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danny schechter
Where Is the American Spring? (or Sunshine on a Cloudy Day)
[CD Editor's Note: While we mourn Thursday's passing of our friend and longtime contributor Danny Schechter, we celebrate his life and work today by offering this selection as a testimony to the power of his masterful ability to cut through current events with a wisdom honed by the past and an optimistic commitment to the future. If time allows in your day, dear reader, take the time to go through the scores of Schechter's other columns in our archive to see just a small portion of the wider body of work to which he dedicated his life. From his peristent role as a both a producer and critic of media to his commitment to peace and justice, Danny offered all of us an uncanny window into the mind of a person who chronicled the late 20th- and early 21st Century with equal shares of reverence for craft, rebelliousness of spirit, and deep caring for others. The following selection was originally published on March 30, 2014.]
Where are you, Temptations, when I need you most?
I needed that Motown spirit again to bolster me in this month of the missing American Spring of 2014. I am still barely singing along to their hit "My Girl:"
I've got sunshine on a cloudy day
When it's cold outside
I've got the month of May
The month of May is here and will soon be gone, with a May winter every other day here in New York following every occasional outbreak of seasonal warmth. We know the planet is warming, but I have yet to feel it with any regularity in my neighborhood.
Worse that that, the cold outside is not just the zigzagging temperatures, but the sense that we are stuck in a political Ice Age where change of the kind that we will soon be discussing, again and again, ad finitem, at yet another Left forum is more remote than ever. While the Left talks, the Right mobilizes, certainly in Europe, save austerity-devastated Greece.
Here, the Tea Party wing nuts have all but conquered the Repugs, bolstered by new court rulings that allow their funders to buy what's still on sale in our political oligarchy in this Republic of Fear.
The Obamanauts are done. They can't steer the ship of state. They are even website-challenged and health care-damaged. Their Ukraine adventure boomeranged, leaving only half a country that needs to render unto Putin more than chocolate. They have driven the bear into his own China pivot, far more lucrative than ours, with warning bells now ringing on every front as the president still yearns for an American "exceptionalism" that is anything but, if not a mirage.
Their co-optation was a willing one, part of the game, and no longer even apologized for. Forget the Hopium. There is always a threat from the right to justify their moving right.
Who, among us, still has illusions?
Even as the spying goes on, sucking up and storing all the big data it can find, the corporations are now out-hoovering the NSA, better to manipulate the marketplace, that is, if the consumertariat has any money left to spend.
We have just passed a turning point with student debt pulling past mortgage debt in the race to the bottom.
"I know all this easy is for me to say. All I seem to have these days is this keyboard to crank out more condemnations and calls to action, knowing full well, as I do it, that I don't know what else to do. I am compelled to make media, compelled to do what I can, thinking modestly that perhaps somewhere, in hearts I don't know, words or images can still stir souls to rise."
Now, even as Snowden boasts he was a spy, not a little guy, and wants to come home, the government is outing its own, beating Wikileaks to the punch.
You can't make this up.
Here, meet our super spook station chief.
Oops!
It's hard to keep a good conspiracy theory going when the espionage business seems to be having such hard times too, caught up in its own Dante-like circles of paranoia, unable to forecast much and doomed to making old mistakes.
There are more mathematicians on the payroll at Fort Meade spy central than ever but what is it adding up to: more scoops for Glenn Greenwald & Co. and more displays of craven collusion by his puffed up critics in the increasingly detestable press?
For a corrective, listen to James Howard Kuntsler, who likes to delve into what he calls the "Deep State:"
I like to say that I'm allergic to conspiracy theories because human beings are generally too inept to carry out schemes at the grand scale, as well as being poor secret-keepers. Insider knowledge is almost always swapped around, even in secretive organizations, often recklessly so, because doling it out confers status, tactical advantage, and sometimes money for the doler-outer. But the Deep State isn't a secret. It operates in plain sight...
It's worse than ever, especially having engaged in two major fiascos on Asian soil the past decade, pointless escapades that cost the lives of 8,000 soldiers in action, many more maimed for life, and in suicides of servicemen returning home in despair to a spavined economy and the manifold indignities of a cruel and incompetent veterans' bureaucracy completely unable to care for their needs.
Besides wishing I could write like that, I have to acknowledge that he sees how bad it is, and that it is becoming worse, especially when you factor in climate change and planetary peril. What problems are being solved? How many new operating systems do we need for our Iphones? What will Apple's acquisition of Beats do for our culture except give us new ways to surround our brains with richer sound to keep us from feeling the pain?
Whatever happened to technologies that liberate the human spirit?
I want to feel hopeful, but as I look around, it's harder and harder to feel optimistic, expert perhaps to cheer on what resistance we see among fast food workers, and others trying to save the internet from the deals that have gone down or are about to go down.
- There is no neutrality in the war to save the net.
- Can the Commissars of Comcast be stopped? I doubt it, given how many lobbyists they have spreading lucre in all the right places.
- The Afghan war will someday end only to see a new army of contractors replace the uniforms, as they did in Iraq, bringing the world's first civilization to its lowest point ever.
A wise man once asked, "What is to be done?" Good question, still.
We can't give up. We know the state, deep or not, is cracking, but will it crack before we do?
We know the ice is melting, and the politicians are lying, while so many of us are sighing, but with plenty of fight still in us.
As the surveillance state watches us, we have to return the favor and watch it more closely.
Has the time for a new upsurge come? Or was the Egypt Spring the ultimate warning of how easily the muscle men in the shadows can turn it all around, no matter the cost in lives and possibility?
Sometimes, the fight back doesn't happen until it's almost too late, until the obscenity of it all is too much to take, or rationalize.
I know all this easy is for me to say. All I seem to have these days is this keyboard to crank out more condemnations and calls to action, knowing full well, as I do it, that I don't know what else to do. I am compelled to make media, compelled to do what I can, thinking modestly that perhaps somewhere, in hearts I don't know, words or images can still stir souls to rise.
Somehow, even as I age, I've still got sunshine on a cloudy day.
Remembering Danny Schechter
When Plakhina disrupted a panel to protest the arrest of several of her fellow activists, Danny started demanding answers. Sadly, what he wrote at the time is no longer online. But I interviewed Plakhina and wrote an article about it for The Guardian. (And in case you're wondering what happened to Plakhina, she is alive and well, according to her Facebook page.)
Danny died of pancreatic cancer in New York on Thursday at the age of 72. The news that Danny was gone hit me hard, as it did a lot of people I know. He was someone I had admired since I was a teenager and he was the "News Dissector" on WBCN Radio in Boston. Listening to Danny and reading alternative weeklies like The Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper were what led me to pursue a career in journalism.
We weren't especially close, but I considered him a friend. I interviewed him on occasion and reviewed a few of his books. (Here is an index of the posts I wrote about him for this blog.) In reading some of the tributes to him on Facebook last night, he seemed David Carr-like in how many lives he touched. He was certainly Carr-like in his energy, fearlessness and kindness toward others.
You can read all about his career in this obituary by Don Hazen at AlterNet.
Schechter was, among many other things, perhaps the leading Western journalist in reporting on South Africa and Nelson Mandela. Which leads to another story about Danny.
A few years ago Danny and I were talking about "Sun City," an anti-apartheid music video produced by Artists United Against Apartheid, founded by Steve Van Zandt and producer Arthur Baker. Schechter was deeply involved in the making of "Sun City." Everyone wanted Miles Davis to be included, but no one wanted to contact the notoriously difficult musician. Schechter agreed to do it, though not, he told me, without a considerable amount of trepidation. As it turned out, Miles agreed immediately -- and Danny was hugely relieved. (That and other stories about "Sun City" are told in this Wikipedia article. And if you've never seen "Sun City," stop what you're doing and click here.)
Back to Kazakhstan. It was because of Danny that I was invited to speak at the Eurasian Media Forum -- he'd attended previous forums, and he recommended me to moderate one panel and participate in another. It was what you might call a semi-legitimate event, held, it seemed, to bolster the image of the president's daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, who is in charge of the forum every year.
Some of the journalists who attended struck me as nauseatingly obsequious to their hosts, but not Danny. Taking his cheerful defiance as my inspiration, I left the hotel (something that was not encouraged by the organizers) to interview Adil Nurmakov, an editor for Global Voices Online and a member of the political opposition.
Danny was especially delighted at the outdoor party that ended the forum. As scantily clad young women danced to loud, vaguely Kazakh-sounding music, Danny yelled in my ear, "This is a nominally Muslim country!" He kept repeating something one of the Kazakh attendees told him about the display of female flesh: "Ach! This is nothing!"
Danny's father, Jerry, died just six years ago at the age of 90. Unlike Jerry Schechter, Danny was not granted the gift of longevity. But he packed a lot of living into his 72 years and touched many lives. Today my heart goes out to his family and friends, including his longtime business partner, Rory O'Connor.
Danny Schechter was a giant of journalism and of progressive politics, demonstrating that the two could be combined with passion and integrity. It's hard to believe that he's gone.
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