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