Television
The great manipulator
Martyn Harris
The Rev Al Sharpton is the American black civil rights leader, also known as 'Rev Sound Bite', who is supposed to be the model for the rabble-rousing Rev Bacon in Tom Wolfe's novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. He has been visiting Britain this week and also happened to be the subject of a fine Everyman programme (BBC 1, 10.30 p.m., Sunday).
I say 'happened to be' because I assumed the concinnity of Sharpton and a pro- gramme about his life had to be a coinci- dence, but after watching him in operation I'm not so sure. In the back of his limo, for instance, cruising through the smoking New York streets, we overheard him fix TV coverage for a protest march on the mobile phone. 'Yow oughta have crew out here for this Bensonhurst march, man. This the weekend 'fore Martin Luther King his birthday — so what better civil right story yow got, hey? I don' even go journalism school, I have to teach yow guys how do yow job. Yow call me media manipulator 'cause yow don't know yow work, man.'
The Reverend Al had chins that hung down to his chest, breasts that hung down to his knees and knees that hung over his shoes. He was two hundredweight of ugly jelly struggling around in a black bin-liner, but his mouth spilled mercury and gold. He was one of the best public speake-s I have ever heard, shaming the wooden histrionics of Jesse Jackson and right up there with Martin Luther King were it not for the screaming insincerity of everything he had to say. Here, for instance, he was speaking to a black audience, but it was the collec- tive White he was addressing: 'Somewhere written in my genes, my grandaddy want to jump and slap the mess outta you. We walking here with three, four hundred years of rage locked up in our footsteps. But now after 400 years you can't tell us shut up no more. You can't tell us be still no more. We'll never shut up. We'll never bow down. We'll never bow heads in slavery again. We will fight until we win. We will rise to the top. We will rule the world again.'
You have to imagine the black audience shouting its approval between the short, incantatory sentences, almost drowning him out in the end. But all the other effects are there in the prose: the clashing invoca- tion of 'we' versus 'you'; the violent, poetic compression of language (lour hundred years of rage locked in our footsteps'); the dreamy, illogical, but compelling proces- sion of images from grandaddy to world rule.
This was a fascist demagogue, an heir to Mosley and Mussolini — and the first live one of the species I have ever seen. The programme, produced by Stephen Walker, and eloquently photographed by John Keeping, showed signs of great hard work, and it was rewarded, as graft often is, by a gift from above. For at the end of the week's filming they followed Sharpton out to the protest march in Bensonhurst, and they got the dour white faces, and the screaming black ones, and the sudden surge of policemen to something happen- ing in the crowd. Then shoulders, sky, feet, shoulders, the yelp of ambulances. What's happening? It was Sharpton, his face punc- tured by fear, and his chest by a white mad- man's kitchen knife.
Not deep enough, of course, or he wouldn't be here this week, spreading his powerful poison, and unforgivably one can't help wishing that it had been.
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