It Could Be Said #91 Love and Harmony In Dudley Zoo

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There are two things that everyone knows that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have said during her bid for the American presidency in 2016. We’ll return to the first but I increasingly can’t get the second supposed gaffe out of my mind, which was her clapping back at Donald Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again”, by saying “America never stopped being great”. Defending the status quo that her current (no really) husband, and her former boss had done more than most to build was supposedly guilty of that most egregious of modern sins; not reading the room.

But there’s a problem with that. Hillary Was Right! America was as great as it had ever been in 2016. It was leading in the technologies of the future, it was pursuing radical free trade deals with Europe and Asia that would secure their loyalty in the face of China’s rise, and by electing and re-electing an African American President it had taken a decisive step to moving past the country’s original sin.

However, the smart sets across American politics said she had failed to recognise the lived experience of the voters whether they be radical race equity activists, bitter end trade unionists in heavy industry, or reactionary racists. For all that these very serious people decry post-modernism, you’d never hear them suggest a politician is right to tell a voter they’re wrong! I guess that objectivism is for thou not for thee.

I was thinking about this whilst walking around Dudley Zoo on Saturday with my son. Just two days before, Reform nearly ran the table across the third of Dudley’s councillors that were up for election, with only 12% of wards resisting the teal tirade. And yet what I saw as I laboured up and down the hill that this huge zoo is built on…(pauses for breath)…what I…(pauses for another breath and to have an ice cream)…what I saw was the very thing that the fascists the people of Dudley elected as their councillors want to destroy.

Because despite Dudley Zoo being in what is clearly the least ethnically diverse borough of the Black Country, you could not have asked for a more diverse range of people enjoying the even more diverse range of animals. You had plenty of wheezing, elderly white people who were moving alarmingly like me as we both desperately tried to keep up with the children we had brought along; some even had my hairline…even more alarming others had more hair (later that evening my stepson who had been busy revising, rubbed salt in theese wounds by remarking how much hair Sir John Major still has at more than twice my age)! But you also saw much younger couples, some of whom seemingly had confused the zoo with a nightclub given how they were dressed.

But you had so many more types of people. I was particularly heartened by a Black woman in a Jamaica jersey with a fancy camera I saw as we entered the zoo for the simple reason that I saw her again as we were about to leave, which reassured me that the four hours it took us to navigate the complex wasn’t a testament to my mobility issues. I saw numerous Muslim women in hijabs (and a couple in niqabs) taking their kids to see the animals. But I also saw plenty of Asian women not in Islamic dress, including one woman who’s outfit that was diametrically opposed to any faith’s concept of modesty! There were also people who were clearly (relatively) recent arrivals from Europe.

And as I sat gasping for air after all the walking whilst my son went to the top of Dudley Castle to take the photo that gave this article its cover image, I couldn’t help but reflect on how sad the juxtaposition between this idyllic scene and those nightmarish results from 48 hours beforehand. Here I saw the Black Country I have fallen in love with over the nine years I have lived here; yes, a society with flaws but fundamentally one that is a success that should be built upon. And yet so many people across the Black Country, including many of the people looking at all these animals from across the world, voted for people who see the multicultural society we were all enjoying that gorgeous Saturday afternoon as a mistake that must be corrected.

But why? What is the problem that they are trying to solve? I mean to make a crude point, and not to flatter my own (mixed-race) child, but all the…let’s say…erm…overbearing children were white rather than Black or Asian. Likewise with the aforementioned solitary exception all the women who were dressed….uh…provocatively, were white. Now I’m not judging either group; I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that there’s a very real chance that draconian parenting may ultimately hold children back in the long-run (funnily enough my ex-wife strongly disagrees and I sensibly defer to her expertise), and personally, I (respectfully) enjoy walking past women who are “provocatively” dressed. But then again, I’m not a social conservative. And yet actual British conservatives claim that devout Muslims are a greater threat to their ideal than white people who are clearly living in a way contrary to the virtues they claim to advocate.

I mean I do understand the dissonance; they’re not actually social conservatives or even radical rightists. They’re just racists. And this brings me back to the first thing that everyone knows Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have said during the 2016 Presidential Election; her “Basket of Deplorables” speech. This is however profoundly misunderstood. She was not saying that all Trump supporters were motivated by bigotry as conservatives guiltily or progressives gullibly claim, just that half were. And to be honest that was almost certainly an underestimate. The point she was actually trying to make was that the Democrats had to look beyond the bigots and win back those who were tempted by the far-right due to frustration at the broader status quo.

This eminently sensible take has fallen victim to a pincer movement from the Right and the Left. The Right obviously hated the idea that their most loyal supporters were motivated by bigotry in a way that wasn’t true of their broader voter base and tried to turn Clinton’s words into a smear against all their supporters. Meanwhile the Left hated the idea the idea that progressive parties should stop trying to win back die-hard bigots because those people were often the last people still living lives that resemble the white working class of the 1950s which leftists claim will be the shocktroops of the socialist revolution. Presumably nobody told them that conservatives governed pretty much all major democracies that decade.

But Hillary was right in both things she wasn’t meant to say. Sadly, things have changed in America, but Britain really is great, having long move beyond the drab and pinched country I grew up in (three years ago I’d have ended that sentence with “where people openly said ‘Enoch Was Right’ in mainstream society” but obviously that bad vibe has come back strong lately). Too many people, and I absolutely include myself in this, took for granted liberalism’s successes and so enjoyed kicking against the squares whose idea of radical politics was being fair and kind to each other.

Well, the time to tolerate such indulgences has long since gone. You want to cosplay as the People’s Soviet of FurryForum2473, please delete your account. You want to lie to your constituents that cackling as the universities that neighbour your constituency implode is good for local industries, go out and touch grass. You want to claim that poverty is causing your members to embrace the far right when plenty of poor Black and Asian people somehow are immune to this supposed causal link, time to check your privilege.

Because the thing that Hiliary Clinton actually got wrong was not succeeding in beating the fascist! That’s a mistake we can’t make again lest in ten years’ time the only non-white face at Dudley Zoo is my beetroot complexion as I climb the steps to the Reptile House whilst I video call my son, stepson and their mother who are no longer allowed to live here.

These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.

Democratic Election Advert, 1964