Egg on face

Kiwi ingenuity is not dead. This amazing short video clip Creme That Egg! (below) is like every schoolboy’s Rube Goldberg fantasy. It is the entry of a 23-year-old New Zealander into a competition for a chocolate company. Entrants needed to find the most creative way to break a chocolate egg. The clip is gobsmacking, and it’s also gobsmacking that it didn’t win (I can’t vouch for the actual chocolate). I suppose the marketing people at the chocolate factory couldn’t work out a way to turn Creme That Egg! into an advertisement. Whatever: advertising’s loss should be New Zealand film’s gain. This fellow deserves a job, now.
Updates
1. In less than a month, YouTube hits went from 1000 to 150,000.
2. As at July 7, it has been viewed 425,000 times on YouTube. The clip has just been recommended by The New Yorker - and Joseph has made another one.

Magnum Opus

In the history of photo-journalism, John G Morris has been involved in almost as many classic images as Kodak. Although his contribution has been outside the viewfinder, many of the pictures that have spoken loudest have had Morris’s thumbprint on the contact sheet. Robert Capa’s blurred GI bobbing above the waves at Omaha Beach is the most famous image from the D-Day landings; Morris was Life magazine’s London photo editor when the undeveloped films arrived from Normandy.

The two most unforgettable images from Vietnam are Ernie Adams’s startling moment-of-execution in a Saigon street, and Huynh Cong Ut’s shocking photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a track, in agony after a napalm attack. Morris was the New York Times photo editor that convinced the paper to run the pictures on its front page. He modestly says the question with Adams’s execution image was not Should we run it? It was How big? And he recalls the editors’ relief that the naked girl in the napalm picture was so young, otherwise the photo would never have been published. Both images won the Pulitzer Prize; more importantly, they helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam war.

Morris is keenly aware of the impact photo-journalism can have. He managed the legendary photo-agency Magnum in its early years, and was photo-editor at the New York Times and Washington Post during the tumultuous 1960s, when image after image entered the history books long after the newspapers lined bird cages. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King was followed only weeks later by that of Robert F Kennedy; the latter event gave Morris his only front-page byline of the New York Times. He happened to be in the Los Angeles hotel when Kennedy was shot, and filed his report. In the next two years, pictures would arrive of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, of Teddy Kennedy’s car submerged at Chappaquiddick, and of the student killings at Kent State. Morris oversaw the images that were to go with the Times’ “Pentagon Papers” scoop, only to see the lengthy text run without illustration, and probably to lesser effect.

Now 90 and a retired American in Paris – a city which can still be regarded as the home base of photo-journalism – Morris pinpoints the difference between photographers in World War Two and the current conflict in Iraq. “Let’s face it, [in the Second World War] we were propagandists. The American and Allied press was not neutral, we were fighting the war and we were an instrument of propaganda.” Hence the job involved self-censorship, even before news copy and photos went through official channels for approval: injured or dead Allied combatants were rarely photographed, and neither were images that may contain useful information (unit badges on uniforms, technical equipment, weaponry). Even photographers such as Capa avoided taking these pictures because they knew they would not be published.

In Iraq, there is also an agenda taking place, says Morris: “There are so many on our side who believe the war in Iraq was unjustified that a lot of people are happy to see it photographed in all its horror.” He compares the lack of images of casualties in Iraq – of either side, but especially American soldiers – with the experience of Life’s Ralph Morse, who photographed a cover story of an injured soldier, following from his wounding in the battlefield, through treatment in field hospitals to his arrival back home.

“Photographers refrained from photographing the most gruesome aspects of war, and perhaps avoided that too much. In recent wars, photo coverage has become more realistic. David Duncan’s pictures of the Korean War showed American forces in retreat: his photos were very realistic and very tragic, too. In the Vietnam War the photos were even more realistic, from people like Larry Burrows but many others as well. The standards of what gets published have loosened up as wars have gone on.”

We met in 2005 at the Frontline Club in Paddington, a London retreat for war correspondents, photographers and film crew. The glass cases showing bloodied maps, destroyed flak jackets and cameras that weren’t bullet proof testify to the dangers endured by the club members and their need to mingle when not in the field. In a black cab ride across London to the Institute of Contemporary Arts for a seminar on war photography, Morris’s anecdotes continued. The ICA was founded by Roland Penrose, husband of Lee Miller – Man Ray’s muse and a war photographer herself, known for her early shots of the liberated concentration camps. Arriving at the ICA, we were greeted by another legendary photo-journalist, Philip Jones Griffiths, whose 1971 book Vietnam Inc. would be the most famous collection from that war.

In London during the Second World War, Morris befriended George Silk, New Zealand’s most celebrated war photographer. Silk was offered a job on Life for one image, in which a Papua New Guinean leads a blind Australian soldier to safety, and later concentrated on sports and stop-motion photography. (Morris was also on the interview panel when New Zealander Brian Brake applied for membership at Magnum.)

We began by talking about George Silk. They first met during the war when Silk was hired by Life magazine, where Morris was assistant editor to the picture editor, in New York. “George was hired on the basis of one remarkable photo he’d taken of a Papuan native walking with a blinded soldier across the mountains of New Guinea. It was a powerful picture and I think Life used it as the picture of the week.

“Then I got to know him better when he came to London several months after D-Day. He’d been in the Italian theatre after covering the action in North Africa. He photographed the Italian front in colour, which was very seldom used at Life, because at Life it took six weeks to close a colour page so we didn’t do it often.

“George more or less experimented with colour in battle in Italy. That was one of very few colour reportages that Life ever published during the war. Then he came to London I guess about October 1944, after the liberation of Paris. “After the war he became a specialist in sports photography and developed techniques which were really quite special. He opened the camera and got sense of motion, and also did multiple exposures.”

It is easy to forget now the impact that the weekly Life magazine had around the world. (Life magazine cover, from 12 June 1964, by Larry Burrows.)

“In the days before television Life magazine was the evidence that America existed, and it was the most prestigious place for a photographer to appear, any photo-journalist. We really had no competition among the magazines: Look was a picture magazine but it closed two or three weeks in advance, whereas we closed on a Saturday night and the magazine appeared the following week. Look would appear two or three weeks later, or normally six weeks. So when Pearl Harbour happened, which was on a Sunday, Look came out for at least one more issue without any reference to the war whatever.”

During wartime, photo editors must balance questions of news values, security and taste. But their role changed between the Second World War and Vietnam.

“The most serious questions of taste are those that arise over the coverage of war, because life and death is so serious. We had to submit everything to censors in the Second World War if it was taken in combat areas. There was no censorship domestically of the magazine. But anything taken in a war theatre had to be censored. Here the censorship was done at the Ministry of Information, mostly English and Canadian censors at work. Every photograph I wanted to send back to the states, every negative, had to be printed four times proof -print size, 5x7: one print for us, one for London censors, one for Washington censors and one print for Life and they would get the negative itself.

“The photographers normally avoided shooting pictures that they knew would be censored. For example the faces of the American dead would have been censored. The shoulder patches that designated military units were censored. Secret weapons were censored: there were fewer and fewer secret weapons as the war went on, but the Norden bombsight for example was something one could not photograph. It was used for precision bombing, a sensor placed in the nose of an aircraft. Norden was the trade name of the manufacturer. Once a picture of the Norden bombsight got through the censors somehow and caused some problems: that’s the kind of thing.

“Photographers also refrained from photographing the most gruesome aspects of war and perhaps avoided that too much. In recent wars, as war has gone on – I was going to say progressed, but I don’t regard it as progression – photo coverage became more realistic with the Korean pictures. David Duncan’s pictures of Korean War that really showed American forces in retreat. His photos of the marines in the Korean War were very realistic indeed, very tragic too. And then in the Vietnam War the photo coverage was very realistic also. Larry Burrows did great work but many others did great reporting in the Vietnam War – some of that got published.

“The standards of what gets published have loosened up as wars have gone on. And I have a slide for example, of the front of the Guardian that shows a photo taken by Jerome Delay of AP in Baghdad the day of the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad when two journalists were killed. An event that is taken very seriously by the journalistic community. Jerome Delay is a French photographer, he was there and was one of those who carried the wounded – he carried the Reuters cameraman out of the hotel to the hospital. He was so upset by this he continued photographing in the hospital, and his colour photo of body parts, of Allied action – when I say Allied action, it’s really American action – appeared on the front of the Guardian. But that’s not very likely in the US.”

There was an element of self-censorship in the Second World War - not just what couldn't be shown, but what wouldn't - because of patriotism.

“Let’s face it, we were propagandists – the American and Allied press was not neutral, we were fighting the war and were an instrument of propaganda. There is such feeling on both sides, so many on our side who believe the war in Iraq was unjustified that a lot of people are happy to see it photographed in all its horror.”

The US government has imposed restrictions on showing the bodies of US soldiers killed in Iraq. Have you discussed this with any of your former colleagues?

“I’ve only talked with the New York Times and International Herald-Tribune. I was picture editor of the New York Times from 1967 to 1974, then I started New York Time Pictures, and I’ve been in touch ever since and have known every managing editor for last 40 years.

“So I’m known there as one who has broken the bounds in stages. I was picture editor of the Times when the famous Eddie Adams pic of an execution of a prisoner in Saigon came over the wire. And at the time I was determined that the picture be used because it was a shocking picture. I also remember the picture of the little naked girl running from the napalm. And I remember the discussion of that at the time. The news editor to whom I presented it was so relieved that she showed no pubic hair because that would have created a problem. Retouching used to be done consistently on genitals and breasts and things of that sort [for taste and also to get clearer reproduction]. Now retouching is easier to do electronically. My first newspaper job in June 1964 was at the Washington Post, they had never had an executive picture editor over the picture desk and photographers. The art department was three men devoted to retouching photos to make them look better. Mostly they made them worse.”

The New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers", but now must be frustrated by the restrictions in Iraq imposed by the military.

“The ‘Pentagon Papers’ was a journalistic triumph. I was asked by Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of the New York Times, to take a man off my desk to work for a month on the ‘Pentagon Papers’. I wasn’t told why he was being detached. He systematically worked at illustrating the ‘Pentagon Papers’, then when time came to publish, the publisher got worried about the cost of so many extra pages and cut the space allotment so severely that very few pictures got used.

“And I think that’s one reason the ‘Pentagon Papers’ never got through to the general public. They did have an importance in terms of the government, especially: Nixon was furious. They may have had some affect in our strategic posture, but the ‘Pentagon Papers’ were a professional success and a public nothing. One of the reasons, I’m afraid, was that they weren’t properly illustrated.”

The casualties aren't being shown in Iraq.

“We still tend to use photographs in ways that favour our side. One of the remarkable things about the Jerome Delay pic was that it showed Iraqi casualties. In the Second World War it was simple, we didn’t show enemy casualties – we simply didn’t show the terrible things we did to them. [There was] a shipment of pics that came from Stockholm to London that showed the horrible effects of the night air raids on Berlin – stacks of bodies – and the censors took them away from me and wouldn’t even let me keep them.”

Can you comment on the effects on photographers of working in these combat zones, of getting in close, having a job to do, while remaining detached.

“One never tells a photographer who’s going into danger how to do it. That’s a decision each person has to make for himself. Picture editors have three basic functions: assignment, collection and usage. Very few picture editors have the ultimate decision as to what runs. They have an advisory function. But at the New York Times and Washington Post I reported directly to the managing editor, so I had direct input into what ran on page one, which is the most sensitive page on a newspaper.”

They also have the function of offering moral support to the photographers.

“The responsibility for photographers’ lives is a serious one but one you don’t talk about very much. You get men who are courageous enough to go, you just tell ’em to go, and let them worry. But I did try to stop Robert Capa from going to Vietnam; I had a bad feeling about that. I had hoped he would turn down the offer from Life, but he didn’t. I telephoned him and urged him not to go.

“By now I’ve lost a number of photographers. We were very lucky at Life in the Second World War: out of the whole war, Life lost two reporters but no photographers. It’s gotten a lot worse.

Robert Capa had an extraordinary work ethic – his two most famous pictures speak for his whole career. It doesn’t matter that the D-Day pics are blurry. He had that saying, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

“Just a few days ago Richard Whelan [the biographer of Capa] sent me a letter that had been written to him concerning a soldier who Robert Capa photographed on Omaha Beach – in that case one of the films that was lost, because according to this soldier’s account, he was wounded and Capa actually assisted him. Robert Capa never mentioned that incident, and we’re not sure it’s true – but there is some evidence that Robert Capa put down his camera and assisted a wounded man on Omaha Beach. which is interesting.

Eugene Smith was one who paid the price of getting too close.

“Smith also believed in taking risks and ultimately was severely wounded on Okinawa because he did. His assignment was 24 hours in the day of an infantry man, and in the process of that he got wounded.

“Ralph Morse did a cover story for Life on a man who was wounded in France, he photographed him immediately after he was wounded, and followed him all the way back through the healing, through field stations and then back home. That was a memorable cover story for Life.

Why do you think the first photographs showing the extent of the holocaust didn’t make much impact?

“The camps were on the Eastern front, finally when the Americans advanced in Germany we got into the camps. Margaret Bourke-White probably made the single strongest photo of the liberation of prisoners, plus Johnny Florea was at Norhausen, and George Rodger at Belsen. All these pictures were in Life but by then it was too late.

“Rodger’s pictures were very strong, stomach turning. He resolved he was never going to photograph war again after that experience, it was horrible. But the very first pictures that reflected the Holocaust came from the East, from the Soviet side, there was no credit to any one photographer. The only [early] photographs published in the West were in the Illustrated London News, and maybe one page in Life magazine.

What characteristics does a person have to have to constantly deal in conflict or disaster: do they have to have more than just a steely nature?

“That’s a tough question, there so many different kind of people among photographers. [They need a] sense of rapport among people. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa were very good friends but totally different approaches to photographing people. Henri never spoke to people, he just photographed them, whereas Robert Capa engaged people, that was his way. He advised other photographers to like people – and to let them know it. That was a nice quote. Henri Cartier-Bresson, unless he was doing a portrait, would never speak to people. He’d just be the silent observer.”

John G Morris’s Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002) is absolutely riveting, with many stories behind some of history’s most famous images. Among them is the heartbreaking story of how all but 11 images from Robert Capa’s D-Day on Omaha Beach were destroyed in a processing accident. Morris’ memoir can be read on-line or bought second-hand.

Sadly, the news arrived this week that Philip Jones Griffiths - the other legend of photojournalism I met that day, a wry, affable and dedicated Welshman - died of cancer on March 18.

Still Life

Once you have seen this photo, you never forget it. Ernie Adams was the photographer, and he took it 40 years ago last month, as the Tet offensive was underway in the Vietnam War. It shows South-Vietnamese General Nguyan Ngoc executing a member of the Vietcong in the streets of Saigon, without a trial.

This picture, along with a handful of others from that war, changed history. It helped swing the attitude of the American people against the war.

It may be in black-and-white, but the issues are far more complex than were perceived at the time. In fact the discussion has got more heated since, as shown by a fascinating, heated debate at the London Times last month. Their headline was:

Which of these men did the photographer think was a hero?

Adams regretted the damage it did to General Ngoc’s reputation. The victim was far from innocent, but the publication of the photo had the opposite effect to what either shooter – executioner or photographer – intended. When combined with famous images such as the naked napalm child, the Vietnam War looked indefensible.

By contrast, Robert Capa’s images of D-Day, blurry as they are, showed the dedication and sacrifice of those landing on Omaha Beach. No one complained, though there have been decades of debate and misinformation about another famous image by Capa, the “falling soldier” shot (in both senses) during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

For years there have been sceptics saying that the photo was posed. The most prominent among the sceptics is Phillip Knightley, author of the highly regarded book The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam, the War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, almost a voluntary set-text among journalists since it came out in 1975.

When evidence was produced in 1998 that suggested otherwise, and identified the soldier as Federico Borrell García, who had indeed died in the battle, Knightley stood his ground: “The famous photograph is almost certainly a fake – Capa posed it,” he said. And, petulantly, “Frederico could have posed for the photograph before he was killed.”

Since then, the author of the definitive biography of Capa, Richard Whelan, has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove the photo’s veracity. This essay tells the whole story; Whelan even gets a police forensic photographer to examine the “pose”.

And if that wasn’t enough, just last month a suitcase full of undeveloped negatives by Capa was discovered. It shows the before and after images of the “falling soldier”. The New York Times turned it into a slide-show so that we can decide. Those who have read Phillip Knightley’s autobiography A Hack’s Progress tell me it’s a great read. But he hasn’t responded to the evidence about the “falling soldier” photo. Zealots have right on their side, so are never wrong. Ask John Pilger or Michael Moore.

These are the best of times and the worst of times in photo-journalism. Never before have so many great images been shot. But it is harder than ever for those images to have the kind of impact that Adams’ execution shot did in 1968.

The photo journalism is out there – all over the web, in lavish photo-galleries and slide-shows – but is rarely on our front pages. These days, the napalm or execution photos would only be seen by those who sought them out, rather than being chosen by astute photo editors to make an immediate impact.

I despair when I see quality magazines that once championed photo journalism now making do with endless bland images from agencies. The publishers are tight-fisted, so the photo librarians cut corners: there are plenty of gritty agency shots that aren’t “posed by models”). The result is a vanilla magazine, from cover to back page. TIME may be a shadow of its former self, but it still makes an effort on all fronts.

Impulse buyers in the supermarket may be more interested in stories that change their cholesterol than their intellect. But free newspaper colour supplements are where hard news can be presented with great design, without affecting newsstand sales. We don’t take the opportunity here; instead proprietors are more interested in editorial that flows nicely around cosmetics ads.

But New Zealand has punched above its weight in photo-journalism, not just historic figures such as Brian Brake, George Silk and Robin Morrison, but contemporary photographers such as Glenn Jowitt, Bruce Connew, Jocelyn Carlin and John McDermott: photographers who don't emulate Vanity Fair.

There are dozens of courses in photography in New Zealand, and plenty of role models. But with the disinterest from the publishing industry, are these students being conned out of their money? Where are the jobs?

(More on this soon, including an encounter with a legendary photo-editor and friend of Capa's. The pop-art RFK cover is a graphic rather than a photo, but brilliantly shows his upward ascent in the primaries. Obama's rise reminded me of it. But the RFK-related TIME cover two weeks later, in June 1968, was equally unforgettable: it showed a handgun.)

Funky President

I feel a little uneasy about Barack Obama’s campaign for the US presidency, and I am trying to work out why. Ali G might ask, “Is it because I is black?” And I have to say, yes. Although if I had a vote at either the Democratic convention or the election itself, Obama would get it.

There are at least a couple of reasons for my apprehension. This is the ABBA election: anybody but Bush, already. Thankfully that isn’t an option, thanks to the 22nd amendment to the US constitution. Congress voted in 1947 to limit presidents to two terms, which had always happened anyway until Franklin Roosevelt was elected to his third – and then fourth – term during the Second World War. The war was probably more of a factor than FDR’s undoubted popularity, but the war in Iraq doesn’t mean anyone is asking Bush back for more.

So even John McCain is looking good in the current circumstances, although he would be older than Reagan was when he took office, and you never know which members of the Republican machinery would doggedly stay on as if nothing had changed. We thought they had left Cheney and Rumsfeld back in the 1970s along with Charley’s Angels and Whopper Choppers.

My hesitance about Obama isn’t due to the inexperience jibe hurled at him by Hillary Clinton, the backseat driver of the 1990s. As presidential historian William Lee Miller points out, another lawyer from Illinois had little track record when he took on the job. His name was Lincoln. (Someone cleverly responds to Miller: “I’m inexperienced too: does that mean I’m qualified?” And besides, George W was still wet behind the ears – and between them – despite time served as Texas governor.)

A sizable chunk of the US electorate may buy into the inexperience argument, combined with deep-seated stereotypes about the ability of African-American politicians to govern prudently. They ignore Bill Clinton’s behaviour in the Oval Office, but recall the black mayors who have erred. Going back to Apirana Ngata, there is a similar stereotype here in New Zealand, that “Maori can’t handle money”. We ignore the successes of Ngai Tahu, but remember Donna Awatere Huata or Alan Duff.

As we have also seen in New Zealand, a Hillary Clinton is eminently qualified for the job and would do it well, even if some couldn’t handle the autocratic style. Unfortunately, sexism still goes with the territory, and when combined with contemporary partisan politics (in both countries), it is seriously ugly and demeaning for all concerned. Pioneering feminist Robin Morgan has written a punchy attack on the double-standards that handicap Clinton in favour of Obama (thanks for the lead, Jolisa).

And, as usual, The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has a succinct way of putting it: “Barack Obama is a phenomenon that comes along once in a lifetime. Unfortunately for Hillary, it’s her lifetime; fortunately for the rest of us, it’s ours.”

Whoever is finally the Democratic candidate, it is deeply unfortunate that the historic play-off between the first serious woman and black contenders may see a Republican slip back in, thanks to the combined deep-set prejudices of the electorate, be they sexist or racist. It’s the Ralph Nader syndrome writ large, like some PC nightmare.

A few commentators have said that watching Obama’s supporters on television is like witnessing any mass-movement rally, such as Nuremburg, and the New York Times’ Frank Rich makes reference to Jonestown and Kool-Aid. But that seems to be the way of modern campaigning, with viral marketing on the net taking the place of the door-knocking of keen, squeaky clean campaigners (think Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver). And when the converted get together (think Howard Dean) it’s a massive love-in, like that notorious clip of our Green Party doing the hokey-tokey. (Why isn't that on YouTube?)

The best analysis of Obama’s candidacy I’ve seen so far is by black writer Darryl Pinckney, earlier this month in the New York Review of Books. (Pinckney has also written for The New Yorker and an acclaimed novel about the black middle class, High Cotton.) As a peg he reviews conservative black essayist Shelby Steele’s book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. He describes it as a “thin, unhappy meditation on what he considers Obama’s costly refusal to repudiate the Sixties and its false, politicised definition of blackness.”

Pinckney discusses Obama’s extraordinary background – his liberal white mother of course, but just as crucial is her father – as well as other key issues. Ideas of blackness, the black middle class, the benefits of affirmative action and understanding “identity”. Billy Paul wasn’t joking when he sang ‘Am I Black Enough For You?’: Obama faces criticism for being too assimilated.

People have been talking about the demonization of black youth since the introduction of harsh sentencing guidelines during the Reagan years, but it turns out that the nation had been absorbing another image of black people right alongside the lurid tales of gangs and guns. Because of affirmative action, the picture of America has changed. However unpopular it has been as public policy, affirmative action has succeeded in integrating the middle class. Obama is not exotic to white Americans. He is familiar, the really nice black guy who went to school with your son.

Though Obama has been praised by some for not making race an issue in his campaign, and for not coming off as the black candidate, his race most certainly is crucial to his broad appeal. Black people can appreciate as much as white people the inclusiveness of his mixed-race heritage and that his story is in part that of an immigrant. But this is not a color-blind election. People aren't voting for Obama in spite of the fact that he is black, or because he is only half-black, they are voting for him because he is black, and this is a whole new feeling in the country and in presidential politics. Forty years ago, Robert Kennedy was sharply criticized for saying that a black man probably could be elected president of the United States in fifty years' time.

Here is the other element to my unease. If the partisan and sexist response to Hillary Clinton has been so ugly, what will the nutters inflict on a charismatic, vulnerable black president? My own political coming of age was in the 1960s. I can just remember being sent over to the neighbours on November 23, 1963 (NZ time), to say that JFK wasn’t just wounded, he had died. In 1968 I was in Standard Two, and will never forget the assassination of Robert Kennedy being discussed earnestly in the playground of Waterloo School. This was just six weeks after Martin Luther King’s murder, and in between we had had images on the TV news each night of not just Vietnam, but the student riots in Paris. There was something happening there, and eight year olds may not have known what it was, but they were conscious of it. The lasting result was that the snuffing out of hope became a given, and some in the States are now expressing their concern in public.

Two books about the civil rights era are among the most compelling I have read in recent years. One is Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene, about racism and corruption in small-town Georgia: its an almost poetic study on the abuse and effects of power. The other is No Place Like Home, by Gary Younge, a black Briton who writes for the Guardian from the States. In the late 1990s he travelled the South following the route of the Freedom Riders in the civil rights era, and visited some of the key participants. (Ironically, until they realised he was black, many retired black activists didn’t want to talk with him.)

But also relevant is a book I’m currently reading: the first biography of Fats Domino, Blue Monday. Despite its determined chronological approach, it is a lucid, shocking story of brazen racism. Domino is usually unfairly caricatured – like Louis Armstrong – with a smiling, Happy Days image. But, like Armstrong, he was as subversive as Stokely Carmichael and a lot more effective at bringing about the world in which Obama now thrives. The early rock’n’roll riots weren’t about the frenzied response to the big beat, but about black teenagers dancing in the same rooms as whites.

After all the indignities, the book finishes with George W Bush’s other outrageous crime: the response to Hurricane Katrina. Reports of Domino’s death were exaggerated, but the sight of him being plucked from the grand home he built in his devastated childhood neighbourhood is just one more reminder of the abuse he has endured.

The song running through my head at the moment isn’t James Brown’s ‘Funky President’, because the sub-title is “People It’s Bad”. It’s by Johnnie Taylor, who was like the smooth Otis on Stax, or a black Robert Palmer. ‘Cheaper to Keep Her’ and ‘Who’s Making Love’ were two infidelitous big hits, and I suppose by the 1970s’ ‘Disco Lady’ he was back on the prowl.

But in 1972 he sang, ‘I Could Never Be President’, an ironic mix of politics and romance. He promises hope and good news and free apples for the children, but like those aforementioned stereotypes he would be a spendthrift and blow it all for the love of a good woman:

If I became President, I know I won’t last a day
I would lower all the taxes just to suit your taste
I’d bring home all the fellers from over in Viet Nam
Station them around your door so the world can’t do you no harm
I’d name every street in the city, Honey, after you (yeah yeah yeah)
In the fight against poverty, there`s no limit to what I’d do
I could never be President
Just as long as I’m lovin’ you

Recently I saw the film Talk To Me, a true story about the 1970s black radio shock-jock Petey Greene, and his more conservative “Mr Tibbs”-style producer, Dewey Hughes. It starts as a blaxploitation cartoon, but with the death of Martin Luther King – and Greene’s on-air response, calming down emotions – it suddenly turns into something more substantial (with a great soundtrack). It reminded me of 1968, and that shocking prediction by Robert Kennedy that in 50 years a black man might be elected president. Kennedy may just be 10 years out; after that, it is fingers crossed.

Apart from everything else, who would want the job of sorting out this mess? I can feel Karl Rove’s cohorts thinking, “Let Obama have a go, just so we can see a black man fail.”