In the run up to the most important American election, most important global election, in modern history I watched Grayson Perry's Big American Road Trip (Channel 4) and it seemed that I did so at a hugely appropriate time. But, such is the division and disunity in America under Trump and even before Trump, any time in the last four years would have been apposite.
Perry filmed the three part series, ostensibly a travelogue but (like all the best travelogues) realistically a political and social documentary, in 2019, before the Covid era. But Covid didn't create the divisions to be found in America and elsewhere (particularly in the UK) and, sadly - despite the best efforts of many, it didn't give us a reason to heal them. If Covid itself did not exacerbate the divide, the administration of Donald Trump used it as a very blunt tool to do so. That's why the American coronavirus death toll, official figure as I type this - 238,516, is the worst in the world by some margin.
Trump's fellow populists Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Narendra Modi (India), and Boris Johnson (UK - do you need reminding?), along with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Mexico) complete the list of the five countries with the highest Covid death tolls. But Trump's disastrous policy of letting his supporters catch the disease and die of it, and even hosting huge super spreading political rallies to speed up this process, may (or may not) see him voted out of the office very very soon but it won't, to use the words of Sacha Baron Cohen's hilarious liberal pastiche Nira Cain-N'degeocello from 2018's Who Is America?, 'heal the divide'.
Nor will the excellent Grayson Perry riding around the country on a predictably garish motorcycle kitted out in wonderfully tasteless self-designed leathers. Perry's erudite, he's conciliatory in nature, and he keeps it light at first so people feel able to speak. But he's also got a fierce and unashamed line of questioning and he's harsher on those who move in similar circles to him than he is to those from different backgrounds and those who see the world through very different eyes. That great amorphous and protean mass that Trump and his supporters so like to rail against, the liberal elite, are defined, denigrated, and blamed explicitly for their part in the rise of Trump and the new age of American fascism.
Which seemed a bit harsh, fascists need to own their shit, but was possibly the only misjudged move in the whole series. One that saw Perry, to the soundtrack of Outkast's Hey Ya and Georgia On My Mind (and it's on lots of our minds right now), hit the open road to visit the south, the east coast, and Wisconsin, exploring the cultural fault lines that continue to divide the once great nation. A nation that seems, to an outsider like me, to somehow be simultaneously imploding and exploding at the same time. With such force the rest of the world cannot fail to be affected.
Perry's journey starts in Atlanta, the self-proclaimed capital of black America. This year's horrific murder of George Floyd (in Minneapolis) may have pushed the Black Lives Matter movement into the global eye but the fight for equality and civil rights is anything but new in America. Isaac Hayes III (aka Ike Dirty, son of the famous soul musician) talks about how black people growing up outside of Atlanta became afflicted with a 'minority mentality' and how in Atlanta there are structures, institutions, and businesses that counter that.
Atlanta's historical black colleges, Spelman and Morehouse, have produced alumni as successful and influential as Martin Luther King Jr and Samuel L Jackson and when Perry speaks to two proud parents they talk of how co-operation is encouraged above competition at these institutions and their son's articulate and passionate manner demonstrates ably how Atlanta has helped, and is helping, him to mature and given him a better chance of success in life.
Some even describe the city as Wakanda. Perry meets with Real Housewives of Atlanta star Sheree Whitfield in the palatial home her fame has bought her and from where she promotes her 'athleisure' range of clothing. Sheree complains about black on black jealousy (though I'm not sure that jealousy of those that have taken more than their fair share is a race specific thing) but a trip around Atlanta shows that many black people there do not have anything like the luxury she enjoys.
Atlanta has four times higher black unemployment than it does white unemployment and the gap between rich Atlantans and poor Atlantans is the widest in the whole of the US. Not many houses in Atlanta look like Sheree Whitfield's. Despite the obvious racial and wealth disparity there are still many white Americans (at a rough guess about seventy million) who fear that when the US becomes minority white (which - with suicide, obesity, and opiates killing white Americans in larger number than they're being born - won't be all that long) the black majority will start to treat the white people as badly as the whites have treated them for generations.
It's always a bad idea to judge people by your own low standards. Trump, with his Muslim ban and his long history of incendiary and racist comments about black people and Latinos, is the face of their resistance to that. The ugly, shit eating, lying, bullying, moaning, orange face created by their own fear, hatred, and wanton stupidity.
Instead of wasting time chatting to racists about race, Perry chats to a man who paints public art images of Martin Luther King Jr and Colin Kaepernick (the latter as Saint Sebastian, punished for telling the truth) and in this we see how black America is always forced to tell its own stories in a land where the narrative is currently, hopefully for not much longer, dominated by Trump and his QAnon quoting conspiracy theorist followers.
If America will soon be majority black then Washington DC has a head start on the rest of the country. It's been that way there since the mid-fifties and when Perry arrives there he finds a very different black lived experience to any of those he'd discovered in Atlanta. Dr Carlotta Miles is a wealthy psychiatrist and is part of an elite establishment of black professionals in the nation's capital who dress, act, and think very differently.
Their version of success is pleasant, polite, and unthreatening but it's underpinned by the very elitism that the far right have juiced so effectively in recent years. In suburban Maryland, Perry meets young black golfers from inner city environments who are being taught not just golf but 'esteem'. It seems as if these young men, like Dr Miles, are being groomed to fit in to a white dominated society, as if they will need to always constantly prove they are worthy equals of white people and not to have that, as should be, as their birth right.
High summer in Martha's Vineyard sees plenty of people who have never had to worry about that. The Clintons vacation in Martha's Vineyard and the Obamas own an $11,000,000 beach home there. It's the absolute apotheosis of liberal elitism but not everyone living there likes to admit that. The former hippy hangout, and the setting for the film Jaws, now, Perry observes, is home to an endless parade of rich men in faded coral Ralph Lauren shorts.
Perry rankles at both the fashion and the complacency of the place. He likens it to "the spiritual home of a knitting blogger" and calls is a "theme park of liberal tastefulness" with the same amount of aggression he applies when he upsets guests at a dinner party by asking them how they were so easily outmanouevred by Trump. How did Trump, despite himself being the worst example of excess imaginable, manage to exploit American anger at their lifestyles with such lethal results?
Was it, Perry asks, because their lifestyles, their life choices, their politics, and the very nature of their being, is simply so easy to caricature? If Martha's Vineyard is where the liberal elite holiday and retire to then New York City is, of course, the "spiritual home of liberal America". Perry, as a liberal, stays in Park Slope, a district of textbook brownstone apartments.
As a self-confessed member of the liberal elite, Perry metaphorically flagellates himself and his social group for their celebration of "romcom diveristy" and for being Farrow & Ball fanatics who judge others by what shade of white they choose to paint their lounge. He's on to something. If you're not even passing the ball to those on your own team you shouldn't be surprised when an opponent starts to dictate the play.
When Trump says he loves the "poorly educated" he's exploiting and widening the division these unwritten social diktats about class and taste have already created. At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Perry visits a sorority house during 'rush week', the period when new recruits are either accepted or denied. It's an old girl's network where fitting in may decide not just which sorority you join but map out one's future career. Not what your career will be in necessarily but almost certainly how far you will go in it.
A very noisy hippy themed party looks, nominally, like fun if you're into that kind of thing but behind the facade of the party the event is all about persuasion, opportunity, and, that truly dreadful word, networking. Inherited wealth always helps you get on and this, over generations, has gradually corrupted a supposed meritocracy. Trump is one of the most vile examples of this and in that it's bizarre, and hypocritical, that he should be the one who benefits so greatly from the backlash.
The American dream had become a nightmare already but with Trump at the helm that nightmare has deepened exponentially. But, as we await confirmation of the result of this most vital of elections, there are still some who live in hope that America can still deliver on her promises. Those that still believe the Statue of Liberty actually means something. In Flushing, a neighbourhood in Queens in New York City, Perry speaks to a young Chinese-American, Eugene, who holds faith that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything. He knows he'll have to work much harder than those from privileged backgrounds but he says, because of that, he'll appreciate his success more than they will.
He's young. He's optimistic. Many aren't. In the commuter town of Westport, Connecticut the wealthy supporters of Hillary Clinton are pessimistic because Trump is in power and in the poverty stricken neighbouring town of Bridgeport they're pessimistic because they live in a country of racial division and vast inequality - and a country with a lot of guns.
What could possibly go wrong? In the midwest state of Wisconsin (a key electoral battleground that Trump won in 2016 and, as I write, looks likely to lose in 2020) they love guns and they hate homosexuals. At least according to the 'bikers for Trump' who call the orange moron a 'badass' who doesn't take 'shit' (a lot of anal references for homophobes, hmmm). The Republican ladies he meets in Minocqua, and who ask Perry if he knows Elton John - I imagine he probably does, believe Obama was ashamed of America and Bob, an elderly keyboard warrior fighting the culture wars from his room full of stuffed baboon hunting trophies, spends an average of five to six hours a day angrily agreeing with people from his own side on Facebook.
Steve Bannon's a dreadful cunt but when he said culture was upstream of politics he set about a change in the way politics is played out in which the ultimate outcome is still to be determined and could ultimately be disastrous for the entire planet. In Wisconsin, abortion is such a hot potato topic in the culture wars that when Perry meets some of the state's liberals, on a mezzanine level of an organic supermarket of course, some of them carry placards with slogans like ABORTION IS COOL AND GOOD and HONK IF YOU LOVE ABORTION.
I'm pro-choice but 'loving' abortion, thinking it's 'cool' - rather than an upsetting and often necessary medical procedure? This, to me, seems like provocation. It seems like lowering yourself to the Trump level of debate. Michelle Obama, famously, said "when they go low, we go high" and it's a message that shouldn't be forgotten. Identify under as many pronouns as you like, buy your food from organic supermarkets, protest Trump's demonstrable crimes and lies, and fight for a better world free of fascist and racist thought but never ever lower yourself to the level of debate that Trump wants.
Not just because he will always drag it down even lower, there is no bottom limit, but because we're better than that. I'm better than that, you're better than that, the people who own prize winning steers and live in farms that look like Norman Rockwell paintings are better than that, and the lady from Twin Lakes, Wisconsin who knows that Russia spread rumours about the dangers of vaccination on the Internet but still refuses to have her four children vaccinated (because if they get sick, doctors can just cure them) is better than that. Or at least would be if she could access the voice of reason inside her head instead of the voice of fear and hatred.
Despite the often depressing subject matter, Perry laughs loudly and often and brings people into his confidence with ease and grace for the most part. He questions his own assumptions and in doing so he questions ours, his most obvious viewers. On his big American road trip he delved behind the lines of the ongoing culture wars to investigate the real lives and the real concerns that underpin them and are being exploited by populists and even, now, by those of us who seek to, and claim to, oppose populism.
Populism, nativism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and all the other acts of hate that Trump and the like (this is a global phenomenon, Trump's American version is just its loudest and most brash iteration) have turbocharged in the last few years cannot be defeated by more of the same. We need a different story, we need a true story, and we need a story of hope.
The pendulum of justice and fairness has swung so far in the wrong direction that it will take a long long time for us to reset our moral compass. The fact that over seventy million people have voted for Donald Trump this week proves we still have a very long way to go on that score. The fact that that may prove not to be enough, at this point I'm starting to feel cautiously optimistic, gives us a foundation of hope that we can begin to build a new future for the world on. Because if we don't it's not that the future will be bad. It's that there will be no future at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment