Voices of experience
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Inevitably it's elections that fill the media air as this eventful year opens – and I don’t just mean Iowa’s couple of hundred thousand caucus-goers who will tonight exert their weird quadrennial influence on America’s picking of a President.
There are the furious, rioting voters of Kenya. Hundreds of them have been shot dead, and others killed with pangas (machetes) as ethnic reprisals have spread since President Mwai Kibaki squeaked back into power earlier this week -- in the face of outrage from his rival Raila Odinga and serious misgivings from international observers tasked with validating the country’s electoral process.
And of course in Pakistan, its elections -- thrown mightily off course by the tumult of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination (with fewer deaths in riots there than in Kenya, but still scores of them) -- are delayed until February 18th, leaving every commentator wondering just what kind of open democratic poll can really be undertaken in the circumstances.
I’m not too dispirited. Unfettered news coverage is of course fundamental to any democracy’s elections, and ’s media are nowadays pretty bold and direct. President Pervez Musharraf – even given his clumsy and, at heart, indecisive imposition of martial law (or “state of emergency” as he called it, to scorn and considerable disregard by press and public alike) – has come to see some once-unimaginable forms of assertive dissent flourish during his seized-by-arms Presidency.
For myself, I admire enormously the incisive weekly, the Friday Times, founded by the extraordinary couple, publisher Jugnu Mohsin and her editor Najam Sethi (who’s also her husband, and who spent four months in jail without trial under a previous authoritarian leader).
I confess what I like most in Friday Times is a regular cartoon series which gives Gary Trudeau’s widely syndicated Doonesbury a good run for its very funny money. The strip is called Mush and Bush (available at http://www.thefridaytimes.com - but you’ll have to subscribe) and, as its name suggests, it skewers the relationship between those two self-proclaimed tough-minded, ”Decider” presidents who manage to make such monumental messes whenever they do decide on anything.
And Kenya? Here too a lively press keeps aflame the fires of democratic opposition to arrogant executive power, but (as in ) it has a narrow line to walk. Other less manageable flames - those of popular riot and soldiers’ firepower - may yet consume the country.
**AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS COLUMN CAN BE HEARD ON ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
PODCAST available by clicking here:
STILL MORE ELECTIONS, THIS TIME IN - A DEMOCRACY since only 1994. They are actually a full eighteen months away, but as THE MEDIA BEAT has been signaling quite a bit lately, stratagems are already afoot aimed at disrupting the once-inevitable transition of the leader of the ruling party, the African National Congress, into the country’s national President. The moves are prompted by the fact that, since December 18th, the ANC leader is now Jacob Zuma, and he’s desperate to succeed national President Thabo Mbeki – but Mbeki is equally desperate to stop Zuma in his tracks.
So it comes as no real shock that, with the turn of the year, there comes a well-publicized announcement: Zuma is being indicted by the country’s National Prosecution Authority (a kind of super, country-wide District Attorney’s office). He’s been nailed in fact by the Authority’s “Directorate of Special Operations”, which has been christened “The Scorpions” by local headline-writers … naturally enough, since this team of specialists in busting financial and organized crime is pretty adept at mounting “stings”.
Zuma is charged with corruption, fraud and money-laundering. And unsurprisingly, if convicted he will be barred from holding parliamentary office - and of course from the national Presidency.
I suggested in my late December column that, cannily, Mbeki will be promoting a speedy return to public office for Tokyo Sexwale, the freedom-fighter turned tycoon (in electronics and media, as well as in the dependable South African mining business) whom Mbeki once effectively marginalized politically.
In a recently recorded radio interview with me (hear it in podcast form at http://www.voicesofourworld.org/download.cfm, by clicking on January 6th’s program – both parts) the man often described as “South Africa’s Conscience”, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, endorses the notion that the country should take a middle course between the two top-ranking rivals duking it out fiercely right now, and opt instead to reconsider some previously excluded leaders who have a strong achievement record (like Sexwale, for instance).
The 76 year-old Archbishop (seen above, left, at our recording session) told me:
“We are not giving people the opportunity of serving as they would want to serve, and have the ability to serve. We are sometimes sidelining people who were involved with the struggle but maybe have decided not to have a party political affiliation”.
Look out for the temporarily non-affiliated Sexwale to start getting a lot more media attention, locally and internationally. (For a start – he’s just been elected back onto to the ANC’s National Executive.) The Archbishop knows a thing or two about how South Africa works.
THE ACTRESS, SINGER AND HOOFER, ELAINE STRITCH, IS – ASTONISHINGLY – SIX YEARS older than Desmond Tutu (how both will be entertained by such a comparison!) But she’s at it again!
Stritch (above right) kicked off 2008 - and I use the verb advisedly - with a new version of her show “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” specially adapted for the intimate cabaret setting of New York’s Café Carlyle. She gives us an extraordinary combination of the hilarious and the poignant.
And what an object-lesson she provides in the communicative value of long experience, if it’s linked with huge talent - and with pole-axing honesty.
Whether evoking the hectic buoyancy of rushing between theatres in her early performing days (even when the shows were on the same evening – and often the same afternoon too – but in cities as far apart as New York and Hartford, Connecticut), or the loss of a massive television success in The Golden Girls by (playfully? … self-destructively?) inserting a profanity into the script while auditioning for the part that Bea Arthur finally got, Stritch tells us straight just how it was.
And she tells how it is – especially inside the raucous and gregarious public performer who is as sensitive and as lonely as she has never wanted to admit … except now, and to us.
It was touching to see the exquisite soprano Renee Fleming in the audience. And especially to observe her focusing such rapt attention on Stritch’s more intense passages as if (at least to this lay observer) in close study of the veteran’s technique … joyfully whooping at the best roof-raising jokes … and giving whispered explanations to her not-quite-sixteen year-old daughter Amelia for some of the more abstruse points of show-biz history and gossip (like why it was a self-described “bum decision” for Stritch to have switched from being Ben Gazzara’s fiancée to pursuing Rock Hudson).
The many laughs aside, the show was acutely summed up by Fleming, when Stritch asked for any suggestions to add to her performance. “There should be a notice outside,” Fleming said. ”Warning: Your Heart Will be Broken.”