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Masked and Anonymous: Bob Dylan’s
elegy for a lost America
By David Vest
Bob Dylan’s new film, Masked and Anonymous, has met with almost
universal condemnation (or worse, condescension) from critics in the corporate
media. According to most reviewers, in lieu of a plot the film offers
“rambling incoherence” and “incomprehensible dialogue.”
It is “an exercise in self-indulgence.” Several reviewers have
actually worried in print that Dylan made the movie in order to have some
kind of joke at their expense. Dylan’s character, Jack Fate, has
little or nothing to say, we are repeatedly told, and more or less just
“sits there like a toad,” in the words of Roger Ebert, who should
be the last person to accuse anyone of that.
Could the movie really be this bad? It wouldn’t matter if it were
equal to “The Tempest” or “Julius Caesar,” it has
already been pronounced D.O.A.
Anytime the nation’s media are this unanimous about anything, one
would do well to be suspicious. After all, President Bush’s decision
to invade Iraq in search of “weapons of mass destruction” was
met not with skepticism but with near-unanimous cheerleading and boosterizing
in the corporate media.
Reviewers had already effectively killed Dylan’s film by the time
it arrived in Portland, Oregon for a perfunctory one-week run. Although
attendance grew steadily during the week, it started sparse and grew toward
respectable.
Not ten minutes after the opening credits I could see why the film had
been marked for assassination by big newspaper media critics. They are
the villains of the piece! “Masked and Anonymous” portrays the
reporters who wrote the bad reviews as people who have to wear ankle monitors.
Editors hold the keys that control them. Who owns the editors is pretty
clear, too. The sight of superstar critic and Sixties specialist “Tom
Friend” (Jeff Bridges) being beaten to death with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s
guitar must have been too much for them. “Friend,” obsessed
with his own memories of the Sixties but oblivious to what is going on
outside the window, never seems to notice that Fate, his quarry, answers
none of his questions. Officials of the “network” televising
the “benefit” on which Fate is to appear see him as self-indulgent,
too. They want him to sing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Jumping Jack
Flash” and “Revolution — the slow version.”
He gives them “Dixie.”
The infamous “rambling and incomprehensible” plot is in fact
rather well-constructed and makes abundant sense. Although the project
could have used some tighter editing and more attention to minor issues
of continuity, anyone who couldn’t follow this movie probably couldn’t
be trusted with a comic book. The storyline is no more “obscure”
or “disjointed” than A Hard Day’s Night.
But it hits a great deal harder. When the camera pans slowly down a desolate
L.A. avenue, and Dylan is heard singing “Seen the arrow on the doorpost,
saying This Land is Condemned, all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem,”
try to keep tears from welling. (Or sit there like a toad eating popcorn
and stuff the feeling, it’s your call.) Whereas the concert finale
of A Hard Day’s Night is witnessed by screaming teenagers and an
adoring TV audience, the concert performed by Fate in Masked and Anonymous
is seen by no one except stage hands and extras because it is pre-empted
by a presidential speech and interrupted by guns and bayonets.
In spite of what you may have read, the film is not “set in some
imaginary third-world country at some point in the future,” anymore
than King Lear is about prehistoric England. Failure to recognize the
true setting should immediately disqualify any reviewer. “Masked
and Anonymous” is a spot-on accurate portrayal of what is going on
RIGHT NOW, seen through the eyes of someone with vision and not just eyesight,
someone who has looked through the eyes not only of Charley Patton and
Elizabeth Cotton but also of Emmett Miller and even Daniel Decatur Emmett.
All America’s chicken-hawk foreign wars have come home to roost.
The horrors once visited upon El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Somalia
and Iraq are now rolling through the streets of California. All the electoral
disgrace of recent campaigns has been compressed into one presidential
speech. As for the major media as portrayed in this film, it is impossible
not to think of Christiane Amanpour’s recent admission that CNN “was
intimidated” by the Bush administration and operated in a “climate
of fear and self-censorship” during the invasion of Iraq.
When the new president (Mickey Roarke) concludes his “war-is-peace”
oration at the end of the film with the sarcastic words “May God
help you all,” it is merely what anyone with a perceptive imagination
can hear Bush or Cheney saying when they conclude their speeches with
the formulaic “God Bless America.” Certainly the administration
portrayed in “Masked and Anonymous” is no more thuggish than
the one currently rooting at the trough in Washington.
Or, as Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman) puts it, “It’s the dark
princes, the democratic republicans, working for a barbarian who can scarcely
spell his own name.”
When a soldier (Giovanni Ribisi) tells Fate of fighting first with the
rebels, then with the counter-insurgents, then with the Government, then
with the rebels again, only to discover that some of the rebels are in
fact funded by the very Government they’re supposed to be opposing,
how strange does that seem to anyone familiar with the betrayals and capitulations
of contemporary politics, especially movement politics? It’s like
finding out who sponsors “Earth Day.” My favorite exchange:
“I’m trying to be on your side, Jack,” says Uncle Sweetheart,
the promoter who is, naturally, “only trying to help.”
“You have to be born on my side, Sweetheart,” says Fate. To
be on the side of workers, of animals, of oppressed people, of love, of
the truth is to court destruction. Before singing his final song and meeting
his own fate, Jack Fate experiences a visitation by his ghostly forerunner,
Oscar Vogel (Ed Harris), a banjo-playing entertainer who worked in blackface
and who disappeared after raising his voice against the times. When Fate
looks back to catch a last glimpse of Vogel, the vaudevillian has been
replaced by a young Black man who could be a janitor, a Reggae artist
or a rising Hip-Hop truth teller, next in the line of destiny, or line
of fire. This film isn’t perfect. I have read the original screenplay
and far too much has been cut out of it to try to make it acceptable to
people who would have had none of it under any circumstances. But it is
the only motion picture I have seen so far in this millennium that seems
to have a clue about what is going on in America. Moviegoers will get
it or they won’t. Great pains have been taken to ensure that they
won’t even see it.
It is a tale of almost unbearable sadness and loss. When Dylan sings “I’ll
Remember You,” as electrifying a performance as has ever been caught
on camera (all the songs are performed live, there’s no lip- synching
in this movie) you feel that he may well be singing not merely about a
person but also about that “lost America of love” that Ginsberg
mourned in “A Supermarket in California,” a work that in its
visionary aspect and intensity Masked and Anonymous resembles. (Its ultimate
antecedents are of course Shakespeare’s history plays.) When Dylan’s
character, Fate, is reunited with his lost/doomed love (Angela Bassett,
magnificent in the role), she endeavors with great tenderness to console
him for his losses, and without a word Dylan manages to convey that Fate’s
grief is inconsolable. It is a scene of considerable beauty and delicacy.
Dylan’s performance has been called “inscrutable.” But
who else could have played this role? There are people who find his songs
inscrutable as well, and I suppose arguing with them would be as pointless
as trying to answer “Tom Friend’s” interview questions.
(These days, anything an idiot can’t or won’t bother to understand
is “incomprehensible” and “inscrutable.”)
The most daring (and intriguing) line in the film slips by almost unnoticed:
moments after Jack Fate is arrested for a sudden act of violence committed
by his sidekick Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson), he thinks to himself, “Sometimes
it’s not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes we have
to know what things don’t mean as well. Like, what does it mean to
not know what the person you love is capable of?”
Unlike D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, which showed a young
Dylan eating dumb but presumptuous critics alive, Masked and Anonymous
depicts an aging Jack Fate with nothing whatever to say to them.
“I was always a singer and maybe no more than that,” he says.
So much for “self-indulgence.”
David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his
band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down
Here. Visit his website at www.rebelangel.com
Source: CounterPunch
Stupid white censorship for Stupid White
Men
By John Lapp
Oct. 1(AGR)— On Thursday, Oct. 9, at 8pm, the Asheville Global Report
will be presenting two films in downtown Asheville to help raise desperately
needed funds for their operating costs. One of the featured movies is
a speech given by Academy Award-winning filmmaker, best selling author,
and self-proclaimed slacker activist, Michael Moore. The speech was given
in the fear-driven months that followed Sept. 11, 2001, and was a promotion
for his best-selling — and almost unreleased – book, Stupid
White Men.
The always outspoken Moore begins the speech with a war story. This story
involves the battle he waged with his publishing company Harper Collins,
owned by corporate media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Apparently the company
planned to censor Moore’s newest book in the wake of 9/11, calling
it “out of touch with the American political climate.” To this
statement, Moore retorts in his impish way, that he still means everything
he wrote on those pages, spanning from a letter to President George W.
Bush asking the “president” (Moore also informs us that he has
decided to put quote marks around the word ‘President’, seeing
as how it’s only fitting) if he is indeed a drunk, a felon and an
idiot; to Moore’s hatred of California’s Three Strikes law.
Moore tells his audience that Harper Collins, finally so annoyed with
Moore’s “no compromise” attitude, announced that they would
totally censor his book and “pulp” the 50,000 copies that were
on hold. Moore then adds what his thought process was upon hearing of
the “pulping” of his book: “How far we, on the other side,
have come. We’ve actually made the oppressors want to recycle. They’ll
pulp my book so that they can print more books by Rush Limbaugh. Screw
Mike, save the trees!”
Later we find out how a couple thousand irate librarians were able to
actually secure the release of Stupid White Men, projecting it to the
top of all of the American charts.
After this anecdote, Moore launches into a tirade against Bush and the
corporate entities that make it possible for Bush to exist. Moore proclaims
that the success of his book is not due to the quality of the book, but
instead a symbol of the general outcry of the American people who were
sick and tired of being force-fed post-9/11 bullshit. During this incredibly
emotional rant (and I use this word with total love and respect), Moore
reveals some disturbing links between the Bush and bin Laden families.
Moore also sheds light on the ties between the Unocal corporation and
the oppressive Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan up until 2002. In
a desperate plea to all those who could hear him, Moore gives out the
White House telephone number and implores his listeners to demand answers
to the questions that no politician, Democratic, Republican or Green,
is asking.
Then, in what can only be seen as an attack on the Democrats in the audience,
Moore suggests that progressives constantly play the victim, totally isolate
regular Americans, and take no real stances on any real issues. Mocking
Californian Governor Gray Davis’ weak positions, Moore says: “Thanks
for voting me in. Remember... a little death penalty is okay.” Moore
then goes on to ask “Where are the warriors on our side?”
The shining moment in the speech is when the slobbish Moore addresses
all the slackers in the audience. He tries to convince them that making
change is really easy. He tells a story about how he was the first 18-year-old
elected to public office and all he had to do was get some stoners to
sign a petition. He later credits his munchies for desegregating the Elks
Club when he was 16. The only negative aspect to the speech was Moore’s
unquestioning anti-Americanism. Moore seems to hold all other western
“democracies” in this high light, while believing that the United
States is some how much less evolved. When asked by a local peace activist
why so many more British people showed up to anti-war marches, Moore’s
response was that they are used to a multiparty system where the people
are truly represented. Such statements totally ignore the fact that politics
and wealth are controlled by the top five percent in every nation despite
how many political parties exist. The rich in Europe capitalize on popular
ideals by naming their parties such things as the Labor Party or the Socialist
Party, when in reality they are no different then our very own spineless
Democrats.
All in all, Moore makes a poorly filmed, hour-plus speech in a church
captivating and emotionally gripping. This is the very same Moore who
has been banned by dozens of corporate headquarters and who drew boos
and screams as he proclaimed Bush a “false president who was elected
in false elections” live on the Academy Awards.
The benefit for AGR takes place at The Big Idea, located at 27 Carolina
Lane (between Walnut & Hiawasee streets).
Michael Moore’s stand-up will be followed by Unprecedented, a film
produced by Indymedia that takes a sharp and provocative, retrospective
look at the 2000 US presidential election.
Meet and greet local sustainability
By Sari Janczlik
Sept. 25 (AGR)— Bioregionalism defines a process
of buying and trading local products and resources while creating
coexistence between the local environment and human communities. The
key point is “being local,” meaning grassroots efforts to
be self-supported without having to operate under the influence of
multi-national corporations. Bioregional movements are organized groups
of activists who change their conditioned ways of consumerism, instead
they provide their own goods and services for the community in which
they thrive and ride bikes to the local tailgate markets.
Being a good neighbor is always a good start in building a sustainable
culture. Asheville has the potential of being included in this nationwide
struggle for bioregionalism. The Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture
Project distributes a free 54-page local food guide of western North
Carolina family farms. The concept of local economy is also present
with financial support from Mountain Micro-Enterprises and the Green
Building Council. Ecological restoration is made possible by these
organizations: WNC Alliance, Earthhaven, and Southern Appalachian
Forest Coalition. The A-team street medics are cooperative and helpful
in time of need. Local newspapers and zines assist in a better understanding
for what exactly is happening in our backyards. We are fortunate enough
to have weekly farmers markets in several locations. The crossing
over of these interrelationships creates an ability to preserve farmland
versus urban sprawl.
Asheville is not perfect in many ways. Public transportation is not
very reliable. The town needs bike lanes. We neglect voting for an
environmentally minded politician. And sometimes it is just too easy
to go to the bigwig home improvement stores because a downtown hardware
store does not exist. In Ithaca, New York, Paul Glover created Ithaca
hours, which is an alternative-internal currency only good for Ithaca-made
products. Imagine the possibilities of bioregionalism if Asheville
did explore these ideas.
A resolution for sustainable societies are set to be prepared in two
different locations during the same weekend, beginning on Friday and
continues through Sunday, Oct. 10-12. The Katuah Bioregional Gathering
will meet at the Earthhaven Ecovillage in Black Mountain, NC in preparation
for the national gathering that will take place next year. The goal
here is to network, participate in workshops, and be part of the local
council who will give conception to a local goods and services index.
The other one is Virginia Forest Watch’s fifth annual conference
at the 4-H Education Center at Holiday Lake State Park, 30 miles east
of Lynchburg, VA. Saturday will be spent touring the Appomattox and
Cumberland State Forests. Their bioregional representatives include
Healing Harvest Forest Foundation from Floyd County and the Staunton-based
Valley Conservation Council, as well as experts and anyone else who
wants to attend. The choice is yours: katauhbioregion@hotmail.com
or vafw@mounet.com for further details.
The Homeschool Project
By Rebecca Sulock
(AGR)-- It’s 11:30am on Thursday morning, and five children are
intently creating posters in a room at the Asheville Community Resource
Center.
“How do you spell ‘pollute’?” asks Liana Murray,
6, in the midst of writing “Do not pollute sea water” on a
piece of blue construction paper. Lift it up, and a carefully drawn
mermaid swims.
The posters offer suggestions and comments for city government, as part
of a social studies project in a free class taught by Eric, a volunteer
instructor. In an hour or so, the class will walk to the City building
to hand-deliver their ideas to Mayor Worley.
“Let’s finish up because it’s almost field trip time,”
announces Sherry Led, mother of Pheran, 9, and a vocal proponent of
kids’ free school. Like all of the parents involved, she has chosen
to take responsibility for her son’s education. Put in those terms,
it seems odd that homeschooling is often viewed as a nontraditional
decision.
“I brought these children into the world, and I should be responsible
for their education,” says Justina Prenatt, mother of Lennon Medvick,
9, and Gareth Medvick, 8. She points to the public school system as
being racist, rampantly sexist and pro-capitalist, sentiments echoed
by Led. The schools are like “a training camp for the next generation
of proletariat workers,” says Prenatt. The system is “classist,”
says Led. “It chooses children for their roles in a corporate,
capitalist society.”
“I felt like I could do a better job,” says Tamiko Murray,
mother of Liana and Logan, 9, both of whom attended public school until
last year. In the school system, “they didn’t have any space
to grow to their full potential.”
“Not that I don’t have respect for teachers,” she adds.
“But even those with the best intentions get swallowed up by the
system.”
Homeschooling allows kids to receive individual attention, work at their
own pace, and facilitate their own education. The adults provide the
resources, and the learning experience becomes cooperative.
“We strive to provide the students with an environment where they
can share in the decisions about their class choices, help recruit teachers,
and become empowered by the experience of sharing learning; as well
as learning to work together to make big dreams happen,” says Mary
Giovanniello, mother of Eris, 7.
Murray describes a current project wherein Logan, Liana, and Eris made
lists of things they wanted to learn about, then checked out books on
their various subjects at the library. After their research, the kids
will teach the parents what they learned. “It breaks down the hierarchical
‘teacher-student’ structure,” says Murray.
The homeschool project is facilitated by Asheville Free School, and
works the same way. Volunteers teach classes on everything from art
to Spanish. Eleven children are involved.
“I have no children, or they’re all my children, depending
on who you ask,” says Eric, the social studies teacher, who has
been blacklisted from substitute teaching after organizing a walk-out
in protest of the war in Iraq.
He admits that the kids may not get to see the mayor that afternoon,
but that will be a lesson for them as well. Walking across town, the
kids have concerns about the meeting.
“Are you sure they’re going to let us in there with these
things?” asks Eris.
“Are we going to get arrested?” asks Logan, and Led reassures
him that you don’t always get arrested for speaking your mind.
The mayor is out, but Eric makes an appointment for next week, between
4 and 4:30pm, when the mayor “sees people in his office,”
according to his receptionist.
One week later, the driving rain doesn’t seem to dampen the kids’
enthusiasm. They make the same trek, and this time the mayor welcomes
the group into his office and passes out pencils.
The kids sit around his table, suddenly shy, watching and listening
to the mayor praise their posters and suggestions.
“We were just talking a minute ago about air pollution,” says
Worley. “I think we’re all concerned about that.” “‘Kids
voices count’ and that’s really true.” “More bike
lanes — that’s great.” After the brief encounter, the
group reconvenes on the steps of the city building.
“He seemed nice, but he needed to be pointed in the right direction,”
says Lennon. “Because I don’t think the Grove Park Inn building
is a good idea. I think it’s a terrible idea, as a matter of fact.”
Prevatt offers a few statements about the nature of politicians (“They
have to make people like them, because that’s how they keep their
jobs”). The kids listen respectfully, then run off to play in the
rain.
The new currency of ‘no’
By Paula Kamen
In debating the high-profile felony sexual-assault case against Kobe
Bryant over the past months, media commentators have been largely preoccupied
with one single issue of social consequence: What does this mean for
the Nutellas and the Nikes?
But what about the bigger-picture story beyond the lost corporate endorsements
of nut butter and sneakers?
This case is still controversial. But the fact that it made the light
of day is unprecedented. Society has begun to accept the criminalization
of acquaintance rape in its most traditionally dismissed form: an encounter
that both parties admit started off consensually.
Meanwhile, but much more under the radar, the growing authority of a
woman’s “no” has surfaced in other public arenas. In
late July, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich approved a law stating that
a woman has a right to change her mind at any point during sex —
probably the first of many similar state laws. While it has become nationally
controversial, the law is merely meant to make existing legislation
clearer to victims, offenders, prosecutors and juries. Lawmakers want
to avoid the confusion that resulted from such a California case involving
two 17-year-olds, that had dragged on for years in the courts and was
finally settled in the state Supreme Court in January.
Or, as one young female Court TV reporter put it to a very leery John
Hannity on a Fox News discussion of Bryant’s case: “If I give
you $5, that doesn’t mean I have to hand over my whole bank account.”
I especially took note of the spirited debate on Hannity and Colmes
because a few days earlier I had witnessed the same one take place almost
word for word, in an entirely different forum — among the audience
after a performance of Sex Signals, a partly improvised and largely
comedic play.
Since 2000, thirty-something producers and actors Gail Stern and Christian
Murphy have made this play an innovative export of Chicago’s improv
scene by turning it into some of the most influential and popular anti-rape
programming in the country. So far, they have performed the play before
hundreds of student groups, and thousands of freshmen starting college
this fall are seeing the show as a part of their orientation.
The complexities and subtleties of Sex Signals reflect how far the issue
of date rape has advanced, even since I was in college in the late ‘80s,
when the very concept of date rape was in question. In Sex Signals,
with the central male character actually being portrayed as likable
(just like Kobe Bryant clearly still is), this play stands in stark
contrast to comparable educational dramas from even the ‘90s. Then
the men were characterized simplistically, as the purely devilish Sigma
Chi with the Roofies. (A common scenario was the guy taking the woman
out to an expensive dinner of steak and lobster, to weaken her resistance.
As a result, the primary lesson that many of us absorbed was limited
to indelibly associating felony-sexual assault with surf and turf.)
In this updated drama, the central case-study being debated involves
a first date between two affable college students. The audience quizzes
an actor, playing the male protagonist Matt, about just what took place
that night. He reveals that he had ignored the woman, Joelle, when she
told him to stop at the start of sexual intercourse. Just like in life,
the situation seems complex. Joelle was not a passive bystander before
quietly asking him to stop.
Clearly, the audience for this Chicago performance was not in complete
agreement over every issue. And the laws in this country are often ahead
of some popular opinion, especially among older women, who think that
all bets are off once a woman visits a man’s hotel room, no matter
how the “vibe” has changed. But the fact that this dialogue
is taking place in such detail and with such new sophistication is very
revealing.
While speaking at college campuses, I have observed a major generation
gap. Young women take this issue of consent as being basic to their
sex lives — not being anti-sex, or neo-Victorian, as some critics
have accused — but being “pro-control.”
Unlike their “elders” from the ‘70s sexual revolution,
they define true sexual liberation as not only being able to say yes,
but also being able to say no. The reframing of date rape is a part
of the same growing “pro-control” and more clearly “pro-sex”
philosophy of young feminists campaigning for student access to the
“morning-after” pill or Emergency Contraception (EC) —
also a major focus of today’s campus activism.
Yet, at the end of Sex Signals, Stern actually tells her audience to
forget the legal issues, exact definitions of what does and does not
define rape, and look at what is moral, how we want to treat each other.
She asks if forcing sex means more to us than “hurting someone
we like.”
Such public discussions about rape have replaced external social controls
of the past, such as strict dorm codes that separated the sexes in the
‘60s, and social norms that blamed the woman for immodesty. Instead,
we are progressing toward establishing a simple Sexual Golden Rule.
And that’s the very true type of sexual liberation for which this
generation is striving, in their overwhelmingly unpublicized —
and improvised — everyday lives.
Paula Kamen is a Chicago-based freelance journalist and playwright and
the author of Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution.
Source: In These Times
Mandela, Mbeki and the future
Review by Anthony Sampson
Beyond the Miracle
By Allister Sparks
Profile Books
“You poor fellow, after all you have done, it must be terrible
to see what is happening to your country.” Allister Sparks recalls
hearing that often when he traveled abroad. And he quotes his fellow
South African writer, Nadine Gordimer, who kept being asked in Europe
and America: “What is happening to whites?”
“They identify only with whites whether consciously or unconsciously,”
Gordimer protested. “Because I am white, they assume I do the same.”
Sparks is a doyen of South African journalism, the author of one of
the best histories of his country and a former correspondent for The
Observer. But he does not automatically identify with whites: he worked
closely with black writers and broadcasters before and after the Mandela
government came to power in 1994, and he is well-placed to assess what
has happened to his country since, among all the races. He has some
unease about calling his book Beyond the Miracle, for the change that
has taken place in South Africa, he says, was not really a miracle.
It “was brought about not by some Damascus Road revelation but
by ordinary, fallible human beings who ultimately recognized that they
had been cast together by the forces of history.”
But having witnessed the transformation at close quarters, and having
lived in the midst of it, he has no doubts about the extent of the achievement.
As he writes: “An equivalent settlement in the Middle East would
see Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip consolidated into a single
secular state which, before long, would be ruled over by a Palestinian
majority government and in which Jews could live in peace and security
as a minority group.”
He provides vivid accounts of different aspects of the reconciliation
process, most notably the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
was able to put the truth of past atrocities on record “to a degree
unequalled by any post-conflict inquiry.” And he describes how
South Africa has survived the extraordinary economic problems, including
the dwindling of gold production on which much of its wealth was based.
He is fiercely critical of sectarian white politicians and businessmen
who refuse to adjust to a multiracial country, including Tony Leon,
the leader of the supposedly liberal Democratic Party who launched a
campaign “aimed blatantly at winning over the white conservative
vote.” He points out how few white businessmen have an understanding
of politics: “The South African economy has always been dominated
by the English-speaking white community, who have been on the political
sidelines for a hundred years.”
He recognizes that many of the Ministers in Mandela’s government
failed to grapple with their departments, and he points to the danger
of black racists who can use the charge of racism to demolish white
competitors for jobs. He quotes the black political journalist Mondli
Makhanya, who describes how the new elite “wield blackness like
a weapon as they climb the ladder of privilege.”
He describes candidly the shortcomings of President Mbeki. He analyses
his obdurate denials and fatal delays in facing up to the menace of
Aids, and he argues vigorously with him about his failure to confront
President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Mbeki tells him that whites are only concerned
about Zimbabwe because some whites are being killed: “The extraordinary
preoccupation with what is going on in Zimbabwe,” says Mbeki, “in
reality has got to do with white fears in South Africa.” Sparks
agrees that whites are too preoccupied with their fellow-whites, but
he insists that “what is happening in Zimbabwe is a major African
tragedy in the making.” What makes this book unusual and important
is the wide overview, across the different racial communities, against
a background of the author’s international experience. He does
not try to ignore the economic problems of South Africa, the high unemployment
and floods of immigrants, the harsh industrial competition from other
countries, the lack of necessary skills. South Africa, he recognizes,
faces a double whammy as a country at the bottom of the most marginalized
continent.
But he has a long historical perspective, a respect for his own countrymen
and their resilience. He has watched his country enduring far more dangerous
predicaments, from which there appeared no way out. “When you have
just escaped Armageddon,” he concludes, “that is no time to
become a pessimist.”
Anthony Sampson is the author of Mandela: The Authorized Biography
Source: Observer (UK)
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