‘Now you will see a film,’ says a close-up of a mouth with not much face to go with it. It’s a mouth that, though not floating so free from its body as the smile of the Cheshire Cat, recalls the disembodied mouth that speaks in Samuel Beckett’s Not I – a mouth that makes the identity of the one who says ‘I’ a lot less self-evident. In this film, however, we recognise the mouth and the voice with which it speaks as belonging to the picture-perfect girl with the straight blonde hair and pretty pink dress we’ve previously seen in a state of furious boredom hurling stones into a stream.
On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All the influencers back him, and he’s all over social media’ (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). ‘Harris is all over social media too,’ I said. ‘Not the same,’ he said. He was right. I should have known better.
Keir Starmer described Badenoch’s election as a ‘proud moment for our country’. He presumably meant that Black British children will see a person like them at the helm of a major political party and believe that they can do it too. Does a poor Black immigrant child look at a wealthy Black person who hates immigrants and feel a dream take shape?
‘We die! You make money!’ was one of the slogans that HIV activists chanted at the New York Stock Exchange in 1997 in protest at pharmaceutical companies whose high drug prices had barred millions of people with the virus from accessing life-saving medicines.
‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery. Then Brick Lane, with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls.’
At PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on 4 November, teams of ushers were handing out signs that said: ‘Trump will fix it.’ They didn’t allow homemade signs because it was a safety risk, they said, though it also meant they could control what appeared in photos and videos. Seating was carefully orchestrated too: teams of workers wearing T-shirts with union logos and hard hats were positioned close to the stage, behind Trump, so the cameras would show him surrounded by cheering blue-collar supporters. Empty seats were kept out of frame, though there weren’t many of them. For weeks leading up to the US election, Democratic Party superstars took aim at Trump’s ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes’, in Barack Obama’s words. But the election result suggests a harsh truth: Democrats needed to do a better job of courting Trump’s crowds rather than dismissing them.
Kamala Harris’s supporters at Howard University on election night. Photo © Jemal Countess / UPI / Alamy
The next morning, the city was silent. DC is openly hostile to Trump: more than 90 per cent of voters backed Harris. Howard was empty, save for a handful of tired campaign workers. There were two students walking by the barricades. ‘All right, so what country are we moving to?’ one asked. ‘What the fuck, Georgia?’