“Keh soh ah Kayah, ki?”: Evening Program Footnotes
[From the May 6th, 1957 program featured in the main post.]
[36] All of the networks hosted six o’clock news shows. KOSC 6 had its own,
Walter Babcock with the News, produced by NBN and using the basic template of the BBC’s approach to news broadcasts. The commercial networks each had their own broadcasts – simulcast on two channels for those with that profile – somewhat more inspired by American models and with a bigger emphasis on human interest stories. Reprinting those listings isn’t necessary here. The reigning Most Trusted Name in News was NBN’s Walter Babcock, who would helm the public news broadcast from 1955 through the mid-Eighties.
The major news of the day as of May 6th, 1957 concerned various speculations about the coming constitutional vote, the sensational hunt for a serial killer in Columbia county, “bandit” attacks in both Ethiopia and Haiti (there was nervousness about unrest in the latter country, but the even despite such stories it will be clear that nobody senses the gathering storm in Ethiopia), Palmey country star Dufonte Baynard’s tour of America and Klan protests at a show in Alabama, and recent sporting results that include the Stepney Spur’s just-announced 2-1 victory in the Premiere League and a homegrown Palmey jockey’s win at the Hillsborough Triple Crown Classic thoroughbred race earlier in the day (see
Live From Fenhalloway Park).
After the news hour wrapped, the Evening Programme began.
[37] A variety show anchored by the full sound and considerable prestige of the Hillsborough Popular Orchestra,
The Spice of Life is the most popular show among its many competitors on the schedule by a long margin, and the only other Palmey-produced variety show that matches the production values of the
Club Catsby Showcase (see above).
[38] Just as Maxfield is by this time Palmera’s counterpart of Nashville, the Coleman Music Hour is the Union’s answer to the Grand Ole Opry. The Coleman Hour started out, like much of the television schedule at this point, as a radio program. It has since become one of the biggest staples of evening television. Virtually everyone who is anyone in Palmey country music has appeared on the show, oftentimes alongside the Coleman Family themselves – either collectively or selectively – who are essentially the royal family of “Jack Freedom Country,” as the nation’s country and bluegrass stars are collectively known.
The impact they’ve made on country on both sides of the border has been considerable. The Coleman Family broke down barriers by touring in America in the forties and early fifties, and despite the resolute Whiteness of country music north of the border, they’ve made it possible for other musicians from the Union to do the same. Aided by the platform provided by the Coleman Hour, Maxfield has become not only the capital of Jack Freedom Country but has also hosted innumerable cross-border musical partnerships and friendships, and the first home-grown Black American country musicians are starting to get breaks in Nashville already as a result. As historically significant television spots go, the Coleman Music Hour is hard to excel, and it will grow even more significant in the years to come. Lucas Coleman, now showing his age but still spry, has eclectic tastes and a vast range of entertainment connections and has already become a significant force not only in the promotion of country, bluegrass and gospel, but of new musical trends like boka and an emerging tradition of folk music based on the retro appeal of old-time landship tunes.
[39] Schweizer is this timeline’s counterpart to Lawrence Welk. He’s surprisingly popular in Palmera, in part because he’s been a great friend to Palmey musicians and performers and has often guested them on a show that effortlessly matches the most lavish variety productions the Union can stage, and has provided them with access to the far-more-lucrative American market. The strait-laced nature of Schweizer’s productions is a frequent target of humour, but this hasn’t impeded his popularity in the least.
[40]
New Horizons is a more journalistic grade of travel show than the norm. Most travel shows maintain a relentlessly apolitical and positive bent. Mrs. Pero, however, doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant or the controversial. She shows her viewers all sides of what it means to travel abroad as a Palmey—including the positive examples of meetings-of-minds and genuine goodwill, and the negative examples of racism, resentment and international rivalry—and also does periodic spots featuring travellers from abroad discovering the Union and its Territories, featuring the same mixture of positive discovery and also negative aspects like alienation and culture shock (particularly common among White visitors from Europe, America and Canada). She talks about all of them frankly and often conducts hard-hitting interviews with her subjects.
This particular episode features Sally Pero on a tour of the Ugandan Kingdom of Toro conducted by its celebrity Royal Family member, the glamorous model and barrister-in-training Princess Elizabeth (parallel to a real historical figure from an actual surviving royal state that’s a component of Uganda, who is on a faster track to fame in this timeline and will become a major advocate for independence), and follows a Midlands British family (the Shaws) on their first experience of Palmera’s integrated beach culture. The show isn’t immune to the usual pieties and its Ugandan segment is thickly layered with “isn’t poverty romantic and authentic?” sentiments that will draw some criticism for normalizing the Protectorate that’s still in place at this point. On the other hand, it’s unusually forthright about showing the Shaws’ clear discomfort with the relative racial equity on show in Palmera’s beach and resort culture—even as they try to hide this or pass it off as just “expecting decent service”—and Mrs. Pero doesn’t hesitate to press them on the absurdly persnickety character of their interactions with the staff and various fellow-vacationers and what it might imply. Combined, it’s the kind of content that makes her show an immensely popular conversation piece.
[41] Tej Telemaco, who we’ve previously encountered in
Songs of Songs, is by this point in his career one of the acknowledged jazz masters of Palmera and indeed the world—in particular he personifies the Union’s connection to the great American jazz centers of Harlem during its “Renaissance” and Chicago’s still-thriving late-era Bronzeville—but his day is passing and his all-star orchestra is doing this weekly half-hour television gig mostly by the numbers. The show is otherwise mainly a chance to use guest spots to showcase the new generation of rising stars on his estranged wife’s Grand Duchess label, which is becoming the focal point of the emerging “gospel jazz” sound that will be Palmera’s most distinctive (and lucrative) contribution to the form. Telemaco’s less-famous contemporaries and their extensive list of Nonay jazz contacts filled out any remaining guest spots.
The show was also an early touchstone for an emerging youth subculture movement obsessed with “modern” jazz. These were an outgrowth of an anti-conformist youth movement, called the “Beat generation” in both our timeline and this one (the reference to “keeping the beat” or “being on-beat” that spawned the name would readily suggest itself to jazz aficionados in either timeline), that grew up in the café culture of New York and later made its way to cities like London and Daltonville. It was at its root a movement oriented around literature and poetry, with jazz forming a backdrop, but more recent adherents were coalescing around the music above all. Their interest in “modern” music led to their being called the
mods, who in the Sixties would move on from jazz to become champions of boka, R&B and ska. Palmera’s mod scene had its own specific signature, being identified with bespoke tailoring, bright colours (shirts especially), and loud, seemingly-clashing prints.
[42] This show originally filmed in Chicago but moved to Daltonville following the DuMont network’s content rights. Its content varied from what one critic of the time described as “painfully Blaney-Nonay [White Northerner] acts” like the Three Graces sister trio to an eclectic mixture of local talent, and in particular it was an early home on the airwaves for Cuban sounds like mambo and salsa whose importance to Palmera was steadily growing.
[43] The Palmeran version of the American game show that at this time is on its way to becoming television’s highest-rated television show ever. This edition is joint sponsored by Colgate and the soap company Hazeltine. Both versions of the show are being fixed behind the scenes and will shortly undergo major public scandals when this practice is exposed, much as eventually happened with
Dotto in our timeline.
[44] Just a straight-ahead rebroadcast of an American game show similar in concept to
Queen for a Day.
[45] At a time when the Nonay television market was still dominated by the all-conquering Western,
The Immortals was pioneering the international super-spy genre. The Immortals team, always informed by Mission Control that their lives were expendable at the beginning of each assignment, faced weekly episodes in which they often had to go up against overwhelming threats with limited resources, wits and guts. Very often, as with this episode, the backdrop was African and the enemy were the dastardly agents of apartheid South Africa. (Note that the country's official name is still Southwest Africa in this timeline, and it's under South African jurisdiction. The show insists on referring to it as "Namibia" in deference to the Union's local resistance Allies, not all of whom were Black. This particular episode is really about an attempt to rescue a relatively liberal diamond-mine owner tacitly allied with the resistance from a takeover attempt by a rival a particularly ruthless and pro-apartheid opponent.) The show’s rotating ensemble cast launched the careers of more than a few action stars and glamorous starlets, some of whom belonged to the early generation of migrant African screen talent (Princess Elizabeth of Toro, seen under
New Horizons above, would be featured in more than a dozen episodes).
[46] Sponsored by Caraby’s Clairin, this was a straightforward ad for Palmeran beach culture and tourism that focused on the glitzy lives of the wealthy and the celebrity set: sumptuous meals, fancy cocktails, sultry bikini fashions and elite beach-culture pastimes (such as, in this case, yachting). Thoroughly superficial and relying heavily on the fulsome charms of expatriate Haitian hostess and model Mme. St. Martin, the show still managed to be sometimes controversial abroad, especially in segregated America, due to its unabashed showcasing of “integrated” beach culture and relationships. (St. Martin, a “white” Haitian and a married woman, was seen by many viewers of all backgrounds as being particularly “shameless” in her – in fact quite chaste and tame – “flirtations” with darker-skinned hunks on the show.)
[47] A unique contribution to the Western genre, this series’ hero was an ex-slave based on a real Texas lawman and former Buffalo soldier. Produced in a cross-border collaboration with ABC and featuring a mixture of American, Mexican and Palmey talent filming in Mexico (whose northern countryside stood in for Texas), it was about the titular hero’s quest to find a sister who had been separated from him by slavery before the Civil War, in course of which he ran across episodic opportunities to team up with a new square-jawed American cowboy every week in taking on injustice. Starring the Palmey actor Charles Travelle – the first Palmeran (and Black) actor to find widespread fame and success in both Palmera and America, a kind of Sidney Poitier figure – the show was careful to present its protagonist as a hero of the American Western narrative whose journey was also a long-arc representation of eventual
whyrah to Palmera.
Immensely popular at the time, the show would come in for criticism from later generations of critics for its negative portrayals of Mexicans and Native Americans, for frequently making Frank Jackson effectively a “guest star” of his own story and for rarely allowing him to tackle a challenge without the help and sponsorship of a white hero (who often started out down on their luck until Frank came along to inspire them, a sort of touring version of what would come to be called the Magical Negro archetype). For the day, it was nevertheless ground-breaking and was another one of those shows that launched a galaxy of stars, in this case both Palmeran and American. There was no other Western quite like it, its protagonist was one of the most-admired heroes on the airwaves (especially in Palmera, but also significantly so north-the-border) and it retained a cult following for decades after it went off the air in 1962.
[48] Professional wrestling had reached the point of overexposure on television north-the-border by the time it found an avid audience in Palmera. Prior to 1956, wrestling promotions in Palmera were small, seat-of-the-pants operations that largely weren’t deemed to have a large enough potential audience to be worth broadcasting, save the occasional promotion that managed to find its way to a radio spot. This changed with the advent of
Wrestling from Gairway, named for the Gairway Arena in Daltonville and near-identical in its basic format and concept to the DuMont Network’s prior
Wrestling from Marigold show, but showcasing what would shortly become the United Championship Wrestling promotion, helmed by flamboyant showman Nicodemus Grigg. Before long, the show would simply be named after the promotion and would achieve a degree of popularity that took everyone aback.
UCW became a magnet for African-American wrestlers who aspired to be main-event attractions and title-holders, not a few of whom actually made
whyrah for the purpose of helming the promotion (among them the long-reigning World Heavyweight Champion Teddy “The Lion” Wright, a counterpart of OTL’s Bearcat Wright). Grigg was also fascinated by the high-flying style of Mexican
lucha libre and worked hard to acquire Mexican talent as soon as he could manage it.
Over the years, UCW developed a reputation for extravagant showmanship, risky athleticism, loose choreography and a pervasive culture of “working stiff” that often made matches genuinely unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. This was partly a matter of legal necessity: the UCW was governed, as with other sports in Palmera, by general regulations against match fixing, and despite the open secret of its “worked” nature it would not be able to openly admit to choreographing matches for decades yet. Though it shared a trade language of showmanship and basic principles with professional wrestling elsewhere, and relied in the same way on kayfabe relationships and conflicts, it had to at least to some degree
look like legitimate sport, making its characteristic unpredictability—while a nightmare for its creative teams—a necessary and indeed highly-profitable part of the package.
Though its stable of Black superstars was its heart and soul and would eventually come to generate much fascination from foreign markets as a cultural curio, the UCW’s roster was always diverse. The wrestling form, in Palmera as elsewhere, was fundamentally four-colour working-class entertainment in which people showed up to see the champions of their slice of the national identity battle their enemies. From outside the Union, the UCW’s vision of good and evil was like looking into a funhouse mirror: whether the face was a clean-cut Lanney golden boy or a rough-and-tumble Gitchey avatar of working-class pride, hopes and frustrations (or an occasional reversal-of-expectation of these two formulas), their enemy was almost always either the proverbial Rich Bastard of any colour, the working-class traitor who’d sold out for a paycheck, or the prototypical Foreigner: usually a White foreigner rendered into a lurid stereotype who could just as easily have made a solid face in another market. Indeed, many of these
were faces from other markets temporarily parachuted in for special events (and a few lead-up spots) on high-paying contracts, playing the inverse of their normal in-ring characters.
Over and over, matches and championship runs told the archetypal story of the Union’s struggle to survive while surrounded and infiltrated by such enemies; struggling and
overcoming however bloodied and bruised, however much the Powers That Be tried to change the rules. Nick Grigg understood the power of this narrative intuitively and leveraged it expertly, which above all else made for the story of his promotion’s success. In fact, Grigg himself often appeared in-ring as the prototypical “traitor,” a dastardly and mercenary manager of the latest Foreigner heel talent, though it was never outright acknowledged in all this that he owned the promotion. [Think in terms of the look, style and delivery of “The Rent Is Too Damn High Party” candidate Jimmy McMillan (complete with straightened hair, a signal attribute of the Traitor) combined with a kayfabe character concept adjacent to Uncle Ruckus from “The Boondocks” or Stevie from “Django Unchained.” ]
[49] The Lone Ranger is a straight rebroadcast of the American Western, coming to the end of its run in this year much as IOTL. It has been and remains a very popular show in Palmera, especially the occasional episode that included plots involving pioneers on their way to make
whyrah to the Union, as occurs in
The Hot Country. These are few and far between, though; for the most part this is broadly the same show as in our timeline, with the same simple “Western superhero” appeal.
[50] Aeronautics research was one of the primary engines of defense cooperation between America and Palmera. America had the economic muscle to press the cutting edge of technology. Palmera had potential launch sites close enough to the equator to give an added boost to rocketry from the Earth’s rotation, along with a sufficiently modern infrastructure to contribute meaningfully to launch support. A joint project of the two nations—later joined by other Western nations—was founded in 1950. The International Aeronautics Foundation launched its first rocket from Cape Canaveral in June of that year.
Participation in the IAF was a point of tremendous national pride in Palmera. One of the original Warwick Government’s conditions for hosting the site was equal participation for Palmey scientists in the Foundation, a condition that led to more than one bitter battle with the NACA’s (later NASA’s) Jim Crow-reared American scientists but that also produced fruitful collaboration and results that even the Americans had to admit were accelerated compared to what might otherwise have been. In Palmera at least, there would be no “hidden figures” in the IAF program: the Union celebrated its aeronautic scientists, men and women alike, as public heroes and celebrities and did the same with their American counterparts, especially the African-American ones.
A possible Soviet-American “space race” was looming on the horizon even in the earliest days, with its first major heat to take place in the fall of 1957—when Russia’s “Kamen” satellite would narrowly beat the IAF’s much more advanced Project Vanguard into orbit—and where space and science were prominent, a public enthusiasm for science
fiction was sure to follow. Palmera was no exception: sci-fi anthologies and magazines flourished; one of the most popular comics of the early Fifties was
The Empyrean Skylark Adventures, featuring a crew of scientists and square-jawed heroes rocketing through the cosmos aboard a vessel named for the single most famous Union ship in WW2; and the DuMont Network’s low-budget
Captain Video and His Video Rangers program was popular pretty much anywhere their broadcasts could be picked up.
Quantum Flight was the brainchild of Palmey author George Shubrick, who was better-known as an essayist and cultural commentator but had gotten a start in fiction with pulp magazines in the Thirties. He had since become a fan of more serious SF writers like Alexander Black (a close TTL counterpart of Alfred Bester) and sought to combine that kind of sensibility with the adventuresome spirit of pulp content in a televised format. Loosely based on the
Empyrean Skylark Adventures comics, but eventually the product of collaboration among a who’s-who cast of Palmeran, Canadian and American science fiction writers and showrunners,
Quantum Flight was the result.
The show would run continuously for twenty-seven years after it first aired in 1956, its core cast taking many different shapes during that time, though it was always fundamentally about crews of scientists engaged in research in a distant future on behalf of “the Foundation.” It frequently combined high-concept science fiction plots—based closely on actual, current science of the day—with a heady mix of action, surrealism, social commentary and lowbrow pulp sensibilities, in particular a more-than-occasional resort to “monster of the week” stories and an infamous fondness for “cheesecake” and revealing outfits on its female stars (the harsh environments of space seemed to attract bikini-clad, raygun-wielding sexpots with surprising regularity, although this tendency and the associated sexist scripts relaxed somewhat in the early Seventies as the original creator’s involvement with the show ended). Like
The Immortals and
Frank Jackson, Hero of the Texas Plains, the show was the launching pad for numerous screen careers, although actors appearing on it were at greater risk of being typecast as “sci-fi actors.”
Quantum Flight would have a long and influential legacy. A spinoff series called
Quantum Flight: Project Vanguard launched in 1977, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the real IAF project of that name, featuring higher production values and a further-future setting (with part of its run concurrent with the last few seasons of the original show). Though rejected by many purist fans, it nevertheless enjoyed a long run of its own, going off the air in 1989. The next show to revive the property in 1994,
Quantum Flight: Beyond, was that series’ direct sequel and would run into the 21st century. Generations of everything from scientists, engineers, doctors and computer programmers to musicians, fashion designers, journalists and even philosophers would ultimately credit the sprawling franchise with inspiring them to pursue their chosen fields. This was particularly true for Black creatives and STEM specialists the world over, for whom the show’s prominent cast of Black heroes and aspirational vision of diversity was a special inspiration.
[51] The Palmey offshoot of the American phenomenon, with its own host and contestants but an identical format. Like the American version, it was a completely choreographed “work” in quiz show form. The Palmey edition is exposed first in this timeline, and is yanked from the airwaves shortly after, which cascades into this timeline’s variant of the infamous “quiz show scandal” in America itself.
[52] Patterned after BBC prestige news-magazine shows,
Panorama typically consisted of short but intense spots on several major news stories of the day – and sometimes on topics the show’s producers believe the news is neglecting – that were meant (with varying degrees of success) to examine multiple sides of any issue without bias, and that were certainly unflinching about confronting the less savoury elements of the Union’s culture. Eventually, the show would acquire a rotating cast of hosts who each took on responsibility for researching and reporting one of the week’s stories, and later generations of Americans who saw it would mistakenly think of the format as having derived from CBS’
60 Minutes (which only came along in the late Sixties). At this time the show’s researchers and reporters were background staff, not visible personalities, and this week’s offering was pretty representative of the range of subject matter:
- “The Question of Guyana”: Apart from its indigenous peoples, most of British Guyana’s population by the 1950s – when independence from Britain became a live issue – was divided between the Afro-Guyanese, who were predominantly urbanized and represented the bulk of the professional class, and the Indo-Guyanese (largely working-class descendants of the “coolie” labourers who, as in Palmera, had become a mainstay of the economy after the abolition of slavery). The former were generally conservative—more so in many ways than the prevailing Palmeran norm—while the latter inclined sharply leftwards, and the emerging People’s National Congress and People’s Progressive Party factions represented these respective worldviews in the struggle for power. Despite being in some ways ideologically closer to the PPP, prevailing Palmey cultural sentiment (and the upper precincts of political power in the Union) favoured the Afro-Guyanese PNC as part of the overall project of Black liberation, and Palmera was at this time playing a prominent role in trying to mediate between the two sides and bring Guyana into the push to establish an Alliance of Caribbean States. Discerning observers saw early signs of the Palmeran establishment placing its thumb on the scales for the PNC, and began to wonder if the project of “liberation” wasn’t also a project to set up well-disposed allies in Guyana to enable its exploitation by Union business interests (an outcome which would, in fact, come to pass to at least some degree not long hence).
- “Peoples Without a Nation”: The distinctively American pattern of urban development known as suburbanization didn’t take hold in Palmera. Gentrification was another matter: traditionally Sutchey and migrant neighbourhoods (where “migrant” denoted the kind of migrant who couldn’t claim the customary rights, protections and resources available to those making whyrah) in the hearts of the Union’s cities were the targets. These “eyesores” began, at an increasing pace through the Fifties, to be bought out by concerns like the Freedom National Realty Company and upgraded for sale to the rising, newly-numerous Gitchey and Lanney middle and upper-middle classes. The poor tenants of these neighbourhoods found themselves shunted out to “economical housing estates” at the outskirts of cities, whence they could be easily accessed by licensed labour recruiters.
Nationally-funded and county-run EHEs were a much-touted project of the Warwick Government supposed to have been “scientifically designed” to provide truly livable and affordable housing to society’s less fortunate. They were meant to be walkable, well-lit, with garden spaces for each of the small prefabricated homes, churches and other centers of worship close to hand, health and law enforcement services and banks readily available, and most importantly of all: the necessary economic vitality to provide every family with a solid living. This last condition depended heavily on another Warwick Government initiative, that being to bolster private recruitment for itinerant agricultural (or urban) labour by eliminating the country’s outdated convict-leasing system.
Unfortunately, that last precondition would be harder to satisfy than had been anticipated; even Warwick’s own party struggled to unify behind a single strategy for accomplishing it. Exploitative criminal elements followed these populations from their former stomping grounds. Bankers proved quietly predatory, law enforcement discriminatory, local religious leaders often crooked, the private labour market ruthless in undercutting the government-mandated minimum wage through under-the-table dealing that the scarcity of work made inescapable. Some county jefe offices were punctilious in the nickel-and-diming of every essential service and repair to the point of soliciting bribery. Transportation infrastructure naturally developed in ways that bypassed and isolated these “walkable” neighbourhoods. The utopian dream gradually developed into a nightmare, eventually producing arguably worse environments – run-down edge cases between trailer parks and shanty towns – than the inner-city slums once were. Many inhabitants had no recourse: Sutcheys and recent migrants alike bore their distinctive accents and traditions like a Mark of Cain, and in the former case there was little real prospect of their ever being wanted elsewhere.
- This (pioneering and later quite famous) Panorama segment on EHEs provided, albeit briefly, some of the earliest warning signals. It drew the curtain back on the budding manifestations of poverty, violence, ethnic strife and rumoured police misconduct that would eventually come to dominate life in these districts, and was often referenced as prescient by critics.
- “Borderlands”: The struggle against segregation was heating up in America at this point. This segment followed an African-American writer named Jonah Washington who’d recently made whyrah from Georgia and was studying attitudes to the changing cultural climate on both sides of the border, partnered with a White writer from Memphis named Raymond Walter Griffiths who was, as part of his enterprise, carrying out an “undercover” report on travelling as a Black man in the deep South (like two similar ITL projects on either side of 1957). Both would produce seminal books from the exercise and both participated in this segment, which described both hope and fatalism in Black people north-the-border and entrenched supremacist attitudes among the Whites.
- The views found on the Palmey side of the border were more surprising. While most people were admiring and unquestioningly supportive of the desegregation effort, a substantial minority (often larunas, second- or third-generation whyrah migrants who’d never lived in America) had a starkly critical view of African-Americans who stayed in the Marches, or America more generally, instead of making whyrah. What were they waiting for? Were they simply cowards, or sheep? Didn’t these fools know Americans were never going to truly change? (This is a close parallel to the judgmental attitudes some Israeli sabras manifested toward Jews making Aliyah, especially – and without doubt most painfully – toward Holocaust survivors, in both our timeline and this one.)
There was also a surprising distribution of views about White attitudes: interview subjects were almost evenly divided between those who saw White supremacism as an existential evil and those (also often larunas) who saw it as simply another variant of “tribal” conflict that had been going on since time immemorial, and that even held certain parallels with the Union’s struggle to establish a state that privileged Black people and institutions. (The former view was still in the majority, but barely, and certainly not to the degree Washington had expected to find.) The Panorama segment registered these sometimes-surprising views with equanimity, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions.
- “Sunset of the Chain Gang”: The Warwick Government’s onslaught on the convict-leasing system was a major part of the country’s constitutional debate. Forbidding the exploitation of prison labour was one of the major provisions of the proposed constitution, and the going assumption at this time was that the constitution would pass with this article intact (although due to internal divisions within the governing party and an aggressive counter-campaign by the opposition, the article ultimately didn’t make the cut). This segment described the history and controversies around convict leasing, gave voice to activists who laid out its troubling resemblance to slavery (and still-more-troubling, though less racialized, similarity to systems still employed in the Marches), laid out the arguments of industrialists about the “necessity” of the practice to economic development, and speculated about what the effects of the a true sunset of the “chain gang” economy would be. The segment also included direct interviews with convict labourers, something that had never really been done before. Although Panorama’s optimism about the timetable of convict leasing’s demise proved mistaken—it would in fact outlive the first such parallel system in the United States—much of this analysis was still credible and earned this spot several awards for journalism and televised broadcasting.
[53] “Palmera’s Funniest Man,” Jethro February, would not actually be much remembered by later decades after the mid-Sixties. He was an artist of the one-liner, a form of comedy that ruled the Fifties but did not fare very well beyond it. He was, however, a conduit to fame for many more durable talents and also provided a stage for classic comedic artists like Blango and Copes, the Union’s answer to Laurel and Hardy, who were regulars among the many established acts who filled out the Royal Comedy Hour’s roster (named for the sponsoring company, of course, although the credits did feature a humorous caricature of Queen Victoria proclaiming “we are
most amused”).
[54] The Palmey counterpart of a popular American show of TTL called “The Pinkerton Files.” Consisting in the main of period 19th- and eatly 20th-century law enforcement tales derived
very loosely from real events, the Overton Files starred a rotating cast of “Toneys” battling various villains from Civil War smugglers to Prohibition-era “booney-men.” The show was relatively low-budget, but popular enough to persist for just over a decade.
[55] Buffalo-3 was the mega-hit and big-budget Palmey police procedural of the era, featuring a trio of Coast and Border Guard agents tackling everything from drug traffickers (their usual villains) to cross-border terrorism, human-trafficking syndicates, sinister Nemoist cults, arms runners and more. The show often featured episodes inspired by real-life incidents, as with “Backlash,” based on a real-life incident where a white American tourist went on an armed, drug-fuelled rampage in Tallahassee and had the final shock of his life when law enforcement simply shot him dead instead of trying to talk him down. The Buffalo-3 version of the story ties its tourist into a larger drug trade network, but the pressure the core characters face from the media, the upper hierarchies of their service and from civilians and governments internationally are much the same as those faced by the officer in the real-life story, which sent shockwaves through the political and law enforcement establishments of the day.
The character involved in the shooting on the television show spends a great deal of time struggling with the morality of what he’s done and wondering what might have happened if he’d made different choices. (The real officer on whom the character was based was reportedly puzzled by this, as he didn’t remember feeling anything remotely close to such ambiguity.) The Buffalo-3 hero’s friends finally lay out for him that a possible outcome was that the perp might have killed many other people and that he’d simply done his job. Buffalo-3, in this general way—aside from the fact that its trio of main hero characters are Black, Jewish and South Asian – follows typical patterns of pro-law enforcement shows elsewhere.
[56] A variant on
Kraft Television Theatre, in this case sponsored by Croft Dairy Products in Daltonville, staging classic theatre productions using student actors from nearby university programmes for a television audience.
[57] The Union Broadcast Group’s attempt to rival the
Panorama series, “The Union Tonight” typically featured a full-hour study of a single topic. It was in most ways lower-budget than “Panorama,” but its custom of focusing on a single topic allowed it to make the most of its limited resources. This week’s episode, as with many news broadcasts during this crucial week, concerned the coming Constitutional vote and was one of its most popular episodes of all time, touching on the topic of
whyrah.
Whyrah had been a core part of Palmey national identity since at least the early nineteenth century, although nobody could say at what precise point the word became attached to the practice of Black people making pilgrimage to the Land of Freedom. Notwithstanding that long tradition, it had never had a defined, official standing in the Union; it was nebulous, with equal parts religious, nationalist and simply moral resonances rooted in anti-racism and abolitionism. Various customs had grown up over the years: of cutting red tape from the process of immigration for those making this pilgrimage, providing them with preferential access to government support programs and land, and putting them in touch with the many church and other charitable operations in the various Parishes designed to provide everything from food and housing support to welcoming social events. It was accepted practice for each jurisdiction to take its own approach.
The only truly one-size-fits-all system the
whyrah-kiyeh encountered was conscription into the national programme for both militia and civilian service, which typically kicked in some three to four years after a family had arrived and had a chance to acclimate. It was in the service system that able-bodied
whyrah pilgrims had their first practical exposure to Chatta—the common language of the enlisted ranks, providing a layer of confidentiality from the prying ears of lifer officers, and indeed the primary vector of transmission for what had formerly been a Calusan patois to the nation as a whole—and to other badges of national identity like (for example) the universal obsession with Association Football. Combined with the less formalized welcoming system of county and parish, this was what most reliably cemented newcomers’ relationship with Palmera, especially after the First World War in which the service made the transition from informal expectation to official, enforced conscription policy.
The constitutional debate had raised certain questions about
whyrah, however: in particular, the question of defining who was entitled to its privileges, what it meant in the modern world, and how much priority it should really have. The Liberty and Justice Party seized on this as one of their major bargaining issues – the other being support for convict leasing – in the constitutional process. They argued that as the legacy of slavery waned in America and elsewhere, as independence movements built strength and momentum across the African continent, the question of who could and should be recognized as
whyrah-kiyeh was growing more complicated, and cried out for explicit definition and programmes built to meet that definition.
As many UFLC parliamentarians began to note at the time, the timing of this obsession on the LJP’s part wasn’t coincidental. It signalled a priority of one of the most powerful groups to align itself with the LJP in the late Fifties and beyond, presaging the party’s drift towards becoming the champions of a new kind of conservatism. These new sponsors, who often provided support and influence in subtle, indirect ways, were the “Hacktey” nationalists, descendants of venerable white British Loyalist families who were the behind-the-scenes mainstays of the nation’s international financial and diplomatic efforts and whose families were silent partners in not a few industrial and agricultural enterprises around the nation.
Their interest in all this requires a little background.
The Hackteys were one of those quietist elite groups that didn’t overmuch advertise their part in political or business affairs. In exchange for their international services to the Union in matters of diplomacy and finance, they were suffered to live mostly outside the public eye, in their own sub-universe of exclusive clubs and resorts (indeed many families literally lived in grand country-squire manors situated on vast club golf courses). But no matter how far-removed they were from the daily lives of most Palmeys, no matter how much their children lived and were educated mostly out-of-country – being schooled in private secondary academies abroad and thereafter at the Sorbonne or Oxford, Yale or Harvard, wintering at secluded beaches in Brazil and Argentina and summering on the French Riviera or in Italy or Spain – these families still tended to look askance at the general drift of Palmeran society at this point.
It wasn’t that they were racist, God forbid. Most would’ve taken profound umbrage at any such characterization. Open prejudice was for low and contemptible sorts like the Sutchey. You would
never hear words like “wog,” “tawney” or “nigger” uttered in a proper Hacktey home. Hackteys were proverbially liberal-minded: they came from generations-long traditions of supporting the Black Zion in a hostile world, they admired and exalted the nation’s various Black and Lanney heroes, and they took pride in all this shared heritage and struggle wherein their own forefathers were the “true,” unsung protagonists, all the more heroic for the quiet nature of their role.
Support for the Union was a given. It was just that this grand tradition was best-appreciated and best-engaged in the abstract, at some remove from actual Black
people. To be sure, the Hacktey universe encountered Black politicians, businessmen and academics in restricted settings and had room in everyday life for the occasional (preferably fair-skinned) Lanney, Asiatic or Jew. This was all well and good, so long as you didn’t go intermarrying with such sorts; indeed at the personal level, it could be fairly said that most Hackteys still regarded the Irish and Italians as exotics, much more so the bewildering multiracial throng of the Palmey commons, middle classes and
nouveau riche (and no matter how old a Bassey or Lanney or Asian fortune and legacy might be, they were all
nouveau riche to Hacktey families who could trace their ancestries back to the British Old World
bon ton). The occasional
enfant terrible might go on a tear outside the confines of this tiny, absurdly affluent and mannered world, mixing for a while with Bohemian artist types and
boka musicians, but this was usually a phase like the Amish
Rumspringa, a prelude to reconciling oneself to one’s place in the “natural” order. The average Hacktey, even in fallen circumstances, was otherwise basically accustomed to thinking of themselves as a kind of aristocrat without official title.
One of the unspoken bedrock contracts of the Palmey political order was that the Hackteys be allowed to go about their business and enjoy their singular privilege undisturbed, well out of the public eye or the commentary of Parliament or the press (except where extraordinary scandal or happenstance intervened, and even then the Hacktey class had extraordinary efficacy in quashing eruptions of publicity). It was a compact that had persisted from the earliest days of Home Rule down to the Second World War, one that had never faced the serious prospect of disturbance… until now. The age of the majority Black voter in Palmera was what finally ruffled the serene waters of Hacktey life, seeming to threaten this “Auld Alliance” with the halls of political power for the first time. The general “leftward drift” that had come with the majority Black vote began to send unfamiliar chills of anxiety down the Hacktey spine: words like “socialism” were suddenly no longer anathema, and the present order was manifesting radical ideas. For example, the Warwick Government was vocally amenable to the establishment of a genuine All Workers’ Union in Palmera; and they were of course pushing hard to abolish a convict leasing system from which many Hacktey families had handsomely profited since time out of mind, in fact longer than any such system had existed in the Marches.
Something clearly had to be done. Brokered by eminences of the Hacktey community like industrialist, financier and amateur diplomat Sir Vyvyan Errol, the LJP’s joint push
against the abolition of convict leasing and
for a precise definition of
whyrah was that “something.” It was the second half of this pincered political onslaught that would make the first half a success.
Effectively, the LJP’s push for a “clear” definition of
whyrah was a sly assault on the very concept of the Black Zion, a line which the Warwick Government had not expected them to cross and which common wisdom held was political suicide. [This proved incorrect; it turned out the more socially conservative parts of the Black electorate were all too happy to see some of the resulting questions publicly enunciated and debated.] It was successful in part because it posed at least some valid, and awkward, questions for the whole Black Zion project, questions long subsumed under the rubric of common sense and the shared endeavour of Black liberation:
- Who, exactly, was entitled to whyrah? It had once applied to escapees from slavery, and after that to escapees from Jim Crow and similarly oppressive situations. Supposing Jim Crow was abolished, as seemed on track to be happening in America: would it still apply to Black Americans thereafter?
- Should it apply to criminals? Should applicants for whyrah be reviewed to ensure they did not have criminal records, or if they did have such records should they be reviewed to ensure such records, and the processes that produced them, met standards of jurisprudence in the Union?
- Which other societies in the Americas did it apply to, and why? Did it apply to Afro-Cubans (and if so, what did this really say of Palmera’s long-standing friendship and alliance with Republican Cuba)? Did it apply to Afro-Brazilians? To the Afro-Guyanese, who were not visibly oppressed in their homeland? To people who simply subsisted under slavery-like conditions (and if so, did this not logically mean the Indo-Guyanese should be able to make whyrah)?
- If it applied to African migrants who were seeking solace from Britain’s and other nations’ colonial systems abroad (as had been argued for the many African royals and independence activists sheltering in the Union), would it no longer apply to African nations who achieved independence? Should it apply to African migrants in general, and if so, did this not devalue the special history of trans-Atlantic slavery which most of Palmera’s Black and Lanney population shared and Africans largely did not?
- For that matter, did not the Africans themselves descend from collaborators in the slave trade and effectively represent the other half of the nation’s ancient enemy?
Fair though at least
some of these critiques and questions might have seemed in isolation—not all; that last one in particular caused outrage in many quarters—taken as a collective strategy they were advanced by the LJP of the era in rapid-fire and interchangeable fashion that quickly began to seem like bad faith. It was at this time that the LJP, formerly a cornerstone of Dustie commitment to the Black Zion, began to float the idea that Palmera could be her best self as a
‘Rainbow Nation,’ a beacon of freedom for
all men and not “just” the Black man, although of course her commitment to Black liberation must in some form remain intact. The Warwick Government correctly divined the purpose of this line of thinking: once it was accepted, the project of soliciting immigration that would dilute the country’s present Black voting majority could proceed. Accordingly, they pushed back strongly against it and championed a definition of
whyrah that recognized white supremacism as a global phenomenon with a unique impact on Black people, from which such people of any nation and origin could rightly seek succour at Palmera, and recognized a special role the nation served for such people that it needn’t apologize for focussing upon.
So much energy was expended in this push—and in securing a majority vote for this definition that depended on winning over one eccentric MP in particular, the “kingmaker” Martin Belgrave—that something had to give. That something would prove to be a loophole in the Constitution, favoured by “law-and-order” fanatic Belgrave, defanging the proposed abolition of convict leasing (effectively stating that convict
labour would continue but that any leasing of such labour would now have to be at the discretion and under the regulation and scrutiny of county magistrates or
jefes). As a result, the Constitution would finally take a form that could pass muster in the Commons, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Warwick Government. They had ultimately been compelled both to subject the idea of
whyrah to strict legalistic definition and commit to examining the relevancy of criminal records to
whyrah applicants on a case-by-case basis (arguably a defeat in itself) and to render their own initiatives against convict labour leasing effectively toothless.
The Union Tonight’s spot
“What Is Whyrah?” laid out all this maneuvering with the unflinching analytic clarity of a hungry journalistic operation in pursuit of a rival’s ratings and possessed of an imperfect understanding of how deep the waters really were. In so doing, it was the first broadcast of its kind to suggest a direct connection between the LJP’s tactics and the interests of the Hacktey class—especially the personage of Sir Vyvyan Errol—working behind the scenes. This was not appreciated at the time for the seismic shift it really was. Sir Errol himself suffered the episode to be aired with grand indifference, his expectation being that nobody would take it seriously given the source. In fact, this broadcast would be the beginning of a public shift of political perception that would draw stark new battle lines for the decades to come.
[58] A wholesome family sitcom that began airing in 1954 and took its format and concept directly from a popular American counterpart. Like the American show, it starred a famous musical family: in this case Frankie and Pheba Dyer and their two daughters. Very popular in Palmera, it came to serve a similar niche as its American counterpart as presenting an idealized vision of family life, with the exception that it featured a Black family. It lasted into the mid-Sixties, but its main relevance to subsequent eras was launching the career of Delia Dyer, a heartthrob of popular music.
More than that right now I can't say.