Does this sound familiar?

“The African National Congress was more intent on celebrating its anniversary than addressing serious issues.” The organisation, led by a president who regularly demonstrated an inability to control his own financial affairs, “suffered from graft” and was “ineffective” in addressing the true needs of the people it claimed to represent. On the occasion of its anniversary, speakers took a “defensive line at the outset”; the “whole tone” of the event was one of “looking back to past achievements”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a description of the ANC at the start of 2012. Indeed, numerous commentators have criticised the party’s centenary celebration for a partial account of the organisation’s role as liberator-in-chief and for selective presentation of its record as a ruling party. They have observed that this exercise in self-congratulation was designed, firstly, to distract South Africans from the many failings of the current ANC; and, secondly, to continue the revisionism by which distinct anti-apartheid movements and individuals are slowly being erased from both formal and informal national histories.

Let’s be candid: for the most part, South Africa’s parliamentarians are an uninspiring lot. From travel scandals to endemic absenteeism, they’ve disappointed us again and again in recent years. Add to that the fact that parliamentary process can be, at times, terribly dull. It’s not surprising that little attention is usually paid to what actually happens in the chamber.

The vote on the Protection of State Information Bill changed all that; renewed interest was shown in the pompous-but-puerile behaviour that is customary in parliaments around the world. The jeering and booing eventually faded away, however, and the smugness of the African National Congress representatives in carrying the Bill will soon be forgotten. The Members of Parliament will return to that part of our collective consciousness reserved for anonymous, generic party politicians whose work seems far removed from our lived reality (even though the opposite is true).

This week, the people of Illinois have been enjoying an “Indian summer” – a golden stretch of time when the chilly descent from autumn into winter is put on hold. In Chicago, the warm weather has tourism entrepreneurs rubbing their hands at the prospect of full boats on architecture-admiring river cruises. In the countryside, visitors to Fall festivals are indulging in the heady excesses of pumpkin displays, hay bales and corn harvesting demonstrations.

Amidst all the fun, few people give much thought to what “Indian summer” may actually mean. Those who do tend to disagree over the origins of the phrase. Some say it simply refers to the time of year during which Native Americans harvested their crops and made the most of pre-hibernation hunting opportunities. It’s equally likely, however, that the term equates “Indians” with deception – as in “Indian giver”, someone who takes back a gift – and is thus a warning against being fooled by a false summer.

There was a time when being white and working-class in Chicago was as bad as, if not worse than, being (for example) a black farm labourer in Alabama.

In the 1880s, railway tycoon George Pullman created a town to the south of Chicago that was billed as an urban utopia to house the employees of the Pullman railcar construction company and their families. He called it – in a fit of modesty – Pullman. It boasted libraries, churches, public parks, shopping boulevards and, the self-styled philanthropist claimed, it would be an idyllic working-class district where “strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the world of labour need not be feared”.

There is no such thing as irony in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This pleasantly-situated town, on the northern edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park, is more or less the American equivalent of a quaint Swiss alpine village: it has the flowerpot-lined roads, the heavy wooden architecture, even the cable-car rides up steep slopes covered in pine trees.

But they don’t do “quaint” in Tennessee. They do tattoos and motorbikes, long beards and cowboy boots, Hard Rock Cafe and souvenir shopping, neon lights and “family amusement” courtesy of Ripley Entertainment Inc. In short, they do bold and brash – unselfconsciously and unashamedly “Southern”.

Irish eyes are smiling after last week’s Rugby World Cup victory over Australia – even in the United States. It’s a little-known fact that the US are the current Olympic rugby title holders, having won the gold medal in 1920 and 1924 (the last time the fifteen-man sport was endorsed by the International Olympic Committee). Although Americans today are largely ignorant about rugby, there is a small but enthusiastic rugby-following community here; a handful of cable TV sports stations are covering the travails of the national team in New Zealand.

Admittedly, however, the American citizens watching the World Cup are far outnumbered by the Australasian and European expats who (with a smattering of South Africans) crowd the Irish pubs to be found in each major city across the continent. These watering holes are perhaps the most prominent manifestation of the peculiar place that Ireland occupies in the American imagination; from the exuberant St Patrick’s Day celebrations of the “Boston Irish” to the old saw that country music has its roots in the Irish fiddle, there are plenty of pseudo-Irish elements in the multiple strands of American cultural identity.

Washington, DC has a new monument. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial opened recently, placing the famous civil rights activist (belatedly, some might say) in the august company of Jefferson, Lincoln, FD Roosevelt and other American icons – most of them former presidents – who are the objects of daily pilgrimage by visitors to the national capital.

When most people think of King, they have in mind his speech at the culmination of the “March on Washington” in 1963. That event, more than any other in the twentieth century, contributed to the association of Washington with the extension of “liberty” to African Americans – an association ostensibly confirmed when Barack Obama was inaugurated there in 2008.

As the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center approaches, American broadcasters and news publications are frequently invoking an infamous combination of numbers: 9/11. For most people in the United States, however, there is another (similar) figure that is more significant: 9.1%.

It’s the country’s current unemployment rate, a mark that is directly related to both accepted measurements of national opinion – such as the president’s approval rating – and to less tangible phenomena, such as the public “mood”. Even if these sentiments can be quantified, they can’t be generalised; after all, while most of the country was enjoying Labor Day this Monday past, large areas of Texas were being destroyed by wildfire and the south-east coast faced yet another storm, with the threat of more flooding.

New York City is a different place altogether when you’re travelling with a toddler. Not for you the noise and bustle, the leisurely hours at art museums, the Broadway shows, the late nights in famous cocktail bars. Instead, you see a lot of parks and playgrounds, you visit the children’s sections at libraries and you look out for “family friendly” restaurants.

This has its advantages. You experience the metropolis in the way that the majority of its residents do; you’re better placed to make the usual comparisons between Manhattan and Brooklyn or other boroughs; above all, you get a sense of the city’s innumerable public spaces. For South Africans who are used to living in relentlessly compartmentalised and privatised urban areas, the sheer number of well-maintained, well-used public areas in a place like New York is salutary.

Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the USA (covering only 4000 square kilometres of land) but, as Rhode Islanders never tire of reminding visitors, “The Ocean State” is in the top five when it comes to length of coastline. That’s because Narragansett Bay, with its estuaries and natural harbours, cuts deep into the state, creating a complex network of islands, peninsulas and land bridges.

Some of the marketing powers-that-be recently came up with a tagline that many Rhode Islanders see as self-demeaning: “So small you can do it all!” Perhaps these particular tourism authorities would have done better to suggest that Rhode Island represents a kind of microcosm of the United States – that, just as one might track the intricacies of its coastline, the state’s fortunes have followed the nuances of American public life over the centuries.

Barack Obama is, as they say in the US, getting it from all sides. The most feted president-elect in decades, the man who invoked comparisons to Lincoln, F.D. Roosevelt and Kennedy, has learned that the American people are impatient with leaders who can’t keep their promises. Nowadays, comparisons to predecessors are with Jimmy Carter – another Democrat president whose inauguration (in 1977) was billed as the beginning of a new era in American and world politics. Carter was unpopular as president and wasn’t re-elected; he became synonymous with an idealism that could not adapt itself to local and global realpolitik.

It has been a steamy summer in Boston, with temperatures here (as elsewhere in the United States) hitting the psychological 100ºF (37ºC) barrier last month. But now that the worst of the heat wave is behind them, and with the odd refreshing thundershower breaking the humidity, Bostonians are getting down to the serious business of fun in August.

It’s not easy to offend – simultaneously – people from across South Africa’s ideological spectrum, as well as from every racial and economic demographic in the country. Yet president Jacob Zuma’s recent comments to the effect that supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) will go to heaven, while opponents will go the other way, seem to have achieved just that.

Zuma is not a man who places much value on the impact language can have on the material world; when he does speak carefully selected words, as his delivery of the State of the Nation address demonstrated, he doesn’t try very hard to communicate the significance of those words. Consequently, it’s difficult to say whether Zuma’s promises and threats about the afterlife were (as commentators such as Jason van Niekerk have observed) simply an exhibition of his capacity to produce “the rhetoric of a drunken uncle”, or whether there was malicious political craft behind these celestial musings.

When Nelson Mandela dies, I won’t grieve.

Such a statement may seem disrespectful, offensive and perhaps even treasonous. But I have maintained for some time now that I (like almost all South Africans) will have neither reason, nor right, nor indeed the luxury to feel sorrow when Tata Madiba passes away. Recently, as the great man was admitted to hospital and then returned home to rest, the media frenzy and the outpouring of public emotion – earnest good wishes, fervent prayers, nervous relief at the announcement of his recovery – signaled to me nothing so much as a basic misunderstanding of what Mandela’s life and death might mean for our country.

 

A few weeks ago I attended a colloquium at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) from which I gained new insight into the history of ‘the left’ in South Africa. As it happened, it was held on the first day of what would become the most disruptive strike this country has seen for some time.

A number of the papers presented alluded to the rift that developed in the early years of the twentieth century between ‘socialist’ and ‘labourist’ camps. Though one would expect them to share a broadly Marxist vision of the worker/proletarian imperative to challenge the oppressive alliance of ‘old money’ and new capital, it turns out they were often bitter opponents.