Everybody loves it when somebody rises up to success from relative obscurity. Especially if their “success” constitutes laying out a fascist with a proverbial bitch-slap. Bonnie Greer has had a thoroughly successful career as a writer and critic, and would be dismayed if the defining moment in her career was that appearance on Question Time. And however much it undoubtedly imprinted her on the national consciousness, she is more concerned these days with the sudden ascent of another political icon.
Greer’s new book charts the rise of Barack Obama with reference to the musical culture he was surrounded by – and is appropriately called Obama Music. Of course, the majority of the time, people who have come from “nowhere” have really had a career of hard work behind them, and just as Greer had appeared on Question Time several times before, those in Obama’s hometown of Chicago will have known a political superstar was in the making.
Or perhaps not. See, Chicago isn’t really Obama’s hometown, the way it is Greer’s. He was born in Hawaii and his first attempt to get elected in Chicago failed, as he was defeated by Bobby Rush. ‘I felt strange about him for a long time, because I can hear that he doesn’t come from the South Side,’ says Greer – and she wasn’t the only one. On the Chicago South Side they have a word for people who fit in, who belong there, and that word is a “regular”. Obama had to learn to be a regular – and perhaps unusually for him, it didn’t necessarily come naturally.
The process of learning to be a regular, particularly when carried out by a politician, is a hard one, because if a regular is roughly defined as someone you can trust, a politician may be roughly defined as someone you can’t. ‘People who are intellectual can appear to be manipulative’ observes Greer, before adding ‘He’s always a person who is very conscious that he is on the outside.’ But Greer is keen to point out that the choice of Chicago wasn’t arbitrary, and early failures didn’t mean Obama had made some sort of mistake. ‘I think he’s a self-made man in the real sense of the word… He needed to have some roots, and he found those roots [in Chicago]’.
So, far from seeing Chicago as a stepping-stone on the way to stardom, perhaps it is better to see it in terms of the very foundation on which the political phenomenon was built. And its culture, its people, its history, have all impacted on the President’s development. ‘One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I wanted to understand why I didn’t trust him, why I didn’t like him, and it did go back to the fact that media were portraying him as if he had come from nowhere, there was no-one like him, he was unique, and, although he was unique in that he became President, he wasn’t unique in where he came from.’ But as he learned to be part of the community, far from it being an act of contrivance, the community actually moulded him. ‘I wanted to show a community, one which was striving to build itself, in spite of segregation, into a viable entity, and that’s what Barack found there, and thought, “this is where I want to be”‘.
Of course, it’s one thing to rise to the top, quite another to deliver. If Chicagoans had now finally accepted Obama as their own, what did Greer, as a South Sider, make of the perceived failure of his administration? At the time when I spoke to her, the health bill was floundering, and only very limited progress had been made with regards to foreign policy. She wasn’t too fussed: ‘the internet has shortened imaginative time, shortened delivery time, and heightened expectations. He’s only been in office for 12/14 months, and think about what he had to face – the collapse of the capitalist system – and i think he’s probably functioning as well as anyone could in the circumstances.’ Yet some of the forces that worked to his advantage during the election now pile on the pressure afterwards. ‘Obama is more than the man, he’s a symbol. Sometime in 2008, he went viral. In a way, we have to ask, which Obama are we talking about, the man or the poster?’ The importance of image in the modern world is not exactly unknown, and the expectations that accompany it perhaps unrealistic – although Obama can take solace in the fact that he at least got over the first hurdle, unlike some. ‘Cameron tried to pull that off here, and it backfired’.
On many levels, Obama’s success doesn’t seem to matter, and Greer likened the role that he plays in black society to the musical culture that he has emerged from. ‘For all the people who complain, there’s a bunch of little kids out there who don’t hear that, and go out thinking I want to be able to do that myself. And Berry Gordy was doing something similar, get it out there so people can see that you can be on TV.’ The importance of this is paramount. For so long, the music of black culture was exploited by the industries. Greer points out that ‘Elvis was invented to use the sound, and have it come out of a white man. Hound Dog was recorded by a black woman’. But it couldn’t last for long. Voices like Aretha Franklin’s just couldn’t be replicated. The success of the Tamla Motown label meant that exploitation by the record companies was no longer necessary, and the work of the likes of Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson ensured that the segregated business of music began to break down some of the barriers. Most importantly though, stereotypes could be broken. ‘In the movies, black people were there for a purpose, to make you laugh, or make you cry, or to make a point’, and yet, through music, this could be challenged. Greer uses the example of the Jacksons. ‘The Jackson family weren’t rioting, they weren’t in dire poverty, they were just a normal American family, just like anyone else’s family – they just happened to have black skin. And Michael was able to punch a way through – of all people Michael Jackson… but at one point he was living a normal life.’
On the topic of TV exposure the subject switched to the inevitable. I asked whether she thought that Nick Griffin had a right to be on Question Time, or if actually she thought he didn’t, but wanted to be the one to rebuke him were he to be given the airtime. ‘I couldn’t see how they could justify keeping him off because his “party” had one about a million votes. In a democratic society, how could the BBC justify him not being on that. In the fair and honest and balanced broadcaster the BBC has to be, they have to make a judgement. And I think they made the right one. The longer you kept this clown off the air, the bigger he became in people’s consciousness.’ As for her personal involvement, she commented: ‘I decided that I was gonna treat it like a normal Question Time, I wasn’t gonna make it any big deal – even though I had enormous pressure from the outside, saying “don’t do it, you’ll give him a platform, say this, don’t say that” – it was horrific’. Clearly she didn’t approve of him as a person, but she didn’t have to do anything special to show this – although she did explain how she positioned her body with her back to him, so as to not make her look sympathetic to his cause. Not that it stopped his advances: ‘He had his hand behind my chair all the way through the set. He tried to talk to me, he gave me his card afterwards, he said we should talk and stuff… I just thought, “Man, you are de-lude-ed.”‘ In fact she hasn’t even watched what unfolded from the viewer’s perspective. ‘I haven’t seen it, because for me, it was another experience on the set with him. So in a way, if I look at him, I remember all those things… Its like surviving a car accident’. Well, it does sound similarly traumatic.
Afterwards there were many complaints suggesting that Griffin hadn’t been given a fair chance – a claim which Greer unsurprisingly rejects. ‘Some people thought he should [have been] on Newsnight, and Jeremy Paxman would have ripped him to shreds. That would’ve been kinda easy in a way.It would have been a good show and quite funny but it wouldn’t have shifted anything, the BNP could say ‘well it’s Paxman, he would do that’. Instead it was the audience who were accused of being loaded against him. ‘It was a brilliant audience, a typical London audience… and the next day, when he was screaming that he was set up: He wasn’t set up! This is London, this is the way London is. Are you too stupid to realise that the majority of London is multicultural, inter-faith, young and old, and you can’t come hear talking a bunch of rubbish and think that nobody’s gonna challenge you. You can’t do it anywhere, but certainly not in London’. Perhaps we don’t have to worry about these platforms after all, and, as Greer says ‘We can’t deny even the fascists, so we have to trust that we have the mechanisms in place, the understanding in place, so that people can judge for themselves’. And I guess if you don’t believe we have that, then you must’ve pretty much given up on democracy.
