-cropped hair and skinny ties, in the 1960s the most intelligent man in TV. Greg Dyke’s seven-year ascent from junior researcher to head of London Weekend Television, delivering entertainment and current affairs in full 1970s colour: not bad for a Whispering Bob Harris lookalike.

Intelligence was everything – among these broadcasters but also on the part of the audience they were broadcasting to. Patronising – a whole way of life for their successors – is just what they didn’t do. read more

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#110 Advice To A Daughter Lamenting Her Late Father, Keith Lamont Scott

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

#55 Letter To America

‘Hideously White’ – Ha, Ha! But That’s Only Half The Story