NO, I DIDN’T DROP DEAD

 Excuse the title of this piece, No I Didn’t Drop Dead. But I’m sure if the only place you know me from is this blog, the thought must very likely have crossed your mind. You may even have looked at my bio here, or even have delved into what it says about me in Wikipedia to try and determine just how ancient I am. Maybe you even said to yourself, “Hmm, could be. I mean, he’s really getting up there.”

Anyway, that’s fine. I won’t hold it against you. Because, against all odds, you kept coming back! In fact, according to the stats that Blogger shares with me, more of you are coming here monthly than were “when I was alive.” Which might be a good recommendation to keep on keeping my mouth shut. 

Dan as a young reporter and correspondent.
Circa 1978 - Photo: John Claude Fernandes

That said, I’m truly grateful to all of you who keep being loyal readers of The Southern Yankee, even when I’m not a faithful correspondent. Or haven’t been lately. I assure you, my absence since October of last year hasn’t been intentional. Had it been, I would have told you that I was taking a “sabbatical”. But no, it has just been a one-day-after-another thing. It has been the product of being too busy with other concerns and with no longer having the energy I once had to be “everywhere at once.”

Like I say, it is only the prized readers who are strictly faithful to this blog, and don’t know me from anywhere else, who must have been baffled by my dearth of activity. People who follow me on social media, or through my political blog, A Yankee At Large, know that I’m still highly active. No few among those would probably prefer I weren’t. Some may even wish I were dead—the ones who don’t agree with me and read me just to get thoroughly pissed off at me, and to send me poison pen messages.

The point is, as an old newsman, when I sink my teeth into a topic, I’m like a dog with a bone. A dog with no desire to bury that bone and leave it alone for some other day. Is that why they refer to being somewhat overly assertive as being dogmatic? Guess not…It says here, “inclined to lay down principles (dogma) as incontrovertibly true.” Guilty as charged. Not because I think I have all the answers. I don’t. In fact, I often wonder how I have the cheek to state my views at all, as if what I say were carved in stone. However, I believe there really are some principles that are incontrovertibly true. For example, when government permits a single person’s inalienable rights to be violated, everyone’s rights are at risk. And that’s just the sort of bone I’m gnawing on right now. That, and the bone of corruption, and of deceit, and of unaccountability. I am sick of seeing the once sacred principles that I grew up, and grew old, believing in being violated daily with impunity by the powers that be.

The other thing that has been taking up a lot of my time is that I am finally trying to finish writing—sometime before I really do die—the memoir I started writing more than twenty-five years ago. Two things have kept me from completing it: the sheer emotive power that those times have over me, and the fact that I kept doubting anybody would be interested decades after the fact.

So why now, after half a century? Simple. Because fifty years out, history is repeating itself in a different place in the world. My place in the world. The place where I was born and reared believing with all my heart and soul in those sacred principles that I mentioned before, the ones I risked my life to defend in a different time and place all those years ago.

My book, the working title of which is A Voice in the Storm, is a tribute to those principles and to the man and the medium that taught me that much more than lip service must be paid to principles that, in their essence, are worth dying for. Freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human and civil rights, resistance to authoritarianism, human decency, respect for life, peace and diversity, all attributes whose value I was to become acutely aware of as I watched them being eroded and became part of an impromptu project to halt their violation.

Dan with Robert Cox in the Buenos
Aires Herald newsroom - circa 1977.
Photo: Carlos Pefaur

This is a place where, I’m convinced, my voice carries weight, and has the authority of proven experience to back it up. It is an area of expertise in which few other Americans have had the experience I have. It is a topic on which I can say with the authority of fact, I’ve seen this movie before and know how it ends. And it doesn’t end well.

I have the hands-on experience to tell Americans who still naïvely cling to the notion of “it could never happen here,” that they are wrong, and that it is indeed happening, right under their noses. The two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American democracy could be democracy’s last. And it all depends on what you and I are prepared to do to defend democracy, and to hold our representatives responsible for it.

In short, I’ve been-there-done-that, and our struggle a half-century ago, in that different time and place, made a difference. In the end, democracy won out. But it is still being tested, where I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m from. And as long as I keep breathing in and out, I’ll remain in the fight.