Birthday Blog: Near The Wall of Lion Shadows
June 27th, 2007 - by: danny
And so its my birthday, June 27, the day that Tony Blair chose to depart his atrocious role as Bush toady in chief only to convert to Catholicism, perhaps in hopes of absolving his sins. And here I am back in South Africa, the home of the cause that connected me to this beloved country for decades.
And it has been decades. It’s not clear how much wisdom comes with aging but my memory bank is pretty good even if I can’t place every name and face. Being here in some ways is a source of pride in the sense that I was privileged to make a small contribution to real change in the real world.
And yet at the same time, I realize how my idealism and driving political commitment concealed a certain naivete, an expectation that somehow my “team,” the movement I supported, was not as flawed as theirs and that the corruptions of power and the betrayals of principles could somehow be avoided because of the commitments made to “the struggle,” a struggle for liberation and transformation.
That hasn’t happened. I keep hearing stories of ANC officials enriching themselves or using the black empowerment legislation to benefit a relatively small elite. Today I am told, a judge received a 60% plus raise while a three week strike by government employees was forced to settle for 7.5%.
There is a lot of anger at the grass roots with the unachieved promises of a government that came to power with the promise of a “better life for all.” (Thabo Mbeki says, and he may be right that you can’t undo 350 years oppression in 13.)
Don’t get me wrong, there has been amazing progress in many areas but the gaps between the rich and the poor that defined the apartheid era are still here. In fact that was the subject of a major conference on poverty and poverty reduction that opened sponsored by Sanpad.
And even there, there were contradictions with several hundred really poor people demanding to be heard at the meeting inside a luxury hotel. They were not welcomed in.
I poked my head into the opening session and was moved by the passionate denunciation of poverty. Privatization, neo-liberal social policies, gender inequality and major structural imbalances. Interestingly the conference also deal with poverty in Brazil and India. The issues will be discussed in detail but what will be done.
I won’t be covering the ANC Policy conference that also opens today that is supposed to “do something,” but, judging by the report in the Mail& Guardian, it sounds pretty bleak:
Political analysts say in public, ANC leaders will emerge from the meeting that begins on Wednesday united, vowing to tackle widespread poverty, high unemployment and one of the world’s worst crime rates.
However, analysts say they expect closed-door meetings to focus on forming alliances ahead of a congress in December that will choose a new leader for the party.
“Now it faces a crisis. Policies won’t be discussed at the policy meeting. It will be driven by self-interest and lobbying,” said Sipho Seepe, a director at the Graduate Institute of Management and Technology.
“You have an ANC elite that has turned on itself.”
At stake is the direction of South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation”, which is enjoying an economic boom but has witnessed growing divisions between the ANC and its traditional union allies, who are leading a costly public-service strike.
The country’s economic growth has accelerated by an average 5% of gross domestic product a year for the past three years, but so far rising levels of wealth have not trickled down. Officially one in four job-seekers cannot find employment, although analysts put the figure much higher.
The ANC conference opened today with escalating the fight against poverty as its central theme. President Mbeki reiterated that the ANC is fighting a “national democratic revolution,” not a socialist one. That’s the job of the South African Communist Party, he said. The SACP is in alliance with the ANC but fairly powerless in influencing policy.
BIRTHDAY REFLECTIONS
For me, these are the best of times and the worst of times. It’s great being treated so respectfully and warmly at this film festival (which, to my surprise gave its top award two years ago to my film on the media coverage of the Iraq War, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception.) I will show In Debt We Trust on Thursday.
At the poverty conference, I congratulated the eloquent Indian photographer Anshu Padayachee about his speech to the opening plenary, and he told me he reads my blog. Wow. I had, in addition to lovely birthday greetings, a note from an organizer of the Monaco Media Forum which invited me to come. “But we certainly hope to be able to offer some assistance. Danny’s voice is too important not to have around! Best…” That feels good.
At the same time, as readers know these are hard times at the farm, with Mediachannel’s future at risk and Globalvision itself facing an uncertain future. I tend to go back and forth between my hopes and doubts. I wrote about that recently for a book I still hope will find an outlet. Let me share it with you on this day with my dad still in the hospital, my executive producer out of action but hanging on, and my own life plagues by anxiety and yet animated by that Leonard Cohen song that advises: “Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring.”
ALTERNATE SIDE OF THE STREET PARKING
Every New Yorker with a car knows the terror and the discipline of alternate side of the street parking. It is a traffic regulation imposed to permit street cleaning by those little mobile broom trucks that weave between automobiles to try to keep the streets clean and our lives healthier, Alternate Side of the Street Parking imposes a set of rules that rules over the lives of drivers who rely on the streets for parking.
The idea was simple. Parking would be on the left side on Mondays and the right on Tuesdays and so forth and so on. Over the years, there has been some relaxation of the rigidity with fewer days so designated and even shorter hours on the days that still observe it.
With spaces in short supply and private lots now costing what apartments once went for, those without the means have to play the game of shuttling from side to side to avoid tickets and, what’s worse, towing that can often mean the appropriation of your vehicle if you have charges outstanding as checked in our computer driven city. It is a nightmare.
Visit any street tagged with this system and you will see the scurrying for spaces the night before, and then the people waiting, sitting in their cars, drinking coffee, waiting for something, anything to open up or for the magic hour when you can freely move across the street. I don’t know how many hours this eats up in the lives of New York residents but it is considerable and relentless. Some people sleep in their cars or stake out spaces for hours. There have been stories about it, and probably movies. The rules have spawned fights and occasionally small acts of kindness.
For the past few years, I have been privileged to park in a lot and so I have avoided this unpleasant ritual of class and community struggle. But the idea has always sat in my imagination like a metaphor, perhaps even a description of my own inner struggle and stare of mind as I yin yang from feeling good about myself and even hopeful about our society, to a more depressed feeling of despair about the failure I fear I have become. I am told this is common, even among people who society views as big achievers.
I have an alternate side of the street duality not always peacefully co-existing within. On Mondays, I start the week on a positive note, eager to go to work and “get” into the flow of projects and events and the like. On Tuesday, I often feel down by the lack of progress we are making because of our small staff and lack of resources. By Friday, I often want nothing more to escape, often feeling I have wasted my time trapped in an illusion that somehow what I try to do matters and has any impact.
My internal combustion engine is constantly shuttling back and forth across the street I live within, ecstatic one day and bummed out the next, moving, in a sense, from one side of a street of personal dreams and self-awareness to the other, an avenue of disillusion and despair.
Instead of being an east-west geographical shift, it’s an up-down psychological one for me. I am not really a manic depressive but sometimes I feel like one, driven to be everywhere even when I feel I am on quixotic journey. Is this condition personal failure or fate? I have read that manic depression is called “the CEO’s disease.” My old friend Abbie Hoffman died from it. CBS veteran-celebrity Mike Wallace admits it has disabled him on more than one occasion.
We all have ghosts and reasons to admit defeat.
Let me explain: I have gone from the Sixties to 60, a warrior of an earlier time that today fills me with nostalgia and cultural references that the kids in my office don’t get and wouldn’t necessarily understand if they did.
I am still a believer in the ideals and issue that were part of my youth—civil rights, economic justice, opposition to war, social change. Sometimes I feel like an archetype and throw back and yet I take pride in managing to marry my movement days with my current work as a TV producer and website blogger. I like to think I remain as “hip” and timely as most of the people I know and relate to.
I think I have changed less than the times, but the fact that I even speak of “my youth” now testifies to my own realization that it has left me, and that I am moving on, in years, in temperament and perhaps even in understanding.
I know I am a driving force at work, sometimes charismatic, not willing to take no for an answer. I am productive and often hard charging maybe obnoxiously so. I sometimes drive colleagues crazy. I know that there are people who respect my work and appreciate my efforts. I joke that I am “a legend in my own mind.” Shouldn’t this be enough?
But I am also slowing down…..
My body sends me that message every day with a tingle of arthritis here or wrinkles and sluggishness there. My dad once said my problem was that I “wanted to dance at every wedding. That’s when I was a good dancer. I hardly dance any more – whine, whine–I move more carefully than I did. I need more sleep, and, as Leonard Cohen sings, “ache in places that I used to play.”
Many people still see me as vital, younger than I am, energetic and maybe even obsessive. I am still productive, perhaps even overly so, churning out films and articles like I always have. And yet, aging is the one force you cannot will away although I am sure that if I was more of a gym rat, I could so more than I am doing to stay healthier. Where is that fountain of youth?
The image of I have of myself and what I see in the mirror often speaks to a self-delusionary disconnect. I don’t like the way I look and more often how I feel. I don’t stop my forward motion enough to feel really depressed but know that I would if I did. “Retirement” is a scary thought for me.
Partly feeding this negativity is the realization over many years that our generation’s political project, the spirit and ambitions of the sixties, have foundered if not been defeated.
Our movements proved no match for the powers of the powers that be. Our exuberances never found true expression in institutions outside of the academy. Our voices rarely moved beyond the margins in to the mainstream. Those of us who penetrated, infiltrated, and migrated into the center were often co-opted and defanged. John Kerry is only one example of the anti-war rebel who ended up backing a war. I could list the names of my fellow journalists and former “friends” who followed that trajectory, but I won’t. Its hard to adjust to hard times and an engineered market driven cultural shift that stands for everything you oppose.
I have always gone my own way, inventing a persona and staying true to it. Despite years on the “inside” I always felt like an outsider identifying with the forces speaking “truth to power.” I never created a real career path. Unexpected opportunities always materialized but I know you can’t count on that.
I turned myself into a ‘news dissector” when others were content to be big media mavens. I always tried to personalize my work and fuse my own sensibility into it. I was always countercultural preferring personal freedom outside the system to socially validated success within it, but then felt hurt when I didn’t receive what I felt was my due. I projected confidence that often masked by insecurity. I’ll admit, rejection hurts but in many ways it is built into what I am trying to do. Is the answer, acceptance and submission?
A 60′s friend heard me kvetch recently and asked simply, “What do you really expect? Why are you surprised?” Of course, he’s right. When you take on a system, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t want you around or honor you, Ignoring complaints comes with the territory. Dismissing criticism comes with the arrogance of power.
Perhaps its time to just temper my ambitions and scale back my expectations I would like to think I don’t need the external validation but often I do because it is a sign that someone somewhere is maybe listening. Is this ego speaking? Maybe. In my line of work, though, recognition often translates into financial rewards which I need as other do. “Nobodies” don’t get work or recognition. Invisibility often leads to downward mobility. I feel that I am at the top of my game even as I slip to the bottom of ability to influence people and issues.
I differentiated myself, and in the process sometimes isolated myself. I was always more the individual than the apparatchik, more the opinionizer than the reporter. I advocated for movements and organizing masses but was never comfortable in their environments, maybe because I always had more questions than answers. I often felt like a soldier in my own army. I have felt others were with me and than I saw no one behind me. That’s delusionary.
I have a thirty-year old daughter, two failed marriages and a string of past relationships that I try not to remember. I may be too self-absorbed to be a good partner. I have been told that.
I have worked in one place for the last twenty years and its fortunes speak to some strengths and many weaknesses. It’s a miracle that it has lasted as long as it has but it is hanging on, barely making it, occasionally making a difference, but not really making money or moving forward. We are too big to be small and too small to be big. Someone once called it more of a cause than a company. They were right.
I co-founded that company and tried to be entrepreneurial when others clung to network jobs and academic sinecures. On some levels, the hopes I invested have been more than realized in terms of creative opportunities and political contributions, but I am not a businessman and the company’s condition shows it.
I live in my mind and know that that it too is being affected, not just with the anxiety of not knowing what’s coming next but with the experience of some of those “senior moments” when memory fails and you forget things on the tip of your tongue. Bodies are built this way and while the past is never past, it sometimes eludes you too. You can’t live there but its pull never quite lets you go.
Right now I am struggling, probably like so many others, with the angers and insecurities of these times and my own fears and foibles. I am writing about them for myself more than anyone else hoping that when I reread this screed, I may realize its time to shuttle across some street to the alternate side
I am trying to be honest. It can be painful.
To Be Continued.
MY MOM’S VIEW
PS: If it’s my birthday it was also by late mom’s who did the deed on this June 27 in a very different time. It was literally her first birth day. She wrote about it her special way in a poem called NEAR THE WALL OF LION SHADOWS. You can read it if you want:
From the land of The Lion King, one appeal
Keep us keeping on:
Write: dissector@mediachannel.org
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DISSECTING FROM SOUTH AFRICA
June 24th, 2007 - by: danny
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA: I have barely had the time to catch my breath. After a sixteen hour “sojourn” in the air, I arrived in Joburg with barely time to spare to catch a flight to Durban, the port city on the Indian Ocean.
I am here to attend the amazingly curated Durban International Film Festival with participants from all over the world. (I will show IN DEBT WE TRUST later this week.) I was whisked from airport to a dinner at the China Plate Restaurant (Talk about international!) hosted by the country’s best known film producer, Anant Singh. Anant had persuaded me to come for the dinner and it was only when I did, that found out in was partly in my honor.
On the way to Durban, I read about the impending Rugby confrontation beween South Africa’s Springboks, a team I was once part of boycotting and New Zealand’s “All Blacks, a team known for its pre-fame rendition of the “Hakka,” a war chant of the Maori people. I had never seen a Rugby match before and even though the stadium was sold out, I was “connected” enough to get in despite the mayhem and watch it in a corporate box.
Rugby was the mainstay of White South Africa, and emblematic of its sports crazed macho culture. That is until Nelson Mandela charmed the fans by turning up in a Jersey and appealing for their support. The still mostly all white crowd started out by singing the national anthem – Nkosi Sikeleli Africa – once the chant of the liberation struggle and now a multi-lingual anthem fused with the old South Africa’s song Die Stem with an all English coda paying tribute to “South Africa our land.”
The Boks took an early lead but seem to have petered in the last fifteen minutes out and were outplayed by the New Zealanders. Not a great day although temperature wise, it was a beautiful first day of Winter. The game is followed by what we would call tailgate parties but theirs are known as Brais and thousands of fans spent hours outside the stadium eating more meat than I could look at.
I didn’t hear any discussions of politics although the country was experiencing a strike by civil servants that was threatening to go into a forth week. I was treated to people about crime which the government has now acknowledged is at epidemic levels, a sign of the great gap between rich and poor that is the new apartheid in this country. (And many others.)
I did see one film Operation Filmmaker by a fellow American Nina Davenport. It chronicles the experience of a young Iraqi captured on MTV explaining that he wants to be a filmmaker but now he is not sure he will be able to pursue his dream because Baghdad’s film school has been bombed by the US. The actor Liev Scheeiber hears his plea and arranges for him to work on a movie he was making in the Czech Republic. Nina gets to document what everyone expected would be a happy ending.
But Muthana Mohmed has ideas of his own and seem to irritate everyone “helping” him with the best of intentions. Like the US invasion of Iraq which Muthana actually supported, no one gets what they want and by the end, Nina is only seeking an “exit” strategy from a project that seems to have no end in sight. It’s a brave film and I was glad to hear her explain what she learned which wasn’t always clear in the well made feature doc.
After collapsing from the jet log and other personal issues that have followed me here, I was up early in the morning in the company of an Iranian distributor and a South African teacher on trip into the Zulu heartland an tourist attraction called SHAKALAND. We were exposed to dancing crafts and Zulu lore as well as a clip from the old Shaka Zulu TV show that I also boycotted when it came out because it seemed at the time to be promoting tribalism as an alternative to the liberation struggle.
When I was there, I had a very disturbing conversation with two people on the hospitality team who warned that there could be war if anything happens to Jacob Zuma, a Zulu and ANC leader who is at odds with the country’s president Thabo Mbeki and will run to replace him. That was ominous and a sign that tribalism is still alive and well in the new South Africa.
I hadn’t penetrated so deeply into the Zulu world since I first visited this luscious green field and sugar cane plantations of what is now Kwazulu Natal when I was a militant pup of 25 and on my first “mission” to South Africa. That was a long time ago and while so much has changed, much of it has yet to impact on the traditional societies and poor communities that survive alongside the wonders of this self-proclaimed “Rainbow Nation.”
Ok, that’s all for now. I still don’t know if I will still be blogging when I return. So I hope those of you who haven’t yet responded to Mediachannel’s funding appeal will pitch in whatever you can. We are still giving it all we can with my report from South Africa and Rory O’Connor’s upcoming reports from the Oh My Citizen Journalism conference in South Korea.
Our world needs Mediachannel.org and I hope you will do your bit to help keep us going. And thanks to those who have sent along birthday wishes. That’s coming up on the 27th.
My prayers for my dad’s survival in a Boston hospital and my best to all of you.
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Take Back America Participants Lean Towards Obama
June 21st, 2007 - by: danny
DON’T MISS THIS: RUNNING THE NUMBERS ON AMERICA
ISRAEL’S INDYMEDIA SAYS PLAN SET FOR ATTACK ON IRAN
TAKE BACK AMERICA POLL BACKS OBAMA
HOW THE CREDIT CARD COMPANIES SCAM US
MICHAEL MOORE BOASTS: “I AM MAINSTREAM NOW”
In what was my first full day in New York in nearly a week, the temperature dropped overnight, the rain fell and then the sun came out – three seasons in one day. But there is no rest for the weary. I am off later today for South Africa, a kind of home away from home for many years, to show In Debt We Trust at the big Film Festival in Durban South Africa. I will also celebrate my big birthday, check in on old friends, and find out the latest on the strikes, the struggle and the like.
So what’s new in the news. First, the full extent of Iraq’s devastation thanks to our war for that country’s freedom now has a new statistic according to the UN – read this and weep – NINE MILLION refugees are now FREE to subsist anyway they can.
Back in Washington, our President spent the day veteoing the stem cell research bill while mob violence back in his lone star state led to a man being beaten to death while a black cloud ascended over Las Vegas and, closer to home, a security guard opened fire on another one at Walter Reed Hospital. Is the country becoming unhinged?
That was what William Rivers Pitt of Truthout was also thinking, writing:
There is something happening today in America. With the right kind of ears, you can hear it in the sound of millions of brows slowly furrowing in anger and disgust. It feels like those tense moments just before the eruption of a summer thunderstorm, those moments when the air is electric, the ozone reek of spent lightning fills the world, and you know something very loud is about to happen. What is happening, what can be heard and smelled and sensed all across the land, is the cresting wave of rage, betrayal and fury that is, finally, roaring across the shores of our collective American heart.”
MEANWHILE
Back at the Washington Hilton Hotel where the Take Back America conference was ending, a straw poll of the progressives in attendance by the website Politico reported that Obama seemed to have captivated the crowd.
Senator Barack Obama scored a victory among progressive activists Wednesday, winning the Politico.com Straw Poll of attendees at the Take Back America Conference in Washington.
Obama received 29% of the 720 votes cast in the straw poll, narrowly beating out former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, and decisively knocking official front-runner Hillary Clinton into third place.
Edwards took 26% of the vote and Clinton 17%.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson received 9% of the vote, and 8% wrote in the name of former Vice President Al Gore, who was not listed as a candidate in the straw poll.
The poll results also indicated intense concern about the Iraq war.
“Obama clearly has strength and a base and enthusiasm here among a network of progressive groups and activists,” said pollster Stan Greenberg, whose Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research adminstered the poll.
He noted that both he and Edwards were the clear front-runners.
“If you look at this, you see Obama’s [supporters'] second choice and Edwards [supporters'] second choice are each other — in this group, the two of them form the top tier.”
Obama delivered an uncharacteristically confrontational performance at Take Back America Tuesday. He lashed the Bush Administration for stubbornness and, he said, for not believing in the Constitution. And he attacked Washington’s culture of lobbying.
“They think they own this government but, we are here to tell them today that our government is not for sale and we are taking it back,” Obama said to loud applause.
HILLARY BOOED–BUT WHY?
Hillary Clinton also spoke and attracted some booing, a story that was played big by the Hillary Haters in conservative media. The conference put out a release that said
“What the boos were actually about is likely to be misreported.
Byron York at the National Review writes that the boos began after Clinton said, “The American military has done its job.” A fellow attendee told me he heard Fox News’ Carl Cameron report that she was booed because she said she supports the troops (though I have not been able to confirm Cameron’s remarks.)
That’s flat wrong. The Politics on the Hudson blog gets it right:
“They jeered the Democratic presidential hopeful when she blamed the Iraqi government for the continued violence that has bogged down U.S. troops.”
See the video for yourself, go to 23 minutes and 38 seconds into her emarks.
Why get booed for that?
Because a lot of people are sick and tired of what’s become a stand-by cop-out bipartisan talking point: that the Iraqis are solely to blame for the chaos and de-stablization.
As if the Iraqis invaded and occupied themselves.
RESPONDING TO JOE LIEBERMAN
On another political front, MoveOn boasted that its supporters donated over $355,000 in the past 24 hours to anti-war candidate Tom Allen, as well as Iraq veteran Rep. Patrick Murphy and MoveOn’s Iraq campaign. Rep. Allen is running to replace Senator Susan Collins, a pro-war candidate from Maine. The effort was prompted by Senator Joe Lieberman’s fundraiser to support Sen. Collins.
“We encourage Senator Lieberman to do fundraisers for other Republican Senators who support the Iraq war, so that our members have an opportunity to do this again for other anti-Iraq war candidates,”MoveOn’s Eli Pariser concluded.
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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