Sinister: The Walk

[P F]

The cold of the morning. The streets of Clive Bell and
John Sutherland. The Daily Mirror placards. NO WAR,
over a soldier hunkered in the desert. It doesn't make
quite as much sense as it could. Still I admire their
courage: more than did the many others who carefully,
disdainfully rip the newspaper's name from the
placards, and carry them thus adjusted.

Chanting is a lost art. 20 years ago we would cry
"Maggie Maggie Maggie: Out Out Out" - and so on. I
tried that today, if only as a scarcely-earned comment
on the poverty of the contemporary chant. I didn't get
beyond the first line. The best chanters I heard were
singers, or rappers, of a kind, parallel to Green
Park. They had rhythmic and melodic invention, and
seemed to invent their sometimes obscene numbers on
the spot. Elsewhere, a pair of girls would start
shouting '1-2-3-4: we don't want your fucking war'
only under the cover of one of the general waves of
noise that would sweep up and down the lines for
nearly no reason. Elsewhere again, a lass singing
'Blair the Bomber: can we stop him? Yes, we can', over
and over again, aparently oblivious to the rest of the
world's refusal to join in.

All of this is a deficit. The noise you could make on
a protest used to be a major part of its meaning, a
royal road to solidarity. That goes for singing too.
There was little of either today, on any grand scale.
The whistle has taken over, feeling like a shred of
club country culture descended to the political
streets.

Compensation for the sonic deficit: the visual
surplus. Certain banners pre-formed: I spent most of
the day with a generic bloodstained 'NO'. But so many,
so many had coined and made their own.

MAKE TEA NOT WAR

PEAS NOT WAR

WAR <--> TERRORISM, a vicious circle

LIBRARIANS SAY SSHHHH, STOP THE WAR

NICE BUSH / NASTY BUSH

I LIKE MY BUSH BETTER

THIS WAR IS UNJUSTIFIED, IMMORAL, FUTILE AND ILL-
     CONSIDERED (actually I forget the last adjective)

I'LL FIGHT CRIME, BUT I WON'T FIGHT IRAQ (carried
by... Batman)

WAR: NEVER. PEACE: CLEVER. POETRY: FOREVER

On screen they look poor enough things. I have
forgotten better ones. But to walk back down the line,
away from Hyde Park, towards the lights of the Ritz,
and see thousands and thousands more still coming past
you in the opposite direction, their textual
idiosyncrasies as good as infinite, their spirits
still high after 3 or 4 hours' walking, their
diversity natural, their unity real, their rolling
extent phenomenal -- this was among the great
political sensations of my life.

The overspill and spread of the approach to Hyde Park.
The pretty girls in long coats and woolly hats.
Speakers, several thousand people away: on screens
like Sting or Rod. Relatively anonymous organizers:
generalities: 'we're here because we want Tony Blair
to listen to us... you should be proud of yourselves:
we're proud of you'. Ramblers, people who seemed to
trail into irrelevances when handed the microphone.

And more familiar faces and voices. Harold Pinter: the
anarchists around me pricked up their ears; something
felt historic about this intervention. His sentences
were barked and sharp and frequently overstated: 'The
United States is a monster which has got out of
control'. His 'poem' is a mere off-the-chest rant. His
one word for Tony Blair, perhaps a joke on
'education', was 'Resign, resign, resign'. Still, he'd
known how to catch a moment's drama. Bianca Jagger
didn't; Mick Jagger would have been better.

But Ken Livingstone: this was another of those
episodes not to be forgotten. All these years of
compromise and accommodation and, allegedly, cynicism;
all the years of back-biting and briefing against him.
But he spoke the best on the day, and it came from as
near the heart as I need. He spoke like a real
politician, a man who's trained for years in speaking
to crowds. He pushed buttons to make whistles blow. He
spoke as Mayor of London, 'proud to welcome the
biggest demonstration to be held in Britain in 2,000
years'. (Really?) He said the cops had told him the
march was a million strong, which meant you could
double it. And he spoke at times like the Livingstone
of old, like it was 1985 - a trick of the light and
air, but also many truths in there. Standard wisdoms
of the left, about Western hypocrisy over its past
relations with Iraq; memories of Tony Benn taking that
stand many years ago; outright ad hominem hostility to
Bush. You or I could knock out this stuff. Hearing the
Mayor of London do it was something else. A lunatic
rushed on to complain about congestion charges. Ken
paused a moment, then remarked that it was nice to be
able to walk through London for once.


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