Ian Martin's Blog
March 21, 2014
Changing The World With Brandy And Coke
This is the record of a discussion held on the terrace of the Lodge at Grootbos Private Nature Reserve on 15 September 2008.
“The 50/50 Foundation,” Henry said, “is not some movement located at the lunatic fringe of society. No, it’s at the very centre of lunacy, because it rejects many of the core values and customs of the present global community.”
Two men were sauntering by. One was about 30, the other some ten years older. They could have been of German, Austrian, or Swiss nationality, and were probably homosexual by orientation. They came to a halt and pretended to be looking attentively at something in the middle distance.
“It’s standard procedure in most societies,” Henry said, “to label the individuals who hold radically different views as ‘mad.’ In this way their message can be invalidated; and if they still won’t shut up you can lock them away in an asylum.”
Being intimately acquainted, the two tourists were able to communicate purely by means of eye contact. Without exchanging a word, they seated themselves at the next table. This irritated Sedrick but Henry didn’t seem to care at all.
“If,” he said, “I were to propagate the ideas of the 50/50 Foundation on my own, I have no doubt I would be dismissed as insane. That’s why I’ve been obliged to assemble this group of eminent persons. Even if they’re not all universally respected, every one of them has an international profile and can’t be ignored. Most of the time they tend to play down their more extreme views in order to reach a wider audience. But as members of the Foundation, they’ll be encouraged to express themselves freely.”
“So what are these ideas?” Sedrick asked. “How do you propose to save the world by 2050?”
The two guests looked like they were casually admiring the view while waiting for the piece of ass to come and take their order. But Sedrick saw how their heads were being swivelled a centimetre to the left, a few millimetres to the right, making minute adjustments to ensure the very best in auditory reception.
“Well,” said Henry, lubricating his vocal cords with the black-brown beverage so popular among South African intellectuals and morons alike, “as I might have mentioned to you when discussing the essential elements of any ideology, the first thing to do is to come up with an honest analysis which identifies the main problems. This analysis is well under way, and has already revealed that a fundamental shift is needed in the way we construct our paradigms and models. We have to acknowledge that reality is becoming increasingly ephemeral, changing at such a pace that what we believe today could appear redundant or patently flawed in a year’s time.”
“I take it,” said Sedrick, “that what you’re alluding to when you talk about a change in paradigm or model is something like a Copernican revolution – instead of being at the centre of the solar system we’re just a revolving planet. That kind of thing?”
The younger of the two eavesdroppers had meanwhile been delving in his handbag and now produced a ballpoint pen and a small notebook. He flipped it open and jotted something down. The waitress arrived and took the older man’s order. She went off with eyebrows arched, a look of questioning surprise on her pretty face.
“Yes,” replied Henry, “that kind of thing. Changes in lifestyle, advances in science and technology, the rapid spread of information: these and other aspects of modern life require us to be constantly re-evaluating our world-view. Because this re-evaluation isn’t taking place on the necessary scale, we find ourselves in a situation of escalating confusion and conflict. The 50/50 Foundation will look at prevailing paradigms that have outgrown their usefulness and need to be revised or replaced. Then we’ll concentrate on devising appropriate systems relevant to the 21st century.”
“I’d be interested to know,” said Sedrick, “what these paradigms are. And how you’re going to persuade people to give up their entrenched ideas and beliefs.”
Henry was aware of the sceptical tone in Sedrick’s voice, but he was quite comfortable with this. He would far rather be talking to someone who was capable of questioning the veracity of his arguments, than to some credulous pumpkin who sat nodding his head in open-mouthed agreement.
“The way we perceive the structure and function of all the main institutions of human civilization will have to be revised.” Henry took another sip from his glass, thereby reducing its contents to a dangerously low level.
“These include,” he continued, “many key concepts in the areas of politics, economics, social engineering and the environment. And in order to prepare people for a radical revision of ideas we would first have to address the root causes of most of our dilemmas: religion and nationalism.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sedrick. “How does it go again? ‘I crap in the holy water, and shit on…’.”
“No, no, no,” Henry interrupted. “’I shit on the altar of religious conviction…’.” He paused, and then recited more slowly, out of consideration for the penman, who was scribbling furiously. “’…and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.’”
“You’re not suggesting the complete eradication of religion and nationalism, are you?” Sedrick sounded incredulous.
“Well, yes, I am,” said Henry. “Eventually. I grant that it could take some time to achieve, but it’s absolutely essential if we’re going to aim for a global solution. I believe it’s possible, if we’re able to rapidly disseminate some important ideas. Like memetics.”
Henry drained his glass just as the waitress arrived with the neighbour’s order. She was the bearer of not two b and c’s, but four, and to his and Sedrick’s mild astonishment she called at their table first.
“Well, I’ll be fucked!” exclaimed Henry, raising the fresh glass. “This is a most timely and welcome surprise. An urbane gesture of good-neighbourliness. Most generous. Thanks, Fritz. Skol!”
All four of them held up their glasses and grinned at each other foolishly. “Skol, skol,” they kept saying, until Henry terminated the chorus with a vexed “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
He took a drink and put the glass down, a disgruntled expression temporarily souring his face. He regretted having been drawn into such an inane ritual.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come across memetics,” said Sedrick, picking up the conversation at the point where it had been interrupted.
“Well, you should have,” said Henry. “It goes back 30 years. Richard Dawkins, one of our founder members – he was supposed to be present today – coined the term in an attempt to explain how elements of culture are passed from one generation to the next. In the same way as evolutionary biologists claim that organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes, our minds are designed by natural selection acting on memes. Memes are elements of culture like habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that’s copied from person to person.”
“I see,” said Sedrick slowly, his brain working on the new concept. “Then one would assume that if a meme is successful and survives, it must be genuinely useful to us.”
“A fair assumption,” said Henry, “if you apply the gene analogy. But we know that many genes are downright harmful. It’s the same with memes. To explain this, Richard came up with the idea of a ‘selfish’ meme. This is one that uses all sorts of tricks to get itself copied. You see, the selfish meme is possessed by a ruthless craving to be replicated, regardless of the effect it has on us; or our genes, for that matter.”
“What are these ‘tricks’ you’re talking about?” Sedrick wanted to know.
“They can be broadly categorized as threats and promises,” said Henry. “These memes act like viruses. A good example is a chain letter, or a ‘copy-me’ e-mail. But while this is a pretty innocuous example, there are others that behave like a pandemic. One of the worst of these selfish meme complexes is religion; which, as in the case of Christianity, perpetuates itself by threatening hell and damnation, and promising salvation and heaven, insisting that the faithful pass on their beliefs to others. By relying so heavily on our fears and other emotions, these meme complexes have become self-perpetuating and very difficult to cure.”
“Well, memetics certainly sounds as if it could be an effective theoretical tool in explaining some of the more bizarre traditions in our culture, like religion.” Sedrick was clearly impressed, as were the two German gents, who were nodding their heads in agreement.
“Yes,” said Henry. “It is bizarre how the world religions have remained strong and virtually unchanged for so long. In the case of Islam, the teachings emanate from circumstances pertaining in the Middle East 1 500 years ago. And 2 000 years for Christianity. Except for some of the core precepts relating to decent behaviour, almost all of the knowledge base these religions were built on is now totally irrelevant.”
Henry drank some more brandy and coke, for he was finding it most efficacious as a mental stimulant, in spite of its reputation amongst pharmacologists as a CNS depressant. He removed his cloth hat and dabbed at his moustache with it. The neighbours looked surprised, even disappointed, to discover the extent of his baldness.
“You don’t need a 2 000 year-old religion,” said Henry, replacing his hat, “to know that you shouldn’t go around murdering and stealing, and screwing your neighbour’s wife when he’s out at work. No, the world religions must be scrapped or completely revamped. In their present form they encourage violently aggressive inclinations and irrational decisions based on dangerous delusions.” He was shaking his head as if he found it hard to believe that his fellow humans could be so stupid. “If only we could break the meme transfer for one generation. Imagine trying to persuade someone who hadn’t been inculcated with religion that if he blew himself up on a busy street he’d wake up in paradise surrounded by a bevy of beautiful virgins desperate to impale themselves upon the male member of a Muslim martyr. Or that it’s possible to rise from the dead, turn water into wine, and then go for a stroll on the lake. He’d think you were totally kopbefokt.” The scribe looked up, perplexed. “Kopbefokt; malletjies; fucked in the head; nuts; bonkers; loony; cuckoo; mad; insane; wahnsinnig.”
“And nationalism?” asked Sedrick. “Do you also consider nationalism a mental virus?”
“Of course I do,” replied the founder of the 50/50 Foundation. “As a force, nationalism has always been more divisive than cohesive. And especially in the last ten years, with the advent of globalisation, it has become an anomaly. The Earth has shrunk in size and become overrun with migrating and miscegenating populations of humans. Nowhere is mysterious or foreign. Every square metre has been mapped and photographed. Thanks to the Internet every location on the planet has become instantly accessible. The paradigm of 250 separate nations with each nation under threat from 149 others is ludicrous. There is only one nation: the human race. And we don’t have any enemies. This is important, Sedrick, and bears repeating and banging on the table about. We don’t have enemies!”
He picked up his drink and banged on the table with his fist, making Sedrick’s glass bounce and slop.
“And if we don’t have enemies,” said Sedrick, mopping the table with a paper napkin, “we don’t need armies. All those resources being wasted on the military all over the world could be put to far better use.”
“You’ve got it, boy,” said Henry. “Convert the arms factories and transfer the technology. Shut down the academies of death and destruction and wean the people off all this horrible macho militarism and aggression. If there’s only one nation it all becomes superfluous.”
“And politics, Henry? What about political systems?”
“Ah, now there we need a major shake-up too,” said Henry. He took a more conservative sip, for the level was getting low once more. “Again we find ourselves trapped in an obsolete paradigm. This slavish obeisance to Western style democracy must go. Firstly, it’s a patently flawed arrangement, allowing for the election and installation of hell-bred fuckwits like George W Bush. And secondly, it’s a fraudulent farce, because the majority of the electorate doesn’t get a fair deal at all. Democracy is all about the rich and the powerful conning the populace into letting them carve up the cake for themselves and their pals. No. Instead, there should be a World Parliament with a constitution drawn up and implemented by panels of consensus-driven experts. And the performance of all public officials could be monitored by the citizens they serve.”
“A World Parliament?” Sedrick wasn’t convinced. “Something like the United Nations Organisation?”
“In some ways like the UN, yes. But structured very differently in terms of voting rights. At present the UN is grossly un-democratic. We’ve got to move away from the current situation where a few historically privileged nations wield al the power.”
“Henry, the scope of your vision is truly breathtaking.”
Henry gave him a hard stare, suspecting him of having loaded the compliment with an impertinent excess of irony. Sedrick hurried on, not wishing to deflect the eccentric drunkard’s energy away from the supremely important task of putting the world to rights.
“I mean it, Henry,” he said earnestly. “There can’t be many people with the…er…hubris…to tackle such a major overhaul of human affairs. I mean, to propose the eradication of religion and nationalism, and to reject the United Nations and democratic governance as incompatible with genuinely egalitarian principles is so wildly radical, and would bring about such revolutionary….”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Henry was annoyed. Even the German gents were looking at Sedrick with stern disapproval.
Henry picked up his glass and contemplated the pathetic remains of a once proud and brimming brandy and coke. Slowly he lowered it to the table and heavy dejection caused his shoulders to slump. Deep lines of anguish creased what was visible of his heavily bearded face. It was as if the commander-in-chief had just received news of another crushing defeat.
The elder member of the couple next door scrambled to his feet and urgently gesticulated in the direction of the waitress.
“Fraulein, Fraulein!” he called. “Bring ze brandy und coke, bitte. Schnell, schnell.”
Henry’s demeanour immediately brightened, and when the fresh glass was placed before him it was clear that the transitory melancholic attack had passed.
“I’m sure,” said Sedrick, “you also hold strong views on macroeconomic policy, and especially the influence of the IMF and the World Bank.”
“Economists,” said Henry, glad to get back to the ideas and aims of his Foundation, “are the most inept of theoreticians. They’re hopeless at predicting the future and hindsight always proves them wrong. But it’s such a complex area, I suppose we can’t be too critical of them. Economics is interrelated with political development, population growth, and environmental considerations, so it’s no wonder economic theorists battle to come up with a workable plan to manage the world’s resources fairly and sustainably.”
“Now,” he said, after sloshing some more booze down his throat and squeezing out the untidy overhang of moustache with his lower lip, “what we, the clear-sighted ones, who have jettisoned the impediments of religion and nationalism, are faced with is this: we live in a world with finite resources but we continue to proliferate and consume as if there was an unlimited chain of Earths waiting to be colonised, one by one, as we trash this one and the next and the next. Crazy. We acknowledge that there is only one planet for us, and we can’t continue in this reckless fashion. If we had a fair dispensation for all the citizens of planet Earth, and we all wanted to live like Americans, we’d need five more planets to sustain us. So it’s obvious that, for a start, there are too many of us. One of our priorities then, is to drastically reduce world population in an intelligent and humane way. And not let religion get in the way of this goal, remember.”
“Then,” Henry went on, “having accepted the need to reduce population, we must also devise ways of cleaning up the filth we’ve been dumping in the environment, and learn to consume resources in a sustainable or recyclable way. This would mean consuming less, not more, and would require a major paradigm shift in economic theory. The challenge would be to find new ways of defining and measuring value.”
“I’m just thinking,” said Sedrick slowly, “about the cost of implementing these ideas. For a start, if there was an egalitarian world government, where would they get the funds to even up the disparity between rich and poor?”
“Sedrick, just consider the enormous waste of resources taking place right now. And don’t forget that huge amounts of money would be freed up once we dispense with the military. What do we need the military for, if we know that the human race has no enemies?”
Even though his glass was nearly empty, Sedrick hastily picked it up, fearing another table-thumping episode.
“No,” said Henry. “There’d be no shortage of money. On the contrary. If we were to run our affairs sensibly, as one nation, the human race without enemies, we’d be awash with wealth. But for this to happen there would need to be another important change of mindset.”
“Oh yes?” said Sedrick, waiting for him to go on. Henry was staring at something so distant that an ordinary mortal could only have picked it out with the aid of an astronomical telescope. Could the brandy be having an anaesthetic effect on his thought processes? The man with the ballpoint and notepad looked up expectantly. He even had time to take a small sip and exchange a smile with his partner.
“Yes?” Henry was back from his galactic vacation. “What was that? Ah yes, as I was saying…. Jesus, what was I saying? Oh, right. We were talking about how to fund the new world order. No problem. You see, once we accept that we have no enemies, it’ll be relatively easy to make another paradigm shift. We’ll see that competition, economically and biologically, no longer serves much of a purpose. In fact, it’s not only hugely destructive, it’s largely an artificial construct. Competition is another one of those virus-like memes that are replicated and reinforced by cultural influences like advertising, sports, games, and other forms of popular entertainment. We’ve been led to believe that competition is necessary for fitness and improvement, in the evolutionary sense. But what if we were to concentrate our energy on co-operation instead? Surely the results would be far more beneficial. We could redevelop our social conscience and move away from the amassing of personal wealth as the ultimate goal. Rather strive for personal excellence than personal wealth. And it would soon become apparent that co-operation and reward are far more productive than competition and coercion.”
“You know,” said Sedrick, “you might be onto something, Henry. There’s something most unusual happening on the Internet. Something unexpected, that would correspond to the notion of co-operation superseding competition. You’ve heard about Web 2.0?” Henry nodded. “Well, just in the last year or so there’s been a phenomenal growth in social networking, collaboration, and free dissemination of information and software. Sharing your resources with the global community has become wildly popular. It gives people the sense that they’re participating in a genuinely democratic project where everybody has a voice.”
“I’m glad you’ve mentioned this,” said Henry. “The Foundation plans to spread the concepts I’ve been outlining by posting them on the Web and calling for discussion and the contribution of related ideas. Yes, Sedrick, I think you’re right about the importance of the Internet in bringing about change. I can’t see a global revolution taking place without it.”
“So long as the conversation doesn’t become too diffuse and…Damn it! Sorry.”
Sedrick had forgotten to turn his phone off, and now it was beeping and vibrating in his pocket. He extracted it and was about to hit the FUCK OFF button, but his eye picked up the caller’s ID before he could do it.
“Sorry, Henry,” he said. “I’d better take this.”
Unfortunately, this is where the conversation ended, because Sedrick had to rush off to attend to some urgent business.
“The 50/50 Foundation,” Henry said, “is not some movement located at the lunatic fringe of society. No, it’s at the very centre of lunacy, because it rejects many of the core values and customs of the present global community.”
Two men were sauntering by. One was about 30, the other some ten years older. They could have been of German, Austrian, or Swiss nationality, and were probably homosexual by orientation. They came to a halt and pretended to be looking attentively at something in the middle distance.
“It’s standard procedure in most societies,” Henry said, “to label the individuals who hold radically different views as ‘mad.’ In this way their message can be invalidated; and if they still won’t shut up you can lock them away in an asylum.”
Being intimately acquainted, the two tourists were able to communicate purely by means of eye contact. Without exchanging a word, they seated themselves at the next table. This irritated Sedrick but Henry didn’t seem to care at all.
“If,” he said, “I were to propagate the ideas of the 50/50 Foundation on my own, I have no doubt I would be dismissed as insane. That’s why I’ve been obliged to assemble this group of eminent persons. Even if they’re not all universally respected, every one of them has an international profile and can’t be ignored. Most of the time they tend to play down their more extreme views in order to reach a wider audience. But as members of the Foundation, they’ll be encouraged to express themselves freely.”
“So what are these ideas?” Sedrick asked. “How do you propose to save the world by 2050?”
The two guests looked like they were casually admiring the view while waiting for the piece of ass to come and take their order. But Sedrick saw how their heads were being swivelled a centimetre to the left, a few millimetres to the right, making minute adjustments to ensure the very best in auditory reception.
“Well,” said Henry, lubricating his vocal cords with the black-brown beverage so popular among South African intellectuals and morons alike, “as I might have mentioned to you when discussing the essential elements of any ideology, the first thing to do is to come up with an honest analysis which identifies the main problems. This analysis is well under way, and has already revealed that a fundamental shift is needed in the way we construct our paradigms and models. We have to acknowledge that reality is becoming increasingly ephemeral, changing at such a pace that what we believe today could appear redundant or patently flawed in a year’s time.”
“I take it,” said Sedrick, “that what you’re alluding to when you talk about a change in paradigm or model is something like a Copernican revolution – instead of being at the centre of the solar system we’re just a revolving planet. That kind of thing?”
The younger of the two eavesdroppers had meanwhile been delving in his handbag and now produced a ballpoint pen and a small notebook. He flipped it open and jotted something down. The waitress arrived and took the older man’s order. She went off with eyebrows arched, a look of questioning surprise on her pretty face.
“Yes,” replied Henry, “that kind of thing. Changes in lifestyle, advances in science and technology, the rapid spread of information: these and other aspects of modern life require us to be constantly re-evaluating our world-view. Because this re-evaluation isn’t taking place on the necessary scale, we find ourselves in a situation of escalating confusion and conflict. The 50/50 Foundation will look at prevailing paradigms that have outgrown their usefulness and need to be revised or replaced. Then we’ll concentrate on devising appropriate systems relevant to the 21st century.”
“I’d be interested to know,” said Sedrick, “what these paradigms are. And how you’re going to persuade people to give up their entrenched ideas and beliefs.”
Henry was aware of the sceptical tone in Sedrick’s voice, but he was quite comfortable with this. He would far rather be talking to someone who was capable of questioning the veracity of his arguments, than to some credulous pumpkin who sat nodding his head in open-mouthed agreement.
“The way we perceive the structure and function of all the main institutions of human civilization will have to be revised.” Henry took another sip from his glass, thereby reducing its contents to a dangerously low level.
“These include,” he continued, “many key concepts in the areas of politics, economics, social engineering and the environment. And in order to prepare people for a radical revision of ideas we would first have to address the root causes of most of our dilemmas: religion and nationalism.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sedrick. “How does it go again? ‘I crap in the holy water, and shit on…’.”
“No, no, no,” Henry interrupted. “’I shit on the altar of religious conviction…’.” He paused, and then recited more slowly, out of consideration for the penman, who was scribbling furiously. “’…and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.’”
“You’re not suggesting the complete eradication of religion and nationalism, are you?” Sedrick sounded incredulous.
“Well, yes, I am,” said Henry. “Eventually. I grant that it could take some time to achieve, but it’s absolutely essential if we’re going to aim for a global solution. I believe it’s possible, if we’re able to rapidly disseminate some important ideas. Like memetics.”
Henry drained his glass just as the waitress arrived with the neighbour’s order. She was the bearer of not two b and c’s, but four, and to his and Sedrick’s mild astonishment she called at their table first.
“Well, I’ll be fucked!” exclaimed Henry, raising the fresh glass. “This is a most timely and welcome surprise. An urbane gesture of good-neighbourliness. Most generous. Thanks, Fritz. Skol!”
All four of them held up their glasses and grinned at each other foolishly. “Skol, skol,” they kept saying, until Henry terminated the chorus with a vexed “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
He took a drink and put the glass down, a disgruntled expression temporarily souring his face. He regretted having been drawn into such an inane ritual.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come across memetics,” said Sedrick, picking up the conversation at the point where it had been interrupted.
“Well, you should have,” said Henry. “It goes back 30 years. Richard Dawkins, one of our founder members – he was supposed to be present today – coined the term in an attempt to explain how elements of culture are passed from one generation to the next. In the same way as evolutionary biologists claim that organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes, our minds are designed by natural selection acting on memes. Memes are elements of culture like habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that’s copied from person to person.”
“I see,” said Sedrick slowly, his brain working on the new concept. “Then one would assume that if a meme is successful and survives, it must be genuinely useful to us.”
“A fair assumption,” said Henry, “if you apply the gene analogy. But we know that many genes are downright harmful. It’s the same with memes. To explain this, Richard came up with the idea of a ‘selfish’ meme. This is one that uses all sorts of tricks to get itself copied. You see, the selfish meme is possessed by a ruthless craving to be replicated, regardless of the effect it has on us; or our genes, for that matter.”
“What are these ‘tricks’ you’re talking about?” Sedrick wanted to know.
“They can be broadly categorized as threats and promises,” said Henry. “These memes act like viruses. A good example is a chain letter, or a ‘copy-me’ e-mail. But while this is a pretty innocuous example, there are others that behave like a pandemic. One of the worst of these selfish meme complexes is religion; which, as in the case of Christianity, perpetuates itself by threatening hell and damnation, and promising salvation and heaven, insisting that the faithful pass on their beliefs to others. By relying so heavily on our fears and other emotions, these meme complexes have become self-perpetuating and very difficult to cure.”
“Well, memetics certainly sounds as if it could be an effective theoretical tool in explaining some of the more bizarre traditions in our culture, like religion.” Sedrick was clearly impressed, as were the two German gents, who were nodding their heads in agreement.
“Yes,” said Henry. “It is bizarre how the world religions have remained strong and virtually unchanged for so long. In the case of Islam, the teachings emanate from circumstances pertaining in the Middle East 1 500 years ago. And 2 000 years for Christianity. Except for some of the core precepts relating to decent behaviour, almost all of the knowledge base these religions were built on is now totally irrelevant.”
Henry drank some more brandy and coke, for he was finding it most efficacious as a mental stimulant, in spite of its reputation amongst pharmacologists as a CNS depressant. He removed his cloth hat and dabbed at his moustache with it. The neighbours looked surprised, even disappointed, to discover the extent of his baldness.
“You don’t need a 2 000 year-old religion,” said Henry, replacing his hat, “to know that you shouldn’t go around murdering and stealing, and screwing your neighbour’s wife when he’s out at work. No, the world religions must be scrapped or completely revamped. In their present form they encourage violently aggressive inclinations and irrational decisions based on dangerous delusions.” He was shaking his head as if he found it hard to believe that his fellow humans could be so stupid. “If only we could break the meme transfer for one generation. Imagine trying to persuade someone who hadn’t been inculcated with religion that if he blew himself up on a busy street he’d wake up in paradise surrounded by a bevy of beautiful virgins desperate to impale themselves upon the male member of a Muslim martyr. Or that it’s possible to rise from the dead, turn water into wine, and then go for a stroll on the lake. He’d think you were totally kopbefokt.” The scribe looked up, perplexed. “Kopbefokt; malletjies; fucked in the head; nuts; bonkers; loony; cuckoo; mad; insane; wahnsinnig.”
“And nationalism?” asked Sedrick. “Do you also consider nationalism a mental virus?”
“Of course I do,” replied the founder of the 50/50 Foundation. “As a force, nationalism has always been more divisive than cohesive. And especially in the last ten years, with the advent of globalisation, it has become an anomaly. The Earth has shrunk in size and become overrun with migrating and miscegenating populations of humans. Nowhere is mysterious or foreign. Every square metre has been mapped and photographed. Thanks to the Internet every location on the planet has become instantly accessible. The paradigm of 250 separate nations with each nation under threat from 149 others is ludicrous. There is only one nation: the human race. And we don’t have any enemies. This is important, Sedrick, and bears repeating and banging on the table about. We don’t have enemies!”
He picked up his drink and banged on the table with his fist, making Sedrick’s glass bounce and slop.
“And if we don’t have enemies,” said Sedrick, mopping the table with a paper napkin, “we don’t need armies. All those resources being wasted on the military all over the world could be put to far better use.”
“You’ve got it, boy,” said Henry. “Convert the arms factories and transfer the technology. Shut down the academies of death and destruction and wean the people off all this horrible macho militarism and aggression. If there’s only one nation it all becomes superfluous.”
“And politics, Henry? What about political systems?”
“Ah, now there we need a major shake-up too,” said Henry. He took a more conservative sip, for the level was getting low once more. “Again we find ourselves trapped in an obsolete paradigm. This slavish obeisance to Western style democracy must go. Firstly, it’s a patently flawed arrangement, allowing for the election and installation of hell-bred fuckwits like George W Bush. And secondly, it’s a fraudulent farce, because the majority of the electorate doesn’t get a fair deal at all. Democracy is all about the rich and the powerful conning the populace into letting them carve up the cake for themselves and their pals. No. Instead, there should be a World Parliament with a constitution drawn up and implemented by panels of consensus-driven experts. And the performance of all public officials could be monitored by the citizens they serve.”
“A World Parliament?” Sedrick wasn’t convinced. “Something like the United Nations Organisation?”
“In some ways like the UN, yes. But structured very differently in terms of voting rights. At present the UN is grossly un-democratic. We’ve got to move away from the current situation where a few historically privileged nations wield al the power.”
“Henry, the scope of your vision is truly breathtaking.”
Henry gave him a hard stare, suspecting him of having loaded the compliment with an impertinent excess of irony. Sedrick hurried on, not wishing to deflect the eccentric drunkard’s energy away from the supremely important task of putting the world to rights.
“I mean it, Henry,” he said earnestly. “There can’t be many people with the…er…hubris…to tackle such a major overhaul of human affairs. I mean, to propose the eradication of religion and nationalism, and to reject the United Nations and democratic governance as incompatible with genuinely egalitarian principles is so wildly radical, and would bring about such revolutionary….”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Henry was annoyed. Even the German gents were looking at Sedrick with stern disapproval.
Henry picked up his glass and contemplated the pathetic remains of a once proud and brimming brandy and coke. Slowly he lowered it to the table and heavy dejection caused his shoulders to slump. Deep lines of anguish creased what was visible of his heavily bearded face. It was as if the commander-in-chief had just received news of another crushing defeat.
The elder member of the couple next door scrambled to his feet and urgently gesticulated in the direction of the waitress.
“Fraulein, Fraulein!” he called. “Bring ze brandy und coke, bitte. Schnell, schnell.”
Henry’s demeanour immediately brightened, and when the fresh glass was placed before him it was clear that the transitory melancholic attack had passed.
“I’m sure,” said Sedrick, “you also hold strong views on macroeconomic policy, and especially the influence of the IMF and the World Bank.”
“Economists,” said Henry, glad to get back to the ideas and aims of his Foundation, “are the most inept of theoreticians. They’re hopeless at predicting the future and hindsight always proves them wrong. But it’s such a complex area, I suppose we can’t be too critical of them. Economics is interrelated with political development, population growth, and environmental considerations, so it’s no wonder economic theorists battle to come up with a workable plan to manage the world’s resources fairly and sustainably.”
“Now,” he said, after sloshing some more booze down his throat and squeezing out the untidy overhang of moustache with his lower lip, “what we, the clear-sighted ones, who have jettisoned the impediments of religion and nationalism, are faced with is this: we live in a world with finite resources but we continue to proliferate and consume as if there was an unlimited chain of Earths waiting to be colonised, one by one, as we trash this one and the next and the next. Crazy. We acknowledge that there is only one planet for us, and we can’t continue in this reckless fashion. If we had a fair dispensation for all the citizens of planet Earth, and we all wanted to live like Americans, we’d need five more planets to sustain us. So it’s obvious that, for a start, there are too many of us. One of our priorities then, is to drastically reduce world population in an intelligent and humane way. And not let religion get in the way of this goal, remember.”
“Then,” Henry went on, “having accepted the need to reduce population, we must also devise ways of cleaning up the filth we’ve been dumping in the environment, and learn to consume resources in a sustainable or recyclable way. This would mean consuming less, not more, and would require a major paradigm shift in economic theory. The challenge would be to find new ways of defining and measuring value.”
“I’m just thinking,” said Sedrick slowly, “about the cost of implementing these ideas. For a start, if there was an egalitarian world government, where would they get the funds to even up the disparity between rich and poor?”
“Sedrick, just consider the enormous waste of resources taking place right now. And don’t forget that huge amounts of money would be freed up once we dispense with the military. What do we need the military for, if we know that the human race has no enemies?”
Even though his glass was nearly empty, Sedrick hastily picked it up, fearing another table-thumping episode.
“No,” said Henry. “There’d be no shortage of money. On the contrary. If we were to run our affairs sensibly, as one nation, the human race without enemies, we’d be awash with wealth. But for this to happen there would need to be another important change of mindset.”
“Oh yes?” said Sedrick, waiting for him to go on. Henry was staring at something so distant that an ordinary mortal could only have picked it out with the aid of an astronomical telescope. Could the brandy be having an anaesthetic effect on his thought processes? The man with the ballpoint and notepad looked up expectantly. He even had time to take a small sip and exchange a smile with his partner.
“Yes?” Henry was back from his galactic vacation. “What was that? Ah yes, as I was saying…. Jesus, what was I saying? Oh, right. We were talking about how to fund the new world order. No problem. You see, once we accept that we have no enemies, it’ll be relatively easy to make another paradigm shift. We’ll see that competition, economically and biologically, no longer serves much of a purpose. In fact, it’s not only hugely destructive, it’s largely an artificial construct. Competition is another one of those virus-like memes that are replicated and reinforced by cultural influences like advertising, sports, games, and other forms of popular entertainment. We’ve been led to believe that competition is necessary for fitness and improvement, in the evolutionary sense. But what if we were to concentrate our energy on co-operation instead? Surely the results would be far more beneficial. We could redevelop our social conscience and move away from the amassing of personal wealth as the ultimate goal. Rather strive for personal excellence than personal wealth. And it would soon become apparent that co-operation and reward are far more productive than competition and coercion.”
“You know,” said Sedrick, “you might be onto something, Henry. There’s something most unusual happening on the Internet. Something unexpected, that would correspond to the notion of co-operation superseding competition. You’ve heard about Web 2.0?” Henry nodded. “Well, just in the last year or so there’s been a phenomenal growth in social networking, collaboration, and free dissemination of information and software. Sharing your resources with the global community has become wildly popular. It gives people the sense that they’re participating in a genuinely democratic project where everybody has a voice.”
“I’m glad you’ve mentioned this,” said Henry. “The Foundation plans to spread the concepts I’ve been outlining by posting them on the Web and calling for discussion and the contribution of related ideas. Yes, Sedrick, I think you’re right about the importance of the Internet in bringing about change. I can’t see a global revolution taking place without it.”
“So long as the conversation doesn’t become too diffuse and…Damn it! Sorry.”
Sedrick had forgotten to turn his phone off, and now it was beeping and vibrating in his pocket. He extracted it and was about to hit the FUCK OFF button, but his eye picked up the caller’s ID before he could do it.
“Sorry, Henry,” he said. “I’d better take this.”
Unfortunately, this is where the conversation ended, because Sedrick had to rush off to attend to some urgent business.
October 4, 2013
Urn For An Education
It is reported that the new mega rich in China are starting to send their sons to England for their education. They favour the old institutions like Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Shrewsbury, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors. The super affluent in Russia and India have also fallen in love with the English Public School system. However, it’s not academic excellence the nouveau riche have in mind when they pack their boys off to boarding school. No, this is about gaining entry to the club.
What the English public school does so well is to foster an unshakable belief in the importance of tradition, comradeship and loyalty. A sense of superiority and entitlement is engendered and they learn how to comport themselves straight back, direct gaze, firm handshake – and how to recognise one of their own kind. Not to mention how to snub outsiders and exclude them from the inner circle.
In South Africa we have our own versions of Eton, Harrow and Winchester. Boarding schools like Bishops, Hilton and Michaelhouse were cloned from the original English model and have replicated several generations of highly influential men. The success of these schools at producing young men capable of making their way to a position of affluence and influence is undisputed. And it has little to do with individual excellence. On the contrary, it’s all about who you know, not what you know. Even a total moron is guaranteed an easy passage through life as long as he wears the old school tie.
Well, in theory. It didn’t work like that for Cedric
“It was the system that killed him,” I said, as we walked to the car.
“It was his father who killed him,” said Cupcake.
“Kak,” said the other guy. “He killed himself.”
The other guy drove. Cupcake was front passenger and I sat in the back with Cedric. Cedric’s ashes, that is.
“That was fucking depressing,” I said. “Stop at the bottle store in Muizenberg.”
When we got to Sunrise Circle the hopelessness of our situation became apparent. The car park was empty and it felt like we were crossing the Sahara in a sand storm. At the beachfront the other guy didn’t even bother to stop the car. He just did a big U-turn and started back the way we had come.
“If I want my windscreen and paintwork sand blasted, I’ll go to a professional and get it done properly, thank you.”
“Park in the lee of the toilets over there,” said Cupcake.
We cracked open the frosties and sat watching the seagulls trying to land next to us
“You can’t go anywhere in Cape Town without some beggar comes hassling you,” said Cupcake. Why don’t these birds go find a job?”
“Or commit suicide,” said the other guy.
“He tried too hard,” I said. “Took it all too seriously.”
“Too much pressure from his father,” said Cupcake. “That’s what triggered his first breakdown.”
“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. Is that it?” said the other guy. “Only a loser blames his parents for his lack of success in life.”
“His father thought he was doing him a favour, sending him to a larney school,” I said. “He would have been alright if he had gone to a crappy, Model C school like the ones we went to.”
“You reckon?”
The first beer had dispelled some of the gloom, so we opened another.
“Hey, Cupcake,” I said. “Did you see how his father was checking out your footwear?”
“Ah, fuck him,” said Cupcake. “I’m wearing a tie, right?”
“:Yah, but Crocs? To a funeral?”
“So why ask us to scatter the ashes if he thinks we got no class? Why didn’t he do it himself?”
“In a wheelchair? How’s he supposed to throw his son’s ashes into the waves if he’s in a wheelchair?”
“Well, there’s no way anybody is going to bbe able to scatter ash in this gale.”
We sat watching the sand forming mini dunes on the expanse of gravel parking.
“You know what they say about the sewage system in Cape Town?”
We waited, wondering where this was going.
“They say that anything you put in the sewers will eventually end up in the sea.”
All three of us turned to look at the international dude marking the entrance to the men’s toilets.
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
“In one of his manic phases,” Cupcake said, “Cedric would have appreciated this.”
“A terrible waste, when you come to think of it,” said the other guy. “All those years of expensive schooling, and then four years at university. Not counting all the medical bills.”
I led the way with the urn and poured roughly equal portions of our friend’s remains into three toilet bowls. We took up our positions, Cupcake imitated a bugler and played the Last Post, and we then ceremoniously and solemnly flushed Cedric on his way.
Back in the car, we opened another beer.
“He’s better off where he is now,” said Cupcake.
“His life was hell on earth,” the other guy said. “He made a wise choice.”
“It just goes to show,” I said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Cedric’s story is a lesson to us. He has shown us the danger of succumbing to societal pressure and aspiring to a …”
“Hey, fuck you!” the other guy shouted, interrupting me. He started the engine. A big black backed gull had just come out of nowhere like a stealth bomber and zapped the windscreen with its payload of filth. It was time to go.
What the English public school does so well is to foster an unshakable belief in the importance of tradition, comradeship and loyalty. A sense of superiority and entitlement is engendered and they learn how to comport themselves straight back, direct gaze, firm handshake – and how to recognise one of their own kind. Not to mention how to snub outsiders and exclude them from the inner circle.
In South Africa we have our own versions of Eton, Harrow and Winchester. Boarding schools like Bishops, Hilton and Michaelhouse were cloned from the original English model and have replicated several generations of highly influential men. The success of these schools at producing young men capable of making their way to a position of affluence and influence is undisputed. And it has little to do with individual excellence. On the contrary, it’s all about who you know, not what you know. Even a total moron is guaranteed an easy passage through life as long as he wears the old school tie.
Well, in theory. It didn’t work like that for Cedric
“It was the system that killed him,” I said, as we walked to the car.
“It was his father who killed him,” said Cupcake.
“Kak,” said the other guy. “He killed himself.”
The other guy drove. Cupcake was front passenger and I sat in the back with Cedric. Cedric’s ashes, that is.
“That was fucking depressing,” I said. “Stop at the bottle store in Muizenberg.”
When we got to Sunrise Circle the hopelessness of our situation became apparent. The car park was empty and it felt like we were crossing the Sahara in a sand storm. At the beachfront the other guy didn’t even bother to stop the car. He just did a big U-turn and started back the way we had come.
“If I want my windscreen and paintwork sand blasted, I’ll go to a professional and get it done properly, thank you.”
“Park in the lee of the toilets over there,” said Cupcake.
We cracked open the frosties and sat watching the seagulls trying to land next to us
“You can’t go anywhere in Cape Town without some beggar comes hassling you,” said Cupcake. Why don’t these birds go find a job?”
“Or commit suicide,” said the other guy.
“He tried too hard,” I said. “Took it all too seriously.”
“Too much pressure from his father,” said Cupcake. “That’s what triggered his first breakdown.”
“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. Is that it?” said the other guy. “Only a loser blames his parents for his lack of success in life.”
“His father thought he was doing him a favour, sending him to a larney school,” I said. “He would have been alright if he had gone to a crappy, Model C school like the ones we went to.”
“You reckon?”
The first beer had dispelled some of the gloom, so we opened another.
“Hey, Cupcake,” I said. “Did you see how his father was checking out your footwear?”
“Ah, fuck him,” said Cupcake. “I’m wearing a tie, right?”
“:Yah, but Crocs? To a funeral?”
“So why ask us to scatter the ashes if he thinks we got no class? Why didn’t he do it himself?”
“In a wheelchair? How’s he supposed to throw his son’s ashes into the waves if he’s in a wheelchair?”
“Well, there’s no way anybody is going to bbe able to scatter ash in this gale.”
We sat watching the sand forming mini dunes on the expanse of gravel parking.
“You know what they say about the sewage system in Cape Town?”
We waited, wondering where this was going.
“They say that anything you put in the sewers will eventually end up in the sea.”
All three of us turned to look at the international dude marking the entrance to the men’s toilets.
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
“In one of his manic phases,” Cupcake said, “Cedric would have appreciated this.”
“A terrible waste, when you come to think of it,” said the other guy. “All those years of expensive schooling, and then four years at university. Not counting all the medical bills.”
I led the way with the urn and poured roughly equal portions of our friend’s remains into three toilet bowls. We took up our positions, Cupcake imitated a bugler and played the Last Post, and we then ceremoniously and solemnly flushed Cedric on his way.
Back in the car, we opened another beer.
“He’s better off where he is now,” said Cupcake.
“His life was hell on earth,” the other guy said. “He made a wise choice.”
“It just goes to show,” I said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Cedric’s story is a lesson to us. He has shown us the danger of succumbing to societal pressure and aspiring to a …”
“Hey, fuck you!” the other guy shouted, interrupting me. He started the engine. A big black backed gull had just come out of nowhere like a stealth bomber and zapped the windscreen with its payload of filth. It was time to go.
September 26, 2013
Sell Me A Gun
The next time he walked down Hout Street he stopped on the pavement opposite City Guns, hesitated, and then crossed over. He had a strong aversion to firearms, deeming them abhorrent on three counts. For starters, he considered force, or the threat of force, as a means of settling a dispute, to be a very unintelligent option. The non-violent possibilities were numerous and he believed strongly in his own ability to extricate himself from confrontation and conflict by employing such methods as argument, persuasion, flattery, reassurance, deception, deceit, pleading, weeping, promises, distraction, diversion and sleight of hand.
Secondly, the mere sight of a gun made him feel faintly queasy. This was on account of the involuntary response that the visual stimulus elicited in him. Into his mind there instantly leapt a scene of horrible carnage: bullets ripping into flesh, blood spurting, bones being irreparably smashed, spinal cords snapping, arteries and nerves being severed. The fact that a gun was loaded meant that it was waiting to go off at any fraction of an instant. It had to go off, like a time bomb, and he braced himself for the imminent explosion.
Finally, he associated a certain type of person with the bearing of firearms, and it was a person not to his liking at all. It was clear that some men derived a Freudian pleasure from carrying a gun. It made them aggressive and obnoxiously proud of their masculinity. They tended to scowl and swear more than was their usual habit, and to swagger and be argumentative. They became boorishly boastful and spoke coarsely of women, subconsciously certain in the delusion that the carrying of a pistol was accompanied by miraculous generation of erectile tissue. These were the selfsame poseurs whose virility was charged up when they slid behind the wheels of their souped-up Ford Cortinas. Henry didn't like them.
He didn't like anything to do with firearms but nevertheless he crossed the street to look in the window, fully intending to enter the shop and experience the dubious pleasure of being sold a gun.
The door was solid and massive and the colour of Pears Soap. The window displays which flanked it were curiously innocuous and, as it turned out, deceptive. The window to the left was devoted largely to an array of knives. There were Swiss Army combinations consisting of a whole toolbox of miniature equipment: scissors, file, can opener, corkscrew, bottle opener, awl, tweezers, saw, pliers, magnifying glass, tooth pick, screw driver - almost entirely useless for practical purposes. Then there were the spring-loaded clasp knives arranged like the spokes of a wheel. These were ideal for cutting bite-sized lengths of biltong (dried meat), or for stabbing rival gangsters. Behind the knives in one corner stood a family of stainless steel vacuum flasks, made in the USA and very expensive. In the other corner were two Coleman cooler boxes arranged one on top of the other.
The right hand window was given over to a scene from the bush, with grass and twigs on the floor and a black pot astride the coals of a campfire. On the seat of a canvas folding-chair was a felt bush hat complete with leopard-skin headband. Casually leaning against the chair was a .303 hunting rifle. In the background he saw a weathered tree trunk upon which hung a pair of handcuffs and a four-foot sjambok (whip) of genuine hippo hide. The sporting life was sketched with skilful economy and the window dresser's dark message was not lost on Henry once he spotted the accoutrements on the periphery - strict discipline was an essential ingredient for a successful safari.
In the Metropole Bar on the corner of Long Street he drank two beers to prepare himself for the little adventure that awaited him. He had no intention of becoming a gun owner but he was more than moderately curious about the process surrounding the legal acquisition of a firearm.
Get the full story from Amazon's kindle store http://www.amazon.com/Sell-Me-A-Gun-e...
Secondly, the mere sight of a gun made him feel faintly queasy. This was on account of the involuntary response that the visual stimulus elicited in him. Into his mind there instantly leapt a scene of horrible carnage: bullets ripping into flesh, blood spurting, bones being irreparably smashed, spinal cords snapping, arteries and nerves being severed. The fact that a gun was loaded meant that it was waiting to go off at any fraction of an instant. It had to go off, like a time bomb, and he braced himself for the imminent explosion.
Finally, he associated a certain type of person with the bearing of firearms, and it was a person not to his liking at all. It was clear that some men derived a Freudian pleasure from carrying a gun. It made them aggressive and obnoxiously proud of their masculinity. They tended to scowl and swear more than was their usual habit, and to swagger and be argumentative. They became boorishly boastful and spoke coarsely of women, subconsciously certain in the delusion that the carrying of a pistol was accompanied by miraculous generation of erectile tissue. These were the selfsame poseurs whose virility was charged up when they slid behind the wheels of their souped-up Ford Cortinas. Henry didn't like them.
He didn't like anything to do with firearms but nevertheless he crossed the street to look in the window, fully intending to enter the shop and experience the dubious pleasure of being sold a gun.
The door was solid and massive and the colour of Pears Soap. The window displays which flanked it were curiously innocuous and, as it turned out, deceptive. The window to the left was devoted largely to an array of knives. There were Swiss Army combinations consisting of a whole toolbox of miniature equipment: scissors, file, can opener, corkscrew, bottle opener, awl, tweezers, saw, pliers, magnifying glass, tooth pick, screw driver - almost entirely useless for practical purposes. Then there were the spring-loaded clasp knives arranged like the spokes of a wheel. These were ideal for cutting bite-sized lengths of biltong (dried meat), or for stabbing rival gangsters. Behind the knives in one corner stood a family of stainless steel vacuum flasks, made in the USA and very expensive. In the other corner were two Coleman cooler boxes arranged one on top of the other.
The right hand window was given over to a scene from the bush, with grass and twigs on the floor and a black pot astride the coals of a campfire. On the seat of a canvas folding-chair was a felt bush hat complete with leopard-skin headband. Casually leaning against the chair was a .303 hunting rifle. In the background he saw a weathered tree trunk upon which hung a pair of handcuffs and a four-foot sjambok (whip) of genuine hippo hide. The sporting life was sketched with skilful economy and the window dresser's dark message was not lost on Henry once he spotted the accoutrements on the periphery - strict discipline was an essential ingredient for a successful safari.
In the Metropole Bar on the corner of Long Street he drank two beers to prepare himself for the little adventure that awaited him. He had no intention of becoming a gun owner but he was more than moderately curious about the process surrounding the legal acquisition of a firearm.
Get the full story from Amazon's kindle store http://www.amazon.com/Sell-Me-A-Gun-e...
August 27, 2013
Paradoxical Materialism
“The stinking rich will always be with us,” I said. “It’s in the Bible.”
“I thought it was the poor who will always be with us,” said the other guy. “Jeez, how long is it going to take this idiot to let us in? All he has to do is push a button.”
“Not so easy,” I said. “There must be a hundred buttons to choose from in that digital fortress.”
We were sitting in the other guy’s car looking at the big sliding gate, waiting for Cupcaked to work out the difference between his arse and his elbow.
“It’s in both the New and Old Testicle,” I went on, “So every exploiter of labour, whether Christian or Jew, feels perfectly justified in paying his workers a pittance, while amassing as much personal wealth as he possibly can. God gave him permission. Ah, at last!”
While the gate got out of our way, the other guy started up, engaged gear, and then stalled the engine. We began to roll back towards the street and there was a long blast from a passing vehicle.
“Nice driving,” I said. “You nearly managed to put a dent in the newest and biggest Merc in the country.”
Cupcake met us in the driveway and indicated where we should park. He seemed pleased to see us.
“I need to show you around,” he said, leading the way towards the house. “You see this?” pointing to the big pond with water feature at the centre of the circular drive. “It’s full of koi, 2k apiece. Two thousand rand for one fucking fish!” And he spat on the water in disgust. A fish immediately surfaced and made short work of the insult.
We skirted a bed of dwarf cypresses and followed him across an expanse of meticulously raked gravel.
“This is supposed to be a Zen garden,” he said, dragging his feet and then trampling a bonsai oak. We arrived at the front door and stepped inside the grand residence.
Modern, airy, full of light.
“You see what I mean?” said Cupcake, as if we knew what he had been ranting about in his head. “Marble throughout, even on the terraces. Rosa Aurora imported from Portugal”
“Cold in winter,” said the other guy, trying to be helpful.
“Underfloor heating!” snapped Cupcake. “This is the fucking atrium. His Highness likes to lie here a lot.” There were some very comfortable looking recliners. “Looking out to sea by day, and up at the fiery firmament at night, glass of single malt in hand.”
“Single malt?” I said. “Sounds promising.”
Cupcake gave me a hostile look and said, “This is what I mean. This place starts corrupting you the moment you step inside.”
He led the way to a sitting room with a fireplace.
“You see that mantelpiece and the surround? Granite. Stolen from the Acropolis, or the Parthenon, or somewhere. This is the sound system.” He opened the door of a cabinet to reveal electronic equipment. “Speakers in every room. The place is wired so your remote works anywhere in the house. What do you want to listen to? Graceland?Now let me show you the fucking summer lounge.”
The summer lounge also served as the dining room.
“You see these art works everywhere? Very classy, you think. This guy must be a connoisseur. Such good taste. Like fuck! All this cunt does is sign the cheques. The architect designs the house, the design company furnishes it, down to last detail, and the landscape guru sorts out the garden. This is how it works. And check this thing.”
We were heading for the kitchen and in a corner of some interim space stood an old fashioned jukebox.
“This is a genuine imitation jukebox from the 1950s. Art deco crap. You put your dime in, the mechanical arm selects a 7-single, and you’re listening to Fats Domino or Little Richard, crystal clear because it’s all digital and not really the real thing.”
We breezed through the designer kitchen and out to the breakfast nook, which was a kind of glass-walled rondavel jutting out into the garden.
“Now let me show you the master bedroom and hot tub spa,” said Cupcake.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “We’ve got the picture.”
We went and stood on the main terrace and looked out over about a thousand hectares of lawn to the lagoon and the sea in the distance.
“You see those tall palms next to the swimming pool?” said Cupcake. “They were brought in by helicopter. And the pool is kept heated twelve months of the year, even though he is hardly ever in residence.”
“Very nice,” I said. “Now how about offering us some of that famous whisky?”
We made ourselves comfortable in the atrium and were soon joined by Cupcake bearing a tray loaded with a bottle of single malt, ice, Sparletta and glasses.
“This is the life,’ I said.
“Yah,” said the other guy. “This isn’t work. Only a fool would complain about a job like this.” He was looking at Cupcake. “What’s your problem?”
“Problem?” said Cupcake. “This house is my problem, mate. This house is a beautiful woman without a vagina. You know what I mean?”
We looked out at the distant strip of blue sea, with the line of white breakers in front and the blue sky at the back, and thought about it.
“Sorry, I don’t get it,” said the other guy.
“Not a bad metaphor,” I said, savouring the subtle blend of highland peat and sheep’s piss infused in water from a bonny brook. “To fall in love with the beautiful exterior, only to discover that one can never get at the honey pot inside must leave one feeling desolate, man, desolate.”
“Okay, now I see,” said the other guy. “You’re not content with living in luxury if you don’t also possess the fortune that makes it possible.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Cupcake. “That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is that all this is initially seductive, but it’s superficial and largely worthless. I’ve been housesitting the place for three weeks now, and it’s making me suicidal. It’s like living in an empty waiting room, it’s so impersonal and cold. And it doesn’t make the owner happy, either. You should see him. He’s 50, fat, got an ulcer, and just had a triple bypass. He’s divorced and his kids only contact him when they want more money. And you should see his neighbour up the road. One of the richest men in South Africa and a real miserable looking bastard who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
“Hey,” I said, “That must be the old dude we nearly crashed into. Does he look like a malevolent toad? Like he’s got no chin he’s so obese?’
“That’s him,’ Sid Cupcake.
“So would you prefer to be looking after some poky two-roomed apartment in a dilapidated block in a rundown part of the city?” asked the other guy. “Where the entrance smells of dustbins and broken plumbing, and there’s a screaming baby next door, and dope fiends overhead trying to kill each other?”
“No, I wouldn’t,’ said Cupcake. “But that’s not what I’m getting at. Look, for the first week or so I couldn’t believe my luck and I was beginning to think that this way of life was what one should aspire to. But then I started to feel uneasy and restless. There was something wrong. It took another three days of worrying about it before I suddenly realised what it was about. The materialism paradox.”
“Too much value attached to the goodies money can buy?” I said. “Tell that to a man who lives in a shack.”
“Why is it a paradox?” asked the other guy.
“Because,’ said Cupcake, “I realised that the millionaire who owns this mansion is, on a certain level, far less of a materialist than I am. Or the man in the shack.
“How so?’
“Look,” said Cupcake, “Let’s take my old Corolla, for example. It’s a crappy old car and it gives me a lot of grief, but I can’t afford an upgrade. When it performs, I’m grateful; and when it misbehaves, I curse and threaten it. I have fond memories of having sex in the back seat, and every dent in the bodywork has a story to tell. You see, I have a relationship with that car. Now take the millionaire. He has a sports car and an SUV standing in the garage. They are hardly ever driven and their owner looks upon them with a total lack of sentiment. He sees them for what they are: disposable commodities that come with a price tag. He values them for the advertising hype about performance, craftsmanship and elegant styling, but only because it confers status. And it’s the same with everything else. This house, the contents, the garden, the fish – they have value for him only because he can afford them and put them on display. He doesn’t relate to the material world the way we do.”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose you could be onto something there. It’s a different way of looking at it. But surely you’re not suggesting this millionaire has a superior value system to yours?”
“Of course not,” said Cupcake. “What I’m saying is that he has become detached from the material objects he possesses. What he values most is the prestige associated with conspicuous consumption. He judges his own success not by how much he enjoys the fruits of his wealth but by the respect, admiration and envy his wealth is able to command. That’s why people like him are driven to make more and more money. There’s always someone able to behave more ostentatiously than you, though, so satisfaction is forever fleeting. I can see what it’s about and it fills me with feelings of meaninglessness and futility. I can’t take this sinecure any longer.”
“Hey, take it easy, man,” said the other guy, getting up to fill the glasses. Cupcake was showing signs of psychological distress, and on the point of becoming seriously distraught. “Keep a grip on the here-and-now. Hold on to the reality of genuine materialism, not that other kak. Here, drink this. This thousand-bucks whisky tastes better with lemonade and gives you more of a kick.”
“Yah,’ I said. “Just because this scumbag materialist has lost his soul down the toilet doesn’t mean we can’t try an wake the dead in his marble-floored mausoleum. We could start with a pool party. Tomorrow.”
“A topless pool party sounds cool,’ said the other guy. “With a venue like this a whole new world of possibilities could open up. What sports car did you say this creep has got in the garage?”
The flicker of interest in Cupcake’s eyes was encouraging. It meant that futility and meaninglessness hadn’t gained the upper hand just yet.
“I thought it was the poor who will always be with us,” said the other guy. “Jeez, how long is it going to take this idiot to let us in? All he has to do is push a button.”
“Not so easy,” I said. “There must be a hundred buttons to choose from in that digital fortress.”
We were sitting in the other guy’s car looking at the big sliding gate, waiting for Cupcaked to work out the difference between his arse and his elbow.
“It’s in both the New and Old Testicle,” I went on, “So every exploiter of labour, whether Christian or Jew, feels perfectly justified in paying his workers a pittance, while amassing as much personal wealth as he possibly can. God gave him permission. Ah, at last!”
While the gate got out of our way, the other guy started up, engaged gear, and then stalled the engine. We began to roll back towards the street and there was a long blast from a passing vehicle.
“Nice driving,” I said. “You nearly managed to put a dent in the newest and biggest Merc in the country.”
Cupcake met us in the driveway and indicated where we should park. He seemed pleased to see us.
“I need to show you around,” he said, leading the way towards the house. “You see this?” pointing to the big pond with water feature at the centre of the circular drive. “It’s full of koi, 2k apiece. Two thousand rand for one fucking fish!” And he spat on the water in disgust. A fish immediately surfaced and made short work of the insult.
We skirted a bed of dwarf cypresses and followed him across an expanse of meticulously raked gravel.
“This is supposed to be a Zen garden,” he said, dragging his feet and then trampling a bonsai oak. We arrived at the front door and stepped inside the grand residence.
Modern, airy, full of light.
“You see what I mean?” said Cupcake, as if we knew what he had been ranting about in his head. “Marble throughout, even on the terraces. Rosa Aurora imported from Portugal”
“Cold in winter,” said the other guy, trying to be helpful.
“Underfloor heating!” snapped Cupcake. “This is the fucking atrium. His Highness likes to lie here a lot.” There were some very comfortable looking recliners. “Looking out to sea by day, and up at the fiery firmament at night, glass of single malt in hand.”
“Single malt?” I said. “Sounds promising.”
Cupcake gave me a hostile look and said, “This is what I mean. This place starts corrupting you the moment you step inside.”
He led the way to a sitting room with a fireplace.
“You see that mantelpiece and the surround? Granite. Stolen from the Acropolis, or the Parthenon, or somewhere. This is the sound system.” He opened the door of a cabinet to reveal electronic equipment. “Speakers in every room. The place is wired so your remote works anywhere in the house. What do you want to listen to? Graceland?Now let me show you the fucking summer lounge.”
The summer lounge also served as the dining room.
“You see these art works everywhere? Very classy, you think. This guy must be a connoisseur. Such good taste. Like fuck! All this cunt does is sign the cheques. The architect designs the house, the design company furnishes it, down to last detail, and the landscape guru sorts out the garden. This is how it works. And check this thing.”
We were heading for the kitchen and in a corner of some interim space stood an old fashioned jukebox.
“This is a genuine imitation jukebox from the 1950s. Art deco crap. You put your dime in, the mechanical arm selects a 7-single, and you’re listening to Fats Domino or Little Richard, crystal clear because it’s all digital and not really the real thing.”
We breezed through the designer kitchen and out to the breakfast nook, which was a kind of glass-walled rondavel jutting out into the garden.
“Now let me show you the master bedroom and hot tub spa,” said Cupcake.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “We’ve got the picture.”
We went and stood on the main terrace and looked out over about a thousand hectares of lawn to the lagoon and the sea in the distance.
“You see those tall palms next to the swimming pool?” said Cupcake. “They were brought in by helicopter. And the pool is kept heated twelve months of the year, even though he is hardly ever in residence.”
“Very nice,” I said. “Now how about offering us some of that famous whisky?”
We made ourselves comfortable in the atrium and were soon joined by Cupcake bearing a tray loaded with a bottle of single malt, ice, Sparletta and glasses.
“This is the life,’ I said.
“Yah,” said the other guy. “This isn’t work. Only a fool would complain about a job like this.” He was looking at Cupcake. “What’s your problem?”
“Problem?” said Cupcake. “This house is my problem, mate. This house is a beautiful woman without a vagina. You know what I mean?”
We looked out at the distant strip of blue sea, with the line of white breakers in front and the blue sky at the back, and thought about it.
“Sorry, I don’t get it,” said the other guy.
“Not a bad metaphor,” I said, savouring the subtle blend of highland peat and sheep’s piss infused in water from a bonny brook. “To fall in love with the beautiful exterior, only to discover that one can never get at the honey pot inside must leave one feeling desolate, man, desolate.”
“Okay, now I see,” said the other guy. “You’re not content with living in luxury if you don’t also possess the fortune that makes it possible.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Cupcake. “That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is that all this is initially seductive, but it’s superficial and largely worthless. I’ve been housesitting the place for three weeks now, and it’s making me suicidal. It’s like living in an empty waiting room, it’s so impersonal and cold. And it doesn’t make the owner happy, either. You should see him. He’s 50, fat, got an ulcer, and just had a triple bypass. He’s divorced and his kids only contact him when they want more money. And you should see his neighbour up the road. One of the richest men in South Africa and a real miserable looking bastard who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
“Hey,” I said, “That must be the old dude we nearly crashed into. Does he look like a malevolent toad? Like he’s got no chin he’s so obese?’
“That’s him,’ Sid Cupcake.
“So would you prefer to be looking after some poky two-roomed apartment in a dilapidated block in a rundown part of the city?” asked the other guy. “Where the entrance smells of dustbins and broken plumbing, and there’s a screaming baby next door, and dope fiends overhead trying to kill each other?”
“No, I wouldn’t,’ said Cupcake. “But that’s not what I’m getting at. Look, for the first week or so I couldn’t believe my luck and I was beginning to think that this way of life was what one should aspire to. But then I started to feel uneasy and restless. There was something wrong. It took another three days of worrying about it before I suddenly realised what it was about. The materialism paradox.”
“Too much value attached to the goodies money can buy?” I said. “Tell that to a man who lives in a shack.”
“Why is it a paradox?” asked the other guy.
“Because,’ said Cupcake, “I realised that the millionaire who owns this mansion is, on a certain level, far less of a materialist than I am. Or the man in the shack.
“How so?’
“Look,” said Cupcake, “Let’s take my old Corolla, for example. It’s a crappy old car and it gives me a lot of grief, but I can’t afford an upgrade. When it performs, I’m grateful; and when it misbehaves, I curse and threaten it. I have fond memories of having sex in the back seat, and every dent in the bodywork has a story to tell. You see, I have a relationship with that car. Now take the millionaire. He has a sports car and an SUV standing in the garage. They are hardly ever driven and their owner looks upon them with a total lack of sentiment. He sees them for what they are: disposable commodities that come with a price tag. He values them for the advertising hype about performance, craftsmanship and elegant styling, but only because it confers status. And it’s the same with everything else. This house, the contents, the garden, the fish – they have value for him only because he can afford them and put them on display. He doesn’t relate to the material world the way we do.”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose you could be onto something there. It’s a different way of looking at it. But surely you’re not suggesting this millionaire has a superior value system to yours?”
“Of course not,” said Cupcake. “What I’m saying is that he has become detached from the material objects he possesses. What he values most is the prestige associated with conspicuous consumption. He judges his own success not by how much he enjoys the fruits of his wealth but by the respect, admiration and envy his wealth is able to command. That’s why people like him are driven to make more and more money. There’s always someone able to behave more ostentatiously than you, though, so satisfaction is forever fleeting. I can see what it’s about and it fills me with feelings of meaninglessness and futility. I can’t take this sinecure any longer.”
“Hey, take it easy, man,” said the other guy, getting up to fill the glasses. Cupcake was showing signs of psychological distress, and on the point of becoming seriously distraught. “Keep a grip on the here-and-now. Hold on to the reality of genuine materialism, not that other kak. Here, drink this. This thousand-bucks whisky tastes better with lemonade and gives you more of a kick.”
“Yah,’ I said. “Just because this scumbag materialist has lost his soul down the toilet doesn’t mean we can’t try an wake the dead in his marble-floored mausoleum. We could start with a pool party. Tomorrow.”
“A topless pool party sounds cool,’ said the other guy. “With a venue like this a whole new world of possibilities could open up. What sports car did you say this creep has got in the garage?”
The flicker of interest in Cupcake’s eyes was encouraging. It meant that futility and meaninglessness hadn’t gained the upper hand just yet.
September 13, 2012
My Affair With Florence Nightingale
When I was in my twenties, I worked as a hospital orderly for a period of about three years. This interlude in my life was not a continuous one, though, because in those days I was incapable of holding down a job for more than six months. I came and went a few times at False Bay Hospital and at Groote Schuur, and I did a stint in the septic ward at Joburg General. Hospital work was broken by intervals of other employment or just plain unemployment.
I can’t say that I enjoyed being an orderly. The work was menial and poorly paid, and carried virtually no status value with it. Only the hospital porter could be considered inferior to me, and I was ordered about by all and sundry. (Porters are the men who push patients about on trolleys, and have been known to molest female corpses en route to the morgue.) So why did I subject myself to those three years of lowly labour?
Well, maybe there was a certain amount of job satisfaction that helped to make it worthwhile. As I rolled a patient from one side to the other, allowing the nurse to change the soiled bed sheets, I used to think, Fuck, this is more rewarding, more meaningful than … than …. Ah, what the hell, at least I was making myself useful. And that wasn’t really why I was doing it. No, I was doing it to learn about the big picture. This was a crash course in sickness, aging, suffering and death. It was about observing human behaviour so that one day I might feel sufficiently qualified to make a statement about human nature and the Condition. And it provided me with any amount of material that would be of value to an aspiring writer.
Most of the time the ward was busy with a combination of routine and emergency activity. But there were quiet moments, like after meals, when there was a lull and a hush, and I was able to jot down my notes. Using the trolley parked at the foot of a patient’s bed as a writing desk, I recorded highlights from the day. Sometimes it was high drama, but mostly it was just snippets of conversation that appealed to me. And I became something of an expert at getting patients to tell me their life story. It didn’t matter that most of it was bullshit; I was fascinated and entertained, and grateful for the rich store I was amassing.
When my inglorious nursing career came to an end in 1980 I had a whole shoebox full of notes but not much else to show for the experience. Oh yes, I had also acquired a degree of empathy for the down-and-out, the good-for-nothing and the loser. For the common man.
And people would remark on what an unassuming, self deprecating person I had become, and I would tell them to try wiping a thousand arses, and they, too, would learn a little humility.
Anyway, to get to the point of this post, I eventually got round to sorting through my notes, putting them into order and editing them. The result was an 18000 word ebook entitled Henry Fuckit’s Nursing Notes. It is available from Amazon.Henry Fuckit's Nursing Notes
I can’t say that I enjoyed being an orderly. The work was menial and poorly paid, and carried virtually no status value with it. Only the hospital porter could be considered inferior to me, and I was ordered about by all and sundry. (Porters are the men who push patients about on trolleys, and have been known to molest female corpses en route to the morgue.) So why did I subject myself to those three years of lowly labour?
Well, maybe there was a certain amount of job satisfaction that helped to make it worthwhile. As I rolled a patient from one side to the other, allowing the nurse to change the soiled bed sheets, I used to think, Fuck, this is more rewarding, more meaningful than … than …. Ah, what the hell, at least I was making myself useful. And that wasn’t really why I was doing it. No, I was doing it to learn about the big picture. This was a crash course in sickness, aging, suffering and death. It was about observing human behaviour so that one day I might feel sufficiently qualified to make a statement about human nature and the Condition. And it provided me with any amount of material that would be of value to an aspiring writer.
Most of the time the ward was busy with a combination of routine and emergency activity. But there were quiet moments, like after meals, when there was a lull and a hush, and I was able to jot down my notes. Using the trolley parked at the foot of a patient’s bed as a writing desk, I recorded highlights from the day. Sometimes it was high drama, but mostly it was just snippets of conversation that appealed to me. And I became something of an expert at getting patients to tell me their life story. It didn’t matter that most of it was bullshit; I was fascinated and entertained, and grateful for the rich store I was amassing.
When my inglorious nursing career came to an end in 1980 I had a whole shoebox full of notes but not much else to show for the experience. Oh yes, I had also acquired a degree of empathy for the down-and-out, the good-for-nothing and the loser. For the common man.
And people would remark on what an unassuming, self deprecating person I had become, and I would tell them to try wiping a thousand arses, and they, too, would learn a little humility.
Anyway, to get to the point of this post, I eventually got round to sorting through my notes, putting them into order and editing them. The result was an 18000 word ebook entitled Henry Fuckit’s Nursing Notes. It is available from Amazon.Henry Fuckit's Nursing Notes
August 27, 2012
Baudrillard's Rhinoceros
What has the plight of the rhinoceros got to do with Jean Baudrillard? You may well ask. The famous French philosopher, who died in 2007, is possibly best known for coming up with an idea so bizarre, it makes you wonder what he was smoking besides Gauloises. He called this concept the simulacrum, and it’s so weird, there aren’t many people who can get their heads around it. Let me try and simplify the thing and put it in a nutshell.
The simulacrum is not just an imitation of reality, it becomes reality itself, and the original reality dwindles into the background and becomes meaningless, and people then relate to the simulacrum and not to reality. See what I mean?
Now, just the other morning, me and my buddies were playing pool over at the Sea View. We were discussing the price of rhino horn.
“If you had a pet rhino,” I said, “would you cut its horn off and sell it?”
“For sure,” said Cupcake, straightening up after having sunk his white. “You know what a kilogram of rhino horn fetches nowadays?”
“Same price as cocaine,” said the other guy.
“Which is?” I said, not knowing the price of cocaine.
“Around $50 000 a kilo.”
“Holy shite fuckers!” I said. “That’s like R350 000! Bring me the chain saw.”
“Except you don’t own a chain saw,” said Cupcake.
“And where’s your pet rhino?” asked the other guy, squinting down his cue and dreaming of a 3-in-one ricochet.
“I suppose it’s all about supply and demand,” I said. “All those Orientals wanting a scarce commodity. The fewer the rhino, the more they’ll pay for the horns.”
“Basic economics,” said Cupcake.
The other guy struck his white one helluva shot, which resulted in just about every other ball on the table being displaced but not one of them ended up in a pocket.
“Basic stupidity,” I said. “These Orientals are paying 350 grand for a kilo of powdered keratin – the same stuff as your fingernails are made of.”
“So? It’s not the intrinsic value that counts. It’s the perceived value, my mate.”
“Just another fucking simulacrum,” said the other guy.
“Yeah, like that stupid watch of yours,” said Cupcake, pointing to the other guy’s imitation gold Rolex. “Does that piece of shit even work?”
“Of course it works. But it loses like two days in four hours. Doesn’t worry me, though. I don’t wear a watch to tell the time. Who needs a watch when you got a cell phone? Everybody’s got a cell phone.”
“So why wear the fucking thing?”
“Image, man, image,” said the other guy. “It throws people into a state of mental confusion. They can’t work out if it’s genuine or not; there’s so much fake shit about, you never can be sure of anything.”
“It’s not a watch you’re wearing,” I said. “It’s a signifier of something else. Some kind of hyper reality.”
“Yah, that’s how it works for me. People think it’s probably a fake, but maybe it’s not. Maybe I stole it, and that makes me kind of dangerous. Or maybe this Rolex is the genuine 50 thousand buck thing, and I’ve got millions in the bank, even though I look like a loser, And that makes me super cool, jy weet? Anyway, this watch, which I bought for a hundred buckaroos at a flea market, makes people treat me with more respect than if I wore some nondescript watch, or no watch at all.”
“Yes,” said Cupcake. “But this hyper reality bullshit, this simulacrum, is no good for our rhino population.”
“That’s for sure,” I said. “As long as the Chinese believe in the efficacy of the simulacrum, the demand will far outweigh the supply. We can say goodbye to the rhino.”
“Not so fast,” said the other guy. “We must turn the simulacrum to our advantage, the way I’ve made this stupid watch replace the reality of a genuine Rolex with something that is not an imitation of a Rolex watch, but an imitation of the Rolex brand. The watch itself is no longer of any consequence. We can do the same thing with the rhino – and make some money at the same time.”
“Is this your crazy thought for the day?” I said.
“What we do is this,” said the other guy. “We make ourselves a rhino horn mould. Then we get a whole lot of ground up cattle horn from the abattoir, and a good modern binding agent that sets really hard, and then we go into production churning out hundreds of imitation rhino horns.”
“Aha!” said Cupcake. “I think I know where you’re going with this little brainwave of yours. We make a quick fortune without having to work too hard, and then we flood the market with our imitation horns.”
“That’s it,” said the other guy. “You got the picture just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in the air. “At a critical point the market will collapse and rhino horn, genuine or fake, will acquire junk status.”
“Brilliant!” I said. “Not only will we have made a pile of lovely boodle and saved the rhino from extinction, but we’ll have exploded the simulacrum. “Those idiots in Viet Nam and China will have to find some other worthless commodity to which they can attach the pseudo magical properties they now attribute to rhino horn.”
“It seems,” said Cupcake, “that the human brain is becoming less and less capable of dealing with reality in its raw condition. But hey, we’re supposed to be playing pool! Whose turn is it?”
The simulacrum is not just an imitation of reality, it becomes reality itself, and the original reality dwindles into the background and becomes meaningless, and people then relate to the simulacrum and not to reality. See what I mean?
Now, just the other morning, me and my buddies were playing pool over at the Sea View. We were discussing the price of rhino horn.
“If you had a pet rhino,” I said, “would you cut its horn off and sell it?”
“For sure,” said Cupcake, straightening up after having sunk his white. “You know what a kilogram of rhino horn fetches nowadays?”
“Same price as cocaine,” said the other guy.
“Which is?” I said, not knowing the price of cocaine.
“Around $50 000 a kilo.”
“Holy shite fuckers!” I said. “That’s like R350 000! Bring me the chain saw.”
“Except you don’t own a chain saw,” said Cupcake.
“And where’s your pet rhino?” asked the other guy, squinting down his cue and dreaming of a 3-in-one ricochet.
“I suppose it’s all about supply and demand,” I said. “All those Orientals wanting a scarce commodity. The fewer the rhino, the more they’ll pay for the horns.”
“Basic economics,” said Cupcake.
The other guy struck his white one helluva shot, which resulted in just about every other ball on the table being displaced but not one of them ended up in a pocket.
“Basic stupidity,” I said. “These Orientals are paying 350 grand for a kilo of powdered keratin – the same stuff as your fingernails are made of.”
“So? It’s not the intrinsic value that counts. It’s the perceived value, my mate.”
“Just another fucking simulacrum,” said the other guy.
“Yeah, like that stupid watch of yours,” said Cupcake, pointing to the other guy’s imitation gold Rolex. “Does that piece of shit even work?”
“Of course it works. But it loses like two days in four hours. Doesn’t worry me, though. I don’t wear a watch to tell the time. Who needs a watch when you got a cell phone? Everybody’s got a cell phone.”
“So why wear the fucking thing?”
“Image, man, image,” said the other guy. “It throws people into a state of mental confusion. They can’t work out if it’s genuine or not; there’s so much fake shit about, you never can be sure of anything.”
“It’s not a watch you’re wearing,” I said. “It’s a signifier of something else. Some kind of hyper reality.”
“Yah, that’s how it works for me. People think it’s probably a fake, but maybe it’s not. Maybe I stole it, and that makes me kind of dangerous. Or maybe this Rolex is the genuine 50 thousand buck thing, and I’ve got millions in the bank, even though I look like a loser, And that makes me super cool, jy weet? Anyway, this watch, which I bought for a hundred buckaroos at a flea market, makes people treat me with more respect than if I wore some nondescript watch, or no watch at all.”
“Yes,” said Cupcake. “But this hyper reality bullshit, this simulacrum, is no good for our rhino population.”
“That’s for sure,” I said. “As long as the Chinese believe in the efficacy of the simulacrum, the demand will far outweigh the supply. We can say goodbye to the rhino.”
“Not so fast,” said the other guy. “We must turn the simulacrum to our advantage, the way I’ve made this stupid watch replace the reality of a genuine Rolex with something that is not an imitation of a Rolex watch, but an imitation of the Rolex brand. The watch itself is no longer of any consequence. We can do the same thing with the rhino – and make some money at the same time.”
“Is this your crazy thought for the day?” I said.
“What we do is this,” said the other guy. “We make ourselves a rhino horn mould. Then we get a whole lot of ground up cattle horn from the abattoir, and a good modern binding agent that sets really hard, and then we go into production churning out hundreds of imitation rhino horns.”
“Aha!” said Cupcake. “I think I know where you’re going with this little brainwave of yours. We make a quick fortune without having to work too hard, and then we flood the market with our imitation horns.”
“That’s it,” said the other guy. “You got the picture just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in the air. “At a critical point the market will collapse and rhino horn, genuine or fake, will acquire junk status.”
“Brilliant!” I said. “Not only will we have made a pile of lovely boodle and saved the rhino from extinction, but we’ll have exploded the simulacrum. “Those idiots in Viet Nam and China will have to find some other worthless commodity to which they can attach the pseudo magical properties they now attribute to rhino horn.”
“It seems,” said Cupcake, “that the human brain is becoming less and less capable of dealing with reality in its raw condition. But hey, we’re supposed to be playing pool! Whose turn is it?”
August 15, 2012
Her Majesty's A Pretty Nice Girl
My relationship with this woman goes back a long way. Back to around 1955 when I was enrolled at Cecil John Rhodes Junior School in Gwelo, a town about half way between Salisbury and Bulawayo. Every morning at assembly we had to stand at attention and sing God Save The Queen.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen!
Even at the age of five I’m sure I found it absurd.
Then, when I was allowed to go to the local bughouse (I think it was called the Royal Theatre, or maybe the Empire, or some other nod to the Imperial masters), I was required to not only stand to attention as the anthem was being played, but I also had to watch Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, sitting on a horse in front of Buckingham Palace presiding over Trooping of the Colour and taking the salute.
“Why does she sit on the horse sideways like that?” I asked my brother, who was five years older than me.
“If a lady sits with her legs wide open, it causes men to have unclean thoughts,” my brother told me.
I was only a little kid, and, as Jean Piaget has made it abundantly clear, there was no way I was going to grasp how something as abstract as a thought could be dirty. So I just had to take my boet’s word for it.
I soon grew to resent this ritual every time we went to the flicks, but there were a lot of ex-servicemen in the audience, still fired up with patriotic fervour after defeating the Nazis and saving the world from fascist domination, and it would have been extremely unwise not to conform. Unless you felt like a clip round the ear.
Then, in 1960, the Queen sent her mother out to open Kariba Dam, and I got my first and only glimpse of royalty in the flesh. The Queen Mother stopped off in Gwello for a few gins and in the process did a little walkabout at Selukwe traffic circle. I was part of a whole bunch of school kids required to stand on the pavement and wave Union Jacks and clap politely.
It was a disappointing experience because the old girl looked completely ordinary except for her hat, and after being presented with a huge bouquet of flowers she got back in the car and was whisked off to the nearest hotel for a right royal lunch. How undramatic! I had been hoping for something like the firing of canon, and maybe even a public flogging to inspire fear in the colonial subjects.
“But they’re just ordinary people,” I complained to my brother.
“Yes,” said my brother, scratching his balls thoughtfully. “They’ve also got to take a crap now and again, just like you and me.”
From then on my view of the royal family changed and I began to see them in a more sympathetic light. Especially the Queen. When she started picking up all that shit with her children and it became apparent that she was not only one of the most unopinionated, boring women on the planet, but was severely lacking in parenting skills as well, I saw that her life wasn’t the fairy tale bed of roses some people make it out to be.
And when those parsimonious Labour politicians decided to decommission the royal yacht Britannia, my heart bled for her. No more of those wonderful family cruises with a crew of 240 at her beck and call. That must have been hard to come to terms with.
Sixty years is a long time to have to reign over a nation, and it might not have been an entirely happy and glorious period in English history, but she seems to be coping pretty well, and in no hurry to step aside for her son and go into retirement.
Yes, all in all, Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl and her subjects love her a lot. She has shown them how it is possible for people of meagre intelligence and mediocre physical abilities to hold the very highest rank in British society. And how to disperse the gloomy clouds of austerity by throwing a party of unrivalled extravagance.
God save the Queen.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen!
Even at the age of five I’m sure I found it absurd.
Then, when I was allowed to go to the local bughouse (I think it was called the Royal Theatre, or maybe the Empire, or some other nod to the Imperial masters), I was required to not only stand to attention as the anthem was being played, but I also had to watch Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, sitting on a horse in front of Buckingham Palace presiding over Trooping of the Colour and taking the salute.
“Why does she sit on the horse sideways like that?” I asked my brother, who was five years older than me.
“If a lady sits with her legs wide open, it causes men to have unclean thoughts,” my brother told me.
I was only a little kid, and, as Jean Piaget has made it abundantly clear, there was no way I was going to grasp how something as abstract as a thought could be dirty. So I just had to take my boet’s word for it.
I soon grew to resent this ritual every time we went to the flicks, but there were a lot of ex-servicemen in the audience, still fired up with patriotic fervour after defeating the Nazis and saving the world from fascist domination, and it would have been extremely unwise not to conform. Unless you felt like a clip round the ear.
Then, in 1960, the Queen sent her mother out to open Kariba Dam, and I got my first and only glimpse of royalty in the flesh. The Queen Mother stopped off in Gwello for a few gins and in the process did a little walkabout at Selukwe traffic circle. I was part of a whole bunch of school kids required to stand on the pavement and wave Union Jacks and clap politely.
It was a disappointing experience because the old girl looked completely ordinary except for her hat, and after being presented with a huge bouquet of flowers she got back in the car and was whisked off to the nearest hotel for a right royal lunch. How undramatic! I had been hoping for something like the firing of canon, and maybe even a public flogging to inspire fear in the colonial subjects.
“But they’re just ordinary people,” I complained to my brother.
“Yes,” said my brother, scratching his balls thoughtfully. “They’ve also got to take a crap now and again, just like you and me.”
From then on my view of the royal family changed and I began to see them in a more sympathetic light. Especially the Queen. When she started picking up all that shit with her children and it became apparent that she was not only one of the most unopinionated, boring women on the planet, but was severely lacking in parenting skills as well, I saw that her life wasn’t the fairy tale bed of roses some people make it out to be.
And when those parsimonious Labour politicians decided to decommission the royal yacht Britannia, my heart bled for her. No more of those wonderful family cruises with a crew of 240 at her beck and call. That must have been hard to come to terms with.
Sixty years is a long time to have to reign over a nation, and it might not have been an entirely happy and glorious period in English history, but she seems to be coping pretty well, and in no hurry to step aside for her son and go into retirement.
Yes, all in all, Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl and her subjects love her a lot. She has shown them how it is possible for people of meagre intelligence and mediocre physical abilities to hold the very highest rank in British society. And how to disperse the gloomy clouds of austerity by throwing a party of unrivalled extravagance.
God save the Queen.
March 1, 2012
Good News For Old Toppies
Let’s face it: growing old is a kak story. Take for example one old toppie who thinks he has it all planned out. At the age of seventy he sells up and moves into a Village Of Golden Harvest. (Doesn’t that name make you want to puke already?) A comfortable 2-bedroomed cottage with garage set in clipped lawns and pretty flower beds. No more sweating in the garden or hassling with home maintenance. There’s a gym and a pool, and he can eat at the Clubhouse, or drink at the bar with the other more sprightly residents. All quite pleasant and tolerable.
Then time, past bad habits and general wear and tear kick in and conspire to move things along a bit. Hypertension, the onset of Type 2 diabetes (he always was a bit of a pig), and maybe some mild emphysema to reward those years of smoking. To cap it all, his spouse goes and kicks the bucket and now he knows he really is on the downhill stretch.
Grief and loneliness sap his will, he spends more and more time in bed, and he neglects himself horribly. His daughter visits once a month but she’s got problems of her own – that bloody useless husband of hers has lost his job. (His other kids fucked off to greener pastures years ago.)
A handful of happy pills is added to all the other medication he’s taking every day, and the shrink gives him a pep talk four times a year. When he falls and breaks an arm, it’s time to make the next move. Assisted Living.
Assisted Living is a two-roomed unit in the main complex, which also accommodates the Frail Care Centre. Over a period of seven or eight years he goes through the three levels of Care – low, medium and high. At first he walks to the dining room, assisted by nothing more than a walking stick. But after several falls the trusty three-wheeled walking frame becomes an indispensable aid. Most of the day is spent dozing in front of the TV. Or shuffling up and down the windowless corridor. Only closed doors and the smell of cooked cabbage. And piss. He becomes incontinent and has to endure the indignity of wearing nappies. Talk about second childhood! Ballooning obesity is attributed to the side effects of psychiatric drugs, which have prevented him from committing suicide but left him an apathetic zombie. Again he falls and hits his head and ends up in hospital. Time for the penultimate move. Frail Care.
Down to one room. A hospital bed with cot sides, and a bell push if he feels like getting up. They wash or shower him, help him dress, clean his dentures. There’s a commode, so he doesn’t even have to make it to the toilet in the night. They shout at him politely and repeat everything four or five times because his hearing aid doesn’t work, and by now he’s gaga anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether he hears or not. It takes about three years for him to lose all that weight he put on and he is reduced to a skeleton draped in a sack of wrinkled hide. It’s time to go. One morning they find him staring at the ceiling and he’s cold to the touch. Like a toad. His final exit consists of a trolley ride down the passage to the back door, where the long limo stands waiting to take him off to the funeral parlour.
And after the memorial service they stand around looking relieved and quietly agree that it would have been better for all concerned if he had popped off ten years ago.
Yes, this old age business, as it stands now, is not something to look forward to, that’s for sure. Especially those last ten years. As it stands now, all we do is resign ourselves to the dreadful prospect as if we are powerless to do anything about it. Well, that might be about to change. Me and a couple of my buddies have come up with an alternative.
The other night, for some old fashioned male comradeship and a bit of intellectual stimulation, we got together over a litre of Bols and a goodly quantity of Coke, and started discussing the state of the world and the human condition and that kind of shit.
“Seven billion and counting,” Cupcake said.
“Too many humans,” the other guy said. “Just too fucking many.”
I agreed but pointed out that the current economic model was based on infinite growth. Galloping consumption driven by an ever-growing population.
“That model is dead, man. Fucked. Like a …”
“It’s not an idea, man,” said Cupcake. “ It’s a piece of cerebral excrement.”
“But,” I objected, “How are you going to throw out the present model, discourage consumption, and shrink the population? I mean, for one thing, who’s going to look after all the old toppies?”
“Fuck the old toppies,” the other guy said.
“Euthanasia,” Cupcake said.
“You sound like a fucking Nazi,” I said.
We had some more b&c and mulled things over in our minds, which were still pretty sharp.
“Hey man. I just got an idea!” Cupcake shouted with a real manic look on his face and in his eyes.
“Take it easy, your brain isn’t used to this,” the other guy said, trying to calm him down.
“No man, I’ve thought of a way to get rid of all the useless old parasites without running into any serious ethical bullshit.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yeah. What you do is this. You put all the oldies - as soon as they start vegetating and can’t look after themselves - on a daily dose of Smarties. Say three a day. The machine that dispenses them is programmed to include a certain percentage of lethal Smarties. Like cyanide, or something.. They look identical to the regular ones, so nobody can cheat the system.”
“Sweet,” the other guy said. “ I get it. No one could be held responsible for administering the fatal dose.”
“It would be like playing Russian roulette every day,” I said, warming to the idea, which was beginning to strike me as fucking audacious.
“Only, nobody would know about the game being played,” said Cupcake. “Both staff and patients would have to be kept in the dark about the program.”
We kicked the idea around some more; fine tuned it, and congratulated ourselves on having removed a major obstacle in the way of getting the aged down to manageable proportions.
“Think of all the suffering that will be prevented,’ said Cupcake, all smug and arrogant as if he was some kind of modern day messiah.
“This is genius stuff,” said the other guy. “Not only will millions of old people be spared the pain and humiliation of a long, slow goodbye, but think of us young people not having to waste all our time and resources looking after them.”
“And you know how fucking depressing and psychologically and emotionally draining it is to have to watch some decrepit old bag of bones lying around senile and feeble and helpless, and so undignified and not even a trace of a shadow of their former selves?”
“Yah,” said Cupcake, looking kind of grim and serious. “It can depress the shit out of you having to deal with some old guy with dementia, especially if it’s a relative.”
“Don’t tell me,” said the other guy. “My gran had Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is the …’
“Alzheimer’s is total bullshit, man,” said Cupcake. I mean, what the fuck use is Alzheimer’s? In terms of evolutionary biology? Tell me that.”
“Fuck-all use,” said the other guy.
“But,” I said, deciding to set a cat among the pigeons. “Who are we to question God’s design for us?”
This proved a very witty thing to have said, because we then spent about five minutes pissing ourselves at the irony of it, and we then decided to call it a night and went off on our separate ways, still chuckling and in a really good mood.
Then time, past bad habits and general wear and tear kick in and conspire to move things along a bit. Hypertension, the onset of Type 2 diabetes (he always was a bit of a pig), and maybe some mild emphysema to reward those years of smoking. To cap it all, his spouse goes and kicks the bucket and now he knows he really is on the downhill stretch.
Grief and loneliness sap his will, he spends more and more time in bed, and he neglects himself horribly. His daughter visits once a month but she’s got problems of her own – that bloody useless husband of hers has lost his job. (His other kids fucked off to greener pastures years ago.)
A handful of happy pills is added to all the other medication he’s taking every day, and the shrink gives him a pep talk four times a year. When he falls and breaks an arm, it’s time to make the next move. Assisted Living.
Assisted Living is a two-roomed unit in the main complex, which also accommodates the Frail Care Centre. Over a period of seven or eight years he goes through the three levels of Care – low, medium and high. At first he walks to the dining room, assisted by nothing more than a walking stick. But after several falls the trusty three-wheeled walking frame becomes an indispensable aid. Most of the day is spent dozing in front of the TV. Or shuffling up and down the windowless corridor. Only closed doors and the smell of cooked cabbage. And piss. He becomes incontinent and has to endure the indignity of wearing nappies. Talk about second childhood! Ballooning obesity is attributed to the side effects of psychiatric drugs, which have prevented him from committing suicide but left him an apathetic zombie. Again he falls and hits his head and ends up in hospital. Time for the penultimate move. Frail Care.
Down to one room. A hospital bed with cot sides, and a bell push if he feels like getting up. They wash or shower him, help him dress, clean his dentures. There’s a commode, so he doesn’t even have to make it to the toilet in the night. They shout at him politely and repeat everything four or five times because his hearing aid doesn’t work, and by now he’s gaga anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether he hears or not. It takes about three years for him to lose all that weight he put on and he is reduced to a skeleton draped in a sack of wrinkled hide. It’s time to go. One morning they find him staring at the ceiling and he’s cold to the touch. Like a toad. His final exit consists of a trolley ride down the passage to the back door, where the long limo stands waiting to take him off to the funeral parlour.
And after the memorial service they stand around looking relieved and quietly agree that it would have been better for all concerned if he had popped off ten years ago.
Yes, this old age business, as it stands now, is not something to look forward to, that’s for sure. Especially those last ten years. As it stands now, all we do is resign ourselves to the dreadful prospect as if we are powerless to do anything about it. Well, that might be about to change. Me and a couple of my buddies have come up with an alternative.
The other night, for some old fashioned male comradeship and a bit of intellectual stimulation, we got together over a litre of Bols and a goodly quantity of Coke, and started discussing the state of the world and the human condition and that kind of shit.
“Seven billion and counting,” Cupcake said.
“Too many humans,” the other guy said. “Just too fucking many.”
I agreed but pointed out that the current economic model was based on infinite growth. Galloping consumption driven by an ever-growing population.
“That model is dead, man. Fucked. Like a …”
“It’s not an idea, man,” said Cupcake. “ It’s a piece of cerebral excrement.”
“But,” I objected, “How are you going to throw out the present model, discourage consumption, and shrink the population? I mean, for one thing, who’s going to look after all the old toppies?”
“Fuck the old toppies,” the other guy said.
“Euthanasia,” Cupcake said.
“You sound like a fucking Nazi,” I said.
We had some more b&c and mulled things over in our minds, which were still pretty sharp.
“Hey man. I just got an idea!” Cupcake shouted with a real manic look on his face and in his eyes.
“Take it easy, your brain isn’t used to this,” the other guy said, trying to calm him down.
“No man, I’ve thought of a way to get rid of all the useless old parasites without running into any serious ethical bullshit.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yeah. What you do is this. You put all the oldies - as soon as they start vegetating and can’t look after themselves - on a daily dose of Smarties. Say three a day. The machine that dispenses them is programmed to include a certain percentage of lethal Smarties. Like cyanide, or something.. They look identical to the regular ones, so nobody can cheat the system.”
“Sweet,” the other guy said. “ I get it. No one could be held responsible for administering the fatal dose.”
“It would be like playing Russian roulette every day,” I said, warming to the idea, which was beginning to strike me as fucking audacious.
“Only, nobody would know about the game being played,” said Cupcake. “Both staff and patients would have to be kept in the dark about the program.”
We kicked the idea around some more; fine tuned it, and congratulated ourselves on having removed a major obstacle in the way of getting the aged down to manageable proportions.
“Think of all the suffering that will be prevented,’ said Cupcake, all smug and arrogant as if he was some kind of modern day messiah.
“This is genius stuff,” said the other guy. “Not only will millions of old people be spared the pain and humiliation of a long, slow goodbye, but think of us young people not having to waste all our time and resources looking after them.”
“And you know how fucking depressing and psychologically and emotionally draining it is to have to watch some decrepit old bag of bones lying around senile and feeble and helpless, and so undignified and not even a trace of a shadow of their former selves?”
“Yah,” said Cupcake, looking kind of grim and serious. “It can depress the shit out of you having to deal with some old guy with dementia, especially if it’s a relative.”
“Don’t tell me,” said the other guy. “My gran had Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is the …’
“Alzheimer’s is total bullshit, man,” said Cupcake. I mean, what the fuck use is Alzheimer’s? In terms of evolutionary biology? Tell me that.”
“Fuck-all use,” said the other guy.
“But,” I said, deciding to set a cat among the pigeons. “Who are we to question God’s design for us?”
This proved a very witty thing to have said, because we then spent about five minutes pissing ourselves at the irony of it, and we then decided to call it a night and went off on our separate ways, still chuckling and in a really good mood.
November 24, 2011
Is Kikaffir A Racist Book?
In response to a phone call from the Human Rights Commission I sent them a copy of Kikaffir – a Black Comedy, the second bovel in my SHOCKSPEARE series.I also issued the following Press Release:
14 NOVEMBER 2011
THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION IS INVESTIGATING A RACIST NOVEL
The Human Rights Commission is investigating allegations of racism relating to South African author Ian Martin’s controversial novel ‘Kikaffir – a Black Comedy’, allegations the author is denying.
The Commission received an enquiry about the book, published earlier this year, but said that no complaint had yet been lodged. Cameron Jacobs, Senior Researcher at South African Human Rights Commission, was not permitted to say who raised the enquiry.
Martin responded to accusations of racism by saying that, “My work isn’t intended to be politically correct, and I don’t write for the mainstream market. If readers are put off by the title, they needn’t read any further. Which is probably wise because there’s a lot of grossly explicit material in the book. But I’m no racial bigot”.
The book follows the exploits of roving bands of whites (‘Vitvarks’ and ‘Frikkers’), Africans (‘Kikaffirs’ and ‘Bacoons’) and coloureds (‘Hortnorts’) in the southern Cape after an apocalyptic event in the near future. Most of the characters end up dying or being murdered, notably through decapitation, crucifixion and disembowelling. There are also scenes of bestiality and rape.
Martin said that the Commission had been in touch with him and that he was working with them to address the inquiry, and had agreed to supply Jacobs with a copy of the novel. “He will need to acquaint himself with the contents,” Martin said. “You can’t judge a book by its title.”
The author said that people needed to make up their own minds about whether his book is racist or not. “Don’t make false assumptions based on hearsay. My book is available from Amazon or from my website. And you can read extracts on the Kikaffir Facebook page. Prejudice is about forming an opinion based on insufficient knowledge, and a bigot is an opinionated person intolerant of those who hold different views.”
Martin is no stranger to controversy. His previous novel, Pop-splat!, was rejected by local publishers due to its explicit and unorthodox content, resulting in self publication in 2008. The book, about a disturbed student investigating his father’s Brett Kebble-style murder, has been called ‘a horrible story about horrible people’ and ‘pornographically sadistic’ by reviewers, yet it has gained a cult following amongst South Africa’s youth.
Recently a number of popular books have been accused of being racist. British bookstores pulled Herge’s ‘Tintin in the Congo’ over racism concerns, something the Vatican described as “politically correct lunacy”.
Some publishers have banned the book while others have put warning labels on the cover. The L’Osservatore Romano recently published a front page story calling Tintin a “hero of Catholicism” driven by a “sacred moral imperative to save the innocent and conquer evil”.
Other well known authors accused of racism include Astrid Lindgren for her Pippi Longstocking series and Enid Blyton, mainly for her depiction of golliwogs.
More information on Kikaffir can be found at www.ianmartintheauthor.com
—
14 NOVEMBER 2011
THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION IS INVESTIGATING A RACIST NOVEL
The Human Rights Commission is investigating allegations of racism relating to South African author Ian Martin’s controversial novel ‘Kikaffir – a Black Comedy’, allegations the author is denying.
The Commission received an enquiry about the book, published earlier this year, but said that no complaint had yet been lodged. Cameron Jacobs, Senior Researcher at South African Human Rights Commission, was not permitted to say who raised the enquiry.
Martin responded to accusations of racism by saying that, “My work isn’t intended to be politically correct, and I don’t write for the mainstream market. If readers are put off by the title, they needn’t read any further. Which is probably wise because there’s a lot of grossly explicit material in the book. But I’m no racial bigot”.
The book follows the exploits of roving bands of whites (‘Vitvarks’ and ‘Frikkers’), Africans (‘Kikaffirs’ and ‘Bacoons’) and coloureds (‘Hortnorts’) in the southern Cape after an apocalyptic event in the near future. Most of the characters end up dying or being murdered, notably through decapitation, crucifixion and disembowelling. There are also scenes of bestiality and rape.
Martin said that the Commission had been in touch with him and that he was working with them to address the inquiry, and had agreed to supply Jacobs with a copy of the novel. “He will need to acquaint himself with the contents,” Martin said. “You can’t judge a book by its title.”
The author said that people needed to make up their own minds about whether his book is racist or not. “Don’t make false assumptions based on hearsay. My book is available from Amazon or from my website. And you can read extracts on the Kikaffir Facebook page. Prejudice is about forming an opinion based on insufficient knowledge, and a bigot is an opinionated person intolerant of those who hold different views.”
Martin is no stranger to controversy. His previous novel, Pop-splat!, was rejected by local publishers due to its explicit and unorthodox content, resulting in self publication in 2008. The book, about a disturbed student investigating his father’s Brett Kebble-style murder, has been called ‘a horrible story about horrible people’ and ‘pornographically sadistic’ by reviewers, yet it has gained a cult following amongst South Africa’s youth.
Recently a number of popular books have been accused of being racist. British bookstores pulled Herge’s ‘Tintin in the Congo’ over racism concerns, something the Vatican described as “politically correct lunacy”.
Some publishers have banned the book while others have put warning labels on the cover. The L’Osservatore Romano recently published a front page story calling Tintin a “hero of Catholicism” driven by a “sacred moral imperative to save the innocent and conquer evil”.
Other well known authors accused of racism include Astrid Lindgren for her Pippi Longstocking series and Enid Blyton, mainly for her depiction of golliwogs.
More information on Kikaffir can be found at www.ianmartintheauthor.com
—
