The Mail n Guardian's annual scorecard for performance by ruling cadre politicians shows a healthy average and there is a joyous sense of general hubris, glossing over the snorting at the feeding trough this year.
For most of us, it seemed obvious that Mr Manuel would be top dog, long may he continue to prevail over the gaping void that lurks below our bluff exterior.
Nonetheless the real winner should have been Ngconde Balfour.
Yes...Absolute top honours for saving the country from immediate financial ruin must be the Minister of Correctional services: a department that has, through some form of pleasantly misguided morality, been relegated to an under-performing position.
Now in fairness to everyone, I hadn't spotted this myself although I did have a hint a short while back. I was alerted to the truth at a dinner party over the hols with a group of businesspersons of comfortable means and immense anxiety. Talk ranged among other things over the M& G 'scorecard'.
We had started out discussing that great thing about Christmas: the 'Presents'.
We discovered that we had all taken Mr Manuel's [and Mr Mboweni's] advice and saved half the bonus, and bought fewer 'pressies': none on credit. We agreed that this had taken immense fortitude, mostly fighting the obsessive needs of our respective wives to spend as though there were no tomorrow [which there isn't].
Alone amongst my peers, I suspect deep down that there is not much point in saving any money at all, other than as a hedge against some immediate catastrophes. Generally after tax and inflation the interest isn't worth a damm [sorry Rhett]. Then of course there is a reasonable probability that whatever one saves will somehow be 'stolen' by some competent, thieving investment industry 'clever'.
Therefore our table voted: for second runner-up for the unsung-hero-of-the-year award, the fellow who beat the insurance/assurance industry into making some long overdue reparations-Vuyani Ngalwana. Good on yer Vu. [Mr Ngalwana was inappropriately voted #37 by M& G on its Dreamers, dazzlers and Doers page 15]
The financial industry has always worked at the sharp end of capitalist enterprise selling fantasy, dreams and ultimately an inevitable day of reckoning: they have sucked gloriously on the marrows of their market. They have it all. Many of us have long held deep suspicions about the veracity of the financial industry, and were equally dubious about the stooges who fill most of the so-called 'regulatory agencies', created more as sinecures for discarded cadres than for any useful purpose other than becoming yet another barrier to market entry. But that fellow Ngalwana actually performed and blew them into submission [and we all suspected that he would soon be 'redeployed'.]
However, it was suggested; helping him was the prospect of real Jail time and the probability of painful and deathly anal rape.
Consider further that there are a collection of aging [former]'execs' from the recently failed Saambou Bank who face the prospect of 'doing time' for palpable failure to perform their jobs according to the newly emerging rules of the market-that do not easily accept [inappropriate] performance apparently.
Plus: [further point] a small bonus-perhaps too late for the Press: a 'Boeremag' prisoner gets an 'Early release' under correctional supervision. The man becomes a 'hands-upper', a 'joiner'; who turned on his fellows, in return for ending jail time. ' [* Boeremag: For offshore readers: a largely irrelevant and marginalized collection of clapped-out alleged right-wing reactionary activists whose objectives are largely incoherent.]
So it could be that on some limited fronts 2005 was the year the People fought back. [Pity about all the other fronts: like plugging a dyke, attempting to keep up with all the good stuff while damping down the fires that rage in too many places.]
'Top of the class' went [officially] to Mr Manuel for a thoroughly well deserved A. Nonetheless I think there is an unsung hero in this package who was buried somewhere on the celebs page and would be my vote for runner up for unsung person of the year. Mr J. Steinberg [#69 on the M&G play list: P15] for an award winning and widely read book on the prison 'Numbers' gangs.He has driven home the reality of life 'inside'.
Why do I make this random and oblique choice of heroes? I don't. They make themselves. The common denominator running through all the above can be summed up in the following idea proposed at our table that evening.
'The ever-rising tide of revenue flowing to the till from formerly reluctant taxpayers may be due to Mr Manuel's trump card: the SA Penal system. Hence the Minister for correctional services [Mr Ngconde Balfour] emerges as the true hero of the revolution and should have received an A++ rather than a measly D.'
Consider: We did away with the death penalty and substituted the so-called 'slow puncture': anal gang rape by HIV AIDS infested fellow inmates is real and happens. Nice 'clevers', fellows who just wanted to keep more of their own money than the government hit men wanted them to keep, will now find themselves sentenced to a minimum period of jail time; and in the short period before they can organise their cash flow to provide for a comfortable stay, they will be raped repeatedly and face an almost inevitable slow and agonising death.
Well this is how urban legend now has it.
So we can see that the State now has a powerful [and formerly well hidden] incentive to maintain the present horror that is a prison system, as a deterrent to stiff collar 'thieving'.
Therefore we all declared first prize for this past year to be the Department of Correctional services [and #1 in the M&G Top Ten] for having presided over a monster of such horrific proportions that the very thought of going there makes grown accountants quail.
Thus the legitimised theft represented by taxation becomes more efficiently ground out of the truly productive in society, and sits in the budget surpluses idly waiting for the same medicine to be meted out to indolent and under performing cadres.
May all bloggers and other readers have a cool and prosperous 2006
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Monday, December 19, 2005
Playing the Rape card: a christmas tale
Weblog
Jozi
18 December 2005
The fun part of this end of the year shutdown time is the opportunity to meet old buddies who have moved offshore and who pay a passing visit to catch up with friends and family.
So on what was once called Dingaan's Day, and has now been deconstructed to some other unremembered reason to have a day off work, I shared a heap of ritually burned meat with an old friend. He is a guy who moved his factory offshore about five or six years ago, to avoid the BEE licensed property theft arrangement, that was blowing in at that time on the winds of change. He has since become rich working out of mainland China and exporting to many places.
He does still maintain a distribution office here now, and pops in and out about four times a year to check on sales, and shake hands with his favourite retailers for a few days. Talk soon turned to The Zuma Affair. 'When I was here a few months ago', he said, 'the news media communicated a definite sense of immanent revolution, I had to go somewhere to see a customer and the area was jammed with rallying supporters chanting weird things like 'down with Thabo'. It was dammed odd...what happened to 'kill the boer?'
'Aagh-a luta continua' I said, 'They are at least two thousand down, and many of the survivors are off to farm in Aussie.'
We then had some comment on the number of prominent personalities who had publicly backed Zuma and how they were all desperately scrambling around now to get their exposed arses back onto the correct seat in the great game of political musical chairs while the music's playing again.
'Now' he said eventually, 'It's like Zuma never existed. He has completely vanished. He's become- 'The man who never was'.' Then he paused and made his dramatic declaration- 'We've just seen the 'Rape Card' used for the first time.' He finished, 'The country's politics are evolving.'
'Oh-' I waited because I knew he wanted to say more, and living in China without speaking Chinese he doesn't get to talk often.
'No one was unhappy when he was accused of stealing, or whatever he was supposed to have done. It was normal and ok to most people, but the first whiff of rape and he's gone.'
And then of course since the man has become a born again racist over the past decade he had to have a theory-involving race, that he had disingenuously evolved from some anti-white tirade presented by our beloved leader last year.
'According to your Thabo the Great,' he said. He likes to lay on the 'your' bit, with that edge of sarcasm reserved especially for whitey's who associate too much with black people or are empathic with their issues.
"You remember that blogging thing he does on the Party's web page. I read it during a stopover in Hong Kong, 'All white people think all black men are natural rapists,'-remember that?'
I vaguely remembered, I said.
'So this is the new variation on the auld Race Card. Thabo's used the race card so successfully that people like me became politically impotent and left.'
'The race card?' I said, being disingenuous again: I thought we were talking about a rape card?' I like to stoke him up a bit.
'We are, but I want to illustrate my point. It's the same principle. The "race card" is used on whitey. You raise a reasonable objection to some outrageous policy direction that you know will have undesirable, unintended outcomes because its like... 'been there done that can't we try something different' and instantly you're silenced-
He manipulates the the old prejudice. Everyone 'knows'- 'All white men are racists' and of course we are. You can't escape it -So therefore you must be a racist to say what you said, and instantly everyone switches off you are equally instantly discredited. Now the same thing has just been done to Zuma-same rationale-same outcome- same cleansing of disagreeable opposition.'
And of course then there was the inevitable conspiracy theory, which i interrupted.
'Okay there are two issues here,' I said, cutting into the conspiracy and buying time with the old binary 'two issues' trick, while figuring out how this needed to be dealt with, or whether we should change subjects and deal with something more useful and tactful;, like generating better business. 'Firstly I disagree that this represents an evolution in our politics and secondly I don't think race is the issue here-for a change. Do you remember Excelsior?' I asked him, while we stirred the meat around on the Weber.
'Who doesn't?' His laughter was hearty: the past is such fun, and we digressed for a while into our shared past, to a time when a 'racist' was someone who despised Afrikaners for excluding us from the game. In similar braai conversations thirty five years ago the3 bullying ruling class of Afrikaners were regularly and contemptuously referred to as 'sandblasted blacks', and frankly Black people had been pushed so far off the agenda through the various litany of oppressive insulating mechanisms used by the white ruling class that most of us were so barely aware of their existence that it was generally convenient to employ the standard stereotype and dismiss them entirely.
Except for one thing, the Immorality Act. This piece of legislation made sexual contact between human beings of different skin pigmentation illegal, and any such 'discovered' contacts were the subject of regular salacious press report in such glorious tabloids as the late Sunday Express. The police vice squad had nothing to do except hang about Zoo Lake spying on courting couples [those were times when people could snog in their cars with no hindrance from itinerant peripatetic rapists and hijackers-one had only to be concerned that the occupants were complimentary in colour when the inevitable cops came checking with their flashlight that everyone was white-Others having been banished by night. We would sneer about policemen rubbing their willies in grand anticipation of what they found naked in motor cars.]
A considerable number of the people I have known over the years confess [now] that they had their first sexual encounter, with a home domestic worker, but such things were beyond secret [then], and were never shared until we were well over the times when such an act could put you behind bars. Men who had been caught especially prominent Afrikaner men, those who supported the law, regularly committed suicide in those bizarre times.
'Then we had Excelsior,' he shouted 'Yes, a whole mini-town wasn't it, suddenly acquiring a previously non-existent coloured population and rising rage amongst the Tannie Kollektive: the old mother grundies, those guardians of morality with their stern oversized hats, vast frocks and their mouths pulled down at the corners in permanent disapproval.' He was triumphant at the recollection. Excelsior was a landmark of note
"Okay but how did it all come out?" I asked
'No idea but I'm sure you are going to tell me aren't you?' He laughed.
'All the main dudes in the alleged town were at a dinner party, at an important person's house.' I was dredging up an imperfect recollection, reconstructing the lead Sunday Express story at the time, filtered through layers of booze.
'The important person was showing off and was abusive to a serving woman, who placed her hands on her hips and announced to him and the roomful of disapproving tannies - 'JA-Right now it's you stupid focken K-.r but later tonight when madam is sleeping, then it's 'my lovey', 'my little sugar', 'my little darling'-
The party ended in an uproar. Someone told the press and the town which was somewhere in the middle of fucksville, nowhere, became a cause celebré forever and the immorality act quietly died. That serving woman, whoever she was, struck a blow for freedom that night and I hope this male dominated new majority has honoured her for her stirring role. She also spawned an army of copycats, according to the urban legends of the time, and suddenly every prominent person was a potential target. "There is no evolving politics here-Black men aren't the only men who take a good fuck,' I finished my point.'
My old friend grudgingly relinquished a part of his theory, but added that guys like Tokyo Sexwale who was rumoured to be thinking of pitching for the 2009 nomination must be shitting themselves wondering who might come leaping out of the woodwork to denounce them, just as they start to develop a head of steam. 'The rape card is out of the bottle!' he declared -then remembering the second part of my objection to his hypothesis, demanded 'And what do you think it is, if it's not race?'
'It's a gender thing-for serious feminazis, all penetration equals rape.'
'Tell that to those horny chicks making the 'L word'' he tossed back.
'Whatever.' I wasn't going to be diverted by this standard sexist response. ' You know it's only power mad people who put up with all the shit you have to put up with to be in politics. And there is nothing much more power mad than women.' I said- He nodded, he knew-he's had four wives and still counting. 'The next President will be a woman.' I concluded. 'And I believe you are wrong too about this 'conspiracy' idea'. I tossed in for good measure.
'I'm sure I'm not.' He launched into a fanciful collection of conspiratorial conjectures that became progressively more intricate than a Hollywood epic, and were huge fun for a while. People so love their favourite conspiracies and there are so many, of such huge complexity. What always baffles me about these conspiracies though is their apparently seamless execution. In the real world in which we plod about, all around us, all we ever encounter in our day-to-day affairs are incompetent, lying morons who have no idea what they are doing. You know what I mean everyone you ever have to deal with seems to have been doing their job for about ten minutes or you got them on their first day. So -like how come we never encounter these amazingly competent conspirators in the real world?
'I don't think you can have it both ways' I said to him, passing him a stiff Gin and tonic. 'Surely, if your 'Thabo' argument, about a black man being prone to raping at a moment's notice, holds any validity, and I personally know of no study that conclusively demonstrates that, then no conspiracy was necessary, Zuma was an accident-in-waiting.'
Jozi
18 December 2005
The fun part of this end of the year shutdown time is the opportunity to meet old buddies who have moved offshore and who pay a passing visit to catch up with friends and family.
So on what was once called Dingaan's Day, and has now been deconstructed to some other unremembered reason to have a day off work, I shared a heap of ritually burned meat with an old friend. He is a guy who moved his factory offshore about five or six years ago, to avoid the BEE licensed property theft arrangement, that was blowing in at that time on the winds of change. He has since become rich working out of mainland China and exporting to many places.
He does still maintain a distribution office here now, and pops in and out about four times a year to check on sales, and shake hands with his favourite retailers for a few days. Talk soon turned to The Zuma Affair. 'When I was here a few months ago', he said, 'the news media communicated a definite sense of immanent revolution, I had to go somewhere to see a customer and the area was jammed with rallying supporters chanting weird things like 'down with Thabo'. It was dammed odd...what happened to 'kill the boer?'
'Aagh-a luta continua' I said, 'They are at least two thousand down, and many of the survivors are off to farm in Aussie.'
We then had some comment on the number of prominent personalities who had publicly backed Zuma and how they were all desperately scrambling around now to get their exposed arses back onto the correct seat in the great game of political musical chairs while the music's playing again.
'Now' he said eventually, 'It's like Zuma never existed. He has completely vanished. He's become- 'The man who never was'.' Then he paused and made his dramatic declaration- 'We've just seen the 'Rape Card' used for the first time.' He finished, 'The country's politics are evolving.'
'Oh-' I waited because I knew he wanted to say more, and living in China without speaking Chinese he doesn't get to talk often.
'No one was unhappy when he was accused of stealing, or whatever he was supposed to have done. It was normal and ok to most people, but the first whiff of rape and he's gone.'
And then of course since the man has become a born again racist over the past decade he had to have a theory-involving race, that he had disingenuously evolved from some anti-white tirade presented by our beloved leader last year.
'According to your Thabo the Great,' he said. He likes to lay on the 'your' bit, with that edge of sarcasm reserved especially for whitey's who associate too much with black people or are empathic with their issues.
"You remember that blogging thing he does on the Party's web page. I read it during a stopover in Hong Kong, 'All white people think all black men are natural rapists,'-remember that?'
I vaguely remembered, I said.
'So this is the new variation on the auld Race Card. Thabo's used the race card so successfully that people like me became politically impotent and left.'
'The race card?' I said, being disingenuous again: I thought we were talking about a rape card?' I like to stoke him up a bit.
'We are, but I want to illustrate my point. It's the same principle. The "race card" is used on whitey. You raise a reasonable objection to some outrageous policy direction that you know will have undesirable, unintended outcomes because its like... 'been there done that can't we try something different' and instantly you're silenced-
He manipulates the the old prejudice. Everyone 'knows'- 'All white men are racists' and of course we are. You can't escape it -So therefore you must be a racist to say what you said, and instantly everyone switches off you are equally instantly discredited. Now the same thing has just been done to Zuma-same rationale-same outcome- same cleansing of disagreeable opposition.'
And of course then there was the inevitable conspiracy theory, which i interrupted.
'Okay there are two issues here,' I said, cutting into the conspiracy and buying time with the old binary 'two issues' trick, while figuring out how this needed to be dealt with, or whether we should change subjects and deal with something more useful and tactful;, like generating better business. 'Firstly I disagree that this represents an evolution in our politics and secondly I don't think race is the issue here-for a change. Do you remember Excelsior?' I asked him, while we stirred the meat around on the Weber.
'Who doesn't?' His laughter was hearty: the past is such fun, and we digressed for a while into our shared past, to a time when a 'racist' was someone who despised Afrikaners for excluding us from the game. In similar braai conversations thirty five years ago the3 bullying ruling class of Afrikaners were regularly and contemptuously referred to as 'sandblasted blacks', and frankly Black people had been pushed so far off the agenda through the various litany of oppressive insulating mechanisms used by the white ruling class that most of us were so barely aware of their existence that it was generally convenient to employ the standard stereotype and dismiss them entirely.
Except for one thing, the Immorality Act. This piece of legislation made sexual contact between human beings of different skin pigmentation illegal, and any such 'discovered' contacts were the subject of regular salacious press report in such glorious tabloids as the late Sunday Express. The police vice squad had nothing to do except hang about Zoo Lake spying on courting couples [those were times when people could snog in their cars with no hindrance from itinerant peripatetic rapists and hijackers-one had only to be concerned that the occupants were complimentary in colour when the inevitable cops came checking with their flashlight that everyone was white-Others having been banished by night. We would sneer about policemen rubbing their willies in grand anticipation of what they found naked in motor cars.]
A considerable number of the people I have known over the years confess [now] that they had their first sexual encounter, with a home domestic worker, but such things were beyond secret [then], and were never shared until we were well over the times when such an act could put you behind bars. Men who had been caught especially prominent Afrikaner men, those who supported the law, regularly committed suicide in those bizarre times.
'Then we had Excelsior,' he shouted 'Yes, a whole mini-town wasn't it, suddenly acquiring a previously non-existent coloured population and rising rage amongst the Tannie Kollektive: the old mother grundies, those guardians of morality with their stern oversized hats, vast frocks and their mouths pulled down at the corners in permanent disapproval.' He was triumphant at the recollection. Excelsior was a landmark of note
"Okay but how did it all come out?" I asked
'No idea but I'm sure you are going to tell me aren't you?' He laughed.
'All the main dudes in the alleged town were at a dinner party, at an important person's house.' I was dredging up an imperfect recollection, reconstructing the lead Sunday Express story at the time, filtered through layers of booze.
'The important person was showing off and was abusive to a serving woman, who placed her hands on her hips and announced to him and the roomful of disapproving tannies - 'JA-Right now it's you stupid focken K-.r but later tonight when madam is sleeping, then it's 'my lovey', 'my little sugar', 'my little darling'-
The party ended in an uproar. Someone told the press and the town which was somewhere in the middle of fucksville, nowhere, became a cause celebré forever and the immorality act quietly died. That serving woman, whoever she was, struck a blow for freedom that night and I hope this male dominated new majority has honoured her for her stirring role. She also spawned an army of copycats, according to the urban legends of the time, and suddenly every prominent person was a potential target. "There is no evolving politics here-Black men aren't the only men who take a good fuck,' I finished my point.'
My old friend grudgingly relinquished a part of his theory, but added that guys like Tokyo Sexwale who was rumoured to be thinking of pitching for the 2009 nomination must be shitting themselves wondering who might come leaping out of the woodwork to denounce them, just as they start to develop a head of steam. 'The rape card is out of the bottle!' he declared -then remembering the second part of my objection to his hypothesis, demanded 'And what do you think it is, if it's not race?'
'It's a gender thing-for serious feminazis, all penetration equals rape.'
'Tell that to those horny chicks making the 'L word'' he tossed back.
'Whatever.' I wasn't going to be diverted by this standard sexist response. ' You know it's only power mad people who put up with all the shit you have to put up with to be in politics. And there is nothing much more power mad than women.' I said- He nodded, he knew-he's had four wives and still counting. 'The next President will be a woman.' I concluded. 'And I believe you are wrong too about this 'conspiracy' idea'. I tossed in for good measure.
'I'm sure I'm not.' He launched into a fanciful collection of conspiratorial conjectures that became progressively more intricate than a Hollywood epic, and were huge fun for a while. People so love their favourite conspiracies and there are so many, of such huge complexity. What always baffles me about these conspiracies though is their apparently seamless execution. In the real world in which we plod about, all around us, all we ever encounter in our day-to-day affairs are incompetent, lying morons who have no idea what they are doing. You know what I mean everyone you ever have to deal with seems to have been doing their job for about ten minutes or you got them on their first day. So -like how come we never encounter these amazingly competent conspirators in the real world?
'I don't think you can have it both ways' I said to him, passing him a stiff Gin and tonic. 'Surely, if your 'Thabo' argument, about a black man being prone to raping at a moment's notice, holds any validity, and I personally know of no study that conclusively demonstrates that, then no conspiracy was necessary, Zuma was an accident-in-waiting.'
Friday, December 9, 2005
Are we a work shy nation?
Are we a work shy nation?
Weblog 10 December 2005
Is it possible that the outcome of 300 years of struggling to overthrow the terrible overlords who dominated the Azanian sub-continent has so completely exhausted our newly liberated citizenry that a 'job' has become merely a place of refuge where the incumbents can rest from their labours?
This does seem to be the message we could draw from the recent bizarre hostage-taking incident at the Home Affairs Dept when an irate citizen finally flipped after waiting four years for an identity document. In the wake of the glorious rewards to 'some' brought about by the Revolution of '94 perhaps we are succumbing to the disturbing truth observed so succinctly by the scientist Steven Wright, that hard work pays off in the future while laziness pays off now.
Of course this single incident would not be valid enough evidence were it not for the overwhelming support for the hostage taker from the public and the media, indicating that the nation is 'Gatvol' with non-performance and that a great many more people would like to take the same steps: again, to borrow from Steven Wright, [a list of whose aphorisms pitched up on my email this week] 'A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking'.
So: We also know that we are almost overwhelmed daily with reports of disintegrating sewerage systems in bankrupt municipalities. Our city experiences electrical blackouts so regularly that you have to factor them into your budget calculations, and there are alarming reports about our long-term water safety needs.
Most pertinently this past fortnight we had a shutdown at a major airport down in the south end of the country when holes were discovered in the runway that had not been noticed in the previous SIX inspections. Amazingly no aircraft hit the things or we would we talking serious tragedy.
For most of us widespread indifferent performance in both the private and public sectors is a daily 'in your face' experience. Take for instance a member of my family who recently had to have a so-called 'medical procedure' [a piece of his body was sawn off, and a prosthetic replacement was hammered into the remaining bone tissue] at a hospital near us called the Morningside medi-clinic; a facility at the edge of Azania's so called 'Golden Square Mile'.
The procedure was a repeat in modern form of one he had thirty-five years ago. That job wore out and needed revision. He remarked that the medical proficiency relating to the 'operation' had improved exponentially over thirty years but that regrettably the 'after-care' had gone the other way and nearly killed him, requiring immediate and expensive interventions thus revealing the hidden cost of incompetence..
I went there once to visit him and was overwhelmed by the sheer filth of the wards in which sick people attempted to fight infection. The carpets looked as though they hadn't been cleaned in ages [should they even have carpets?], sack loads of discarded waste lay around in the hallway to his ward and I observed alleged orderlies who handled things like drips and dressings immediately after handling soiled bedpans, without washing hands in between-What a scary place [although in fairness I have seen worse in less salubrious neighbourhoods]. It is as though hospital assistants no longer need to consider hygiene in their day to day affairs -what would Florence have thought?
What brings this work-shy trend in our post- revolutionary society into sharp bas-relief is the contrasting sheer efficiency with which the current spate of 'heists' has been carried out this year [and a few others before].
[For offshore readers {O.R.}] who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon. One of the daily experiences of our 'neighbourhood' is the military style assaults-to-burgle on travelling armoured cash in transit vehicles, shopping malls, and casinos. It is not unusual for a squad of thirty men all armed with machine3 guns to be involved in such an 'event'.] The numbers of these heists runs into the hundreds for this year alone and they are a pretty long term phenomena that has accounted for a few billion bucks worth of 'takings' in 2005; not to mention that a few dozen innocent citizens have been gunned down in the frequent fire-fights that take place when these events occur.
The interesting thing is that there appear to have been so few arrests of these 'baddies' that one could say these heists are arrest proof, suggesting either incompetence on the part of the authorities or an iron tough discipline on the part of the [presumably] multiple gangs of 'heistees'.
Again, to draw on my Steven Wright [whoever he is?] email this week: "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to avoid work". Imagine a country where every legally empowered person has achieved their ambition and discovered the leisure inherent in 'work'.
Which brings me back to the baddies who reap their daily heist around our turf. In my view what distinguishes these outstanding exponents of a functional work ethic from the increasing dross of humanity that punctuate both corporate and public facilities, is embodied in that quaint word 'motivation'.
For most people it seems, work interrupts life. The main difference between a circus elephant and one that grew up in the wild is the length of the training. As the Jesuits were fond of observing, give me a child until its sixth birthday and it's ours for life.
People who have grown up in the prison that was pre-apartheid vile state would inevitably never have learned any other ambition other than to take over and 'gettital'- a completely reasonable ambition. As a result we became a society where everyone bought into the present-exclusively. Ripping off pays off now. I don't believe I am referring to any particular element in our society; notwithstanding that we are a diverse nation there are huge areas where we are all completely alike: laziness pays off now, corruption pays off now, a quick fuck pays off now; and the future is something one can put off indefinitely.
Success lies in determining what the future should be and then moulding one's energy towards its achievement-making the future real.
For an enormous number of people they have achieved beyond their fettered imaginations could have prescribed and it is for their children to continue and expand their own horizons. There is no longer a drum seductively beating-follow me-I'll take you there.
So what is it that makes the prolific heist so different to the run of the mill good guys-what is this 'motivation'?
At this point we have to resort to conjecture, which you will remember to be 'the formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence' [Collins].
Why have only a limited number of heistees been apprehended? No main organisers seem to have appeared in courts. Now and again a shootout occurs, resulting in the deaths of a clutch of criminals whose photos are then displayed in gory details in the omnivorous local media, always sharp to exploit a bit of bloodlust.
My own preference as a proponent of chaos theory is that the heistees represent the free market in crime: they are in many ways the last bastion of free enterprise in an over regulated State. Comfortable risks, short hours, and high rewards make heisting an attractive short-term career option. Plus you get to handle a machine gun and have power of life and death over the human Impalas who proliferate in our comfortable milieus. Bang, bang, people fall over: it's cool and fun and almost chic.
Others tell me that the heistees are the stooges of our famed 'Syndicates'[For O.R: the Chinese have Triads, the Italians the Mafia: we Southern Azanians have 'Syndicates']. There are some who argue that these 'Syndicates' are 'managed by Triads or prison 'Numbers' gangs, and who knows what other alien entities, all sucking off the natural intelligence of the masses.
Which raises a thought. [I warn you that this is a complicated thought, so follow carefully] What if a neighbouring crackpot dictator were seriously short of funds for meeting certain outstanding payments to the International Monetary Fund. He demands tribute from a feudal underling. What if his self-asserted feudal underling [later in history to be known as Thabo the Great] refused to make certain payments available from the public purse, of his fiefdom, to the crackpot dictator who, believing himself to be the last of an ancient ruling dynasty [aka Rozwi] has assumed some form of feudal obligation that exists only in the arcane depths of pre-colonial oral tradition.
Strange idea? Then imagine a man who is iron willwed enough to destroy the homes of the poor, [in bizarre echo of equally deluded 'devine rightist': Russian Tsars 'pogramising' the zones of the poor] to prevent them from expressing their political outrage, Such a man may well send forth squads of highly trained military chaps to take out the budget shortfall in heist takings. These men would be trained and experienced military fellows used to war and opposition. The crackpot dictator may be deluded but his military machine could be the slickest our money can buy.
If there has to be a well-organised syndicate orchestrating this entire Heist thing then I vote for 'Bob the Roz'. Notwithstanding this though my personal view is that we are witnessing the fruits of outcomes based education structured business studies classes, that have brilliantly inflamed the entrepreneurial hearts of an entire generation, and sent them forth to prosper in a way that makes perfect sense and gives bankrolling a completely new flavour. I vote for the young to be hiring out the old.
The irony is that this is not where the smart money has gone. Those motivated souls who are truly creaming it are doing it the smart way. According to regular press reports, clean collar criminals get away with around forty billion every year with minimal exposure, minimal gunfire, hardly ever a fatality and almost never a prosecution. It's regrettable to think that due to money laundering rules much of this loot will disappear from the national financial structure.
Either way it's a toss up between laziness-now-is-forever-extended and grabthemoneyandrun, as our collective failure to buy into the idea of the future places us precariously in a pillaging present.
Perhaps this is the subliminal reason for our Cabinet deciding against all reason and sensible accounting practices to 'Go For' the disputed Gautrain investment.
We are almost running this country at the moment on bullshit and hype. The future is a soccer match sometime in 2010 and a train to ferry the people.We constantly reiterate tired promises and cliches and progress is measured in micro gains. Ultimately to do this will be to say we are somebody in the world and can deliver on expectations.
We are a country in need of 'Purpose'. This idea of 'ongoing struggle' palls against the obvious overt lootage-As someone other than Steven Wright once observed 'You can fool all the people some times, most, most times but never all, all the time' [sic]. When you see your neighbour join the ruling party, take some form of office and suddenly acquire visible wealth it doesn't take the genius we hardly foster to recognise a rapidly 'berigged' deck.
Thus despair becomes the handmaiden of disillusionment; and underperformance becomes a right.
The absence of Purpose, or an overwhelming Reason for doing something, was the single most important factor discovered by the writer Victor Frankel for why so many of his fellow detainees in Auschwitz failed to survive the holocaust. The deadly efficiency of the heistees [whether Roz underlings or not] demonstrates the power of Purpose rooted into effective implementation. The indolence of the home affairs flunkeys who induced a citizen to break the law is a natural outcome of a purpose free life and demonstrates brilliantly why some people succeed and others don't. Purpose is a choice; work is an obligation that without Purpose becomes onerous and avoidable.
Only someone who buys into the idea that the future will one day arrive can be truly purposeful.
Love you all-NiK
Weblog 10 December 2005
Is it possible that the outcome of 300 years of struggling to overthrow the terrible overlords who dominated the Azanian sub-continent has so completely exhausted our newly liberated citizenry that a 'job' has become merely a place of refuge where the incumbents can rest from their labours?
This does seem to be the message we could draw from the recent bizarre hostage-taking incident at the Home Affairs Dept when an irate citizen finally flipped after waiting four years for an identity document. In the wake of the glorious rewards to 'some' brought about by the Revolution of '94 perhaps we are succumbing to the disturbing truth observed so succinctly by the scientist Steven Wright, that hard work pays off in the future while laziness pays off now.
Of course this single incident would not be valid enough evidence were it not for the overwhelming support for the hostage taker from the public and the media, indicating that the nation is 'Gatvol' with non-performance and that a great many more people would like to take the same steps: again, to borrow from Steven Wright, [a list of whose aphorisms pitched up on my email this week] 'A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking'.
So: We also know that we are almost overwhelmed daily with reports of disintegrating sewerage systems in bankrupt municipalities. Our city experiences electrical blackouts so regularly that you have to factor them into your budget calculations, and there are alarming reports about our long-term water safety needs.
Most pertinently this past fortnight we had a shutdown at a major airport down in the south end of the country when holes were discovered in the runway that had not been noticed in the previous SIX inspections. Amazingly no aircraft hit the things or we would we talking serious tragedy.
For most of us widespread indifferent performance in both the private and public sectors is a daily 'in your face' experience. Take for instance a member of my family who recently had to have a so-called 'medical procedure' [a piece of his body was sawn off, and a prosthetic replacement was hammered into the remaining bone tissue] at a hospital near us called the Morningside medi-clinic; a facility at the edge of Azania's so called 'Golden Square Mile'.
The procedure was a repeat in modern form of one he had thirty-five years ago. That job wore out and needed revision. He remarked that the medical proficiency relating to the 'operation' had improved exponentially over thirty years but that regrettably the 'after-care' had gone the other way and nearly killed him, requiring immediate and expensive interventions thus revealing the hidden cost of incompetence..
I went there once to visit him and was overwhelmed by the sheer filth of the wards in which sick people attempted to fight infection. The carpets looked as though they hadn't been cleaned in ages [should they even have carpets?], sack loads of discarded waste lay around in the hallway to his ward and I observed alleged orderlies who handled things like drips and dressings immediately after handling soiled bedpans, without washing hands in between-What a scary place [although in fairness I have seen worse in less salubrious neighbourhoods]. It is as though hospital assistants no longer need to consider hygiene in their day to day affairs -what would Florence have thought?
What brings this work-shy trend in our post- revolutionary society into sharp bas-relief is the contrasting sheer efficiency with which the current spate of 'heists' has been carried out this year [and a few others before].
[For offshore readers {O.R.}] who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon. One of the daily experiences of our 'neighbourhood' is the military style assaults-to-burgle on travelling armoured cash in transit vehicles, shopping malls, and casinos. It is not unusual for a squad of thirty men all armed with machine3 guns to be involved in such an 'event'.] The numbers of these heists runs into the hundreds for this year alone and they are a pretty long term phenomena that has accounted for a few billion bucks worth of 'takings' in 2005; not to mention that a few dozen innocent citizens have been gunned down in the frequent fire-fights that take place when these events occur.
The interesting thing is that there appear to have been so few arrests of these 'baddies' that one could say these heists are arrest proof, suggesting either incompetence on the part of the authorities or an iron tough discipline on the part of the [presumably] multiple gangs of 'heistees'.
Again, to draw on my Steven Wright [whoever he is?] email this week: "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to avoid work". Imagine a country where every legally empowered person has achieved their ambition and discovered the leisure inherent in 'work'.
Which brings me back to the baddies who reap their daily heist around our turf. In my view what distinguishes these outstanding exponents of a functional work ethic from the increasing dross of humanity that punctuate both corporate and public facilities, is embodied in that quaint word 'motivation'.
For most people it seems, work interrupts life. The main difference between a circus elephant and one that grew up in the wild is the length of the training. As the Jesuits were fond of observing, give me a child until its sixth birthday and it's ours for life.
People who have grown up in the prison that was pre-apartheid vile state would inevitably never have learned any other ambition other than to take over and 'gettital'- a completely reasonable ambition. As a result we became a society where everyone bought into the present-exclusively. Ripping off pays off now. I don't believe I am referring to any particular element in our society; notwithstanding that we are a diverse nation there are huge areas where we are all completely alike: laziness pays off now, corruption pays off now, a quick fuck pays off now; and the future is something one can put off indefinitely.
Success lies in determining what the future should be and then moulding one's energy towards its achievement-making the future real.
For an enormous number of people they have achieved beyond their fettered imaginations could have prescribed and it is for their children to continue and expand their own horizons. There is no longer a drum seductively beating-follow me-I'll take you there.
So what is it that makes the prolific heist so different to the run of the mill good guys-what is this 'motivation'?
At this point we have to resort to conjecture, which you will remember to be 'the formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence' [Collins].
Why have only a limited number of heistees been apprehended? No main organisers seem to have appeared in courts. Now and again a shootout occurs, resulting in the deaths of a clutch of criminals whose photos are then displayed in gory details in the omnivorous local media, always sharp to exploit a bit of bloodlust.
My own preference as a proponent of chaos theory is that the heistees represent the free market in crime: they are in many ways the last bastion of free enterprise in an over regulated State. Comfortable risks, short hours, and high rewards make heisting an attractive short-term career option. Plus you get to handle a machine gun and have power of life and death over the human Impalas who proliferate in our comfortable milieus. Bang, bang, people fall over: it's cool and fun and almost chic.
Others tell me that the heistees are the stooges of our famed 'Syndicates'[For O.R: the Chinese have Triads, the Italians the Mafia: we Southern Azanians have 'Syndicates']. There are some who argue that these 'Syndicates' are 'managed by Triads or prison 'Numbers' gangs, and who knows what other alien entities, all sucking off the natural intelligence of the masses.
Which raises a thought. [I warn you that this is a complicated thought, so follow carefully] What if a neighbouring crackpot dictator were seriously short of funds for meeting certain outstanding payments to the International Monetary Fund. He demands tribute from a feudal underling. What if his self-asserted feudal underling [later in history to be known as Thabo the Great] refused to make certain payments available from the public purse, of his fiefdom, to the crackpot dictator who, believing himself to be the last of an ancient ruling dynasty [aka Rozwi] has assumed some form of feudal obligation that exists only in the arcane depths of pre-colonial oral tradition.
Strange idea? Then imagine a man who is iron willwed enough to destroy the homes of the poor, [in bizarre echo of equally deluded 'devine rightist': Russian Tsars 'pogramising' the zones of the poor] to prevent them from expressing their political outrage, Such a man may well send forth squads of highly trained military chaps to take out the budget shortfall in heist takings. These men would be trained and experienced military fellows used to war and opposition. The crackpot dictator may be deluded but his military machine could be the slickest our money can buy.
If there has to be a well-organised syndicate orchestrating this entire Heist thing then I vote for 'Bob the Roz'. Notwithstanding this though my personal view is that we are witnessing the fruits of outcomes based education structured business studies classes, that have brilliantly inflamed the entrepreneurial hearts of an entire generation, and sent them forth to prosper in a way that makes perfect sense and gives bankrolling a completely new flavour. I vote for the young to be hiring out the old.
The irony is that this is not where the smart money has gone. Those motivated souls who are truly creaming it are doing it the smart way. According to regular press reports, clean collar criminals get away with around forty billion every year with minimal exposure, minimal gunfire, hardly ever a fatality and almost never a prosecution. It's regrettable to think that due to money laundering rules much of this loot will disappear from the national financial structure.
Either way it's a toss up between laziness-now-is-forever-extended and grabthemoneyandrun, as our collective failure to buy into the idea of the future places us precariously in a pillaging present.
Perhaps this is the subliminal reason for our Cabinet deciding against all reason and sensible accounting practices to 'Go For' the disputed Gautrain investment.
We are almost running this country at the moment on bullshit and hype. The future is a soccer match sometime in 2010 and a train to ferry the people.We constantly reiterate tired promises and cliches and progress is measured in micro gains. Ultimately to do this will be to say we are somebody in the world and can deliver on expectations.
We are a country in need of 'Purpose'. This idea of 'ongoing struggle' palls against the obvious overt lootage-As someone other than Steven Wright once observed 'You can fool all the people some times, most, most times but never all, all the time' [sic]. When you see your neighbour join the ruling party, take some form of office and suddenly acquire visible wealth it doesn't take the genius we hardly foster to recognise a rapidly 'berigged' deck.
Thus despair becomes the handmaiden of disillusionment; and underperformance becomes a right.
The absence of Purpose, or an overwhelming Reason for doing something, was the single most important factor discovered by the writer Victor Frankel for why so many of his fellow detainees in Auschwitz failed to survive the holocaust. The deadly efficiency of the heistees [whether Roz underlings or not] demonstrates the power of Purpose rooted into effective implementation. The indolence of the home affairs flunkeys who induced a citizen to break the law is a natural outcome of a purpose free life and demonstrates brilliantly why some people succeed and others don't. Purpose is a choice; work is an obligation that without Purpose becomes onerous and avoidable.
Only someone who buys into the idea that the future will one day arrive can be truly purposeful.
Love you all-NiK
Monday, November 14, 2005
The Butchers of Bali
The horrible slaughter of human beings at play last week in Amman, Jordan once again highlights the presence of evil in our world.
Fanciful as it is to speculate that the CIA is brainwashing idiots into committing acts of horror, it is more probable that fanatics of many descriptions are hijacking various religions to fight a last ditch struggle against the secular forces of reason that have been in the ascendency for some time now.
This piece was written in rage after the murders of hundred of children playing in Bali some years ago.
Now i see that a woman, part of a married pair has condfessed to blowing up a room full of wedding guests. She is a failed bomb and a bomb cannot be expected to have any morality.
Lyndon Johnson was alleged to have spoken in a cavalier fashion about America's prospects in Vietnam. "We are killing ten of theirs to one of ours." he said,"So we must win, cause we got more people."
Alexander HAig said much the same thing in the great european civil war 1914-1918.
AT the moment the bombers are scoring twenty to thirty per hit so if we're not careful 'we' whoever 'we' are who are the presumed objective of all this terror may well lose.
Weblog 17/10/02
The Butchers of Bali
'What we obtain too cheaply we value too lightly'
I read these lines of Thomas Paine, American
Revolutionary, and secular pamphleteer
as I heard
The news on the Television
About the horror attack on happy
Young
Human
Beings
At play in Bali.
Once again the world of unreason
Has intersected with that
Of the rational.
Democracy and human ingenuity versus the
Nature of the human at its worst
This struggle between the forces of reason
And unreason, millennia old
Has persisted in force now for 500 years: is it finally
Showdown time.
How does one react to a barbaric act?
What could motivate a human being to
Deliberately plan and then execute
Such an horrendous crime
Against ordinary people.
What war are these people fighting
That makes it possible to demonise a room full of children
So completely that their destruction leaves them cold?
Is this the true face of evil
Acting in defence of some irrational good?
In this strange war between the
Secular forces of progress, the law,
The democratic process and the frequent flaw
Of reason
Against the insidious poison of
Unreason how does one define the
Line
Between good and evil
Other than to extend beyond
Both.
Is it the taking of life itself that is evil?
Should evil be fought with evil?
Should we argue that an eye deserves an eye?
Or would it be more certain to argue
That an eye deserves the entire body when
Those who preach and then practice bloody murder
Perpetrate such acts in defence of the indefensible.
If we gave this behaviour any other motivation than religion then we should call
Those people madmen
And we should incarcerate them in a place of safety
For both themselves and us, for they
Act on behalf of a conjecture
Raised to a fantasy.
If evil lies in ignorance then
How is one to judge
A creed that holds an unbeliever to be
Evil
And pursuit of their own creed
To be the only truth.
Is it then truth?
To live in blissful
Ignorance
Of the real nature of death and the illusion of the life
Ever after
Is this not substantiating one evil by recourse to another?
And is this not in conflict with the law?
At best it is deceptive advertising.
So what Now?
Firstly it is beyond obvious that we are engaged in a circumstance Mao
Tse Tung once defined as the
'War of the Flea.'
The scratch, scratch, scratch has already made its mark
Upon us
In the form of sagging, markets, declining
Productivity and terrorised citizens.
Airlines have collapsed and millions have had their lives
Disrupted, many terminally, by this scratch
Scratch
Scratch.
This 'War-' is being motivated and prompted by
Unreasoning fanatics who hate the world
As it is, or even as it could be, probably because liberated citizens have no need
Of fantastical nostrums to leaven the horror of their
Lives.
No these unreasoning fanatics seek nothing less
Than a return to
A more congenial form of Stone Age: where inequality
May be rationalised
Through invocation of some of other
Sacred message justifying the inequality of human beings.
For the Secularists of the world
The way forward is terrifyingly apparent.
We are under siege by people, who it seems believe in ghosts and goblins
And in their desperate search for
Simplicity
Seek a future more deeply rooted in the 8th century than in the 21st.
It is an essential ingredient
Of the democratic viewpoint that
Those strange human beings who are terrified of the
Dark and seek solace in strange antediluvian
Philosophies and pastimes are entitled to those beliefs and practices
Provided they remain
Private and personal.
When those beliefs transcend their correct place in moderating
Private behaviour then, as they say, the buck must stop.
Any system of belief that condones
The butchery of citizens
Whether in Bali, New York or the remotest villages of
Algeria or wherever else this pestilential
Terror has struck over the past decades of increasing horror,
Has to be evaluated in terms of
Its final objective, which is to enslave the mind
And shackle it to darkness.
This layman and secularist has to
Interpret that desired outcome of the Fundamentalist
(Of whatever creed)
Using the objective evidence
Presented by those places which have succumbed to the terror
Of religious oppression.
Away with this horror
Down with all the priests of darkness with their infernal cargo cults.
What priests and other brainwashed acolytes may choose to believe in the sanctity of their heads in private places
Is their right.
It is not their right
To demand that if the rest of us do not share their onanistic
Obsession that we must die.
This is both barbaric and absurd.
To put it more simply their position is the metaphysical equivalent of
Claiming that all those
Who will not drive, say, a Mercedes Benz
Should be put to death for failing to drive the 'true motorcar'
Or failing to achieve 'the true driving experience'.
We see this
As absurd. Why is it that the marketers of
Soul food should expect us to see their musings as being any different or
Subject to alternative rules just because
The product they sell
Is more intangible than
Life assurance or the sales of advertising space?
At best they sell a conjecture at worst they peddle
Lies.
Increasingly we citizens of a secular State
View people of such a fanatical disposition (favouring
The world of unreason)
As objects of pity: the lunatics of Bedlam, at best
Sad confused people who seek the certainty in ghost stories, ghost written
For them by countless nameless monks
Who gathered about them nostrums,
Like so much unsophisticated advertising fluff
And public relations hype.
That we should let them kill us
In their despair at our amusement
Is intolerable and may require that we set aside
Our indulgence in the
Interests of our own survival.
.NiK(2002)
God is a thought that makes cooked all that is straight, and
Makes turn whatever
Stands. How? Should time be gone and all that is
Impermanent a mere lie? -. Evil I call it and
Misanthropic all this teaching of the One and the Plenum
And the Unmoved and the Sated
And the Permanent. All the permanent --- that is only
A parable
And the poets lie too much.
Nietzsche
After Bond: a Haiku for Leigh Matthews: *
Sweet child lies here
plucked too early left
cold one winter's night.
.NiK[04]
Student and loved child of distraught parents: abducted at random from the car park of Bond University in Jozi, was ransomed and then murdered. 2004. R.I.P.
There is no greater calamity
Than lavish desires
There is no greater guilt
Than discontent
There is no greater disaster
Than greed.
Lao Tzu
The judge quoted these words when sentencing Donovan Moodley to life in prison for the abduction and murder of Leigh Mathews on the eve of her twenty first birthday. He pleaded guilty and took the secret of who had helped him [if anyone] to prison.
Fanciful as it is to speculate that the CIA is brainwashing idiots into committing acts of horror, it is more probable that fanatics of many descriptions are hijacking various religions to fight a last ditch struggle against the secular forces of reason that have been in the ascendency for some time now.
This piece was written in rage after the murders of hundred of children playing in Bali some years ago.
Now i see that a woman, part of a married pair has condfessed to blowing up a room full of wedding guests. She is a failed bomb and a bomb cannot be expected to have any morality.
Lyndon Johnson was alleged to have spoken in a cavalier fashion about America's prospects in Vietnam. "We are killing ten of theirs to one of ours." he said,"So we must win, cause we got more people."
Alexander HAig said much the same thing in the great european civil war 1914-1918.
AT the moment the bombers are scoring twenty to thirty per hit so if we're not careful 'we' whoever 'we' are who are the presumed objective of all this terror may well lose.
Weblog 17/10/02
The Butchers of Bali
'What we obtain too cheaply we value too lightly'
I read these lines of Thomas Paine, American
Revolutionary, and secular pamphleteer
as I heard
The news on the Television
About the horror attack on happy
Young
Human
Beings
At play in Bali.
Once again the world of unreason
Has intersected with that
Of the rational.
Democracy and human ingenuity versus the
Nature of the human at its worst
This struggle between the forces of reason
And unreason, millennia old
Has persisted in force now for 500 years: is it finally
Showdown time.
How does one react to a barbaric act?
What could motivate a human being to
Deliberately plan and then execute
Such an horrendous crime
Against ordinary people.
What war are these people fighting
That makes it possible to demonise a room full of children
So completely that their destruction leaves them cold?
Is this the true face of evil
Acting in defence of some irrational good?
In this strange war between the
Secular forces of progress, the law,
The democratic process and the frequent flaw
Of reason
Against the insidious poison of
Unreason how does one define the
Line
Between good and evil
Other than to extend beyond
Both.
Is it the taking of life itself that is evil?
Should evil be fought with evil?
Should we argue that an eye deserves an eye?
Or would it be more certain to argue
That an eye deserves the entire body when
Those who preach and then practice bloody murder
Perpetrate such acts in defence of the indefensible.
If we gave this behaviour any other motivation than religion then we should call
Those people madmen
And we should incarcerate them in a place of safety
For both themselves and us, for they
Act on behalf of a conjecture
Raised to a fantasy.
If evil lies in ignorance then
How is one to judge
A creed that holds an unbeliever to be
Evil
And pursuit of their own creed
To be the only truth.
Is it then truth?
To live in blissful
Ignorance
Of the real nature of death and the illusion of the life
Ever after
Is this not substantiating one evil by recourse to another?
And is this not in conflict with the law?
At best it is deceptive advertising.
So what Now?
Firstly it is beyond obvious that we are engaged in a circumstance Mao
Tse Tung once defined as the
'War of the Flea.'
The scratch, scratch, scratch has already made its mark
Upon us
In the form of sagging, markets, declining
Productivity and terrorised citizens.
Airlines have collapsed and millions have had their lives
Disrupted, many terminally, by this scratch
Scratch
Scratch.
This 'War-' is being motivated and prompted by
Unreasoning fanatics who hate the world
As it is, or even as it could be, probably because liberated citizens have no need
Of fantastical nostrums to leaven the horror of their
Lives.
No these unreasoning fanatics seek nothing less
Than a return to
A more congenial form of Stone Age: where inequality
May be rationalised
Through invocation of some of other
Sacred message justifying the inequality of human beings.
For the Secularists of the world
The way forward is terrifyingly apparent.
We are under siege by people, who it seems believe in ghosts and goblins
And in their desperate search for
Simplicity
Seek a future more deeply rooted in the 8th century than in the 21st.
It is an essential ingredient
Of the democratic viewpoint that
Those strange human beings who are terrified of the
Dark and seek solace in strange antediluvian
Philosophies and pastimes are entitled to those beliefs and practices
Provided they remain
Private and personal.
When those beliefs transcend their correct place in moderating
Private behaviour then, as they say, the buck must stop.
Any system of belief that condones
The butchery of citizens
Whether in Bali, New York or the remotest villages of
Algeria or wherever else this pestilential
Terror has struck over the past decades of increasing horror,
Has to be evaluated in terms of
Its final objective, which is to enslave the mind
And shackle it to darkness.
This layman and secularist has to
Interpret that desired outcome of the Fundamentalist
(Of whatever creed)
Using the objective evidence
Presented by those places which have succumbed to the terror
Of religious oppression.
Away with this horror
Down with all the priests of darkness with their infernal cargo cults.
What priests and other brainwashed acolytes may choose to believe in the sanctity of their heads in private places
Is their right.
It is not their right
To demand that if the rest of us do not share their onanistic
Obsession that we must die.
This is both barbaric and absurd.
To put it more simply their position is the metaphysical equivalent of
Claiming that all those
Who will not drive, say, a Mercedes Benz
Should be put to death for failing to drive the 'true motorcar'
Or failing to achieve 'the true driving experience'.
We see this
As absurd. Why is it that the marketers of
Soul food should expect us to see their musings as being any different or
Subject to alternative rules just because
The product they sell
Is more intangible than
Life assurance or the sales of advertising space?
At best they sell a conjecture at worst they peddle
Lies.
Increasingly we citizens of a secular State
View people of such a fanatical disposition (favouring
The world of unreason)
As objects of pity: the lunatics of Bedlam, at best
Sad confused people who seek the certainty in ghost stories, ghost written
For them by countless nameless monks
Who gathered about them nostrums,
Like so much unsophisticated advertising fluff
And public relations hype.
That we should let them kill us
In their despair at our amusement
Is intolerable and may require that we set aside
Our indulgence in the
Interests of our own survival.
.NiK(2002)
God is a thought that makes cooked all that is straight, and
Makes turn whatever
Stands. How? Should time be gone and all that is
Impermanent a mere lie? -. Evil I call it and
Misanthropic all this teaching of the One and the Plenum
And the Unmoved and the Sated
And the Permanent. All the permanent --- that is only
A parable
And the poets lie too much.
Nietzsche
After Bond: a Haiku for Leigh Matthews: *
Sweet child lies here
plucked too early left
cold one winter's night.
.NiK[04]
Student and loved child of distraught parents: abducted at random from the car park of Bond University in Jozi, was ransomed and then murdered. 2004. R.I.P.
There is no greater calamity
Than lavish desires
There is no greater guilt
Than discontent
There is no greater disaster
Than greed.
Lao Tzu
The judge quoted these words when sentencing Donovan Moodley to life in prison for the abduction and murder of Leigh Mathews on the eve of her twenty first birthday. He pleaded guilty and took the secret of who had helped him [if anyone] to prison.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
Weblog 6 November 05
Jozi South Central Zone One
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
At the moment all Thabo's good wo/ men
And all Thabo's horses want to knock Humpty Dumpty
Off the wall again with a battering ram of rising interest rates.
And we all know about the problem of putting things back together again.
It is this Blog's view that a rise in interest rates should be postponed for as long as
reasonably possible towards the end of next year. There are in my view various
reasons why this would be sensible.
Firstly I think it is a bad move from the point of view of the BEE programme.
Secondly our interest rates are still far too high for us and should in fact come down even further than they already are. They are our interest rates not some other country's. Thirdly it is my opinion that we have a change of investor in the offshore foreign investor category and this may well indicate a shift in investor behaviour significant enough to test by squeezing the margins traditionally expected by offshore investors.
But firstly to the BEE programme [for offshore readers: South Africa has embarked on a programme to remedy the past evils of the ancient Apartheid system by introducing a counter ' Togetherheit' programme which the government of SA calls BEE or Black Economic Empowerment. It's rapidly becoming more Byzantine than the Apartheid wankers dreamt of in their philosophy [sorry willy]]
This Togetherheit programme is turning into a quagmire of bureaucratic black tape as increasingly the beady eye of the State is brought to bear on every facet of commercial life; with the intention that no one should even contemplate any commercially oriented action that does not intimately involve a black person. Even black people have to be intimately involved with black people.
One of the emerging downsides of the programme is that it creates discriminatory vested interest structures between competing black individuals. In having to make a decision to employ or share ownership with a statutory black person the most logical and sensible approach [for a non black whatever that is or any other person] has to be to choose someone who is connected to the system in some way: someone that is, who is 'greased'. Logically therefore when choosing between a competent qualified and skilled black person and a buffoon who represents the Party's interests or who has a cousin on the tender board: but both of whom can be considered as 'having grease', then centuries of history and present anecdotal evidence suggests that the latter gets the job. Grease always trumps merit.
Therefore notwithstanding that Black people make up 91 % of the population only a few thousand have Grease. Because of this we have an explosion in upper end remuneration packages as the handful of well-connected dudes trot around factoring their prices higher and higher. This pursuit of those who have 'grease' pushes up the price of greasemongers at the broad expense of those less connected giving rise to the currently accelerating wage gap between the well-connected rich and the generally unwashed poor. It also facilitates a skills exodus of alarming proportions [ if anyone could get their noses out of the trough long enough to care], as those unconnected, greaseless black citizens seek a level playing field elsewhere where grease counts for less than know how or, less fashionably, 'merit'.
What this means at a practical level is that huge chunks of the economy are increasingly under the guidance of persons whose prime business skill and acumen is suspect, since grease power is not necessarily the same as business savvy [although obviously there are instances when it is and we will later discover some ratios].
This means that a rising tide of interest rates will do the 'market's' traditional work of weeding out the weak and the inept, the corrupt and the useless with perhaps rather more brutality than would be politically convenient, given that the top of the next rates cycle could be somewhere in the run up to the next general election.
Because so many appointees may be suspect under stress, it is better that the present crop of BEE winners should have a bit more practice on the smooth fields of the longest period of economic expansion in our history, before they have to start riding bareback on a rocky slope. The real issue here is the size of the debt burden, in the debt for equity swap that has characterised the past few years and which is unknown, or like almost all statistics in our fair land something of a thumb suck.
Currently this debt is being liquidated by the healthy profit flows of the past two years. However it could be that five fat years are needed to push most of these deals into positive debt limited cash flows.
As we all know monetary economics discriminates against those who use borrowed capital to develop their businesses. Why should we whack our newly emerging entrepreneur base with the heavy reality of monetary theory before it's absolutely necessary.
In fact what the logic of BEE demands is that the interest rate regime be lowered even further so as to consolidate debt into more manageable packages while building profits to offset debt. To throw an entire emerging class to the wolves as they are just beginning to gain their spurs would add cruelty to the growing resentment the ruling party is facing amongst discontented mobs in a rising number of backwater places.
Of course the Reserve Bank would argue, plausibly, that we are hostage to foreign trends and that we must start to raise our interest rates or get out of 'sync'.
One of these 'trends', is that we have for decades now had a spread of three, four or even five percentage points between our rate and that of our trading partners, to encourage investment, by party's in those places, in our economy, which by default therefore has to be considered a risky environment.
In other words America's present rate is 4% [after being raised twelve times in the past year or so] versus our 7% historically 'low' rates, giving a 'low' spread of three percentage points. When you consider that in many [developed world] regions a quarter of one eighth of one percent may be a margin sufficient to attract one of the billion dollar funds investors who proliferate in the first world you can imagine that a three point spread is munificent, and even seen as risky.
Yet we need it. Most of our foreign investment is hot investment. This doesn't mean it is illegal although some probably is FICA notwithstanding. It means it's the money a fund manger is looking to use to balance his* quarterly earnings growth profile and meet his* targets. Stick some money in the SA market for a few months and pull some guaranteed percentages. [* Apparently fund managers are almost always 'he']
Now you may argue why should we citizens have to pay higher rates of interest so's some offshore punter can get a fatter guarantee than he could at home. Well firstly it works and brings in money that wasn't coming anyway. Secondly you're right why should we?
Mostly we have to do it because the laws we are cobbling together to facilitate our new "Togetherheit" policy are complicated enough for we to live here to figure out, but mostly, as far as foreigners are concerned, it's like a game of Marabaraba. Most canny investors know that the more complicated the rules the greater the risks of business. In all probability one attracts a class of investor who enjoys the Byzantine because it affords strategic hiding places.
This historical spread between 'our' rates and 'their' rates suits offshore investors at our expense. Achieving an official 6% growth rate [I'm ignoring unconfirmed reports with which I agree that the true rate of growth is probably already 6%] requires an acceleration of activity. Rising patterns of interest rates have as their rationale the curbing off growth to restrain cost and wage inflationary pressures. Therefore raising interest rates in the near future will work counter to our expressed desire.
This raises the third issue. Given that risks of business under conditions of bureaucratic excess is not going to disappear how can I suggest lowering rates when the rest of the world is raising theirs.
It is because of the canny class of investor I've just mentioned. I believe we have a different type of investor today than we had in the past when the four-point spread was critical.
To illustrate this I ask you to cast your mind back a few weeks to a most eventful week when the murder of a prominent mining financial personality drove the headlines while page three carried the story of the governments expropriation moves on a clutch of farms. A funny thing happened on our way to the interest rate argument.
The exchange rate never moved. More recently the Gov't has announced it intends to expropriate another sixty farms [and, I predict, about a thousand by end 2006]. Again the rate never flickered. Five years ago a similar event sent the rand crashing to thirteen to the dollar and financial mayhem ensued.
Now, notwithstanding considerable urban and rural unrest, expropriations, high profile crimes and other things that would normally cause investor jitters we have not a murmur. Interest rates have remained what Michael Coulson of the financial press calls 'range bound'. [okay it is nudging above the top of the range at the moment but this is hardly dramatic.]
My suspicion is that we currently have a different breed of investor to what we have had in the past. They certainly seem tougher and with a much lower 'whine' factor. They may possibly even be those to whom our issues are small beer, and are as such demonstrably people who may be here for more than a train ride.
In fact I would speculate that many are hovering on the sidelines to swoop in and buy up the shareholdings of BEE empowerment entities when those groupings find it expedient to 'sell off' when the debt service burden becomes unbearable, as it inevitably must do when interest rates are fifty percent higher than they are today and the monthly instalment on the family Merc jumps from ten grand to fifteen, simultaneously with the relevant revenue stream shrinking by twenty percent. It's a well-worn story.
As a side issue on this I am also speculating that those many business entities that have structured their BEE ownership equity with forced 'buy back' provisions: i.e.: a 'You have to sell your shares back to us if you want to sell them' clause will be challenged in court and the court will rule against them, quite possibly on onerous restraint of trade grounds. In fact it is possible that too early a resort to hiking interest rates may well see us emerge from the next round of the 'grand old' business cycle with a radically transformed ownership structure in the national economy-albeit not necessarily the transformation we envisaged.
So to nurture the BEE programme and sustain the present 'good times' we should take account of a changed behaviour response pattern on the part of our current crop of offshore and other sources of FDI's [foreign direct investments] and accept that all this gives us the potential to track at least a half to one percentage point closer to the American rate.
We have to act with the courage of our convictions here. Since we have chosen to go this complex BEE route we must hold true to our conviction. We have demonstrated to some investors at least that ours is a stable financial environment, albeit with some curious quirks, and an expanding market maintains this stability. As such, ours is appears to be a reliable investment destination end in itself. Holding ourselves steady in the present interest regime place, or even lower, for the next twelve months would extend our present buoyant market conditions for at least another twelve months, and that may then piggy back us into the era of 'Grand Spending' the Government intends to initiate when they get around to it-with Gautrain and other tales. Only then should we be thinking of tightening the taps a tad.
Loves ya all
NiK
Jozi South Central Zone One
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
At the moment all Thabo's good wo/ men
And all Thabo's horses want to knock Humpty Dumpty
Off the wall again with a battering ram of rising interest rates.
And we all know about the problem of putting things back together again.
It is this Blog's view that a rise in interest rates should be postponed for as long as
reasonably possible towards the end of next year. There are in my view various
reasons why this would be sensible.
Firstly I think it is a bad move from the point of view of the BEE programme.
Secondly our interest rates are still far too high for us and should in fact come down even further than they already are. They are our interest rates not some other country's. Thirdly it is my opinion that we have a change of investor in the offshore foreign investor category and this may well indicate a shift in investor behaviour significant enough to test by squeezing the margins traditionally expected by offshore investors.
But firstly to the BEE programme [for offshore readers: South Africa has embarked on a programme to remedy the past evils of the ancient Apartheid system by introducing a counter ' Togetherheit' programme which the government of SA calls BEE or Black Economic Empowerment. It's rapidly becoming more Byzantine than the Apartheid wankers dreamt of in their philosophy [sorry willy]]
This Togetherheit programme is turning into a quagmire of bureaucratic black tape as increasingly the beady eye of the State is brought to bear on every facet of commercial life; with the intention that no one should even contemplate any commercially oriented action that does not intimately involve a black person. Even black people have to be intimately involved with black people.
One of the emerging downsides of the programme is that it creates discriminatory vested interest structures between competing black individuals. In having to make a decision to employ or share ownership with a statutory black person the most logical and sensible approach [for a non black whatever that is or any other person] has to be to choose someone who is connected to the system in some way: someone that is, who is 'greased'. Logically therefore when choosing between a competent qualified and skilled black person and a buffoon who represents the Party's interests or who has a cousin on the tender board: but both of whom can be considered as 'having grease', then centuries of history and present anecdotal evidence suggests that the latter gets the job. Grease always trumps merit.
Therefore notwithstanding that Black people make up 91 % of the population only a few thousand have Grease. Because of this we have an explosion in upper end remuneration packages as the handful of well-connected dudes trot around factoring their prices higher and higher. This pursuit of those who have 'grease' pushes up the price of greasemongers at the broad expense of those less connected giving rise to the currently accelerating wage gap between the well-connected rich and the generally unwashed poor. It also facilitates a skills exodus of alarming proportions [ if anyone could get their noses out of the trough long enough to care], as those unconnected, greaseless black citizens seek a level playing field elsewhere where grease counts for less than know how or, less fashionably, 'merit'.
What this means at a practical level is that huge chunks of the economy are increasingly under the guidance of persons whose prime business skill and acumen is suspect, since grease power is not necessarily the same as business savvy [although obviously there are instances when it is and we will later discover some ratios].
This means that a rising tide of interest rates will do the 'market's' traditional work of weeding out the weak and the inept, the corrupt and the useless with perhaps rather more brutality than would be politically convenient, given that the top of the next rates cycle could be somewhere in the run up to the next general election.
Because so many appointees may be suspect under stress, it is better that the present crop of BEE winners should have a bit more practice on the smooth fields of the longest period of economic expansion in our history, before they have to start riding bareback on a rocky slope. The real issue here is the size of the debt burden, in the debt for equity swap that has characterised the past few years and which is unknown, or like almost all statistics in our fair land something of a thumb suck.
Currently this debt is being liquidated by the healthy profit flows of the past two years. However it could be that five fat years are needed to push most of these deals into positive debt limited cash flows.
As we all know monetary economics discriminates against those who use borrowed capital to develop their businesses. Why should we whack our newly emerging entrepreneur base with the heavy reality of monetary theory before it's absolutely necessary.
In fact what the logic of BEE demands is that the interest rate regime be lowered even further so as to consolidate debt into more manageable packages while building profits to offset debt. To throw an entire emerging class to the wolves as they are just beginning to gain their spurs would add cruelty to the growing resentment the ruling party is facing amongst discontented mobs in a rising number of backwater places.
Of course the Reserve Bank would argue, plausibly, that we are hostage to foreign trends and that we must start to raise our interest rates or get out of 'sync'.
One of these 'trends', is that we have for decades now had a spread of three, four or even five percentage points between our rate and that of our trading partners, to encourage investment, by party's in those places, in our economy, which by default therefore has to be considered a risky environment.
In other words America's present rate is 4% [after being raised twelve times in the past year or so] versus our 7% historically 'low' rates, giving a 'low' spread of three percentage points. When you consider that in many [developed world] regions a quarter of one eighth of one percent may be a margin sufficient to attract one of the billion dollar funds investors who proliferate in the first world you can imagine that a three point spread is munificent, and even seen as risky.
Yet we need it. Most of our foreign investment is hot investment. This doesn't mean it is illegal although some probably is FICA notwithstanding. It means it's the money a fund manger is looking to use to balance his* quarterly earnings growth profile and meet his* targets. Stick some money in the SA market for a few months and pull some guaranteed percentages. [* Apparently fund managers are almost always 'he']
Now you may argue why should we citizens have to pay higher rates of interest so's some offshore punter can get a fatter guarantee than he could at home. Well firstly it works and brings in money that wasn't coming anyway. Secondly you're right why should we?
Mostly we have to do it because the laws we are cobbling together to facilitate our new "Togetherheit" policy are complicated enough for we to live here to figure out, but mostly, as far as foreigners are concerned, it's like a game of Marabaraba. Most canny investors know that the more complicated the rules the greater the risks of business. In all probability one attracts a class of investor who enjoys the Byzantine because it affords strategic hiding places.
This historical spread between 'our' rates and 'their' rates suits offshore investors at our expense. Achieving an official 6% growth rate [I'm ignoring unconfirmed reports with which I agree that the true rate of growth is probably already 6%] requires an acceleration of activity. Rising patterns of interest rates have as their rationale the curbing off growth to restrain cost and wage inflationary pressures. Therefore raising interest rates in the near future will work counter to our expressed desire.
This raises the third issue. Given that risks of business under conditions of bureaucratic excess is not going to disappear how can I suggest lowering rates when the rest of the world is raising theirs.
It is because of the canny class of investor I've just mentioned. I believe we have a different type of investor today than we had in the past when the four-point spread was critical.
To illustrate this I ask you to cast your mind back a few weeks to a most eventful week when the murder of a prominent mining financial personality drove the headlines while page three carried the story of the governments expropriation moves on a clutch of farms. A funny thing happened on our way to the interest rate argument.
The exchange rate never moved. More recently the Gov't has announced it intends to expropriate another sixty farms [and, I predict, about a thousand by end 2006]. Again the rate never flickered. Five years ago a similar event sent the rand crashing to thirteen to the dollar and financial mayhem ensued.
Now, notwithstanding considerable urban and rural unrest, expropriations, high profile crimes and other things that would normally cause investor jitters we have not a murmur. Interest rates have remained what Michael Coulson of the financial press calls 'range bound'. [okay it is nudging above the top of the range at the moment but this is hardly dramatic.]
My suspicion is that we currently have a different breed of investor to what we have had in the past. They certainly seem tougher and with a much lower 'whine' factor. They may possibly even be those to whom our issues are small beer, and are as such demonstrably people who may be here for more than a train ride.
In fact I would speculate that many are hovering on the sidelines to swoop in and buy up the shareholdings of BEE empowerment entities when those groupings find it expedient to 'sell off' when the debt service burden becomes unbearable, as it inevitably must do when interest rates are fifty percent higher than they are today and the monthly instalment on the family Merc jumps from ten grand to fifteen, simultaneously with the relevant revenue stream shrinking by twenty percent. It's a well-worn story.
As a side issue on this I am also speculating that those many business entities that have structured their BEE ownership equity with forced 'buy back' provisions: i.e.: a 'You have to sell your shares back to us if you want to sell them' clause will be challenged in court and the court will rule against them, quite possibly on onerous restraint of trade grounds. In fact it is possible that too early a resort to hiking interest rates may well see us emerge from the next round of the 'grand old' business cycle with a radically transformed ownership structure in the national economy-albeit not necessarily the transformation we envisaged.
So to nurture the BEE programme and sustain the present 'good times' we should take account of a changed behaviour response pattern on the part of our current crop of offshore and other sources of FDI's [foreign direct investments] and accept that all this gives us the potential to track at least a half to one percentage point closer to the American rate.
We have to act with the courage of our convictions here. Since we have chosen to go this complex BEE route we must hold true to our conviction. We have demonstrated to some investors at least that ours is a stable financial environment, albeit with some curious quirks, and an expanding market maintains this stability. As such, ours is appears to be a reliable investment destination end in itself. Holding ourselves steady in the present interest regime place, or even lower, for the next twelve months would extend our present buoyant market conditions for at least another twelve months, and that may then piggy back us into the era of 'Grand Spending' the Government intends to initiate when they get around to it-with Gautrain and other tales. Only then should we be thinking of tightening the taps a tad.
Loves ya all
NiK
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Scrap the Gautrain
Scrap the Gautrain
It is time to seriously question the wisdom of building the Gautrain.
According to a recent report on the Voyo Mbuli programme radio South Africa comes bottom of the list in the fields of Maths and science. No where is this more apparent than in the current rising tide of madness over the Gautrain.
Are we mathematical illiterates? To judge by the way gambling has taken off over the past decade we have to assume we are but for certainty let us consider three numbers.
R20 Billion Rand-ie: R20,000,000,000.00 current estimate of the ballooning cost
of the Gautrain. It may be comfortably assumed that this will not be the final figure.
102,000 the number of citizens and tourists expected to use the elitist instrument each day.
R40.00 the present proposed ticket price inclusive of parking and transport to and from destination for traveller at 'other end'[Business Day]
We'll add one more number: the number of days in the year when 102,000 people might most probably use Gautrain. 365-104 [weekends: annually] public holidays and long weekends 15 = 261
Ignore for the moment the fact that Gauteng is like a graveyard from December 15 to January 15 each year when most people leave town to crowd out the coast and the place becomes sheer pleasure.
If we multiply 102,000 by R40.00 and then again that figure by 261 the anticipated revenue from the annual sales of Gautrain rides is marginally over one billion rand, equivalent to the interest on the 20 billion capital in a country with 5 % interest rates.
If we do a Mrs Thatcher here and put these figures into groceries language would you consider spending R20.00 to earn one Rand a sensible and feasible proposition-?
The fact that we are even debating this is testimony to our position at the bottom of the world's mathematical literacy tables -Hello.
We undoubtedly have to solve the problem of congested roadways but this is increasingly not the solution. It was always dubious that it was feasible it is now certain.
How can a country in the developing emerging category of existence even contemplate such a catastrophic concept-The entire province is jammed up daily and we anticipate spending five times our annual national transport budget on a rich kids toy-so as some politicians can avoid the discomfort of travelling by road. Get creative use the road reserves between the highway lanes-this figure of spending R20.00 to earn R1.00 is a sure path to ruination. Frankly the revenue does not even cover the interest on the capital outlay [but then we are a high interest country]
And while we are on the issue of mathematical illiteracy how come the price of this project jumps 400 % over a five year period when global inflation is allegedly around 2% and our targeted inflation rate has been under 6% for the whole time.
Either the first round was a thumb suck or we [the public and politicians] have been the victims of a classic 'Bait and switch' marketing strategy by those who sell trains. To facilitate their sale we had hype that this whole thing would be built for the World Cup in 2010. They are now selling the idea that it wont, after probably inflating the original cost to allow for a rack of contingencies to achieve the 2010 deadline.[which could be the real hidden reason for the escalation...the organisers are costing in the importation of chinese Indian or other heavy experience construction crews as contingencies.]
It is possible that we are witnessing the most dishonest sales pitch ever presented to any citizens of this city in which bent deals have always proliferated.
Assuming Parliament is of the people and for the people it is hard to see why the people should have to suffer this disaster which is most unlikely to benefit all of the people. They must reject this plan. We need a better and cheaper one.In fact what else could we do with 20 billion [bearing in mind that we haven't yet started paying for the guns and planes and ships and things yet].
NiK
It is time to seriously question the wisdom of building the Gautrain.
According to a recent report on the Voyo Mbuli programme radio South Africa comes bottom of the list in the fields of Maths and science. No where is this more apparent than in the current rising tide of madness over the Gautrain.
Are we mathematical illiterates? To judge by the way gambling has taken off over the past decade we have to assume we are but for certainty let us consider three numbers.
R20 Billion Rand-ie: R20,000,000,000.00 current estimate of the ballooning cost
of the Gautrain. It may be comfortably assumed that this will not be the final figure.
102,000 the number of citizens and tourists expected to use the elitist instrument each day.
R40.00 the present proposed ticket price inclusive of parking and transport to and from destination for traveller at 'other end'[Business Day]
We'll add one more number: the number of days in the year when 102,000 people might most probably use Gautrain. 365-104 [weekends: annually] public holidays and long weekends 15 = 261
Ignore for the moment the fact that Gauteng is like a graveyard from December 15 to January 15 each year when most people leave town to crowd out the coast and the place becomes sheer pleasure.
If we multiply 102,000 by R40.00 and then again that figure by 261 the anticipated revenue from the annual sales of Gautrain rides is marginally over one billion rand, equivalent to the interest on the 20 billion capital in a country with 5 % interest rates.
If we do a Mrs Thatcher here and put these figures into groceries language would you consider spending R20.00 to earn one Rand a sensible and feasible proposition-?
The fact that we are even debating this is testimony to our position at the bottom of the world's mathematical literacy tables -Hello.
We undoubtedly have to solve the problem of congested roadways but this is increasingly not the solution. It was always dubious that it was feasible it is now certain.
How can a country in the developing emerging category of existence even contemplate such a catastrophic concept-The entire province is jammed up daily and we anticipate spending five times our annual national transport budget on a rich kids toy-so as some politicians can avoid the discomfort of travelling by road. Get creative use the road reserves between the highway lanes-this figure of spending R20.00 to earn R1.00 is a sure path to ruination. Frankly the revenue does not even cover the interest on the capital outlay [but then we are a high interest country]
And while we are on the issue of mathematical illiteracy how come the price of this project jumps 400 % over a five year period when global inflation is allegedly around 2% and our targeted inflation rate has been under 6% for the whole time.
Either the first round was a thumb suck or we [the public and politicians] have been the victims of a classic 'Bait and switch' marketing strategy by those who sell trains. To facilitate their sale we had hype that this whole thing would be built for the World Cup in 2010. They are now selling the idea that it wont, after probably inflating the original cost to allow for a rack of contingencies to achieve the 2010 deadline.[which could be the real hidden reason for the escalation...the organisers are costing in the importation of chinese Indian or other heavy experience construction crews as contingencies.]
It is possible that we are witnessing the most dishonest sales pitch ever presented to any citizens of this city in which bent deals have always proliferated.
Assuming Parliament is of the people and for the people it is hard to see why the people should have to suffer this disaster which is most unlikely to benefit all of the people. They must reject this plan. We need a better and cheaper one.In fact what else could we do with 20 billion [bearing in mind that we haven't yet started paying for the guns and planes and ships and things yet].
NiK
Monday, November 7, 2005
Goodbye childhood hello bureaucracy
In the new world of Outcomes Based Education, which is being foisted onto all schoolgoing children whether, they like it or not childhood ends with the beginning of schooldays: it ends for certain now with the introduction of the new Grade ten to twelve phase of the new education curriculum programme next year.
Along the way six out of ten peers will vanish from the mill. They will be as the wind.
With OBE the Child has to produce 'outcomes'- a general stream of them culminating in the new curriculum grades ten to twelve. They seem to be developing into robotically controlled 'learners' producing wads of documentation daily to prove they have attained outcomesn without which they have no future and once attained can either remain on the paper mill for a few more years or collapse exhausted onto the sidelines.
Last week I spoke to a group of twelfth grade 'learners' at a dinner. I was their guest. I asked them about their workload for the so-called Matric exam that they are currently writing. After some consultation and discussion between them they said That aside from having to ingest learn and remember all the information covering their range of subject choices and the usual homework associated with it all they had in addition to complete about 108 items of work done for purposes of so-called "Portfolio Assessment"[ aka CASS or Continuous assessment].
The 'Portfolio' contains a battery of tasks that have been completed assessed and filed as evidence of work done. In theory a sensible idea, in practice it is a fair whack of work to get through in about two hundred schooldays. It certainly means the end of childhood is now nigh for all those entering Grade ten in 2006.
According to current forecasts those entering Grade ten will have to adhere to a 'lesser' version of the current Grade Twelve programme-whereby the kids produced 108 pieces of completed work in one school year. Now of course there are seven prescribed subjects for the 'new' National Senior Certificate [recently renamed from the proposed FET certificate which fell into disrepute once enough people understood its significance.]
So once this engine gets hot these grade tens will be producing work almost by rote, ironically. As one of my dinner hosts observed 'School interferes with my inner child.' Another said less charitably, 'another day another project let 'em roll, knock 'em down, move right on don't think about them once they're gone.' She shrugged her shoulders-I feel like I've been pressure-cooked her words accompanied with a wry smile.
It's a pressure cooker that discriminates against poor and under-resourced kids and the casualty rate is immense. One could speculate that many of the new wave of 'Barricadeers' manning the offensives in rural town after town currently, could well be from this new lost generation, which frankly will be repeated time after time because this new system of education which offered so much promise is turning into a bureaucratic production line manufacturing system that has incorporated the child into the process with its entire focus on production output. This system somehow becomes.."child in...paper out". The old discredited system paid much stock on the production of a rounded person with focus on the human resource concerned. The new system is simply a bean counting exercise.
The new system exists as an accounting monument. The 'Classroom learning mediator' presents a series of learning skills exercises to the 'learner' who produces a pile of paper as proof which goes into his file and is later checked by the government who now pore over all the files of work done in every school in every district [perhaps to]making sure that only approved information is contained within the pages. The pressure to perform so great that no deviance can occur never mind reach a toleration point.
In their wildest imagination the architects of the former discredited system never conceptualised such finely tuned control. One hundred and eight completed projects ranging, according to my hosts, from two or three page efforts to a few pieces in excess of 6000 words. In less than one year while hanging out thirty or forty to a class! What are we trying to do here? It is small wonder the minister has recently referred to a pending crisis in the profession with more teachers opting out than are opting in.
The teachers I've spoken to tell me they don't know what the point is of all this outpouring of stuff. They have no time in their schedules to teach anything they are so busy checking that the children have discovered for themselves the pristine principles that were once the arcane territory of 'he who knows'- that they can't remember if they know anything. They tell me they spend their entire time assessing now instead of teaching and this is because most don't realise that teaching is no longer their job they are simply bureaucratic assessors
They are not supposed to be called teachers anymore by the way broadly because they aren't supposed to teach anything. Teachers are now called "Learning outcomes Mediators". The more you think about it the more you realise it is a subtly different job. In many ways it is a more creative job and certainly could be a more exciting one if anyone had time or energy to notice.
The teachers with whom I have discussed this all tell me that their administrative load has trebled or even quadrupled. I have spoken to some five hundred teachers over the past couple of years and this theme is constant. Many are experiencing family stress as assessments steal ever more consistently into private time. A number have resigned. Most tell me they see little point in their jobs anymore especially those who are older and feel they have been turned into highly trained childminders functioning on robot control.
At the present rate within the decade the State will run out of teachers and schools will employ minders to control internet access so's kids can calculate their outcomes on the web and truly take control of their own learning, becoming liberated at last from 'teachers'. Will this work? We'll find out.
Meanwhile children experience personal stress as ever more assessments creep into childhood and turn their voyage of discovery into a tedious mind numbing exercise in filing, that huge numbers have simply abandoned. It is hard to conceive of a system more brutalising, more guaranteed to despair: more insane, which is odd given that it was supposed to do the exact opposite.
What is even more insane is that the Teacher unions have bought into a system that demands more hours than are allowed for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act [which doesn't apply to teachers] demands vastly more work for less pay, when they should be demanding that this system inherently requires them to be more knowledgeable and more effective organisers and that therefore they should be paid three times what they are now and since this wont happen we'll have far fewer next time round and the worst of them will be promoted upwards into the bureaucracy where they can pretend to read some of the billions of pages of stuff that will be produced annually for evermore.
Billions! Yeah think about it 500,000 matriculants this year have produced 50,000,000 items of "portfolio" material amounting to about one billion pages of things of uimportance to the bureaucracy.
Multiply by three for grades ten eleven twelve and we thought the cops were having issues trying to process a million gun licences.
Why are we turning our country into a bureaucratic mindfuck worthy of ten Kafkas?
NiK
Along the way six out of ten peers will vanish from the mill. They will be as the wind.
With OBE the Child has to produce 'outcomes'- a general stream of them culminating in the new curriculum grades ten to twelve. They seem to be developing into robotically controlled 'learners' producing wads of documentation daily to prove they have attained outcomesn without which they have no future and once attained can either remain on the paper mill for a few more years or collapse exhausted onto the sidelines.
Last week I spoke to a group of twelfth grade 'learners' at a dinner. I was their guest. I asked them about their workload for the so-called Matric exam that they are currently writing. After some consultation and discussion between them they said That aside from having to ingest learn and remember all the information covering their range of subject choices and the usual homework associated with it all they had in addition to complete about 108 items of work done for purposes of so-called "Portfolio Assessment"[ aka CASS or Continuous assessment].
The 'Portfolio' contains a battery of tasks that have been completed assessed and filed as evidence of work done. In theory a sensible idea, in practice it is a fair whack of work to get through in about two hundred schooldays. It certainly means the end of childhood is now nigh for all those entering Grade ten in 2006.
According to current forecasts those entering Grade ten will have to adhere to a 'lesser' version of the current Grade Twelve programme-whereby the kids produced 108 pieces of completed work in one school year. Now of course there are seven prescribed subjects for the 'new' National Senior Certificate [recently renamed from the proposed FET certificate which fell into disrepute once enough people understood its significance.]
So once this engine gets hot these grade tens will be producing work almost by rote, ironically. As one of my dinner hosts observed 'School interferes with my inner child.' Another said less charitably, 'another day another project let 'em roll, knock 'em down, move right on don't think about them once they're gone.' She shrugged her shoulders-I feel like I've been pressure-cooked her words accompanied with a wry smile.
It's a pressure cooker that discriminates against poor and under-resourced kids and the casualty rate is immense. One could speculate that many of the new wave of 'Barricadeers' manning the offensives in rural town after town currently, could well be from this new lost generation, which frankly will be repeated time after time because this new system of education which offered so much promise is turning into a bureaucratic production line manufacturing system that has incorporated the child into the process with its entire focus on production output. This system somehow becomes.."child in...paper out". The old discredited system paid much stock on the production of a rounded person with focus on the human resource concerned. The new system is simply a bean counting exercise.
The new system exists as an accounting monument. The 'Classroom learning mediator' presents a series of learning skills exercises to the 'learner' who produces a pile of paper as proof which goes into his file and is later checked by the government who now pore over all the files of work done in every school in every district [perhaps to]making sure that only approved information is contained within the pages. The pressure to perform so great that no deviance can occur never mind reach a toleration point.
In their wildest imagination the architects of the former discredited system never conceptualised such finely tuned control. One hundred and eight completed projects ranging, according to my hosts, from two or three page efforts to a few pieces in excess of 6000 words. In less than one year while hanging out thirty or forty to a class! What are we trying to do here? It is small wonder the minister has recently referred to a pending crisis in the profession with more teachers opting out than are opting in.
The teachers I've spoken to tell me they don't know what the point is of all this outpouring of stuff. They have no time in their schedules to teach anything they are so busy checking that the children have discovered for themselves the pristine principles that were once the arcane territory of 'he who knows'- that they can't remember if they know anything. They tell me they spend their entire time assessing now instead of teaching and this is because most don't realise that teaching is no longer their job they are simply bureaucratic assessors
They are not supposed to be called teachers anymore by the way broadly because they aren't supposed to teach anything. Teachers are now called "Learning outcomes Mediators". The more you think about it the more you realise it is a subtly different job. In many ways it is a more creative job and certainly could be a more exciting one if anyone had time or energy to notice.
The teachers with whom I have discussed this all tell me that their administrative load has trebled or even quadrupled. I have spoken to some five hundred teachers over the past couple of years and this theme is constant. Many are experiencing family stress as assessments steal ever more consistently into private time. A number have resigned. Most tell me they see little point in their jobs anymore especially those who are older and feel they have been turned into highly trained childminders functioning on robot control.
At the present rate within the decade the State will run out of teachers and schools will employ minders to control internet access so's kids can calculate their outcomes on the web and truly take control of their own learning, becoming liberated at last from 'teachers'. Will this work? We'll find out.
Meanwhile children experience personal stress as ever more assessments creep into childhood and turn their voyage of discovery into a tedious mind numbing exercise in filing, that huge numbers have simply abandoned. It is hard to conceive of a system more brutalising, more guaranteed to despair: more insane, which is odd given that it was supposed to do the exact opposite.
What is even more insane is that the Teacher unions have bought into a system that demands more hours than are allowed for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act [which doesn't apply to teachers] demands vastly more work for less pay, when they should be demanding that this system inherently requires them to be more knowledgeable and more effective organisers and that therefore they should be paid three times what they are now and since this wont happen we'll have far fewer next time round and the worst of them will be promoted upwards into the bureaucracy where they can pretend to read some of the billions of pages of stuff that will be produced annually for evermore.
Billions! Yeah think about it 500,000 matriculants this year have produced 50,000,000 items of "portfolio" material amounting to about one billion pages of things of uimportance to the bureaucracy.
Multiply by three for grades ten eleven twelve and we thought the cops were having issues trying to process a million gun licences.
Why are we turning our country into a bureaucratic mindfuck worthy of ten Kafkas?
NiK
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Gun Control: The Brazilians's shock NO vote
If there was ever an action more guaranteed to inspire the belief that the Main Steam Media follow orders it has to have been the reaction to the Brazilian gun control referendum this week.
For those of you who missed it the Brazilian people went to the polls this week to vote whether gun sales in the country be restricted. The question: should gun sales be restricted? Yes or No, evoked an OVERWHELMING NO.
The pollsters were suggesting their usual close run thing and the shockwave was tangible.
Here was a country with a populace much like our own, run for a change by a government 'of the people' and they share with us an overwhelming wave of crime and violent behaviour.
According to the 'Gun Free' lobby -the citizens yearn to be liberated from the burden of guns.
Yet the Brazilian outcome demonstrates that it is only a minority who require that firearms be suppressed. The majority, reasonably, have little faith in their police establishment and want to protect themselves.
The American second amendment to the US constitution was to guarantee that all citizens could bear arms -the sub-text to the motion was that the citizen's responsibility in bearing arms was to act if necessary to protect the State from being hijacked by anti-democratic elements. Criminals are anti-democratic agents.
The Brazilians must obviously share the ancient sentiments of America's forebears because in their view nothing apparently has changed. Since the end of their own colonial era the place has always been violent. Our own was too, until colonial governments came along and disarmed and hence suppressed the indigenous citizenry, who have now been liberated and it seems that the right of our newly emancipated citizenry to bear arms is strongly disputed, especially by the SAPS..
Thus we are currently experiencing gun control by stealth. Our leadership knows that if they were to put the question of outlawing firearms ownership to our citizenry in the form of a referendum the outcome could well be the same. Imagine asking a black man who had to take up arms to free himself from the oppression of white men to give up his arms and trust the government the way the disarmed citizens of Zimbabwe have to trust Robert Mugabe.
They would say No in sufficient numbers to kill the Bill and so they should, for oppression comes in all colours as most of us know.
So why the deathly silence on the Brazilian results. Why the deathly silence on the apparent fact that the police who are overseeing the new licence allocation don't seem to be achieving their expressed goal of regulating all existing guns in private hands. The bare minimum of news that emanates about the present gun re-licensing activities indicates pending chaos with the usual waffle from the authorities about how 'alles sal reg kom'.
The present gun legislation process threatens to criminalize an entire population of formerly legitimate gun owners without in any way significantly lessening the threats the guns are allegedly helping to keep at bay.. It will certainly force many people to maintain 'illegal' firearms and quite frankly seems anti-democratic. It also doesn't seem to work.
For instance the British Prime Minister Tony Blair stampeded through gun control legislation in the wake of the Dunblaine massacre six or so years ago and now we have a situation where the formerly peaceful country experienced more than 'ten thousand gun related crimes' in 2003 [ Sky news][up from a handful a decade ago] and the formerly unarmed police now apparently operate under 'shoot to kill orders': and have become so gung ho they recently butchered an unarmed tourist with thirteen shots to the head. Maybe Robert Mugabe is right-perhaps there isn't that much difference between he and Blair.
In our backyard we have the SAPS, whom some suggest should be taking over the mini mite Scorpions who are proving too much like their namesakes for comfort, who are 'straining' to get through the mountains of gun licence renewal applications and who, it would also seem, according to conflicting reports, are 'straining' to make headway on the case of the recently doomed mining magnate Bee Kay. Further, according to screeds of callers on a recent SAFM phone in programme the SAPS are regularly failing to do their jobs, and I will personally never forget that it took them ELEVEN DAYS once to attend to the fact that I had been badly shot by bad people..
Perhaps it is because it was never really their job in the past to solve crimes [notwithstanding that in the past there were some police who's job it was to solve serious crimes.] This crime busting is a modern idea of policing- Historically it was the purpose of the constabulary to prevent crime from happening in the first place by making almost every realistic action illegal and thereby ruling by terror, and we grew used to that. Perhaps many of us believe it is easier to live as a terrorised citizen in a crime free zone than a free citizen in a crime plagued zone: waiting for the police who never come; always lose their dockets, trample on the crime scene, and generally contribute to a certain randomness in existence.
There are many who hold to the belief that terror is the way to go. Control a society by passing a plague of laws that are seriously compliance defective. An absurd example would be to pass a law making breathing more often than five times a minute illegal. Most people can't comply and you can selectively apply the law to 'catch' your enemies. As the moviemakers regularly prove, terror can come in many disguises.
The great Hannah Arendt always argued forcefully that the first step to tyranny is the passage of laws that are impossible to enforce except selectively-Is that what we are experiencing here with such legislation as our own 'gun-control-by-Stealth' legislation? Is that why we have this wall of silence about the shock decision of the Brazilian people to retain their own defence in their own hands.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist: I am a chaos theorist. I think that what happens, for instance in this case, is that humans in their natural propensity to arse-creep their fellow humans, in order to get along, have generally bought into the gun free idea because it is much 'nicer' to live in a place where there are no baddies lurking about waiting to gryp, rape and escape than it is to live in a place overwhelmed with random violence. From belief to action.
Ands so every one of these hundreds of humans in the form of editors and proprietors and journo's and broadcasters across the national sweep of Main Stream Media experienced an identical wave of revulsion and denial this week in the wake of the Brazilian NO outcome and unilaterally decided that we would pretend it hadn't happened.
NiK
For those of you who missed it the Brazilian people went to the polls this week to vote whether gun sales in the country be restricted. The question: should gun sales be restricted? Yes or No, evoked an OVERWHELMING NO.
The pollsters were suggesting their usual close run thing and the shockwave was tangible.
Here was a country with a populace much like our own, run for a change by a government 'of the people' and they share with us an overwhelming wave of crime and violent behaviour.
According to the 'Gun Free' lobby -the citizens yearn to be liberated from the burden of guns.
Yet the Brazilian outcome demonstrates that it is only a minority who require that firearms be suppressed. The majority, reasonably, have little faith in their police establishment and want to protect themselves.
The American second amendment to the US constitution was to guarantee that all citizens could bear arms -the sub-text to the motion was that the citizen's responsibility in bearing arms was to act if necessary to protect the State from being hijacked by anti-democratic elements. Criminals are anti-democratic agents.
The Brazilians must obviously share the ancient sentiments of America's forebears because in their view nothing apparently has changed. Since the end of their own colonial era the place has always been violent. Our own was too, until colonial governments came along and disarmed and hence suppressed the indigenous citizenry, who have now been liberated and it seems that the right of our newly emancipated citizenry to bear arms is strongly disputed, especially by the SAPS..
Thus we are currently experiencing gun control by stealth. Our leadership knows that if they were to put the question of outlawing firearms ownership to our citizenry in the form of a referendum the outcome could well be the same. Imagine asking a black man who had to take up arms to free himself from the oppression of white men to give up his arms and trust the government the way the disarmed citizens of Zimbabwe have to trust Robert Mugabe.
They would say No in sufficient numbers to kill the Bill and so they should, for oppression comes in all colours as most of us know.
So why the deathly silence on the Brazilian results. Why the deathly silence on the apparent fact that the police who are overseeing the new licence allocation don't seem to be achieving their expressed goal of regulating all existing guns in private hands. The bare minimum of news that emanates about the present gun re-licensing activities indicates pending chaos with the usual waffle from the authorities about how 'alles sal reg kom'.
The present gun legislation process threatens to criminalize an entire population of formerly legitimate gun owners without in any way significantly lessening the threats the guns are allegedly helping to keep at bay.. It will certainly force many people to maintain 'illegal' firearms and quite frankly seems anti-democratic. It also doesn't seem to work.
For instance the British Prime Minister Tony Blair stampeded through gun control legislation in the wake of the Dunblaine massacre six or so years ago and now we have a situation where the formerly peaceful country experienced more than 'ten thousand gun related crimes' in 2003 [ Sky news][up from a handful a decade ago] and the formerly unarmed police now apparently operate under 'shoot to kill orders': and have become so gung ho they recently butchered an unarmed tourist with thirteen shots to the head. Maybe Robert Mugabe is right-perhaps there isn't that much difference between he and Blair.
In our backyard we have the SAPS, whom some suggest should be taking over the mini mite Scorpions who are proving too much like their namesakes for comfort, who are 'straining' to get through the mountains of gun licence renewal applications and who, it would also seem, according to conflicting reports, are 'straining' to make headway on the case of the recently doomed mining magnate Bee Kay. Further, according to screeds of callers on a recent SAFM phone in programme the SAPS are regularly failing to do their jobs, and I will personally never forget that it took them ELEVEN DAYS once to attend to the fact that I had been badly shot by bad people..
Perhaps it is because it was never really their job in the past to solve crimes [notwithstanding that in the past there were some police who's job it was to solve serious crimes.] This crime busting is a modern idea of policing- Historically it was the purpose of the constabulary to prevent crime from happening in the first place by making almost every realistic action illegal and thereby ruling by terror, and we grew used to that. Perhaps many of us believe it is easier to live as a terrorised citizen in a crime free zone than a free citizen in a crime plagued zone: waiting for the police who never come; always lose their dockets, trample on the crime scene, and generally contribute to a certain randomness in existence.
There are many who hold to the belief that terror is the way to go. Control a society by passing a plague of laws that are seriously compliance defective. An absurd example would be to pass a law making breathing more often than five times a minute illegal. Most people can't comply and you can selectively apply the law to 'catch' your enemies. As the moviemakers regularly prove, terror can come in many disguises.
The great Hannah Arendt always argued forcefully that the first step to tyranny is the passage of laws that are impossible to enforce except selectively-Is that what we are experiencing here with such legislation as our own 'gun-control-by-Stealth' legislation? Is that why we have this wall of silence about the shock decision of the Brazilian people to retain their own defence in their own hands.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist: I am a chaos theorist. I think that what happens, for instance in this case, is that humans in their natural propensity to arse-creep their fellow humans, in order to get along, have generally bought into the gun free idea because it is much 'nicer' to live in a place where there are no baddies lurking about waiting to gryp, rape and escape than it is to live in a place overwhelmed with random violence. From belief to action.
Ands so every one of these hundreds of humans in the form of editors and proprietors and journo's and broadcasters across the national sweep of Main Stream Media experienced an identical wave of revulsion and denial this week in the wake of the Brazilian NO outcome and unilaterally decided that we would pretend it hadn't happened.
NiK
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Whoops there goes another un-natural disaster
Weblog 15th October 2005-10-15
Dateline: Jozi
Is the planet beginning to show signs of disaster fatigue?
In this past year alone the devastation caused by natural disasters
Has been enormous with damages surely beyond a trillion dollars [US.].
The total for the decade is probably two trillion and rising. Think about it. The city of Bam-[ in Iran] gone. It may never be rebuilt. Then just the biggies: Algiers, Greece Turkey Iran and over to the other end of the tectonic plate system that runs from and along the Himalayas through South east Asia and the radiating spray from there to Japan and China, not to mention the islands of Sumatra et al. All of these places have experienced natural disasters over the past few years and this discounts the many more places that have experienced servere flooding. Now we have this vast explosion of horror in Pakistani Kashmir. Perhaps this is all not as natural as it appears.
All the people who have for decades denied that there was such a thing as Climate change are now jumping about to demand that present disasters are normal; that the pattern of earthquakes recorded annually is roughly unchanged. But notwithstanding that the weather patterns are now acknowledged to be altering somehow the pattern of earthquakes, flooding, drought and fire is supposed to be 'normal'. I dispute this.
What makes me think that the rate of disasters is increasing is spurred by a report that the plea by Malawi [among other Southern African States] for food aid to feed huge numbers of people who are slowly starving has been met by a stony silence.
People's hearts usually go out to those who are in trouble but suddenly there are so many people whose otherwise orderly lives are being suddenly and abruptly demolished forever that pity runs into a myriad of constraints-
We have a new emerging paradigm for AID. Those who deserve help such as the victims of natural disasters get it-albeit slowly due to the vast scale of the need. Those whose horror is perceived to be an outcome of foolish policies designed for aggrandising purposes on the part of ideologically fundamentalist leaderships or straightforward corrupt administrations, are it would seem to be left to sort themselves out. We saw this earlier this year with Niger where desperation was alleviated at the very last minute after wide scale television footage of starving humans was broadcast to the planet's hard working citizenry..
It is this Blog's speculation that this subtle shift of mercy activity is prompted by a growing understanding that the present pattern of disasters will continue: swinging pendulum like along the Himalayan fault line as the reverberating shock wave from a series of multiple Nuclear 'test' blasts continues to seek out the weaknesses in the fissure. These nuke tests you will remember took place a few years ago in a tit for tat power contest between two ancient enemies India and Pakistan. Since then we have had a surge in bad natural disasters.
This geological reverberation is a process I have called 'the Ringing' in some fiction I have concocted for my own desultory entertainment. In my fiction 'the Ringing' was an historical event [from my fictional perspective: the tale being set about a century from now] The penultimate climax [ in my fictional concoction] comes in 2012 AD. On this date and roughly in line with an old Mayan prophecy New York is demolished .
Like Bam and the great Tsunami, it happens around Christmas day, when an island called Cumbre Vieja, in the Grand Canaries, that is at the top of the Earth watch 'bad possibility' list, falls down, as predicted; and drowns New York and the American East coast which will largely disappear in much the same way that Banda Aceh just-vanished. But, pshew, this is simply a fictional concoction by NiK-It's not really happening it?
Maybe...what is not fiction though is that the scale of disaster is growing with each event and the response rate are beginning to look "punchy"; and Cumbre Vieja is at the end of the plate faultline that seems to be reacting so violently to the Indo- Pakistani nuclear exchanges..
The response to the disaster in Pakistan has been slower than the response to Katrina, which was already widely condemned. Maybe there just aren't enough disaster relief personnel drifting around the world waiting for disasters to happen; plus there is this glut of disasters presently.
So it looks like the world could rapidly run out of compassion for those who are widely perceived to have played while history rampaged on its own private rodeo. And the first sign of this fatigue could be represented by the almost unprecedented failure of the Southern African appeal as at a week or so ago. With the Pakistani disaster this past week intervening the Malawian's cries can barely be heard above the clamour from wretched millions in diverse places.
On the other hand perhaps these disaters are normal and the failure to feed Malawi is just a bit of bad PR.
I suspect though that we must stand by for overwhelming demands for help from our northern brothers. These seem to be People who are being unfairly condemned to genetic extinction because they could not compete with free food. It is arguable that the supply ogf free food over decades has fuelled a wonderfully corrupt syastem that is barely functional, and serves only to keep the Wabenzi class in SUV's while the populace remain slim n trim.
It isn't fair to stop supplying free food to people who have gotten used to it. Like the poor citizens of New Orleans we saw recently on our TV screens these are people who have been helped for so long they have lost the capacity to save themselves. Now in the past few years about one hundred million or so have this year been added to the list of people to be helped.It seems the world's helping hands may be overwhelmed.
We [in SA] may have to decide what we are going to do about them [ MAlawians n all] given our own priorities- We are already supporting twelve million citizens with grants and aid and they are not shrinking the numbers could grow by another five million withing three years so aid is costing.
We have our own fatigue issues.
NiK
Dateline: Jozi
Is the planet beginning to show signs of disaster fatigue?
In this past year alone the devastation caused by natural disasters
Has been enormous with damages surely beyond a trillion dollars [US.].
The total for the decade is probably two trillion and rising. Think about it. The city of Bam-[ in Iran] gone. It may never be rebuilt. Then just the biggies: Algiers, Greece Turkey Iran and over to the other end of the tectonic plate system that runs from and along the Himalayas through South east Asia and the radiating spray from there to Japan and China, not to mention the islands of Sumatra et al. All of these places have experienced natural disasters over the past few years and this discounts the many more places that have experienced servere flooding. Now we have this vast explosion of horror in Pakistani Kashmir. Perhaps this is all not as natural as it appears.
All the people who have for decades denied that there was such a thing as Climate change are now jumping about to demand that present disasters are normal; that the pattern of earthquakes recorded annually is roughly unchanged. But notwithstanding that the weather patterns are now acknowledged to be altering somehow the pattern of earthquakes, flooding, drought and fire is supposed to be 'normal'. I dispute this.
What makes me think that the rate of disasters is increasing is spurred by a report that the plea by Malawi [among other Southern African States] for food aid to feed huge numbers of people who are slowly starving has been met by a stony silence.
People's hearts usually go out to those who are in trouble but suddenly there are so many people whose otherwise orderly lives are being suddenly and abruptly demolished forever that pity runs into a myriad of constraints-
We have a new emerging paradigm for AID. Those who deserve help such as the victims of natural disasters get it-albeit slowly due to the vast scale of the need. Those whose horror is perceived to be an outcome of foolish policies designed for aggrandising purposes on the part of ideologically fundamentalist leaderships or straightforward corrupt administrations, are it would seem to be left to sort themselves out. We saw this earlier this year with Niger where desperation was alleviated at the very last minute after wide scale television footage of starving humans was broadcast to the planet's hard working citizenry..
It is this Blog's speculation that this subtle shift of mercy activity is prompted by a growing understanding that the present pattern of disasters will continue: swinging pendulum like along the Himalayan fault line as the reverberating shock wave from a series of multiple Nuclear 'test' blasts continues to seek out the weaknesses in the fissure. These nuke tests you will remember took place a few years ago in a tit for tat power contest between two ancient enemies India and Pakistan. Since then we have had a surge in bad natural disasters.
This geological reverberation is a process I have called 'the Ringing' in some fiction I have concocted for my own desultory entertainment. In my fiction 'the Ringing' was an historical event [from my fictional perspective: the tale being set about a century from now] The penultimate climax [ in my fictional concoction] comes in 2012 AD. On this date and roughly in line with an old Mayan prophecy New York is demolished .
Like Bam and the great Tsunami, it happens around Christmas day, when an island called Cumbre Vieja, in the Grand Canaries, that is at the top of the Earth watch 'bad possibility' list, falls down, as predicted; and drowns New York and the American East coast which will largely disappear in much the same way that Banda Aceh just-vanished. But, pshew, this is simply a fictional concoction by NiK-It's not really happening it?
Maybe...what is not fiction though is that the scale of disaster is growing with each event and the response rate are beginning to look "punchy"; and Cumbre Vieja is at the end of the plate faultline that seems to be reacting so violently to the Indo- Pakistani nuclear exchanges..
The response to the disaster in Pakistan has been slower than the response to Katrina, which was already widely condemned. Maybe there just aren't enough disaster relief personnel drifting around the world waiting for disasters to happen; plus there is this glut of disasters presently.
So it looks like the world could rapidly run out of compassion for those who are widely perceived to have played while history rampaged on its own private rodeo. And the first sign of this fatigue could be represented by the almost unprecedented failure of the Southern African appeal as at a week or so ago. With the Pakistani disaster this past week intervening the Malawian's cries can barely be heard above the clamour from wretched millions in diverse places.
On the other hand perhaps these disaters are normal and the failure to feed Malawi is just a bit of bad PR.
I suspect though that we must stand by for overwhelming demands for help from our northern brothers. These seem to be People who are being unfairly condemned to genetic extinction because they could not compete with free food. It is arguable that the supply ogf free food over decades has fuelled a wonderfully corrupt syastem that is barely functional, and serves only to keep the Wabenzi class in SUV's while the populace remain slim n trim.
It isn't fair to stop supplying free food to people who have gotten used to it. Like the poor citizens of New Orleans we saw recently on our TV screens these are people who have been helped for so long they have lost the capacity to save themselves. Now in the past few years about one hundred million or so have this year been added to the list of people to be helped.It seems the world's helping hands may be overwhelmed.
We [in SA] may have to decide what we are going to do about them [ MAlawians n all] given our own priorities- We are already supporting twelve million citizens with grants and aid and they are not shrinking the numbers could grow by another five million withing three years so aid is costing.
We have our own fatigue issues.
NiK
Friday, October 14, 2005
Scorpions: the Homeopathic option
Fighting corruption with corruption
A further objection to maintaining the Scorpions as an independent agency centres on the premise that somehow they are "Corrupt".
In a country where corruption is rapidly becoming a way of life [ as if it wasn't already pretty well established before the present era] isn't the idea of fighting a disease with elements of a disease, as in vaccinations, not similar to the idea of fighting corruption with corruption...I think we've established pretty well that corruption is like HIV AIDS ...Once you've got it it's incurable and the most useful way of handling it is through palliatives.So one can use thieves to catch thieves...Its not a particularly "nice" idea...it is however practical.
In a society that has chosen to make one political party almost omnipotent for the present it is inevitable that political instruments are used for point scoring purposes to facilitate internal power struggles.
We still need to see the advantage to the greater society of having competing groups of investigative agencies available to keep some margin of propriety in what could otherwise be a rapidly degenerating environment characterised by the serious abuses of power with which we used to be familiar.
As to whether there is a conspiracy to remove the former deputy president and replace him with the wife of the former Scorpions head this speculation falls into to the category of a "falling out amongsts thieves" [and politicians] and like the scrappings amongst siblings or the family dogs scrapping over leftover bones should be left alone to work itself out.
The country will outlive this particular momentary concern [with the doings and the screwings of ANC political honchos} as it has endured through the ghastliness of the former regime.Corruption however will endure and only the rivalries between competing agencies with overlapping agendas has any chance of keeping the stables passably clear...and even with them it is probable that it will be a close run thing.
The suggestion that there should be some civilian oversight of this agency is perhaps the most useful to have come out of the present debate even given that the oversight appointees will in all probability be stooges representing the current "in" faction: rather like that stooge intitution we call parliament.
A final note here regarding the broad based mal-performance of the SAPS which has been sadly highlighted this past week with their general failure to protect the interests of various young children...It is even possible that hardly any personnel in the police actually like their jobs...few people, generally, seem to like their jobs... So the idea of taking an entity that seems to function, and blending it into an agency with difficulties would only give us a policing variation on Gresham's law, which those economists amongst you will remember states that"bad money drives out good". In other words like mixing bad wine and good wine the result is crappy wine. Similarly blending the Scorpions into the SAPS will simply give us more poorly implemiented policing where only those rich enough to afford private investigators can see a margin of justice.
Viva Scorpions, Viva Competition
NiK
A further objection to maintaining the Scorpions as an independent agency centres on the premise that somehow they are "Corrupt".
In a country where corruption is rapidly becoming a way of life [ as if it wasn't already pretty well established before the present era] isn't the idea of fighting a disease with elements of a disease, as in vaccinations, not similar to the idea of fighting corruption with corruption...I think we've established pretty well that corruption is like HIV AIDS ...Once you've got it it's incurable and the most useful way of handling it is through palliatives.So one can use thieves to catch thieves...Its not a particularly "nice" idea...it is however practical.
In a society that has chosen to make one political party almost omnipotent for the present it is inevitable that political instruments are used for point scoring purposes to facilitate internal power struggles.
We still need to see the advantage to the greater society of having competing groups of investigative agencies available to keep some margin of propriety in what could otherwise be a rapidly degenerating environment characterised by the serious abuses of power with which we used to be familiar.
As to whether there is a conspiracy to remove the former deputy president and replace him with the wife of the former Scorpions head this speculation falls into to the category of a "falling out amongsts thieves" [and politicians] and like the scrappings amongst siblings or the family dogs scrapping over leftover bones should be left alone to work itself out.
The country will outlive this particular momentary concern [with the doings and the screwings of ANC political honchos} as it has endured through the ghastliness of the former regime.Corruption however will endure and only the rivalries between competing agencies with overlapping agendas has any chance of keeping the stables passably clear...and even with them it is probable that it will be a close run thing.
The suggestion that there should be some civilian oversight of this agency is perhaps the most useful to have come out of the present debate even given that the oversight appointees will in all probability be stooges representing the current "in" faction: rather like that stooge intitution we call parliament.
A final note here regarding the broad based mal-performance of the SAPS which has been sadly highlighted this past week with their general failure to protect the interests of various young children...It is even possible that hardly any personnel in the police actually like their jobs...few people, generally, seem to like their jobs... So the idea of taking an entity that seems to function, and blending it into an agency with difficulties would only give us a policing variation on Gresham's law, which those economists amongst you will remember states that"bad money drives out good". In other words like mixing bad wine and good wine the result is crappy wine. Similarly blending the Scorpions into the SAPS will simply give us more poorly implemiented policing where only those rich enough to afford private investigators can see a margin of justice.
Viva Scorpions, Viva Competition
NiK
Sunday, October 9, 2005
In further defence of the Scorpions
Some responses to my blog on the Justice Minister's recent unusual request to lose the Scorpions from her portfolio have centred on the idea that the Scorpions are loaded with Apartheid era spies.
I don't see how this has anything to do with the issue. If we assume the blog associates are right and that the Scorpions are loaded with former apartheid era spies [ and I have no idea whether they are or not] then what reason have we to believe that the NIA/SAPS/Ministries of Finance/Home affairs et al are not similarly loaded with Apartheid era spies? A dozen years ago every Broederbonder in the civil service could have been defined as an Apartheid era spy-
Nonetheless the rules of competition would still apply in my view.
Secondly if the recent demise of Lothar Neethling and Gideon Niewoudt are a useful indicator one would imagine most apartheid era spies are either at or close to retirement age or dying off. Those still surviving are more probably more unlikely than most civil servants to want to rock the boat that will feed their beloved pensions.
Thirdly whomever they are likely to be they are most likely to be civil servants first and the nature of civil servants is that they do the job allocated to them because that is what they are paid to do. If part of the Scorpion's brief is to root out corruption then they will pursue that brief because it's their job.
One could argue that a government that appears to tolerate corruption is only setting up prospective 'enemies' [Jacob Zuma for instance] with a clear case to be answered in court at whatever stage they decide someone somewhere needs to be eradicated.
It would thus be useful to have a few 'pit bulls' around to pursue that goal with vigour- This would be a normal political practice and if I had the energy to go back and re-read 'the Prince' or the 'Discourses' we'd probably find that it was a core recommendation of Mr Machiavelli all those centuries ago. Corruption wasn't invented by the ANC.
In other words Apartheid era spies will soon all be gone but corruption is like HIV Aids once you've got it you've got it forever-there is no known cure only palliatives. Viva the Scorpions. Viva competition Viva the separation of Powers
I don't see how this has anything to do with the issue. If we assume the blog associates are right and that the Scorpions are loaded with former apartheid era spies [ and I have no idea whether they are or not] then what reason have we to believe that the NIA/SAPS/Ministries of Finance/Home affairs et al are not similarly loaded with Apartheid era spies? A dozen years ago every Broederbonder in the civil service could have been defined as an Apartheid era spy-
Nonetheless the rules of competition would still apply in my view.
Secondly if the recent demise of Lothar Neethling and Gideon Niewoudt are a useful indicator one would imagine most apartheid era spies are either at or close to retirement age or dying off. Those still surviving are more probably more unlikely than most civil servants to want to rock the boat that will feed their beloved pensions.
Thirdly whomever they are likely to be they are most likely to be civil servants first and the nature of civil servants is that they do the job allocated to them because that is what they are paid to do. If part of the Scorpion's brief is to root out corruption then they will pursue that brief because it's their job.
One could argue that a government that appears to tolerate corruption is only setting up prospective 'enemies' [Jacob Zuma for instance] with a clear case to be answered in court at whatever stage they decide someone somewhere needs to be eradicated.
It would thus be useful to have a few 'pit bulls' around to pursue that goal with vigour- This would be a normal political practice and if I had the energy to go back and re-read 'the Prince' or the 'Discourses' we'd probably find that it was a core recommendation of Mr Machiavelli all those centuries ago. Corruption wasn't invented by the ANC.
In other words Apartheid era spies will soon all be gone but corruption is like HIV Aids once you've got it you've got it forever-there is no known cure only palliatives. Viva the Scorpions. Viva competition Viva the separation of Powers
Friday, October 7, 2005
Viva Scorpions
This business of Justice minister Mabandla announcing that she wants to dump the Scorpions has a Trojan horse feel to it.
In the same way that our society will be better off with some competition for Telkom in the fixed line business and we all agree on that [excepting for the Telkom crew] it is good for our democracy for the SAPS to have some formal [and obviously unwanted] competition.
The fact that the SAPS is unhappy with the independent nature of the Scorpions seems to be a perfect reason to continue their independence-Do we really want another all powerful John Vorster type minister of Police and interrogation services?
Who ever heard of a bureaucrat wanting to get rid of part of their portfolio anyway-it seems unnatural. As to tensions between the SAPS and the Scorpions undermining the country's security this seems a spurious argument that would be hard to rationalise on any reasonable history of democratic precedents.Competition is always healthy for the body politic.
Most of us are not overly impressed with the general performance of the Police Services anyway, most of the time: what with the perrenial inevitable "lost docket" game, intermittent regular reports of corrupt practices and varied interpretations of justice according to status in society-not to mention stumbling around over all the clues so often it becomes embarassing...Viva Scorpions.
In the same way that our society will be better off with some competition for Telkom in the fixed line business and we all agree on that [excepting for the Telkom crew] it is good for our democracy for the SAPS to have some formal [and obviously unwanted] competition.
The fact that the SAPS is unhappy with the independent nature of the Scorpions seems to be a perfect reason to continue their independence-Do we really want another all powerful John Vorster type minister of Police and interrogation services?
Who ever heard of a bureaucrat wanting to get rid of part of their portfolio anyway-it seems unnatural. As to tensions between the SAPS and the Scorpions undermining the country's security this seems a spurious argument that would be hard to rationalise on any reasonable history of democratic precedents.Competition is always healthy for the body politic.
Most of us are not overly impressed with the general performance of the Police Services anyway, most of the time: what with the perrenial inevitable "lost docket" game, intermittent regular reports of corrupt practices and varied interpretations of justice according to status in society-not to mention stumbling around over all the clues so often it becomes embarassing...Viva Scorpions.
State of the Nation
State of the Nation 2005
I listened to our leader's State of the Nation
Speech and couldn't understand it
I read a critic's review that
Said the
Citizens of
'Manenburg, Harrismith, Diepsloot, Hanover Park
Phomolong and Crossroads'* couldn't
Understand the speech either
And although I know none of these
Places
I felt empowered knowing none of us knew:
And that our President's secret was safe.
.NiK[05]
*Business Day, Johannesburg]
I listened to our leader's State of the Nation
Speech and couldn't understand it
I read a critic's review that
Said the
Citizens of
'Manenburg, Harrismith, Diepsloot, Hanover Park
Phomolong and Crossroads'* couldn't
Understand the speech either
And although I know none of these
Places
I felt empowered knowing none of us knew:
And that our President's secret was safe.
.NiK[05]
*Business Day, Johannesburg]
The apprentice hit man
The recent death by shooting of a celebrity figure from the mining financial industry, the late Whatisname,has aroused much comment regarding whether his apparent murder was the result of a botched carjacking or a carefully executed assassination or 'hit'.
This reminded me about a story/poem that I wrote back in '92 when some things were altogether much as they are now; and when a third option presented itself to a financial man of my aquaintance who was in a state of desperation-So I dug the tale out and it is here for your reading interest. I filed it at the time because there was no such thing as the Internet and because it was a little slow moving, as it sets up the core plot
Nonetheless the pace does pick up and in the light of past events it becomes more enjoyable as it progresses, if such a story can be enjoyable. I haven't made any changes to it except to fix some of the grammar and update the numbers to current inflation adjusted reality.
It's about eight thousand words so it shouldn't take too long.
I would point out that the story is entirely fictional, was written thirteen years ago and so any similarities between the story and the real world and current events or anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental and in the mind of the reader only.
***************************************
The Apprentice Hit Man.
If it could be said
of some people
that they conspired in their own catastrophe then
undoubtedly Lucretious Sekati
would have to be included
amongst them.
Lucretious Sekati; one time yuppie, mover and
shaker, sophisticated materialist.
What the formerly glorious left would have called an arch-
bourgeoise.
Could Lucretious be a metaphor for our times?
the architect of his own destiny ?
or
was his fate preordained by some malevolent concatenation
of events,
orchestrated
by an evil conspiracy of nameless "enemies"?
Being a yuppie (or former yuppie) in a period post-
economic boom, for Lucretious-an era of unremitting financial callisthenics signifying nothing but
ongoing impervious decline,
was, he thought, rather like playing out a slow motion game
of musical chairs.
The realisation that the number of chairs in the game are
being steadily whittled down,
gradually dawns on the players
resulting
in an ever more evident and unscrupulous scramble
for the remaining places.
Of course the difference between party games and the
world, is what happens to the players when they're "Out".
If you remember those endless parties of our collective
youth, the losers would all congregate around some
variation of an ice-cream counter; and ignoring the rest of
the participating players, would start some new game unrelated to the
former, so that when the last player in the "real'" game
stalked triumphantly off the floor, it was to find
itself an outsider in a newly evolved game being
played elsewhere.
Now of course, it's much later, and it seemed to Lucretious [sometimes known as licentious Lucretious]
that
he had lost that easy ability to shift consciousness; embark
on new playtimes at will. He was suddenly old...not really
old you understand
not like actuarially old,
simply the wrong side
of thirty five...
Now many of the `losers' wind up sitting on the sidelines,
nursing a beer, a bloody mary, a large scotch or a fat joint,
spending their days playing all sorts of wonderful
sideline games on such themes as "Isn't everything
absolutely dreadful",
or
"Did you hear what happened to so n so?"
as urban legend became
bloodied truth.
And so the difference is the sidelines.
Win or lose you still pay the rent, eat and have to
scavenge about to settle all the other bills which you
just seem to have somehow accumulated whether you're up,
down or nowhere in the middle.
And when he was up he was up
And when he was down he was down
And by the time the new game starts
He'll be neither up nor down.
The former players are superseded by the new
upward mobile players and today's yuppies are tomorrow's
has beens or what is, from Luc's, perspective, worse. Do
yesterday's yuppies become today's has-beens? And is he
therefore condemned
to become part
of the name and blame generation.
Lucretious, bless him, was unaware of any world, which did
not specifically revolve around him. He made money and
spent it as though there were no tomorrow, which there
isn't, or wasn't, for according to his life script
he was supposed to live happily ever after.
His key philosophy had always been that truth was
subordinate to need, and if therefore the truth hurts then
change it. If reality intrudes on fantasy then either
ignore it or invent a better reality, on the absolute
principle that whatever he believed in with enough fervour
would inevitably come to pass.
Now what if disaster strikes? All best laid plans
explode in your face...it happens...then the most popular
strategy a is to get heavily into the game of Pin the
blame on the Donkey. And the donkey must always be someone
else.
And so, of course, you would understand that this process
of "blaming" would paralyse the very principle of self
help which had brought about Lucretious's climb to success
in the first place.(the less charitable would question
whether it was really self-help and not just the good
fortune to be in the right place at the right time with
the right idea and the right backing.)
Lucretious Sekati was the precise epitome of the thoroughly
modern man. He was well trained in the primitive rudiments
of exploitative understanding. Had been taught how to
manipulate the levers of finance in the advanced
literacy/numeric courses provided by his local School of
Business.
Armed with his high-powered .45 calibre MBA, Lucretious had
gone forth and conquered some newly defined market segment
in the field of investment scams.
He had been wonderfully successful setting up a succession of
`empty shell' corporations, whose stock he'd market on the
newly emerging Venture Capital Exchange to little old
widows with pots of cash and naive expectations. His
enormous success in this, together with the ministrations
of a flock of tame tax consultants meant that he had been
able to pour a vast stream of income into material
gratification.
When questioned on his profligate lifestyle his favourite
boast, once made public through an indiscreet well
lubricated aside to a `dolly' from that ghastly "Stylish
Living" magazine was "Work sucks just gimme the Bucks".
In fairness to Lucretious however, the article in `Stylish
Living" did go on to point out that the tax payable on not
spending his money was a terrifying prospect...better it
had noted to pour the money, into tax avoidable perks and
live for the day.
And Lucretious now believed he had had his `day'. The
economy, masked by inflation and government inspired hype
had resumed it's former onward decline. The interlude of
bullish yuppiedom had come and gone, great global systems
had decayed and vanished into the dustbins of history,
nonetheless mortgage bonds and lease agreements
marched resolutely onward.
For those with a yearning for the `good life', I'm sorry to tell you that
we're not dealing with that part where he was making pots
of cash. Its a great soapy, filled with brilliantly
executed scams, devious, ruthless and immensly
profitable. And with the money, long joyous nights gang
banging with a succession of beautiful people in warm
jacuzzis at the expense of grieving widows...And then of
course there was the romance. Luc's fairy tale
marriage to his secretary cum bookkeeper, who knew all
about his scams and used the promise of glorious
nights between her thighs combined with not so subtle
threats of blackmail to get him to the nuptial bed.
No that's it, as Lucretious is now wont to say,
'Happiness is ephemeral but depression is forever.'
And so we find ourselves at the point where "the going has
become tough"...at the point where our hero has grievous
doubts about his own toughness. For when the going got
tough, Lucretious's tough wife went shopping and
Lucretious Sekati found himself at the end of his tether.
There are certain questions that usually arise here
concerning the issue of comparative poverty. To those
whose sympathies tend to lie with the traditionally poor:
that great crowd of ragged unwashed fellows who hover
around at the off-ramps of up market highways, hands
outstretched, tugging at the heartstrings of our
collective guilt; the question of poverty is obvious, and
identifying the victims even more so.
To these, the idea that the Lucretious Sekatis of the
world could be in the same category is laughable, the man's
worth a billion. Sod him! ... If he's suffering... good!
However when we look closer...at the empty fridge...the
bare shelves...the extended structure of debt...the
television lifestyle exposed as a hollow sham...then...for
what we may ask the old Dickensian dictum: ... Income Ten
Million, expenditure Thirty... result misery, confusion,
anger, despair and depression in roughly that order.
So it's all very well sitting there smugly saying, Good!
Serve the bloated yuppie right. How dare he claim poverty
driving around in his AMG Mercedes swapping plastic for
food?....let him sell it all and lose it all, and should we
dare, we may compare..
For the truth, according to Lucretious Sekati is that
"When yuppies bleed the world haemorrhages." and to
Lucretious, his tragedy is the tragedy of a modern
Everyman. The man who `Has it all'...when he suffers all
suffer. And Lucretious is truly suffering...he is three
months behind on his 4,000,000 mortgage, the market has turned and the house is
unsaleable at the price he needs. He's six months behind on the Merc, and he's
ages behind on his wife's Bee Emm. He's also being sued by
the Orthodontist who is in turn four months behind on his
mortgage etc...And he hasn't paid for his daughter's dance
classes since forever.
Now you're probably asking, What happened to all the
money! Well join Lucretious because he doesn't know either
neither do I if it comes to that. The only one who might
have known was a Minister of Finance who resigned on
grounds of exhaustion, probably caused by digging around
desperately trying to figure out where it had all gone.
In fact the whole question of where the money had gone had
become a burning question at almost all the ritual meat
burning ceremonies which traditionally fill the summer
weekends.
This is where the story of Sekati's conspiracy with
himself starts, at a crucial Sunday afternoon "Meat eat n
defeat" programme. A special day party for Luc' with a whole cow on a spit roasting gently
in simmering heat washed with sumptuous liquids.
The topic of the day, excluding those more important
topics like who had died, had a baby, was getting married,
or had made the national team, centred around increasingly banal revelations
of mass scale corruption in some or other
government departments.
What was happening was that many amongst the group felt,
like Lucretious, that they had to work hard to steal
their money, and that now they were finding their sources
of cash increasingly strapped. People had less and less
disposable income to blow on attractive investment scams
due amongst other things to paying ever increasing amounts
of stealth taxes to fund the increasingly avaricious appetites of
state officials. It was an extreme form of unfair
competition, said one of Luc's family.
"Of course this is a global phenomenon, I mean how's
Italy, The mafia's got it my man, the people can fight but
everyone's got a price....like you know what I mean hey.
The idea of globalisation had become tres fashionable
and if Levi jeans and pocket sized information communicators
could be
part of a worldwide phenomena so could corruption, angst
and economic decay.
And of course talk drifted over to whether someone had
taken a bribe to include Louie someone in some national
team and there was a long discussion about the importance
of knowing people and so what if a few bucks had to move
around a bit as long as the team won.
"A Man's a man you know?'
"Yeah; It's what a guy does you know, not what he thinks."
"Yeah there's too much thinking, and talking and nothing
doing."
Like a man who has slowly, dispiritedly lost all appetite
Sekati wandered steadily off indoors, manoeuvring through
The interminable ritual backslapping "How's it
going man" type introductions .
Does it mean, he thought gloomily, that if what a man
does, is all his life means, and if what he does comes to
nothing then was he therefore also nothing...a blankness
on the page of history.
He was talking to people through a cloud, reaching out in
slomo through a fog, a so familiar fog
"determinism is out, uncertainty is in ...and nothing we
have ever known will be in vogue again,"
Who said that? Who let that man into the party?
Lucretious felt an abyss open up beneath his feet. For an
instant he was staring into a void...a no mans land; and
he felt a moment of absolute terror. The ghost wandered
over to the liquor cabinet. That's what I am he thought
distractedly, a ghost. I am the ghost of Lucretious Sekati
playing out the hours and moments of my stay in purgatory.
He could hear the murmur of conversation from the
fireplace where discussion had shifted from the
abstractions of corruption in all places to the ever escalating
volumes of violence sweeping the country.
He found himself standing next to Angina Oline, his sister- in- laws
brother-in-law who had spent years living in Nepal in exile during
the bad years, and was now designing software
programmes in his own networking company. Why Nepal people would ask. He would shrug and smile.
'Yes," Angina said, "They forget that for a lot of people life
had no particular meaning, it was just something they
did, and therefore death was a relative non-event, a simple
abstraction."
"After all" he said, "We can never know the fact of our
own deaths and therefore the idea of death is, in effect
meaningless...beyond the terror of it's inevitability."
Now usually Lucretious couldn't stand this guy. He used
big words as if he knew what they meant, and Lucretious
often didn't and that pissed him off, and for a moment he
sparked.
"What's this bull, we never know the fact of our own
deaths...where you getting off with that shit man."
"What I said man, did you know someone who came back and
said "how's it my man,?"
"..........No."
"So"
"No.."
"So here, you're here, there you are not, so how could you
know here that you're there."
"Lucretious's mind folded up...for a moment something
flashed away, as if he almost grabbed something
precious and it was gone and he was instead paralysed with
an unaccountable terror."
"We shy away from the terror of our non-existence because
we fear the loss of what we have in exchange for the
unknown place beyond our understanding...these gangsters
who terrify them," waving in the direction of the
fireplace, "They who commit acts of desperation act from
nothing, have therefore nothing to value...or lose and the
concept of death never arises.
"The Terror", Lucretious thought, standing at that abyss
before the cabinet, staring at his ghost reflected in the
glass. It is life which is pointless, not death...and in
that instant he resolved upon a plan.
This, he decided was to be the last plan...plan Z... all
other stratagems had failed completely to resolve the
dilemma in which he found himself. He'd contemplated suing
for insolvency...the act of financial suicide, and had
decided that it would solve very little; he would still be
who he was when all the stuff was gone...even if his wife
left him, and took the child he would still be responsible
for the maintenance, only then, having nothing he could
only envisage himself on the edge for the rest of his
life.
"I have lost all confidence in myself,' he told the ghost staring back at him impassively; as if
it too had written him off. In his rising paranoia he
sensed that former associates were shunning him, labelling
him a loser, unwilling to maintain contact lest they
become contaminated in the ever more vicious real world
game of musical chairs upon which his business life had
come to be based.
Now you may well recognise that Lucretious was suffering
from some form of chronic depression which had reduced him
to a de facto state of impotence (definitely in the
sexual sense, and his wife's carping on this subject was
not helping his self-esteem either).This state made it
increasingly difficult for him to focus on the necessary
requirement to go out and score the `big one' in the
market place.
He felt boxed in...The debt was mounting...he was caught
by the balls...and absolutely nothing was working...like,
the world, for him, had stopped.
It was so bad he'd even looked for a job...discreetly only
to find to his horror that he was redundant...too
expensive, too experienced ...too threatening perhaps, but
mainly because he had lost that virginal naive enthusiasm
which is the herald of success, a complete inability to
understand the concept of failure.
Lucretious felt that overwhelming aura of failure hang on him
like one of his old overcoats which hung on that scarecrow
he called a gardener.
And so, staring at his ghost in the cabinet he suddenly
realised that the only way out of his cul de sac was to
kill himself.
"Yo ho ho" he said to himself immediately the thought ran
through his mind..."this is madness...I must be insane or
I wouldn't be thinking this"...so thinking he poured
himself a large scotch and made a mental note that he was
drinking too much, and then he sat listening to the
murmering voices from the nearby patio, trying not to think about
the idea he had just had.
Now if you have never viewed suicide as a viable option in
times of trouble it need hardly be pointed out that it's a
serious concept with practical as well as philosophical
implications. Consider the facts. Lucretious is broke...he
has used up all his reserves attempting to find alternate
solutions to his financial dilemma, and he has reached
the stage where all seems hopeless. The country is in a
deepening financial crisis, as is the world.
This never bothered him in his hey day, after
all here a bribe there a bribe everywhere a bribe,
bribe. The real problem was a growing problem of connections, who sensing a decline in his cash flows had themselves flowed and he, currently
too cash strapped to go out and make some new ones
in the time honoured way.
And of course there was a picky investor confidence
in the country's destiny, for a man who made his living
promoting high risk ventures a business environment which
regards the bluest of blue chip as dodgy, is a total
disaster. So it's time, he thinks to down tools.
For Lucretious his survival is now to be measured in weeks
not even months, he has run out of ideas and his wife's
credit limit has just been raised as the banking sector
desperately seeks to sell it's products...credit, in the
wake of sluggish demand.
On a philosophic level therefore he can readily justify
suicide on the grounds that it is a rational response to a
deranged circumstance...He thinks briefly of a line from
"The Brother's Karamazov", when Ivan says to God, "If you
exist, I respectfully return my ticket." he laughs remembering his fifteenth year when he had discovered
reading for pleasure, and the "Brothers" whilst laid up
with a broken leg...he had done precious little reading
since.
So to the practical problems. [One realises that there are
aspects to this decision which would be of concern to
those of a Theistic bent, ie damage to the immortal soul
etc, and that there should be rather more anguishing over
the decision than there is going to be. However
Lucretious, being essentially given to Sybaritic pastimes
had never given any thought to his immortal soul...wasn't
in fact aware that he might have one]
The first question was, did he simply "do himself in"? or
should he include the family?...He resolved this one quite
quickly by deciding that mass family suicide\murders were
altogether too trendy these days with every disaffected
Tom, Musa and Jacobus bumping off his whole family at the
drop of a divorce notice.
Then there was the very real consideration that he was not
overly fond of his wife...resented her spending
habits...her threats of blackmail to get him into marriage
in the first place, and since things had gone from bad to
worse she had taken to deriding his performance in bed,
which wasn't helping him at all.
No...he thought ... if there was any life after death the
last thing he wanted was to be saddled along with her
again..let her rather stay in purgatory.
Lucretious's death would bring in enough Insurance money
to pay off the bond, the two cars, the shack at the coast,
the stereo hi fi, this that and the other, and still leave
enough over to send his daughter to a good private school
where they would teach her how to get out of the AMG
Mercedes without revealing her knickers. He could
therefore get out of the rat race while leaving his honour
intact.
And so, his mind made up, he headed for his study where he
kept his collection of firearms, The shotgun, he decided,
messy but efficient...no foolish errors with inadequately
powered bullets bouncing off a bone fragment to leave him
brain damaged, vegetating in some expensive clinic. One
thing which could always be said of Lucretious, he was
never a man to mull over an idea...if it sounded good then
"lets do it" The motto over his desk read "There are no
obstacles only opportunities"
He was already dusting off the ole Purdey side by side 12
gauge when it occurred to him that his life policies might
not pay out on suicide, and that therefore killing himself
would not actually solve the problem unless he could make
it look like an accident. This stopped him in his
tracks...could he blow himself away in the study with
enough panache to give the appearance of an
accident?...surely questions would be asked about why he
was fooling around with a loaded shotgun while all his
guests were outside burning his meat? It wasn't as if he
was even showing it to someone, For an instant he thought
of dragging in a few dudes as witnesses to an accident.
Russian Roulette? No even the thought that questions may
be asked was enough to induce caution.
Of course it could also be argued that the human spirit is
too resilient to allow us to immolate ourselves willy
nilly, there is some corner of our erstwhile minds which
remains forever cautious: However be that as may be
Lucretious felt sufficiently justified in his caution to
embark over the next few days on a series of strategies to
achieve his end...a set of activities carried out with a
degree of masochistic pleasure and more enthusiasm than
he'd shown in weeks.
Perhaps though, it was no more than the joy of finding
himself engaged in some worthwhile pastime with a definite
payoff.
First thing Monday, Lucretious begins a discreet process
of establishing the precise nature of his affairs...a
horrible experience...there is, he decides nothing more
conducive to self-immolation that sitting down in the
middle of a crippling down cycle in one's fortunes and evaluating one's
financial status. It was no less than he expected. Dead he
is worth a fortune...alive he's technically insolvent.
His death however is hemmed in by specific guidelines
which would rule out anything self actuated unless it
appeared not to be. He also discovered that some tame tax
type he'd once employed had structured his estate into a
trust...for the prime benefit of his daughter. It would
therefore have proved imprudent to alter all these
arrangements in favour of some obscure beneficiary prior
to a staged disappearance cum insurance scam.
So his first thought centred on some form of accident.
What if he was killed in a horrendous crash in his AMG
Mercedes...the car was regarded as being so safe that his
death in an accident could hardly be regarded as anything
but ordained...So the thought so the act, and Wednesday
sees him racing up the Great North Road at hi-speed searching
out a handy concrete
bridge pylon with which to connect.
Of course deciding to make an "accident" happen is
considerably more difficult than having one
spontaneously...The nagging thought is of course will it
be final, will I be no more than crippled, and shall it be
`now'.
So on that first day all he did was use up a quantity of
credit sponsored petrol to no avail..."there was too much
traffic to make it convincing", and too many doubts. He
also, so he told himself, had no really valid reason for
being on the Great North Road, all of which he realised
were merely excuses for avoiding action.
'Yeah, you've got too many excuses bra...don't think...do"
Then on Thursday some visitors arrived at the house, just
as he was leaving; large fellows with drooping moustaches
and big hands. They held him for a while, almost lovingly in
fact. They were certainly more gentle than "That Bitch" 'his otherwise unmentionable wife, had
been for awhile. They pointed out politely that he
owed someone called Louie a large sum of money.
They actually had to gently jog his memory a bit and it
turned out that the money had originally been
`borrowed' from a very amiable old gentleman by Lucretious
who had appropriated it on the pretext of investing it in
a secure place. Peter had long since been ravaged by Paul
to pay Helveen who had been plundered to pay Rspv and all....
The Gentleman had been trying to contact Lucretious for
some weeks and he had been avoiding him. Now it seemed he
had "factored" his investment to this Louie chap who
didn't favour the telephone at all.
They also didn't favour cheques and so Lucretious had to
raid his final reserve stocks of cash to pay a percentage
of what was owed on the basis that he hadn't expected them
and would pay the rest later....
"No sweat China...." gently picking up a photograph of
Lucretious's daughter and pushing his thumb nail through
her crotch.
"We'll call again..". holding the picture, impaled upon his
thumb, under his nose...to him...and then the big hairy fellow gently pushed
his thumb into Lucretious's mouth pressing the picture
against his lips, while his head was equally gently held immobile,
and until Lucretious gagged.
Afterwards he set off, racing up towards the Great North
Road in a mixture of fear, terror and revulsion, and so
intent was he on the incident which had just transpired
that he lost concentration going around a bend and slid
the AMG off the road at a place where the road was being
widened and narrowly missed ploughing into a huge piece of
earthmoving equipment before he ended up shredding the
entire underside of the car on a huge pile of concrete
paving blocks.
People rushed over to see if he was ok and to goggle at
the wreck. A few shouted at him for being stupid and
putting their lives at risk. Were they living now for the
first time, he wondered. A site foreman told him he was
"Lucky, cause some ou was killed only a few days before
when his car ploughed into the blade of the grader".
Did he need that luck thought Lucretious, realising that
being alive held no joys for him, rather like surviving a
journey to the gas chamber only to discover that they'd run out of gas and the real
ordeal was still to come, again.
And so he climbed unscathed out of the AMG..."The safest
car in the world", but it would be weeks before he could
drive it again, and in the meantime he would have to hire
a car which his burgeoning credit limits would just permit
for a short time yet.
When he got to his office there was a registered letter of
demand waiting for him from the tax department, requiring
an immediate accounting of his financial affairs for the
past five years.
So to plan Z part the second.
The following day Lucretious went off in his newly hired
car to a surgical supplies store in the city. There he
purchased a hundred metres of Haasrek, surgical rubber
band of the type with which he used to make catapaults,
during the unstressed moments of his childhood.
Then on the pretext of "business" he set of North into the
deepest reaches of untamed rural countryside with the
objective of killing himself in a very elaborate manner
designed to give the appearance of murder.
His reasoning was that given the inordinate level of
violence in the country at large, with people being
slaughtered on an apparently random basis in their scores
daily, the police force was stretched beyond capacity
simply coping with the flood of death reports, burglaries, streams of illegal immigrants etc,
with precious
little time available to investigate specific cases. He
also hoped that a country policeman would be less
scrupulous about detail, forgetting of course that he
might be "lucky" and get a country policeman with a
burning desire for promotion.
His plan was complex yet inherently simple, he would
select a spot at the edge of some trees with an open space
of about two hundred metres separating him from more
heavily wooded forest land. He would then climb some fairly
accessible tree and attach one end of the rubber hosing
to it. Then he would extend the hosing for some two
hundred metres, at which point it would be at full
stretch. The other end was attached to his .357 Magnum
revolver.
His idea was to hold the thing at about arms length from
his head with the hammer cocked. Then, using a twig pushed
through the trigger guard as a lever he could pull the
trigger with his thumbs and the ensuing recoil combined
with the heavy elastic band should comfortably send the revolver
hurtling off a few hundred metres into the tops of a few
trees where it would hopefully remain for years. A very
simple and probably most effective plan.
He would then arrange everything to give the appearance of
a possible hijacking and robbery with a final execution at
the end of some supposed "ordeal". The newspapers were
filled daily with such reports; so unless there were vast
numbers of citizens throughout the country wilfully
committing suicide by proxy, his demise should be no more
than a byline in a local newspaper.
And so to the "best laid plans" as the great Scotsman
observed...His car hidden in the trees a few hundred
metres ( in fact nearly a kilometre) from the spot
eventually chosen. (had he subconsciously prevaricated over
the "right" spot, you may ask) His wallet, Rolex and other
valuables carefully buried far from the spot; and then the
elaborate preparations with the elastic band.
Perhaps it was that final moment staring into that
drainpipe that masqueraded as a handgun. Perhaps his hand
flinched at that penultimate instant, or his head
twitched, or a sudden unaccounted breeze ruffled the
branches, Lucretious never knew, and probably never would
know whether his indomitable human spirit simply refused
to be quenched or whether it was pure funk or plain
incompetence...there was a loud explosion, slightly behind
schedule, and blackness.
When he awoke it was to the thought that he had died and
gone to hell except that his throat was drier than a fuck
without foreplay. He was also freezing cold and he was
surrounded by a circle of squatting children, some sombre,
some simply silent and some giggling behind their hands.
Standing over him was a near naked infant with a rancid
snot regurgitated face, all streaked over with streams of
dirt. He was prodding at Luc's genitals with a stick.
At this point Lucretious realised that he was stark naked
and that his genitals were coated with
something that could be white enamel paint, and in terror
he leaped to his feet, scattering children and evoking
equal terror in a group of other onlookers whom he had not
previously perceived but now sees to be a group of young
village girls.
Embarrassment on top of catastrophe, he has died and gone
off to some place where it is his fate to be humiliated. Characteristically
given his former obsession his first
thought is:
what is this going to cost him ?
A Great deal as it transpired, because of course he had
failed to kill himself. He had knocked himself out in some way
and given himself a headache that reduced all the worst
hangovers of his excessive moments to mere phosphene
kaleidographics with twinkly lights flashing merrily in front of aching eyesockets.
While he'd been unconscious some thieving bandits had
snucked up on him and stolen all his clothes [They'd also
stolen his carefully buried wallet, Rolex and other
valuables and the 357, as well as the hired car, and had
disappeared never to be seen again.]
It appeared as if they had also been intent on stealing
his genitals, for why else had they been coated with that
white gunk, had they perhaps been disturbed? Possibly. He
was unable to find out. It certainly appeared that they had
been watching his elaborate preparations from some secret
vantage spot. On the other hand, perhaps the white painted
genitals were simply intended to "make his day".
Nonetheless the former assumption was the basic position
taken by the extremely laid back constable who came out to take
down Lucretious's report, and who was really not that much
more interested in the living than he was in the dead. So
much for ambition.
And so Lucretious returned to the city in a friendly police
squad car with borrowed clothes. His wife, who had been
shopping, pauses long enough in her labours to register
that with all the credit cards having been stolen she will
now be subjected to the inconvenience of having to go
through all the elaborate paraphernalia which goes with
reissuing new cards and she is furious: In fact she is
beyond furious.
"I could murder you " she screams, frequently, "You are so
inconsiderate, it's a pity you weren't killed!"
After he told her about the bit with the genitals, she
sneered openly. She pointed out that it was a long time
since he'd shown any sign of having balls, and if he
really thought about it the act was more likely to have
been ceremonial than real.
Luc's daughter pauses for a moment in some video
game, to complain that their argument is ruining her
concentration and Lucretious sinks into a depression too
profound for discussion here.
Reviewing the entire thing over the next few days
he is painfully aware that if he believed he could
no longer afford to live, then dying is proving
catastrophically costly. It was time to seek professional
help: He decides to hire a "Hit Man".
Now this is a lot easier said than done. After all one
doesn't simply open the yellow pages and find one listed
in the easy reference index. Like lawyers, hit men are only
available on referral: and they are frequently expensive.
So he approaches the man he calls the Scarecrow, his
gardener, a fellow, with an awkward way of walking, called
Lucas. Lucas Radebe, one time factory worker, until his
leg had been injured in an accident at work; a former
gatekeeper, dagga smuggler and prison gardener, (Not that
Lucretious actually `knew' any of this.) He simply made an
assumption that Radebe would have some contact in the
townships who could do the deed efficiently for a small
sum.
At first Lucas is incredulous; not that Lucretious should
be seeking a hit man, that after all was quite common,
everyone with a gripe against his fellow man was out
hiring hit men at the moment, the rate of slaughter was
after all really quite astronomical, if anyone cared
enough to analyse it.
Ironically Lucretious was turning to one of the few growth
Industries left in the country for his solution: death and funerals.
No...Lucas was simply amazed at the target of Lucretious
request. However once he realises that Lucretious is
serious...the ways of the bosses are after all
mysterious...he decides to recommend his cousin who has
been out of work for some months and has become an
apprentice hit man for a small family syndicate based in a
township on the north east side of the city.
Not being a man to let an opportunity slip Lucas also
ponders whether Mrs Sekati might not also be interested
in laying out a few bucks as well ...just for
insurance...he had after all been party to their frequent
outbursts of acrimonious table talk for weeks now. It was
also quite well known that women of certain classes often
seemed to benefit considerably from the deaths of their
husbands. And so with this thought in mind he arranged for
Lucretious to meet his cousin
Five Grand! That's how much it would cost, five G's
to sneak up and blow Lucretious's head off.
Lucretious natural instinct to haggle over the price was
arrested at the thought that he was haggling over the
price of his own demise...was he only worth five
grand dead! Try wrestling with value and what have you
got, an empty corpse for a grave. It would cost more to
bury him.
He also discovered that it would cost seven and a half grand for a serious beating if he wanted to give someone a lesson. Killing is not such a mission, Lucas pointed out. With a beating you had to take more care and that could be more dangerous.
This presented Lucretious with an intriguing problem...he
didn't have the five thous in cash that was required by the hit
man...his world revolved ever less easily around a web of
extended plastic credit...and the "Apprentice Hit Man"
wouldn't take a cheque...didn't actually know what it was.
He certainly had no idea de of plastic and
therefore carried no merchant's machine for a Visacard .So
eventually Lucretious pawned an original Chagall at a
place on the Rietfontein road, gave the fellow his five
large and prepared more or less to meet his doom.
What we do is we make it look like a hijacking the hit man explained to Lucas.
We will use nine millimetres and hard-nosed ammunition so that it looks ordinary and we
wear gloves.
We collect him as he drives out of the gate get in behind him take him to a place
where he is
executed. Then walk away.
Two kilometres away dump gloves: firearm goes back to rentagun.
Now a curious thing begins to happen, gradually,
insidiously Lucretious feels his deep depression lift, he
is like a man playing out the last few days before his
annual holidays. Interestingly he begins to notice things
he hadn't seen before. The leaves are falling from the
trees and he sees with a particular enthrallment the last
glow of sunset, a golden rage of light behind the bare
etched branches on an avenue of Jacaranda's.
There are other things, the nuances of speech listening to
people talking in a shop, he notices too with growing and
profound amazement that there appear to be people who
actually sound as if they are happy. It is possible that
he feels a moment of regret at this insight, however he
rationalises that these are essentially people who have
nothing anyone really wants.
He also notices the garbage in the streets and girls with
bizarre spikes where most had hair. Even his wife's
carping and whining, her substitutes for love and
affection take on a peculiar air of finality.
He had left the actual "moment" open ended. The element of
surprise would add a certain zest to the exercise, which
could otherwise take on the ghastly planned agony of end
of the year school exams. Nonetheless after some six or
seven days had passed he began to get restless, the real
world of debt and anxiety was beginning to close in again
and here he was all dressed up and nowhere to go as it
were.
Then on the morning of the eighth day Lucas appears just
as Lucretious is preparing to leave the house and tells
him that his cousin wishes to talk to him. Lucretious
feels his stomach lurch, was it now, and did he want to
go...he panics inwardly, and is overwhelmed for an instant
by a feeling of utter futility and despair.
With a sense of dread he watches the approaching figure of
the apprentice hit man, smiling, almost embarrassed. At the
same time he notices that his wife is watching them from a
window in the lounge. He waves to her out of a sense of
nonchalance, and she disappears. The hit man coughs, his
eyes shift away and he mumbles something incoherent.
"What did he say" Lucretious asks when it is obvious that
there is to be no more said.
"He says he needs more money" replies Lucas.
Lucretious is dumfounded..."More money?"
"Yes".
"We agreed on the figure, why does he now need more"
A discussion ensues between Lucas and the hit man.
"He has expenses" says Lucas at last...and no further
information is forthcoming.
It occurs to Lucretious that technically his contract has
been voided, however he doesn't think that the hit man
will really understand the finer nuances of this argument,
and anyway as it dawns on Lucretious that his plan may
come to naught he feels the oppressive world of debt and
failure grabbing him again, his disappointment is acute,
his rage overwhelms him and he starts screaming at the hit
man, who cowers stoically.
Eventually however they all calm down and Lucretious
agrees to renegotiate the contract, drawing on another of
his Chagalls, this time at a different pawnshop.
"This is the last payment" he tells the surprised hit
man. "If you don't do it properly this time the deal's
off"
And so life returns to it's former tenor, and gradually as
Lucretious feels the comforting aura of immanent closure.
he begins to relax, he sets about his daily routine of
trying to put a "Big deal" together with renewed vigour
with the thriving confidence of a man with a million
dollar bank account.
And inevitably, as day follows night, the mood getteth the
deal and as ye believe so shall ye prosper and suddenly
out of the blue the biggest deal of Lucretious life comes
bursting in over the horizon: a hedge fund opportunity of truly mathematical glory.
Its everything he wants, a glorious scam calling for the
setting up of a syndicate to acquire property in
transitional suburbs in the city which could then be rack
rented by the square metre to the hordes of desperate homeless
seeking shelter in the city.
Suddenly Lucretious realises that his dilemma had been
caused by myopia. Just because the market for ripping off
the rich and naive had disappeared did not mean that all
opportunity was gone, there were all those masses of poor
out there with something to squeeze. He envisages a
wonderful future in which he can now live happily ever
after robbing the poor to feed the credit card classes.
Almost preordained the pieces come together with clockwork
precision. Had it been scripted it could not have gone
better until suddenly, days later, rejoicing in the rosy glow of
pre-eminant success he remembers the hitman. He must stop
him...buy him off if necessary before, like unwanted
taxes, now unwanted death sweeps uncomfortably in.
"I want to live forever" he shouts to Lucas as he bundles him into his replacement
hired car.
Lucas must take him to the Hit man so that they can cancel
the contract. So engrossed is he in his new mission that he
doesn't notice that Lucas is less than enthusiastic about
the change of plan, is in fact even more taciturn than is
monosyllabically normal.
So they set off on a bizarre journey through the
backstreets of dissolute townships, past rows of cardboard
and sinkplaat shacks. Lucretious is amazed that there are
so many people living on such confined places and, his
mind immediately filled with plans for squeezing rents from numbers
divided into space. He start's planning the replacement of his
AMG Mercedes with an updated model.
Their passage through the vast ocean of shacks is brooded
over by lounging lurking hordes of what appear to all
intents to be gangsters, thugs and general layabouts.
However Lucretious doesn't see them either...or perhaps he
sees only a romanticised version of them as he glances
incessantly at his new Rolex, anxious to be back at his
dealmaking.
Then Lucas spots his cousin walking across a rubble strewn
Square, between what could be a couple of main roads.
Lucretious skids to a stop and leaps from the car, shouts
to the hit man and takes off after him, Lucas in hobbly
pursuit. The hit man sees him, shouts back and from the
distance begins gesticulating violently.
Simultaneously some quick thinking lounging types nip in
and hijack the unattended vehicle which goes roaring off
with a flourish of agonised wheel spins.
Lucretious stops, suddenly shocked at what he has done so
intemperately, and he immediately realises that he is in a
completely alien place, which only hours before he had
never known to exist and that now, having suddenly got his
life together again he has exposed himself to the insanity
of loss.
He sees the Hit man starting towards him shouting and
gesticulating, and not understanding what he is saying,
knowing only that this man has a contract to complete,
Lucretious panics and races off back the way he had come
towards where he had left the car, realises in complete
disbelief that it is no longer there and then dashes in
mounting terror over the broad ribbon of patched tar which
served as the main road. The hit man pursues him.
And then suddenly it is over, halfway across the road the
Apprentice Hit Man is knocked down by a speeding bus and
instantly the scene is crowded with agitated bystanders.
Lucretious pushes through the crowd and sees Lucas
crouched down next to his dying cousin, who is desperately
trying to tell him something.
Lucretious is overwhelmed with guilt. This man is dying
because of him, he starts formulating pension plans for
the man's family, stops, realises the man is probably
related to the entire continent, revises his thought to
sending flowers.
"What is he saying " he asks Lucas at last as the man
continues to gasp out some things.
Lucas looks at Lucretious for a long time, everybody in
the crowd starts looking at Lucretious, he begins to feels
most exposed and starts shivering violently.
"He says he's sorry..."
"Sorry?"
"Yes he says he's sorry...he couldn't do it...he wanted to
you understand...but he couldn't"
"He couldn't do it" Lucretious says, dumfounded. It had
never occurred to him that the man had scruples, that
wasn't fair he was a hit man, what kind of a hit man has
scruples!
He looks around him at the crowd, they are all looking at
him, they are waiting. The hit man says something else to
Lucas before falling back. There is a long silence.
Eventually Lucretious breaks it. As he does
so he thinks inanely for a moment of the old sales
cliché. The first to break the silence loses...well the
hit man loses this one he thinks.
"What did he say then !"
Lucas stands, awkward on his game leg, he'd hurt it
chasing around after them. He stares at Lucretious.
"Well" Lucretious says, breaking the interminable silence
again....this time he doesn't think about the old sales
cliche...he is impatient...there are deals waiting to be
brokered. The crowd pressing around him also bothered him,
It was threatening.
"He said that he didn't want to disappoint you..."
"Yes"
"So he sub-contracted the job".
end.
Copyright...1992...Nicholas Williamson.aka...NiK...
P.O.Box 891224
Lyndhurst 2106. Azania/RSA.
This reminded me about a story/poem that I wrote back in '92 when some things were altogether much as they are now; and when a third option presented itself to a financial man of my aquaintance who was in a state of desperation-So I dug the tale out and it is here for your reading interest. I filed it at the time because there was no such thing as the Internet and because it was a little slow moving, as it sets up the core plot
Nonetheless the pace does pick up and in the light of past events it becomes more enjoyable as it progresses, if such a story can be enjoyable. I haven't made any changes to it except to fix some of the grammar and update the numbers to current inflation adjusted reality.
It's about eight thousand words so it shouldn't take too long.
I would point out that the story is entirely fictional, was written thirteen years ago and so any similarities between the story and the real world and current events or anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental and in the mind of the reader only.
***************************************
The Apprentice Hit Man.
If it could be said
of some people
that they conspired in their own catastrophe then
undoubtedly Lucretious Sekati
would have to be included
amongst them.
Lucretious Sekati; one time yuppie, mover and
shaker, sophisticated materialist.
What the formerly glorious left would have called an arch-
bourgeoise.
Could Lucretious be a metaphor for our times?
the architect of his own destiny ?
or
was his fate preordained by some malevolent concatenation
of events,
orchestrated
by an evil conspiracy of nameless "enemies"?
Being a yuppie (or former yuppie) in a period post-
economic boom, for Lucretious-an era of unremitting financial callisthenics signifying nothing but
ongoing impervious decline,
was, he thought, rather like playing out a slow motion game
of musical chairs.
The realisation that the number of chairs in the game are
being steadily whittled down,
gradually dawns on the players
resulting
in an ever more evident and unscrupulous scramble
for the remaining places.
Of course the difference between party games and the
world, is what happens to the players when they're "Out".
If you remember those endless parties of our collective
youth, the losers would all congregate around some
variation of an ice-cream counter; and ignoring the rest of
the participating players, would start some new game unrelated to the
former, so that when the last player in the "real'" game
stalked triumphantly off the floor, it was to find
itself an outsider in a newly evolved game being
played elsewhere.
Now of course, it's much later, and it seemed to Lucretious [sometimes known as licentious Lucretious]
that
he had lost that easy ability to shift consciousness; embark
on new playtimes at will. He was suddenly old...not really
old you understand
not like actuarially old,
simply the wrong side
of thirty five...
Now many of the `losers' wind up sitting on the sidelines,
nursing a beer, a bloody mary, a large scotch or a fat joint,
spending their days playing all sorts of wonderful
sideline games on such themes as "Isn't everything
absolutely dreadful",
or
"Did you hear what happened to so n so?"
as urban legend became
bloodied truth.
And so the difference is the sidelines.
Win or lose you still pay the rent, eat and have to
scavenge about to settle all the other bills which you
just seem to have somehow accumulated whether you're up,
down or nowhere in the middle.
And when he was up he was up
And when he was down he was down
And by the time the new game starts
He'll be neither up nor down.
The former players are superseded by the new
upward mobile players and today's yuppies are tomorrow's
has beens or what is, from Luc's, perspective, worse. Do
yesterday's yuppies become today's has-beens? And is he
therefore condemned
to become part
of the name and blame generation.
Lucretious, bless him, was unaware of any world, which did
not specifically revolve around him. He made money and
spent it as though there were no tomorrow, which there
isn't, or wasn't, for according to his life script
he was supposed to live happily ever after.
His key philosophy had always been that truth was
subordinate to need, and if therefore the truth hurts then
change it. If reality intrudes on fantasy then either
ignore it or invent a better reality, on the absolute
principle that whatever he believed in with enough fervour
would inevitably come to pass.
Now what if disaster strikes? All best laid plans
explode in your face...it happens...then the most popular
strategy a is to get heavily into the game of Pin the
blame on the Donkey. And the donkey must always be someone
else.
And so, of course, you would understand that this process
of "blaming" would paralyse the very principle of self
help which had brought about Lucretious's climb to success
in the first place.(the less charitable would question
whether it was really self-help and not just the good
fortune to be in the right place at the right time with
the right idea and the right backing.)
Lucretious Sekati was the precise epitome of the thoroughly
modern man. He was well trained in the primitive rudiments
of exploitative understanding. Had been taught how to
manipulate the levers of finance in the advanced
literacy/numeric courses provided by his local School of
Business.
Armed with his high-powered .45 calibre MBA, Lucretious had
gone forth and conquered some newly defined market segment
in the field of investment scams.
He had been wonderfully successful setting up a succession of
`empty shell' corporations, whose stock he'd market on the
newly emerging Venture Capital Exchange to little old
widows with pots of cash and naive expectations. His
enormous success in this, together with the ministrations
of a flock of tame tax consultants meant that he had been
able to pour a vast stream of income into material
gratification.
When questioned on his profligate lifestyle his favourite
boast, once made public through an indiscreet well
lubricated aside to a `dolly' from that ghastly "Stylish
Living" magazine was "Work sucks just gimme the Bucks".
In fairness to Lucretious however, the article in `Stylish
Living" did go on to point out that the tax payable on not
spending his money was a terrifying prospect...better it
had noted to pour the money, into tax avoidable perks and
live for the day.
And Lucretious now believed he had had his `day'. The
economy, masked by inflation and government inspired hype
had resumed it's former onward decline. The interlude of
bullish yuppiedom had come and gone, great global systems
had decayed and vanished into the dustbins of history,
nonetheless mortgage bonds and lease agreements
marched resolutely onward.
For those with a yearning for the `good life', I'm sorry to tell you that
we're not dealing with that part where he was making pots
of cash. Its a great soapy, filled with brilliantly
executed scams, devious, ruthless and immensly
profitable. And with the money, long joyous nights gang
banging with a succession of beautiful people in warm
jacuzzis at the expense of grieving widows...And then of
course there was the romance. Luc's fairy tale
marriage to his secretary cum bookkeeper, who knew all
about his scams and used the promise of glorious
nights between her thighs combined with not so subtle
threats of blackmail to get him to the nuptial bed.
No that's it, as Lucretious is now wont to say,
'Happiness is ephemeral but depression is forever.'
And so we find ourselves at the point where "the going has
become tough"...at the point where our hero has grievous
doubts about his own toughness. For when the going got
tough, Lucretious's tough wife went shopping and
Lucretious Sekati found himself at the end of his tether.
There are certain questions that usually arise here
concerning the issue of comparative poverty. To those
whose sympathies tend to lie with the traditionally poor:
that great crowd of ragged unwashed fellows who hover
around at the off-ramps of up market highways, hands
outstretched, tugging at the heartstrings of our
collective guilt; the question of poverty is obvious, and
identifying the victims even more so.
To these, the idea that the Lucretious Sekatis of the
world could be in the same category is laughable, the man's
worth a billion. Sod him! ... If he's suffering... good!
However when we look closer...at the empty fridge...the
bare shelves...the extended structure of debt...the
television lifestyle exposed as a hollow sham...then...for
what we may ask the old Dickensian dictum: ... Income Ten
Million, expenditure Thirty... result misery, confusion,
anger, despair and depression in roughly that order.
So it's all very well sitting there smugly saying, Good!
Serve the bloated yuppie right. How dare he claim poverty
driving around in his AMG Mercedes swapping plastic for
food?....let him sell it all and lose it all, and should we
dare, we may compare..
For the truth, according to Lucretious Sekati is that
"When yuppies bleed the world haemorrhages." and to
Lucretious, his tragedy is the tragedy of a modern
Everyman. The man who `Has it all'...when he suffers all
suffer. And Lucretious is truly suffering...he is three
months behind on his 4,000,000 mortgage, the market has turned and the house is
unsaleable at the price he needs. He's six months behind on the Merc, and he's
ages behind on his wife's Bee Emm. He's also being sued by
the Orthodontist who is in turn four months behind on his
mortgage etc...And he hasn't paid for his daughter's dance
classes since forever.
Now you're probably asking, What happened to all the
money! Well join Lucretious because he doesn't know either
neither do I if it comes to that. The only one who might
have known was a Minister of Finance who resigned on
grounds of exhaustion, probably caused by digging around
desperately trying to figure out where it had all gone.
In fact the whole question of where the money had gone had
become a burning question at almost all the ritual meat
burning ceremonies which traditionally fill the summer
weekends.
This is where the story of Sekati's conspiracy with
himself starts, at a crucial Sunday afternoon "Meat eat n
defeat" programme. A special day party for Luc' with a whole cow on a spit roasting gently
in simmering heat washed with sumptuous liquids.
The topic of the day, excluding those more important
topics like who had died, had a baby, was getting married,
or had made the national team, centred around increasingly banal revelations
of mass scale corruption in some or other
government departments.
What was happening was that many amongst the group felt,
like Lucretious, that they had to work hard to steal
their money, and that now they were finding their sources
of cash increasingly strapped. People had less and less
disposable income to blow on attractive investment scams
due amongst other things to paying ever increasing amounts
of stealth taxes to fund the increasingly avaricious appetites of
state officials. It was an extreme form of unfair
competition, said one of Luc's family.
"Of course this is a global phenomenon, I mean how's
Italy, The mafia's got it my man, the people can fight but
everyone's got a price....like you know what I mean hey.
The idea of globalisation had become tres fashionable
and if Levi jeans and pocket sized information communicators
could be
part of a worldwide phenomena so could corruption, angst
and economic decay.
And of course talk drifted over to whether someone had
taken a bribe to include Louie someone in some national
team and there was a long discussion about the importance
of knowing people and so what if a few bucks had to move
around a bit as long as the team won.
"A Man's a man you know?'
"Yeah; It's what a guy does you know, not what he thinks."
"Yeah there's too much thinking, and talking and nothing
doing."
Like a man who has slowly, dispiritedly lost all appetite
Sekati wandered steadily off indoors, manoeuvring through
The interminable ritual backslapping "How's it
going man" type introductions .
Does it mean, he thought gloomily, that if what a man
does, is all his life means, and if what he does comes to
nothing then was he therefore also nothing...a blankness
on the page of history.
He was talking to people through a cloud, reaching out in
slomo through a fog, a so familiar fog
"determinism is out, uncertainty is in ...and nothing we
have ever known will be in vogue again,"
Who said that? Who let that man into the party?
Lucretious felt an abyss open up beneath his feet. For an
instant he was staring into a void...a no mans land; and
he felt a moment of absolute terror. The ghost wandered
over to the liquor cabinet. That's what I am he thought
distractedly, a ghost. I am the ghost of Lucretious Sekati
playing out the hours and moments of my stay in purgatory.
He could hear the murmur of conversation from the
fireplace where discussion had shifted from the
abstractions of corruption in all places to the ever escalating
volumes of violence sweeping the country.
He found himself standing next to Angina Oline, his sister- in- laws
brother-in-law who had spent years living in Nepal in exile during
the bad years, and was now designing software
programmes in his own networking company. Why Nepal people would ask. He would shrug and smile.
'Yes," Angina said, "They forget that for a lot of people life
had no particular meaning, it was just something they
did, and therefore death was a relative non-event, a simple
abstraction."
"After all" he said, "We can never know the fact of our
own deaths and therefore the idea of death is, in effect
meaningless...beyond the terror of it's inevitability."
Now usually Lucretious couldn't stand this guy. He used
big words as if he knew what they meant, and Lucretious
often didn't and that pissed him off, and for a moment he
sparked.
"What's this bull, we never know the fact of our own
deaths...where you getting off with that shit man."
"What I said man, did you know someone who came back and
said "how's it my man,?"
"..........No."
"So"
"No.."
"So here, you're here, there you are not, so how could you
know here that you're there."
"Lucretious's mind folded up...for a moment something
flashed away, as if he almost grabbed something
precious and it was gone and he was instead paralysed with
an unaccountable terror."
"We shy away from the terror of our non-existence because
we fear the loss of what we have in exchange for the
unknown place beyond our understanding...these gangsters
who terrify them," waving in the direction of the
fireplace, "They who commit acts of desperation act from
nothing, have therefore nothing to value...or lose and the
concept of death never arises.
"The Terror", Lucretious thought, standing at that abyss
before the cabinet, staring at his ghost reflected in the
glass. It is life which is pointless, not death...and in
that instant he resolved upon a plan.
This, he decided was to be the last plan...plan Z... all
other stratagems had failed completely to resolve the
dilemma in which he found himself. He'd contemplated suing
for insolvency...the act of financial suicide, and had
decided that it would solve very little; he would still be
who he was when all the stuff was gone...even if his wife
left him, and took the child he would still be responsible
for the maintenance, only then, having nothing he could
only envisage himself on the edge for the rest of his
life.
"I have lost all confidence in myself,' he told the ghost staring back at him impassively; as if
it too had written him off. In his rising paranoia he
sensed that former associates were shunning him, labelling
him a loser, unwilling to maintain contact lest they
become contaminated in the ever more vicious real world
game of musical chairs upon which his business life had
come to be based.
Now you may well recognise that Lucretious was suffering
from some form of chronic depression which had reduced him
to a de facto state of impotence (definitely in the
sexual sense, and his wife's carping on this subject was
not helping his self-esteem either).This state made it
increasingly difficult for him to focus on the necessary
requirement to go out and score the `big one' in the
market place.
He felt boxed in...The debt was mounting...he was caught
by the balls...and absolutely nothing was working...like,
the world, for him, had stopped.
It was so bad he'd even looked for a job...discreetly only
to find to his horror that he was redundant...too
expensive, too experienced ...too threatening perhaps, but
mainly because he had lost that virginal naive enthusiasm
which is the herald of success, a complete inability to
understand the concept of failure.
Lucretious felt that overwhelming aura of failure hang on him
like one of his old overcoats which hung on that scarecrow
he called a gardener.
And so, staring at his ghost in the cabinet he suddenly
realised that the only way out of his cul de sac was to
kill himself.
"Yo ho ho" he said to himself immediately the thought ran
through his mind..."this is madness...I must be insane or
I wouldn't be thinking this"...so thinking he poured
himself a large scotch and made a mental note that he was
drinking too much, and then he sat listening to the
murmering voices from the nearby patio, trying not to think about
the idea he had just had.
Now if you have never viewed suicide as a viable option in
times of trouble it need hardly be pointed out that it's a
serious concept with practical as well as philosophical
implications. Consider the facts. Lucretious is broke...he
has used up all his reserves attempting to find alternate
solutions to his financial dilemma, and he has reached
the stage where all seems hopeless. The country is in a
deepening financial crisis, as is the world.
This never bothered him in his hey day, after
all here a bribe there a bribe everywhere a bribe,
bribe. The real problem was a growing problem of connections, who sensing a decline in his cash flows had themselves flowed and he, currently
too cash strapped to go out and make some new ones
in the time honoured way.
And of course there was a picky investor confidence
in the country's destiny, for a man who made his living
promoting high risk ventures a business environment which
regards the bluest of blue chip as dodgy, is a total
disaster. So it's time, he thinks to down tools.
For Lucretious his survival is now to be measured in weeks
not even months, he has run out of ideas and his wife's
credit limit has just been raised as the banking sector
desperately seeks to sell it's products...credit, in the
wake of sluggish demand.
On a philosophic level therefore he can readily justify
suicide on the grounds that it is a rational response to a
deranged circumstance...He thinks briefly of a line from
"The Brother's Karamazov", when Ivan says to God, "If you
exist, I respectfully return my ticket." he laughs remembering his fifteenth year when he had discovered
reading for pleasure, and the "Brothers" whilst laid up
with a broken leg...he had done precious little reading
since.
So to the practical problems. [One realises that there are
aspects to this decision which would be of concern to
those of a Theistic bent, ie damage to the immortal soul
etc, and that there should be rather more anguishing over
the decision than there is going to be. However
Lucretious, being essentially given to Sybaritic pastimes
had never given any thought to his immortal soul...wasn't
in fact aware that he might have one]
The first question was, did he simply "do himself in"? or
should he include the family?...He resolved this one quite
quickly by deciding that mass family suicide\murders were
altogether too trendy these days with every disaffected
Tom, Musa and Jacobus bumping off his whole family at the
drop of a divorce notice.
Then there was the very real consideration that he was not
overly fond of his wife...resented her spending
habits...her threats of blackmail to get him into marriage
in the first place, and since things had gone from bad to
worse she had taken to deriding his performance in bed,
which wasn't helping him at all.
No...he thought ... if there was any life after death the
last thing he wanted was to be saddled along with her
again..let her rather stay in purgatory.
Lucretious's death would bring in enough Insurance money
to pay off the bond, the two cars, the shack at the coast,
the stereo hi fi, this that and the other, and still leave
enough over to send his daughter to a good private school
where they would teach her how to get out of the AMG
Mercedes without revealing her knickers. He could
therefore get out of the rat race while leaving his honour
intact.
And so, his mind made up, he headed for his study where he
kept his collection of firearms, The shotgun, he decided,
messy but efficient...no foolish errors with inadequately
powered bullets bouncing off a bone fragment to leave him
brain damaged, vegetating in some expensive clinic. One
thing which could always be said of Lucretious, he was
never a man to mull over an idea...if it sounded good then
"lets do it" The motto over his desk read "There are no
obstacles only opportunities"
He was already dusting off the ole Purdey side by side 12
gauge when it occurred to him that his life policies might
not pay out on suicide, and that therefore killing himself
would not actually solve the problem unless he could make
it look like an accident. This stopped him in his
tracks...could he blow himself away in the study with
enough panache to give the appearance of an
accident?...surely questions would be asked about why he
was fooling around with a loaded shotgun while all his
guests were outside burning his meat? It wasn't as if he
was even showing it to someone, For an instant he thought
of dragging in a few dudes as witnesses to an accident.
Russian Roulette? No even the thought that questions may
be asked was enough to induce caution.
Of course it could also be argued that the human spirit is
too resilient to allow us to immolate ourselves willy
nilly, there is some corner of our erstwhile minds which
remains forever cautious: However be that as may be
Lucretious felt sufficiently justified in his caution to
embark over the next few days on a series of strategies to
achieve his end...a set of activities carried out with a
degree of masochistic pleasure and more enthusiasm than
he'd shown in weeks.
Perhaps though, it was no more than the joy of finding
himself engaged in some worthwhile pastime with a definite
payoff.
First thing Monday, Lucretious begins a discreet process
of establishing the precise nature of his affairs...a
horrible experience...there is, he decides nothing more
conducive to self-immolation that sitting down in the
middle of a crippling down cycle in one's fortunes and evaluating one's
financial status. It was no less than he expected. Dead he
is worth a fortune...alive he's technically insolvent.
His death however is hemmed in by specific guidelines
which would rule out anything self actuated unless it
appeared not to be. He also discovered that some tame tax
type he'd once employed had structured his estate into a
trust...for the prime benefit of his daughter. It would
therefore have proved imprudent to alter all these
arrangements in favour of some obscure beneficiary prior
to a staged disappearance cum insurance scam.
So his first thought centred on some form of accident.
What if he was killed in a horrendous crash in his AMG
Mercedes...the car was regarded as being so safe that his
death in an accident could hardly be regarded as anything
but ordained...So the thought so the act, and Wednesday
sees him racing up the Great North Road at hi-speed searching
out a handy concrete
bridge pylon with which to connect.
Of course deciding to make an "accident" happen is
considerably more difficult than having one
spontaneously...The nagging thought is of course will it
be final, will I be no more than crippled, and shall it be
`now'.
So on that first day all he did was use up a quantity of
credit sponsored petrol to no avail..."there was too much
traffic to make it convincing", and too many doubts. He
also, so he told himself, had no really valid reason for
being on the Great North Road, all of which he realised
were merely excuses for avoiding action.
'Yeah, you've got too many excuses bra...don't think...do"
Then on Thursday some visitors arrived at the house, just
as he was leaving; large fellows with drooping moustaches
and big hands. They held him for a while, almost lovingly in
fact. They were certainly more gentle than "That Bitch" 'his otherwise unmentionable wife, had
been for awhile. They pointed out politely that he
owed someone called Louie a large sum of money.
They actually had to gently jog his memory a bit and it
turned out that the money had originally been
`borrowed' from a very amiable old gentleman by Lucretious
who had appropriated it on the pretext of investing it in
a secure place. Peter had long since been ravaged by Paul
to pay Helveen who had been plundered to pay Rspv and all....
The Gentleman had been trying to contact Lucretious for
some weeks and he had been avoiding him. Now it seemed he
had "factored" his investment to this Louie chap who
didn't favour the telephone at all.
They also didn't favour cheques and so Lucretious had to
raid his final reserve stocks of cash to pay a percentage
of what was owed on the basis that he hadn't expected them
and would pay the rest later....
"No sweat China...." gently picking up a photograph of
Lucretious's daughter and pushing his thumb nail through
her crotch.
"We'll call again..". holding the picture, impaled upon his
thumb, under his nose...to him...and then the big hairy fellow gently pushed
his thumb into Lucretious's mouth pressing the picture
against his lips, while his head was equally gently held immobile,
and until Lucretious gagged.
Afterwards he set off, racing up towards the Great North
Road in a mixture of fear, terror and revulsion, and so
intent was he on the incident which had just transpired
that he lost concentration going around a bend and slid
the AMG off the road at a place where the road was being
widened and narrowly missed ploughing into a huge piece of
earthmoving equipment before he ended up shredding the
entire underside of the car on a huge pile of concrete
paving blocks.
People rushed over to see if he was ok and to goggle at
the wreck. A few shouted at him for being stupid and
putting their lives at risk. Were they living now for the
first time, he wondered. A site foreman told him he was
"Lucky, cause some ou was killed only a few days before
when his car ploughed into the blade of the grader".
Did he need that luck thought Lucretious, realising that
being alive held no joys for him, rather like surviving a
journey to the gas chamber only to discover that they'd run out of gas and the real
ordeal was still to come, again.
And so he climbed unscathed out of the AMG..."The safest
car in the world", but it would be weeks before he could
drive it again, and in the meantime he would have to hire
a car which his burgeoning credit limits would just permit
for a short time yet.
When he got to his office there was a registered letter of
demand waiting for him from the tax department, requiring
an immediate accounting of his financial affairs for the
past five years.
So to plan Z part the second.
The following day Lucretious went off in his newly hired
car to a surgical supplies store in the city. There he
purchased a hundred metres of Haasrek, surgical rubber
band of the type with which he used to make catapaults,
during the unstressed moments of his childhood.
Then on the pretext of "business" he set of North into the
deepest reaches of untamed rural countryside with the
objective of killing himself in a very elaborate manner
designed to give the appearance of murder.
His reasoning was that given the inordinate level of
violence in the country at large, with people being
slaughtered on an apparently random basis in their scores
daily, the police force was stretched beyond capacity
simply coping with the flood of death reports, burglaries, streams of illegal immigrants etc,
with precious
little time available to investigate specific cases. He
also hoped that a country policeman would be less
scrupulous about detail, forgetting of course that he
might be "lucky" and get a country policeman with a
burning desire for promotion.
His plan was complex yet inherently simple, he would
select a spot at the edge of some trees with an open space
of about two hundred metres separating him from more
heavily wooded forest land. He would then climb some fairly
accessible tree and attach one end of the rubber hosing
to it. Then he would extend the hosing for some two
hundred metres, at which point it would be at full
stretch. The other end was attached to his .357 Magnum
revolver.
His idea was to hold the thing at about arms length from
his head with the hammer cocked. Then, using a twig pushed
through the trigger guard as a lever he could pull the
trigger with his thumbs and the ensuing recoil combined
with the heavy elastic band should comfortably send the revolver
hurtling off a few hundred metres into the tops of a few
trees where it would hopefully remain for years. A very
simple and probably most effective plan.
He would then arrange everything to give the appearance of
a possible hijacking and robbery with a final execution at
the end of some supposed "ordeal". The newspapers were
filled daily with such reports; so unless there were vast
numbers of citizens throughout the country wilfully
committing suicide by proxy, his demise should be no more
than a byline in a local newspaper.
And so to the "best laid plans" as the great Scotsman
observed...His car hidden in the trees a few hundred
metres ( in fact nearly a kilometre) from the spot
eventually chosen. (had he subconsciously prevaricated over
the "right" spot, you may ask) His wallet, Rolex and other
valuables carefully buried far from the spot; and then the
elaborate preparations with the elastic band.
Perhaps it was that final moment staring into that
drainpipe that masqueraded as a handgun. Perhaps his hand
flinched at that penultimate instant, or his head
twitched, or a sudden unaccounted breeze ruffled the
branches, Lucretious never knew, and probably never would
know whether his indomitable human spirit simply refused
to be quenched or whether it was pure funk or plain
incompetence...there was a loud explosion, slightly behind
schedule, and blackness.
When he awoke it was to the thought that he had died and
gone to hell except that his throat was drier than a fuck
without foreplay. He was also freezing cold and he was
surrounded by a circle of squatting children, some sombre,
some simply silent and some giggling behind their hands.
Standing over him was a near naked infant with a rancid
snot regurgitated face, all streaked over with streams of
dirt. He was prodding at Luc's genitals with a stick.
At this point Lucretious realised that he was stark naked
and that his genitals were coated with
something that could be white enamel paint, and in terror
he leaped to his feet, scattering children and evoking
equal terror in a group of other onlookers whom he had not
previously perceived but now sees to be a group of young
village girls.
Embarrassment on top of catastrophe, he has died and gone
off to some place where it is his fate to be humiliated. Characteristically
given his former obsession his first
thought is:
what is this going to cost him ?
A Great deal as it transpired, because of course he had
failed to kill himself. He had knocked himself out in some way
and given himself a headache that reduced all the worst
hangovers of his excessive moments to mere phosphene
kaleidographics with twinkly lights flashing merrily in front of aching eyesockets.
While he'd been unconscious some thieving bandits had
snucked up on him and stolen all his clothes [They'd also
stolen his carefully buried wallet, Rolex and other
valuables and the 357, as well as the hired car, and had
disappeared never to be seen again.]
It appeared as if they had also been intent on stealing
his genitals, for why else had they been coated with that
white gunk, had they perhaps been disturbed? Possibly. He
was unable to find out. It certainly appeared that they had
been watching his elaborate preparations from some secret
vantage spot. On the other hand, perhaps the white painted
genitals were simply intended to "make his day".
Nonetheless the former assumption was the basic position
taken by the extremely laid back constable who came out to take
down Lucretious's report, and who was really not that much
more interested in the living than he was in the dead. So
much for ambition.
And so Lucretious returned to the city in a friendly police
squad car with borrowed clothes. His wife, who had been
shopping, pauses long enough in her labours to register
that with all the credit cards having been stolen she will
now be subjected to the inconvenience of having to go
through all the elaborate paraphernalia which goes with
reissuing new cards and she is furious: In fact she is
beyond furious.
"I could murder you " she screams, frequently, "You are so
inconsiderate, it's a pity you weren't killed!"
After he told her about the bit with the genitals, she
sneered openly. She pointed out that it was a long time
since he'd shown any sign of having balls, and if he
really thought about it the act was more likely to have
been ceremonial than real.
Luc's daughter pauses for a moment in some video
game, to complain that their argument is ruining her
concentration and Lucretious sinks into a depression too
profound for discussion here.
Reviewing the entire thing over the next few days
he is painfully aware that if he believed he could
no longer afford to live, then dying is proving
catastrophically costly. It was time to seek professional
help: He decides to hire a "Hit Man".
Now this is a lot easier said than done. After all one
doesn't simply open the yellow pages and find one listed
in the easy reference index. Like lawyers, hit men are only
available on referral: and they are frequently expensive.
So he approaches the man he calls the Scarecrow, his
gardener, a fellow, with an awkward way of walking, called
Lucas. Lucas Radebe, one time factory worker, until his
leg had been injured in an accident at work; a former
gatekeeper, dagga smuggler and prison gardener, (Not that
Lucretious actually `knew' any of this.) He simply made an
assumption that Radebe would have some contact in the
townships who could do the deed efficiently for a small
sum.
At first Lucas is incredulous; not that Lucretious should
be seeking a hit man, that after all was quite common,
everyone with a gripe against his fellow man was out
hiring hit men at the moment, the rate of slaughter was
after all really quite astronomical, if anyone cared
enough to analyse it.
Ironically Lucretious was turning to one of the few growth
Industries left in the country for his solution: death and funerals.
No...Lucas was simply amazed at the target of Lucretious
request. However once he realises that Lucretious is
serious...the ways of the bosses are after all
mysterious...he decides to recommend his cousin who has
been out of work for some months and has become an
apprentice hit man for a small family syndicate based in a
township on the north east side of the city.
Not being a man to let an opportunity slip Lucas also
ponders whether Mrs Sekati might not also be interested
in laying out a few bucks as well ...just for
insurance...he had after all been party to their frequent
outbursts of acrimonious table talk for weeks now. It was
also quite well known that women of certain classes often
seemed to benefit considerably from the deaths of their
husbands. And so with this thought in mind he arranged for
Lucretious to meet his cousin
Five Grand! That's how much it would cost, five G's
to sneak up and blow Lucretious's head off.
Lucretious natural instinct to haggle over the price was
arrested at the thought that he was haggling over the
price of his own demise...was he only worth five
grand dead! Try wrestling with value and what have you
got, an empty corpse for a grave. It would cost more to
bury him.
He also discovered that it would cost seven and a half grand for a serious beating if he wanted to give someone a lesson. Killing is not such a mission, Lucas pointed out. With a beating you had to take more care and that could be more dangerous.
This presented Lucretious with an intriguing problem...he
didn't have the five thous in cash that was required by the hit
man...his world revolved ever less easily around a web of
extended plastic credit...and the "Apprentice Hit Man"
wouldn't take a cheque...didn't actually know what it was.
He certainly had no idea de of plastic and
therefore carried no merchant's machine for a Visacard .So
eventually Lucretious pawned an original Chagall at a
place on the Rietfontein road, gave the fellow his five
large and prepared more or less to meet his doom.
What we do is we make it look like a hijacking the hit man explained to Lucas.
We will use nine millimetres and hard-nosed ammunition so that it looks ordinary and we
wear gloves.
We collect him as he drives out of the gate get in behind him take him to a place
where he is
executed. Then walk away.
Two kilometres away dump gloves: firearm goes back to rentagun.
Now a curious thing begins to happen, gradually,
insidiously Lucretious feels his deep depression lift, he
is like a man playing out the last few days before his
annual holidays. Interestingly he begins to notice things
he hadn't seen before. The leaves are falling from the
trees and he sees with a particular enthrallment the last
glow of sunset, a golden rage of light behind the bare
etched branches on an avenue of Jacaranda's.
There are other things, the nuances of speech listening to
people talking in a shop, he notices too with growing and
profound amazement that there appear to be people who
actually sound as if they are happy. It is possible that
he feels a moment of regret at this insight, however he
rationalises that these are essentially people who have
nothing anyone really wants.
He also notices the garbage in the streets and girls with
bizarre spikes where most had hair. Even his wife's
carping and whining, her substitutes for love and
affection take on a peculiar air of finality.
He had left the actual "moment" open ended. The element of
surprise would add a certain zest to the exercise, which
could otherwise take on the ghastly planned agony of end
of the year school exams. Nonetheless after some six or
seven days had passed he began to get restless, the real
world of debt and anxiety was beginning to close in again
and here he was all dressed up and nowhere to go as it
were.
Then on the morning of the eighth day Lucas appears just
as Lucretious is preparing to leave the house and tells
him that his cousin wishes to talk to him. Lucretious
feels his stomach lurch, was it now, and did he want to
go...he panics inwardly, and is overwhelmed for an instant
by a feeling of utter futility and despair.
With a sense of dread he watches the approaching figure of
the apprentice hit man, smiling, almost embarrassed. At the
same time he notices that his wife is watching them from a
window in the lounge. He waves to her out of a sense of
nonchalance, and she disappears. The hit man coughs, his
eyes shift away and he mumbles something incoherent.
"What did he say" Lucretious asks when it is obvious that
there is to be no more said.
"He says he needs more money" replies Lucas.
Lucretious is dumfounded..."More money?"
"Yes".
"We agreed on the figure, why does he now need more"
A discussion ensues between Lucas and the hit man.
"He has expenses" says Lucas at last...and no further
information is forthcoming.
It occurs to Lucretious that technically his contract has
been voided, however he doesn't think that the hit man
will really understand the finer nuances of this argument,
and anyway as it dawns on Lucretious that his plan may
come to naught he feels the oppressive world of debt and
failure grabbing him again, his disappointment is acute,
his rage overwhelms him and he starts screaming at the hit
man, who cowers stoically.
Eventually however they all calm down and Lucretious
agrees to renegotiate the contract, drawing on another of
his Chagalls, this time at a different pawnshop.
"This is the last payment" he tells the surprised hit
man. "If you don't do it properly this time the deal's
off"
And so life returns to it's former tenor, and gradually as
Lucretious feels the comforting aura of immanent closure.
he begins to relax, he sets about his daily routine of
trying to put a "Big deal" together with renewed vigour
with the thriving confidence of a man with a million
dollar bank account.
And inevitably, as day follows night, the mood getteth the
deal and as ye believe so shall ye prosper and suddenly
out of the blue the biggest deal of Lucretious life comes
bursting in over the horizon: a hedge fund opportunity of truly mathematical glory.
Its everything he wants, a glorious scam calling for the
setting up of a syndicate to acquire property in
transitional suburbs in the city which could then be rack
rented by the square metre to the hordes of desperate homeless
seeking shelter in the city.
Suddenly Lucretious realises that his dilemma had been
caused by myopia. Just because the market for ripping off
the rich and naive had disappeared did not mean that all
opportunity was gone, there were all those masses of poor
out there with something to squeeze. He envisages a
wonderful future in which he can now live happily ever
after robbing the poor to feed the credit card classes.
Almost preordained the pieces come together with clockwork
precision. Had it been scripted it could not have gone
better until suddenly, days later, rejoicing in the rosy glow of
pre-eminant success he remembers the hitman. He must stop
him...buy him off if necessary before, like unwanted
taxes, now unwanted death sweeps uncomfortably in.
"I want to live forever" he shouts to Lucas as he bundles him into his replacement
hired car.
Lucas must take him to the Hit man so that they can cancel
the contract. So engrossed is he in his new mission that he
doesn't notice that Lucas is less than enthusiastic about
the change of plan, is in fact even more taciturn than is
monosyllabically normal.
So they set off on a bizarre journey through the
backstreets of dissolute townships, past rows of cardboard
and sinkplaat shacks. Lucretious is amazed that there are
so many people living on such confined places and, his
mind immediately filled with plans for squeezing rents from numbers
divided into space. He start's planning the replacement of his
AMG Mercedes with an updated model.
Their passage through the vast ocean of shacks is brooded
over by lounging lurking hordes of what appear to all
intents to be gangsters, thugs and general layabouts.
However Lucretious doesn't see them either...or perhaps he
sees only a romanticised version of them as he glances
incessantly at his new Rolex, anxious to be back at his
dealmaking.
Then Lucas spots his cousin walking across a rubble strewn
Square, between what could be a couple of main roads.
Lucretious skids to a stop and leaps from the car, shouts
to the hit man and takes off after him, Lucas in hobbly
pursuit. The hit man sees him, shouts back and from the
distance begins gesticulating violently.
Simultaneously some quick thinking lounging types nip in
and hijack the unattended vehicle which goes roaring off
with a flourish of agonised wheel spins.
Lucretious stops, suddenly shocked at what he has done so
intemperately, and he immediately realises that he is in a
completely alien place, which only hours before he had
never known to exist and that now, having suddenly got his
life together again he has exposed himself to the insanity
of loss.
He sees the Hit man starting towards him shouting and
gesticulating, and not understanding what he is saying,
knowing only that this man has a contract to complete,
Lucretious panics and races off back the way he had come
towards where he had left the car, realises in complete
disbelief that it is no longer there and then dashes in
mounting terror over the broad ribbon of patched tar which
served as the main road. The hit man pursues him.
And then suddenly it is over, halfway across the road the
Apprentice Hit Man is knocked down by a speeding bus and
instantly the scene is crowded with agitated bystanders.
Lucretious pushes through the crowd and sees Lucas
crouched down next to his dying cousin, who is desperately
trying to tell him something.
Lucretious is overwhelmed with guilt. This man is dying
because of him, he starts formulating pension plans for
the man's family, stops, realises the man is probably
related to the entire continent, revises his thought to
sending flowers.
"What is he saying " he asks Lucas at last as the man
continues to gasp out some things.
Lucas looks at Lucretious for a long time, everybody in
the crowd starts looking at Lucretious, he begins to feels
most exposed and starts shivering violently.
"He says he's sorry..."
"Sorry?"
"Yes he says he's sorry...he couldn't do it...he wanted to
you understand...but he couldn't"
"He couldn't do it" Lucretious says, dumfounded. It had
never occurred to him that the man had scruples, that
wasn't fair he was a hit man, what kind of a hit man has
scruples!
He looks around him at the crowd, they are all looking at
him, they are waiting. The hit man says something else to
Lucas before falling back. There is a long silence.
Eventually Lucretious breaks it. As he does
so he thinks inanely for a moment of the old sales
cliché. The first to break the silence loses...well the
hit man loses this one he thinks.
"What did he say then !"
Lucas stands, awkward on his game leg, he'd hurt it
chasing around after them. He stares at Lucretious.
"Well" Lucretious says, breaking the interminable silence
again....this time he doesn't think about the old sales
cliche...he is impatient...there are deals waiting to be
brokered. The crowd pressing around him also bothered him,
It was threatening.
"He said that he didn't want to disappoint you..."
"Yes"
"So he sub-contracted the job".
end.
Copyright...1992...Nicholas Williamson.aka...NiK...
P.O.Box 891224
Lyndhurst 2106. Azania/RSA.
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