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Overturning expectations

Thursday, March 12, 2009

IT'S LITERALLY A WORLD AWAY, you’d think, from the economic meltdown wrought by reckless lending and Wall Street's over-leveraged financial instruments. Africa, for that's where my thoughts turn again this week, might have been spared the pain afflicting so-called developed countries.

If life were fair, that is. But in this modern interconnected world, of course, nothing is so simple - or indeed fair.

 

Without an awful lot of western media attention, as so often, an African capital - Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania - has just been the venue for a thorough-going inquiry into the damage being inflicted by the world-wide crisis on African countries – during a conference convened by the International Monetary Fund. Too often and too easily this continent of over 50 nations can be considered as "uncoupled", in the lumpen jargon of economists, from the global economy.

 

In fact, though, whether it’s through slumping trade with rich Western countries (flagging tourism and low uptake of African commodities like copper) or the universal crimping of credit, Africa’s prospects are badly threatened all over again. And this just at a time when many of its countries were beginning to get much more financially stable.

 

Indeed many have established strong economic growth in the last decade or so – and right now they are having to use up the hard-currency reserves they’ve recently built up, in an effort to preserve their own economies - given the massive amounts of foreign money being withdrawn.

 

Many are angry at this financial pestilence being visited on them, when they had absolutely no part in creating it. South Africa’s Finance Minister Trevor Manuel (above left) told Reuters news agency: "If an African country would have been the cause of the crisis, the IMF would have been at you like a ton of bricks".

 

But paradoxically perhaps, Africa may be in a position to help the rest of us. The IMF’s Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told delegates that the continent’s annual growth rate as a whole is now reckoned to be 3%.

 

Not great but pretty good in the circumstances … and certainly better than the world as a whole, whose annual growth rate was assessed in this same Dar es Salaam session to be running at below zero. Some at the conference, like Morocco's Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar, believe Africa can consequently act as a small but catalyzing stimulus for the rich world's shrinking economies.

 

"African is a land of many opportunities”, said Mezouar, “and through investment we can prop up growth, and by supporting African growth you can rekindle it at a global level."

 

I can’t help remembering the prediction aired in THE MEDIA BEAT well over a year ago – long before the global disaster become fully apparent - that the US “can't take economic growth for granted" in the words of a then under-reported World Bank study - and that developing countries will be the ones to help “cushion” the West’s economic distress.

 

Hmm... We can perhaps be grateful for at least a cushion, can’t we? Whatever unexpected source it comes from.

  

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

  

 

DESPITE ALL THE PRE-OPENING HYPE getting us used to the notion, it still seems remarkable that it's an entire forty-six years since Jane Fonda (above right, in her dressing room) appeared on the New York stage. Much longer, in other words, than the lifetime of many a current Broadway star.

 

You'd think it would be a firecracker of a play that has brought her back after so long, and at the age of 71. Thirty-Three Variations, written and directed by Moises Kaufman – at the Eugene O’Neill Theater - is unhappily not that firecracker.

 

Indeed Kaufman, who is rightly lauded for his previous pieces based closely on transcripts of historical reality (The Laramie Project, on the hate-crime killing of Matthew Shepard, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde) has delivered a squib in his awkward mixture of a domestic relationship drama and a musicology mystery tale. He brings - amid some wonderful touches like the haunting set made of racks of files and paper by Derek Maclane, and some fluid, indispensable piano-playing by musical director Diane Walsh - a disappointingly heavy hand to his story-telling.

 

I winced especially when Fonda, as an obsessed music scholar, has the significance of particular phrasings in Ludwig Van Beethoven's original sketchbook notations for his famous Variations explained to her carefully by a German archivist. Their dialogue pauses pointedly, and with metronomic timing the requisite notes appear enlarged on a back-projection and favored by a spotlight, while Ms Walsh at the piano picks out the exactly apt musical passage.

 

I recalled my years in documentary editing rooms trying to avoid such pedantic obviousness. For me such over-literal presentations had been skewered devastatingly - fatally, you'd hope - by Monty Python's Flying Circus. The satirical team once immortalized the way TV producers could visualize that admittedly odd and archaic British Cabinet member's title ... Lord (shot of judge in periwig) ... Privy (shot of outdoor toilet) ... Seal (aquatic mammal balancing a beach-ball on its nose).

 

Maybe, just maybe, such clunkiness in a play could be rescued with a subtle, elevating performance from the central character. But sadly no.

 

Other figures in the tale combine realism with a strong theatrical presence - like Colin Hanks as a nurse, Samantha Mathis as the academic's daughter and Zach Grenier as an almost believable Beethoven.

 

But as for Fonda herself, she ends up with her character's stern, even caustic classroom style and her own struggle to project her voice at the auditorium being fused together into some barely-controlled form of yelling. It's an almost unvarying vocal delivery that wore this initially willing listener down to a hapless desire to leave the lecture-hall.

 

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