These rotten judges are not working hard enough and they are expensive and don't work at a desired pace. So the minister wants to take control of them, just like has been done to school teachers who were generally considered to be idle layabouts by the new regime leaders and so they devised a system so fiendishly complicated to implement and administer that five teachers [now renamed learning mediators] are leaving the trade for every new recruit.
In their legal world the jurists are crying foul.
Now from what one gathers this is what the jurists are whingeing about. Some subversive bureaucrats somewhere in the Justice, law or whatever department have decided that all these judges and magistrates and whatever else falls under the 'justice' system heading are not working hard enough, taking too long to do whatever they do and they must be hustled along by the imposition of the kind of strict criteria carefully ducked by crony town managers and other friends of the rich and newly powerful.
These legal chaps are after all, all paid by the State and they do not seem to be accountable to the people in any way so the govt came up with an amendment to the system. An accountability chain would be created to link the executive to the Judiciary with the executive having override powers of some undefined kind [well they're vague to me anyway.]. The precise workings of this organisational restructure are arcane and wonderfully hazy presumably because we the public are considered too stupid to be expected to take any interest in something that may change our lives: a good fuck is generally more pleasant and immediate.
Now what we could argue is that all we have here is a simple turf war. One group of people have trampled into another's domain. And will inevitably change it utterly while all the time crying: 'that was not what they meant at all-not what they meant at all.' [With apologies to whoever wrote the now mangled original]
But that is what will happen. Cost cutting and other constraints resulting from freedom motivate the changes to the system. Today people are free to move around and commit a crime-that is their right. In the past they may have wished to commit a crime but freedom of movement was so restricted that the illusion of crime free places was created.
That illusion is gone. There are more criminals today than the system designed for a more leisurely era can cope with. The whip must be cracked -Zese people must conform to ze new social order-away with sinful tea breaks und gin wiiz tonics.
I have an old buddy who now hangs out in the British [Pomeranian] national health service. He was a good and experienced surgeon here in his field and he went off to a larney hospital system over there-he lasted about two years. They moved him on-too slow -he was only allotted four minutes per patient and he was taking ten, fifteen whatever doing his job properly and thoroughly. That wasn't good enough according to some work study specialist somewhere and he had to go.
Now he is one of ten thousand partially employed foreign doctors in London alone, who practice 'locum' work -the business has become so stressfull it seems there is a shortage of local recruits-How do you diagnose some aging human with minimal education and a vaguely defined pain somewhere-in four minutes-and sleep at night on your Hippocratic oath-but that's how it works and no one local wants to do the job anymore so they rely on foreigners.
The Pom Schooling system is the same, so full of admin there's no time for lessons so poor kids are worse and worse off.
The rougher parts of the system depends on foreign teachers who are too blown away by the 'huge' salaries to notice that the work conditions are more abusive than those condemned by Charles Dickens. A recent state sponsored report suggested that within a few years we will start depending on foreign teachers to keep our system going and there will be hardly any local teachers between thirty and forty years of age.
And that is the most important reason why the Judges are angry about the proposals. This is a cosy job. You listen to evidence, you potter off to your chambers. You poddle through heaps of law books, demand evaluations from young acolytes, guzzle sherry with 'Chums' at the Judges club, wherever it is, and ponder the conclusions you have to make -maybe even throw a little I Ching to tip the scales in really complex assessments-The government doesn't think you should have this time it's too slow and there are too many crimes.
We did have this speeded up thing before-the two minute trial was a daily feature of our lives and perhaps the government is really pissed off that there are so many of the present main jurist dudes who were hot young two minute milers back then and they seem to be slacking now; when they were dead keen on being nasty before. Maybe?
Nonetheless the two-minute trial was a daily ritual- Hundreds daily, like a sausage making machine. A man could be picked up off the pavement of the home where he worked. Perhaps he was pruning the roses at the pavement's edge. His jacket containing his compulsory 'dompas' was hanging on the garden gate and he would be arrested for not being in possession of this thing and no protestation would avail. He would disappear into the system, be brutalised, have a two minute trial be found guilty be 'endorsed' out of the city, and still wouldn't have his jacket-often he vanished forever leaving puzzled, confused and terrified employers to rail about the unreliability of the working classs.
That was what happened when the politicians controlled the judges before.
Last year Bob [the Roz] Mugabe became enraged that his urban 'subjects' were choosing a different party to his -that they were not happy with his 'rule' he demonstrated to them that they were pitiful 'subjects' and he their King-He destroyed the homes of nearly a million people although today you wouldn't know that; we're all pretending it never happened. There is no longer a credible judicial system in Zimbabwe, and sensible tourists avoid the place. That is what happens when politicians control the judges.
So the two aging Lefties who have so surprisingly come out in opposition to this change in the Constitution have caused some consternation, and the Rand's weakening for the first time in an age could be only co-incidentally associated with a touch of concern at the margins, that the freedom of the judiciary to ponder their cases is at the heart of the freedom we enjoy today and which is less than we had a decade ago and perhaps more than we will have in a decade's time.
Loves ya all
The Blog
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Thursday, February 23, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Public places chairless spaces
I met some elderly ladies this week in a queue in a post office in a small town well outside the Dome where I had ventured on business. They said that they found the hardest thing to bear in our new society was the complete eradication of seating in our contemporary urban landscape.
"In a democracy everyone has the right to stand," said one.
Looking around me in the post office, which has been 'there' for about seventy years, I could see where there had once been benches but they been removed. It's the same all around the town they said-when they are there people sit on them all day and wait for opportunities to rob people. So 'they've' taken them away. I was told earnestly.
And people who are unemployed or need to feed babies would sit there for hours feeding children talking to their friends and generally appropriate the amenity.
'They' took the chairs away because those people weren't spending any money one of the old duck's hissed vehemently at me, and their presence intimidated people who had money to spend so the seats had to go.
I wanted to ask her who 'they' were but the other touched me suddenly on the forearm saying, 'We have to go to the coffee shops to have a sit down'.
That seems reasonable, I said, you need refreshment to cope with the horror of shopping.
Yes there are more coffee shops now than there used to be.
But you can't just sit there and catch your breath and deal with your pains said the older of the pair, stabbing with a pointed finger on my arm to emphasis her point as if I were some layabout lounging around on chairs all day. If you're not spending money they move you on-just like 'them'. She managed to sound both sad and indignant simultaneously.
'And at the library there's no where to sit anymore, not even for the schoolchildren who come in to do their homework, because the unemployed and the homeless come in there to sleep.' Her friend added. She didn't sound angry, she seemed sad and helpless about the unemployed who roamed that husk of a town like caged tigers.
'It's even true in the shops too the other launched in randomly. You want to try on shoes there's nowhere to sit. You have to go and ask for a seat.
Yes and even in the change rooms the benches have gone.
Yes that's because homeless women would go in there to feed their babies so most of the shops have taken them away.
Later in the day I gatecrashed a conference at the three star hotel where I was staying and found earnest people outlining a plan to prepare other people to accept mediocrity as a viable option in life. Their role model was a sports star, not noted for anything but a tireless ability to keep exercising to a point of excellence who now in his post glory years was reduced to sustaining life trading on his laurels and exhorting people to 'do their best'. Ironically he makes more money doing this, I am told, than most people who spent their days exercising their brains to become 'clevers'. It is tough being unemployed and homeless I imagine in a world where the standard of mediocrity was some Herculean success.
I was reminded of Sean Connery's admonition in The Rock; 'why is it that losers always whine on about doing their best.' And left the conference feeling profoundly depressed and in need of a drink and a fuck not necessarily in that order.
A fuck is a wonderful depression cure don't you think. OF course finding a fuck is easy or not depending on what you're prepared to pay isn't it? It is also usually the start of something that ends up as a need for a depression cure of a different type-What about murder?
Now there's a game that has all the ingredients of post-mediocrity. What about finding someone to fuck and then murdering them?
I read somewhere recently that about ten percent of all the murders committed in this country are solved. Since we do not get credible crime statistics anymore we have to assume that to be correct-even if I was charitable, 20 % would be tops, I understand. It is certain that there has never been a better time than now to commit murder and I first said that over a decade ago.
Consider that we had five times more murders last year than the Americans had murdered in Iraq since they invaded it. And since the Iraqi war [invasion] started more people [non-combatant citizens] have been murdered in our country than [non-combatant citizens] have been murdered in Iraq. Which begs the question why are we not making as much fuss about the murders as the Americans and others are making about those deaths there. We are however making it harder for murderers to sit.
So what. One of them that was murdered wasn't me and I shall continue to live now because it may be me tomorrow although I hope it wont. Do we regard life with such contempt here that the issues of elderly customers are of less import than keeping the homeless out of our shops? Perhaps we never thought about it.
Perhaps we decided that in order to reduce the likelihood of being murdered we shall remove all the seating from our business environments so as to reduce the number of loungers and loiterers and limit the ease with which they can study me and my movements.
Death to loiterers.
Democracy is so much more of an adventure than fascist dictatorships could ever be.
'Red shoes blue shoes
Which one will you choose,
Should they let you buy?'
Loves Ya
NiK
"In a democracy everyone has the right to stand," said one.
Looking around me in the post office, which has been 'there' for about seventy years, I could see where there had once been benches but they been removed. It's the same all around the town they said-when they are there people sit on them all day and wait for opportunities to rob people. So 'they've' taken them away. I was told earnestly.
And people who are unemployed or need to feed babies would sit there for hours feeding children talking to their friends and generally appropriate the amenity.
'They' took the chairs away because those people weren't spending any money one of the old duck's hissed vehemently at me, and their presence intimidated people who had money to spend so the seats had to go.
I wanted to ask her who 'they' were but the other touched me suddenly on the forearm saying, 'We have to go to the coffee shops to have a sit down'.
That seems reasonable, I said, you need refreshment to cope with the horror of shopping.
Yes there are more coffee shops now than there used to be.
But you can't just sit there and catch your breath and deal with your pains said the older of the pair, stabbing with a pointed finger on my arm to emphasis her point as if I were some layabout lounging around on chairs all day. If you're not spending money they move you on-just like 'them'. She managed to sound both sad and indignant simultaneously.
'And at the library there's no where to sit anymore, not even for the schoolchildren who come in to do their homework, because the unemployed and the homeless come in there to sleep.' Her friend added. She didn't sound angry, she seemed sad and helpless about the unemployed who roamed that husk of a town like caged tigers.
'It's even true in the shops too the other launched in randomly. You want to try on shoes there's nowhere to sit. You have to go and ask for a seat.
Yes and even in the change rooms the benches have gone.
Yes that's because homeless women would go in there to feed their babies so most of the shops have taken them away.
Later in the day I gatecrashed a conference at the three star hotel where I was staying and found earnest people outlining a plan to prepare other people to accept mediocrity as a viable option in life. Their role model was a sports star, not noted for anything but a tireless ability to keep exercising to a point of excellence who now in his post glory years was reduced to sustaining life trading on his laurels and exhorting people to 'do their best'. Ironically he makes more money doing this, I am told, than most people who spent their days exercising their brains to become 'clevers'. It is tough being unemployed and homeless I imagine in a world where the standard of mediocrity was some Herculean success.
I was reminded of Sean Connery's admonition in The Rock; 'why is it that losers always whine on about doing their best.' And left the conference feeling profoundly depressed and in need of a drink and a fuck not necessarily in that order.
A fuck is a wonderful depression cure don't you think. OF course finding a fuck is easy or not depending on what you're prepared to pay isn't it? It is also usually the start of something that ends up as a need for a depression cure of a different type-What about murder?
Now there's a game that has all the ingredients of post-mediocrity. What about finding someone to fuck and then murdering them?
I read somewhere recently that about ten percent of all the murders committed in this country are solved. Since we do not get credible crime statistics anymore we have to assume that to be correct-even if I was charitable, 20 % would be tops, I understand. It is certain that there has never been a better time than now to commit murder and I first said that over a decade ago.
Consider that we had five times more murders last year than the Americans had murdered in Iraq since they invaded it. And since the Iraqi war [invasion] started more people [non-combatant citizens] have been murdered in our country than [non-combatant citizens] have been murdered in Iraq. Which begs the question why are we not making as much fuss about the murders as the Americans and others are making about those deaths there. We are however making it harder for murderers to sit.
So what. One of them that was murdered wasn't me and I shall continue to live now because it may be me tomorrow although I hope it wont. Do we regard life with such contempt here that the issues of elderly customers are of less import than keeping the homeless out of our shops? Perhaps we never thought about it.
Perhaps we decided that in order to reduce the likelihood of being murdered we shall remove all the seating from our business environments so as to reduce the number of loungers and loiterers and limit the ease with which they can study me and my movements.
Death to loiterers.
Democracy is so much more of an adventure than fascist dictatorships could ever be.
'Red shoes blue shoes
Which one will you choose,
Should they let you buy?'
Loves Ya
NiK
Saturday, February 11, 2006
a day at the dentist
I can see that the general drift of bloggishness on our spot has moved inexorably towards the gratuitous and the inane: listmanias, intertextual language and what did happen to Valli Moosa?.
This all makes me realise that I am becoming a boring old fart taking the whole world so seriously that one loses all sense of rational perspective. Nothing actually matters at all unless we choose it to.
So here is a bizarre experience I had this week at the dentist. Those seekers after meaning may seek what they wish.
I'm sure that like most people you don't much like going to the dentist. I am told that dentists have a high rate of suicides largely because people so dislike dentists and too many tend to take it personally. I don't know if this is true.
[Incidentally for the list mania types out there Psychiatrists are also reputed to have a high suicide rate as do retired cricketers of all people. One would never have thought that such an idler's activity could generate sufficient stress to warrant high rates of suicide-[Of course this may all be a lie.]
So, to this dentist thing. I was at one time hostile to this particular dentist because my jaw would hurt for weeks after visiting him. I went off and tried a number of other dentists for a year or two and found them all to be worse. There was even a fellow who practiced what he called 'new dentistry' where they eschew some of the traditional inject and drill stuff for a clumsy arrangement involving some kind of scraping spoon. The filling fell out three days later, and so did its replacement, at least Mervyns's fillings never fell out.
So eventually I went back to my 'old' dentist. I knew he could tell from checking my mouth against his X rays that I had cheated on him, and although he never said anything he communicated intense depression-more depressed than usual. I must admit that I also like him because he is the only person I know who drives an older car than mine. Anyway something must have happened in the meantime; perhaps or he went on a sensitivity training course or whatever in the interim because he had become so gentle that on that return occasion I fell asleep while he was working on the inside of my head.
Anyway this time I wasn't going to push my luck, I was going to listen to soothing music while he worked. I had given myself the biannual upgrade cellphone for a change. The kids have had the last few and I was still using an old brick. This thing that I gave me for Christmas [from me and my bank manager-a jolly wonderful person] can apparently do everything but bark. So far I had worked out more or less how to make a phone call and discovered that I had earphones and apparently that I could listen to the radio. So I decided I would lie in the chair and listen to the finest stuff that Classic FM could throw at me.
Like a lot of other bloggists on the 'spot' I have become disenchanted with the radio over the past few years- loads of 'realgoose' [propaganda right], endless inane chat shows on channels a b and c-scatterbrained psychobabble and hysterical advertisements cluttering the 'rock n roll' stations, d through z to the extent that music has become an afterthought-obviously everyone is saving money on royalty payments. Gareth Cliff is ok but it was ten o clock in the morning-so Classic it was.
I've vaguely listened to the kinda stuff they play on classic for decades without it ever having become a turn on [well except for Johan Sebastian Bach and Mr Purcell] but since the great radio station implosion of the past few years I find it the most pleasant station. It is also most uncluttered with hysterical advertising and inane chatter and while the occasional operatic piece will see me hit the change button mostly the tinkling of ivories is soothing and some of the local players are more than world class.
So I had a set of earphones and plugged them where the phone manual said it must be plugged. I think the manual went through GaryM's translator programme because I had to do some improvising to get sound -but eventually it came and I plugged into that superb Julian Bream version of the Concerto de Aranjuez that has been almost played to death over the year or so that I have been listening to the station. [Deep down I still prefer the Miles Davis version that I first heard nearly forty years ago and was the first time I ever had an orgasm from listening to a piece of music-not that it does that anymore mind.]
The earphones are tricky and the left one fell out so I jammed the right one in a tad harder wondering why it was the kids never seemed to have such problems. Then i lay back to let the man begin his task.
He had that huge needle n syringe thing they always have and he did that little squirty thing dentists do in front of you to let you know they are not about to pump two kilolitres of air into your bloodstream. Then he smiles that little half vengeful, half apologetic smile. You know that you are about to get a two-litre bottle of sense numbing muti zapped into some part of your inner skull.
And then he loomed into my space over my right shoulder and at the precise moment that he inserted the needle into wherever it goes by mirror and choke into some previously unexplored part of my upper gums the concerto ended, and instantly my peace seeking intention was abruptly violated by a 'a party political broadcast that does not necessarily reflect the views of the station concerned'
Un-knowing his steely bicep locked the earpiece deeper into my earhole. Before I could do a thing, trapped into my chair, unable to access the earplug for fear of bashing the dentist's injecting arm, I was doubly numbed by a ghastly tirade from the so-called self styled 'leader of the opposition' for a full thirty-second blast of petulant prevaricating reasons why I should vote against the present government and give favour to 'his' team.
Now you must understand that I have never been a fan of this man once dubbed the 'Chihuahua' of parliament. I had a neighbourhood run in with him once in the eighties when he was still a city councillor and my feelings about him are therefore personal and have always been influenced by the events of that incident. In addition he always manages to sound like an outraged hysterical schoolmaster faced with a farting epidemic in an undersized classroom.
I always think of him as a roadblock in our political system, holding his demanding finger in a dyke that should be allowed to burst so we can come to terms with the New: uncluttered with the baggage of a less than glorious past.
I was attacked once a dozen years ago by a gang of hijackers while I was getting something out of the boot of my car and we had something like a thirty second/ lifetime, full-on close quarter gunfight, rock n roll party if you like, during which they fired seventeen bullets at me and hit me four times and I fired thirteen back at them and hit them nine times [so I 'won'] and I remember somewhere in the middle of the entire horrific incident having a momentary despairing thought that this was all over and that it wasn't a movie and that I was on my way to darkness-The same thought assailed me then when I could see by squeezing my eyes that the syringe was half gone and that screechy voice was about half way through the message from our 'Mr Klean as kleen...hoho' Some evil thought out there, I decided, has chosen this moment to intrude on my secular peace-can there be much worse than the prevaricating ghastliness of professional politicians.
Then I thought-At least the gunmen were honest bandits.
This all makes me realise that I am becoming a boring old fart taking the whole world so seriously that one loses all sense of rational perspective. Nothing actually matters at all unless we choose it to.
So here is a bizarre experience I had this week at the dentist. Those seekers after meaning may seek what they wish.
I'm sure that like most people you don't much like going to the dentist. I am told that dentists have a high rate of suicides largely because people so dislike dentists and too many tend to take it personally. I don't know if this is true.
[Incidentally for the list mania types out there Psychiatrists are also reputed to have a high suicide rate as do retired cricketers of all people. One would never have thought that such an idler's activity could generate sufficient stress to warrant high rates of suicide-[Of course this may all be a lie.]
So, to this dentist thing. I was at one time hostile to this particular dentist because my jaw would hurt for weeks after visiting him. I went off and tried a number of other dentists for a year or two and found them all to be worse. There was even a fellow who practiced what he called 'new dentistry' where they eschew some of the traditional inject and drill stuff for a clumsy arrangement involving some kind of scraping spoon. The filling fell out three days later, and so did its replacement, at least Mervyns's fillings never fell out.
So eventually I went back to my 'old' dentist. I knew he could tell from checking my mouth against his X rays that I had cheated on him, and although he never said anything he communicated intense depression-more depressed than usual. I must admit that I also like him because he is the only person I know who drives an older car than mine. Anyway something must have happened in the meantime; perhaps or he went on a sensitivity training course or whatever in the interim because he had become so gentle that on that return occasion I fell asleep while he was working on the inside of my head.
Anyway this time I wasn't going to push my luck, I was going to listen to soothing music while he worked. I had given myself the biannual upgrade cellphone for a change. The kids have had the last few and I was still using an old brick. This thing that I gave me for Christmas [from me and my bank manager-a jolly wonderful person] can apparently do everything but bark. So far I had worked out more or less how to make a phone call and discovered that I had earphones and apparently that I could listen to the radio. So I decided I would lie in the chair and listen to the finest stuff that Classic FM could throw at me.
Like a lot of other bloggists on the 'spot' I have become disenchanted with the radio over the past few years- loads of 'realgoose' [propaganda right], endless inane chat shows on channels a b and c-scatterbrained psychobabble and hysterical advertisements cluttering the 'rock n roll' stations, d through z to the extent that music has become an afterthought-obviously everyone is saving money on royalty payments. Gareth Cliff is ok but it was ten o clock in the morning-so Classic it was.
I've vaguely listened to the kinda stuff they play on classic for decades without it ever having become a turn on [well except for Johan Sebastian Bach and Mr Purcell] but since the great radio station implosion of the past few years I find it the most pleasant station. It is also most uncluttered with hysterical advertising and inane chatter and while the occasional operatic piece will see me hit the change button mostly the tinkling of ivories is soothing and some of the local players are more than world class.
So I had a set of earphones and plugged them where the phone manual said it must be plugged. I think the manual went through GaryM's translator programme because I had to do some improvising to get sound -but eventually it came and I plugged into that superb Julian Bream version of the Concerto de Aranjuez that has been almost played to death over the year or so that I have been listening to the station. [Deep down I still prefer the Miles Davis version that I first heard nearly forty years ago and was the first time I ever had an orgasm from listening to a piece of music-not that it does that anymore mind.]
The earphones are tricky and the left one fell out so I jammed the right one in a tad harder wondering why it was the kids never seemed to have such problems. Then i lay back to let the man begin his task.
He had that huge needle n syringe thing they always have and he did that little squirty thing dentists do in front of you to let you know they are not about to pump two kilolitres of air into your bloodstream. Then he smiles that little half vengeful, half apologetic smile. You know that you are about to get a two-litre bottle of sense numbing muti zapped into some part of your inner skull.
And then he loomed into my space over my right shoulder and at the precise moment that he inserted the needle into wherever it goes by mirror and choke into some previously unexplored part of my upper gums the concerto ended, and instantly my peace seeking intention was abruptly violated by a 'a party political broadcast that does not necessarily reflect the views of the station concerned'
Un-knowing his steely bicep locked the earpiece deeper into my earhole. Before I could do a thing, trapped into my chair, unable to access the earplug for fear of bashing the dentist's injecting arm, I was doubly numbed by a ghastly tirade from the so-called self styled 'leader of the opposition' for a full thirty-second blast of petulant prevaricating reasons why I should vote against the present government and give favour to 'his' team.
Now you must understand that I have never been a fan of this man once dubbed the 'Chihuahua' of parliament. I had a neighbourhood run in with him once in the eighties when he was still a city councillor and my feelings about him are therefore personal and have always been influenced by the events of that incident. In addition he always manages to sound like an outraged hysterical schoolmaster faced with a farting epidemic in an undersized classroom.
I always think of him as a roadblock in our political system, holding his demanding finger in a dyke that should be allowed to burst so we can come to terms with the New: uncluttered with the baggage of a less than glorious past.
I was attacked once a dozen years ago by a gang of hijackers while I was getting something out of the boot of my car and we had something like a thirty second/ lifetime, full-on close quarter gunfight, rock n roll party if you like, during which they fired seventeen bullets at me and hit me four times and I fired thirteen back at them and hit them nine times [so I 'won'] and I remember somewhere in the middle of the entire horrific incident having a momentary despairing thought that this was all over and that it wasn't a movie and that I was on my way to darkness-The same thought assailed me then when I could see by squeezing my eyes that the syringe was half gone and that screechy voice was about half way through the message from our 'Mr Klean as kleen...hoho' Some evil thought out there, I decided, has chosen this moment to intrude on my secular peace-can there be much worse than the prevaricating ghastliness of professional politicians.
Then I thought-At least the gunmen were honest bandits.
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
This Muslim thing and Mr Nietzsche
As I write this, a mob of people are milling about acting out vast, wonderfully well orchestrated, manic, riot scenarios in all the places where they and their kin reside. These are places not noted for democratic protests in the main and the generally unelected leaders of those places derive considerable emotional and cathartic capital from 'tolerating' the rioting.
So, setting aside for the moment the Rent-a-crowd sense of the entire affair and its attempt to distract us and misdirect opinion from the Iranian stealth armament process, I decided to check out for a moment the core issue manifest here.
For the cause is a spark in the imagination
When he made his famous pronouncement that 'God was dead' back in the year that our beloved Jozi was founded, Friedrich Nietzsche unleashed a wave of pent up resentment against the overlordship of the irrational in our lives. The result has been the century long retreat from the Cross, in western culture. In fact there is no longer such a thing as 'Western Culture' there is a pan global culture of Nike wearing people that is founded on the reality that what you see is what you get. This obsession with the 'other world' is nowadays limited to an increasingly marginalised collection of people who missed completely Nietzsche's message. Amongst these who have failed to get the message, the most fervent protagonists of the reality of a non-existent place that resides exclusively in the imagination are these disturbed and much derided Islamite's.
They have missed it mainly because they have been kept poor by those same self-serving irrationalist salespeople who would soon find themselves unemployed and unemployable in a society that shows the kind of advances experienced by most liberated regions since the 1950's: regions that have shlucked off the need for mumbo jumbo in their lives because they get a surfeit on the telly.
There are those who say that we are moving within this decade to a point where it would become illegal to sell this product [god] without major warnings to the public-Warning: believing in otherworlds represents a form of delusion and the teachings of this delusionary world should not be confused with reality. Use with caution. It may well be that, as with that re-emerging former giant China, that proselytising in favour of an insubstantiatable concept called 'god' to the young, and the solicitation of revenue in pursuit of such fantasy concepts becomes a criminal offence.
Of course, like so many other former adherents to fantastical nostrums people would feel a certain nostalgia for a lost era of innocence when they thought or 'believed' there was a 'big daddy' up there in the clouds who would pick us up when we were hurt and spank us when we did something naughty. It is much harder to live in the world knowing that you are the champion of your destiny, not some illusion out there that we can accuse of fickleness when things don't go our own way.
Then since no new generations of pestilential priests would come into existence and foist their parasitic phantasms on those liberated citizens of the former Muslim seeking world, playing to our anxieties and looting our credulity in pursuit of people unfriendly opinion those people too could become more comfortable in our more humanistic world, and cease this devious game of victimhood with which they seek to beguile us.
We do have issues of course in our more material world. The same problems of inherent alienation persist that gave rise to all these phantasms in the first place. We are still, as Tennessee Williams put it locked inside our own submarines'. Nonetheless this time around we have developed brain-numbing techniques: like television soap operas and incandescently dis-illuminating television commercials, and hour upon hour of football. Television not religion is the new opium of the masses. The tangible reality of simulated existence on the 'box' has overwhelmed the intangible unreality of life after death.
But in places where people are poor and oppressed and their television diet is loaded with messianic madness then secularism becomes a fraught option. When your irrationalist opponent lends emphasis to his urgent need to force his message onto our incredulous ears by turning its adherents into human bombs-surely the most terrible weapon ever to have been devised as an act of policy- then you know you are dealing with desperate men determined to destroy what they can no longer control.
The use of this weapon, the human bomb, and its tacit approval through failure to condemn, by not only more allegedly 'moderate' exponents of the users irrationalist belief system, but also by places such as that where we ourselves live, is a modern tragedy. [Of course in our place we are loaded with irrationalist of all persuasions who would and have dealt harshly with unbelievers over past ages and at any future opportunity. So it is not surprising that we have to tread with care.] We should rejoice in the knowledge that 'god is a conjecture' and that we have been freed to mould our own existence.
However we may again have lost the plot and are again mesmerised by the bully.
One has to evaluate Iran's behaviour in the light of this: its fundamentalist irrationalist belief system. Bear in mind too, that Iran imposes this 'system' electocratically and through violent fraud upon a citizenry straining to rejoin the real world, where what you see is what you get. And what that citizenry of Iran wants is no different to what every other human being wants on this planet. A life made comfortable by the gadgetry of contemporary existence. This is the world that matters, not some place in the imaginations of a few fervent freaks.
Because this is all there is, the idea of 'heaven and earth'; of a virgin loaded paradise, is mere conjecture flavoured with a rousing dose of energy salts.
Inevitably too, the idea of the irrational is reinforced by a truth that the idea that this is all that there is, is itself conjectural, albeit overwhelmingly less conjectural than the old heaven and hell bit allied to the idea that there is some weird old dude hanging out up there playing scoutmaster/mistress/person.
There is also increasingly the conjectural idea that quantum physics holds a key to 'otherworlds' parallel universes, multiverses in fact: albeit all still conjectural. These ideas too have been gripping an imagination blunted by material possessions and revealed in such congenial absurdities as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.
What is not conjectural though is that the human race has no choice but to go forwards. There are too many of us now to stop, turn around or go back. We are committed to a scientifically based future. The idea that we can have what we have and also persist in our behaviour of holding to the irrational, as being a certainty, can only bring the catastrophic developmental outcomes it has demonstrated over the past fourteen hundred years or so of its hegemony. It can be said with certainty that an obsession with the irrational has retarded the development of our race, the human race, for the best part of two millennia since the Roman Empire was vanquished by the barbarous hordes of mindless irrationality that flooded it out of existence. Five hundred years ago we began to break this stranglehold of the irrational on our imaginations and for every metre gained the human race has prospered exponentially. But this could happen again-we could slide back into the pits of despair again. It happens regularly enough and may have happened in the remote past as well for all we know.
What is also certain is the complete disregard for human rights that is at the base of this particular irrationalist philosophy. It starts from the idea that apostasy is an offence punishable by death. It continues with the idea that any unbeliever is fair game and killing one is okay. It continues too, with the idea that we convert adherents into robots who blow themselves up, always aiming to kill ten for one, irrespective of the piety deemed or otherwise of the victims.
These people in any normal secular society would be locked away in the interests of the public good
Right now the world is at the most dangerous intersection that it has been at possibly since the Cuban missile crisis, and certainly since the Second World War. Once again as in the 1930's, we have the spectre of overt and direct threat against the existence of one of our human tribes. Once again a barbarous horde of glazed fanatics stand at the gates of our empire and threatens to topple it back into the stone age claiming all the time that they are the real victims.
For some sixty years the more humanistic inclinations of the worlds most bloodthirsty family of tribes have been able to suppress the natural violence of its members through a calculated diet of 'political correctness'. Broadly, the idea that it is not 'nice' to be horrible has become systemic. Allied to this is the freedom and accompanying prosperity that can only be appreciated by those who spilt blood to obtain it: most importantly the freedom to move freely, to disseminate ideas and 'do your own thing'. There is a disturbing current trends towards neo fascist behaviour is a direct response to the behaviour of irrationalist reinforced with the sheer abhorrence of suicide bombing and this will not be kept under long-Should the middle eastern irrationalists succeed for a third time in toppling the prosperity of the rest of the world they can expect an irrationalist response. In the same way that one cannot reason with a drunk one cannot reason with an ideological fanatic whose whole purpose is to destroy your life. We've been there before.
This last-ditch fight back against the modern world by the adherents of irrationalism feeds the natural inclination to irrational response from a still tentatively secular planet. Thus at this moment the giant of the planet is also 'ruled' by an irrationalist, their first openly irrationalist leader in centuries. This self appointed saviour intends to lead the planet into the last crusade towards the long awaited battle of Armageddon: predicted for eons and desired by his most ardent supporters with all the same frantic urgency of that milling mob I see as I write this, on television, burning down the premises of the 'satanic' Danes-good grief.
Link this to the rise of a Jihadist party in the middle east who have won popular support on a platform that includes the violent overthrow of a neighbour and that neighbour in turn without their personal strong man and an election looming in which other irrationals are poised to begin the bombing. This is one of those moments in history when the best conspiracies of mice and men may easily go astray.
It's not for nothing that we live in an age of relativity.
What was it again-?
What if the riotous behaviour is a threat in itself? 'Do something we don't like and we will burn your places and do bad things to your pleasant cities. We've stolen your freedom with 9/11 now we are going to censor you and those who don't cherish freedom shall succumb and we will move our agenda forward: convert or death,' except there is no Vin Diesel fighting the agents of evil in the Chronicles of Riddick: this is real.
The solution may well come from the sky. I have read of weapons that have been conceptualised by the big bad wolf crowd that involve hurling a ton or so of some kind of titanium steel from an off planet source launched by a fast moving scramjet, and fitted with accelerants and guided weapons systems. The existence of such 'scramjets' was extensively reported on last year in national newspapers, so we are beyond the fantasy stage here.
Such a piece of metal one is told would carry no warhead and have the effect of a nuclear strike while leaving no nuclear signature. It would be a so-called 'Kinetic energy' 'facilitator'.
It would be as if the place had been hit by an earthquake, which is fairly common in Iran-one of their cities fell down a couple of years ago and we have all been allowed to forget its relative non- reconstruction; rather like the non-reconstruction following the tsunami which is not really happening as we don't look. Maybe someone tested their weapon on that Iranian city, appropriately called Bam.
Of course the 'New Crusader', the regrettable uncle Dubya, is generally such a ham-fisted fellow that he'll probably just nuke the nuke facility on the basis that he can and must act now. Perhaps he remembers that it was Genghis Khan, who overwhelmed his enemies by the simple expedient of inviting surrender and then making a terrifying example of those who resisted. One also remembers that Charles 'the Hammer' Martel sacrificed one million casualties to prevent the ancestors of these mullahs, the Saracens, from gaining a foothold in his beloved France and that was 1372 years ago [Tours: 634 AD] There isn't much glory in facilitating the destruction of the nuke site if no one knows it was done. On the other hand a piece of steel could be described by the credulous as 'an act of god'. When its 'chips on the table' time the mullahs will discover just what a beast they have re-awakened with their delusions and they will go with joy to the afterlife they crave and sell.
Either way it's show time looming folks.
One thing is certain in amongst all this. The idea; that people who base their philosophy on the right to murder, promote murder and facilitate its occurrence should have the capability to impose their insanity through the blackmail of a nuclear threat is so abhorrent that both secularists, and the general range of competing irrationalists on the opposing range of teams will inevitably bind together to eradicate the threat before it is manifest. This is already apparent in an unprecedented show of solidarity from hitherto erstwhile opponents. Ordinary decent citizens of mullah county who just happen to be locked into that particular imposed worldview but otherwise just get on with their lives as best they can are going to find their world soon turned upside down if we are not immensely cautious at this time.
Sadly what the big book never mentions is that Armageddon is just another place where everything stopped while the rest of the world moved on. When the 'raptures' have come and gone and the alleged 144000 people have vanished, there will still be six billion of us sitting around, gaaning aan, with our beers and vintage wines watching it all on Teevee. Our real universe is bigger than these competing crowds of petty priests can ever imagine from their clouded consciousness. It is our destiny to explore it.
The alternative would be like turning the lights off.
So, setting aside for the moment the Rent-a-crowd sense of the entire affair and its attempt to distract us and misdirect opinion from the Iranian stealth armament process, I decided to check out for a moment the core issue manifest here.
For the cause is a spark in the imagination
When he made his famous pronouncement that 'God was dead' back in the year that our beloved Jozi was founded, Friedrich Nietzsche unleashed a wave of pent up resentment against the overlordship of the irrational in our lives. The result has been the century long retreat from the Cross, in western culture. In fact there is no longer such a thing as 'Western Culture' there is a pan global culture of Nike wearing people that is founded on the reality that what you see is what you get. This obsession with the 'other world' is nowadays limited to an increasingly marginalised collection of people who missed completely Nietzsche's message. Amongst these who have failed to get the message, the most fervent protagonists of the reality of a non-existent place that resides exclusively in the imagination are these disturbed and much derided Islamite's.
They have missed it mainly because they have been kept poor by those same self-serving irrationalist salespeople who would soon find themselves unemployed and unemployable in a society that shows the kind of advances experienced by most liberated regions since the 1950's: regions that have shlucked off the need for mumbo jumbo in their lives because they get a surfeit on the telly.
There are those who say that we are moving within this decade to a point where it would become illegal to sell this product [god] without major warnings to the public-Warning: believing in otherworlds represents a form of delusion and the teachings of this delusionary world should not be confused with reality. Use with caution. It may well be that, as with that re-emerging former giant China, that proselytising in favour of an insubstantiatable concept called 'god' to the young, and the solicitation of revenue in pursuit of such fantasy concepts becomes a criminal offence.
Of course, like so many other former adherents to fantastical nostrums people would feel a certain nostalgia for a lost era of innocence when they thought or 'believed' there was a 'big daddy' up there in the clouds who would pick us up when we were hurt and spank us when we did something naughty. It is much harder to live in the world knowing that you are the champion of your destiny, not some illusion out there that we can accuse of fickleness when things don't go our own way.
Then since no new generations of pestilential priests would come into existence and foist their parasitic phantasms on those liberated citizens of the former Muslim seeking world, playing to our anxieties and looting our credulity in pursuit of people unfriendly opinion those people too could become more comfortable in our more humanistic world, and cease this devious game of victimhood with which they seek to beguile us.
We do have issues of course in our more material world. The same problems of inherent alienation persist that gave rise to all these phantasms in the first place. We are still, as Tennessee Williams put it locked inside our own submarines'. Nonetheless this time around we have developed brain-numbing techniques: like television soap operas and incandescently dis-illuminating television commercials, and hour upon hour of football. Television not religion is the new opium of the masses. The tangible reality of simulated existence on the 'box' has overwhelmed the intangible unreality of life after death.
But in places where people are poor and oppressed and their television diet is loaded with messianic madness then secularism becomes a fraught option. When your irrationalist opponent lends emphasis to his urgent need to force his message onto our incredulous ears by turning its adherents into human bombs-surely the most terrible weapon ever to have been devised as an act of policy- then you know you are dealing with desperate men determined to destroy what they can no longer control.
The use of this weapon, the human bomb, and its tacit approval through failure to condemn, by not only more allegedly 'moderate' exponents of the users irrationalist belief system, but also by places such as that where we ourselves live, is a modern tragedy. [Of course in our place we are loaded with irrationalist of all persuasions who would and have dealt harshly with unbelievers over past ages and at any future opportunity. So it is not surprising that we have to tread with care.] We should rejoice in the knowledge that 'god is a conjecture' and that we have been freed to mould our own existence.
However we may again have lost the plot and are again mesmerised by the bully.
One has to evaluate Iran's behaviour in the light of this: its fundamentalist irrationalist belief system. Bear in mind too, that Iran imposes this 'system' electocratically and through violent fraud upon a citizenry straining to rejoin the real world, where what you see is what you get. And what that citizenry of Iran wants is no different to what every other human being wants on this planet. A life made comfortable by the gadgetry of contemporary existence. This is the world that matters, not some place in the imaginations of a few fervent freaks.
Because this is all there is, the idea of 'heaven and earth'; of a virgin loaded paradise, is mere conjecture flavoured with a rousing dose of energy salts.
Inevitably too, the idea of the irrational is reinforced by a truth that the idea that this is all that there is, is itself conjectural, albeit overwhelmingly less conjectural than the old heaven and hell bit allied to the idea that there is some weird old dude hanging out up there playing scoutmaster/mistress/person.
There is also increasingly the conjectural idea that quantum physics holds a key to 'otherworlds' parallel universes, multiverses in fact: albeit all still conjectural. These ideas too have been gripping an imagination blunted by material possessions and revealed in such congenial absurdities as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.
What is not conjectural though is that the human race has no choice but to go forwards. There are too many of us now to stop, turn around or go back. We are committed to a scientifically based future. The idea that we can have what we have and also persist in our behaviour of holding to the irrational, as being a certainty, can only bring the catastrophic developmental outcomes it has demonstrated over the past fourteen hundred years or so of its hegemony. It can be said with certainty that an obsession with the irrational has retarded the development of our race, the human race, for the best part of two millennia since the Roman Empire was vanquished by the barbarous hordes of mindless irrationality that flooded it out of existence. Five hundred years ago we began to break this stranglehold of the irrational on our imaginations and for every metre gained the human race has prospered exponentially. But this could happen again-we could slide back into the pits of despair again. It happens regularly enough and may have happened in the remote past as well for all we know.
What is also certain is the complete disregard for human rights that is at the base of this particular irrationalist philosophy. It starts from the idea that apostasy is an offence punishable by death. It continues with the idea that any unbeliever is fair game and killing one is okay. It continues too, with the idea that we convert adherents into robots who blow themselves up, always aiming to kill ten for one, irrespective of the piety deemed or otherwise of the victims.
These people in any normal secular society would be locked away in the interests of the public good
Right now the world is at the most dangerous intersection that it has been at possibly since the Cuban missile crisis, and certainly since the Second World War. Once again as in the 1930's, we have the spectre of overt and direct threat against the existence of one of our human tribes. Once again a barbarous horde of glazed fanatics stand at the gates of our empire and threatens to topple it back into the stone age claiming all the time that they are the real victims.
For some sixty years the more humanistic inclinations of the worlds most bloodthirsty family of tribes have been able to suppress the natural violence of its members through a calculated diet of 'political correctness'. Broadly, the idea that it is not 'nice' to be horrible has become systemic. Allied to this is the freedom and accompanying prosperity that can only be appreciated by those who spilt blood to obtain it: most importantly the freedom to move freely, to disseminate ideas and 'do your own thing'. There is a disturbing current trends towards neo fascist behaviour is a direct response to the behaviour of irrationalist reinforced with the sheer abhorrence of suicide bombing and this will not be kept under long-Should the middle eastern irrationalists succeed for a third time in toppling the prosperity of the rest of the world they can expect an irrationalist response. In the same way that one cannot reason with a drunk one cannot reason with an ideological fanatic whose whole purpose is to destroy your life. We've been there before.
This last-ditch fight back against the modern world by the adherents of irrationalism feeds the natural inclination to irrational response from a still tentatively secular planet. Thus at this moment the giant of the planet is also 'ruled' by an irrationalist, their first openly irrationalist leader in centuries. This self appointed saviour intends to lead the planet into the last crusade towards the long awaited battle of Armageddon: predicted for eons and desired by his most ardent supporters with all the same frantic urgency of that milling mob I see as I write this, on television, burning down the premises of the 'satanic' Danes-good grief.
Link this to the rise of a Jihadist party in the middle east who have won popular support on a platform that includes the violent overthrow of a neighbour and that neighbour in turn without their personal strong man and an election looming in which other irrationals are poised to begin the bombing. This is one of those moments in history when the best conspiracies of mice and men may easily go astray.
It's not for nothing that we live in an age of relativity.
What was it again-?
What if the riotous behaviour is a threat in itself? 'Do something we don't like and we will burn your places and do bad things to your pleasant cities. We've stolen your freedom with 9/11 now we are going to censor you and those who don't cherish freedom shall succumb and we will move our agenda forward: convert or death,' except there is no Vin Diesel fighting the agents of evil in the Chronicles of Riddick: this is real.
The solution may well come from the sky. I have read of weapons that have been conceptualised by the big bad wolf crowd that involve hurling a ton or so of some kind of titanium steel from an off planet source launched by a fast moving scramjet, and fitted with accelerants and guided weapons systems. The existence of such 'scramjets' was extensively reported on last year in national newspapers, so we are beyond the fantasy stage here.
Such a piece of metal one is told would carry no warhead and have the effect of a nuclear strike while leaving no nuclear signature. It would be a so-called 'Kinetic energy' 'facilitator'.
It would be as if the place had been hit by an earthquake, which is fairly common in Iran-one of their cities fell down a couple of years ago and we have all been allowed to forget its relative non- reconstruction; rather like the non-reconstruction following the tsunami which is not really happening as we don't look. Maybe someone tested their weapon on that Iranian city, appropriately called Bam.
Of course the 'New Crusader', the regrettable uncle Dubya, is generally such a ham-fisted fellow that he'll probably just nuke the nuke facility on the basis that he can and must act now. Perhaps he remembers that it was Genghis Khan, who overwhelmed his enemies by the simple expedient of inviting surrender and then making a terrifying example of those who resisted. One also remembers that Charles 'the Hammer' Martel sacrificed one million casualties to prevent the ancestors of these mullahs, the Saracens, from gaining a foothold in his beloved France and that was 1372 years ago [Tours: 634 AD] There isn't much glory in facilitating the destruction of the nuke site if no one knows it was done. On the other hand a piece of steel could be described by the credulous as 'an act of god'. When its 'chips on the table' time the mullahs will discover just what a beast they have re-awakened with their delusions and they will go with joy to the afterlife they crave and sell.
Either way it's show time looming folks.
One thing is certain in amongst all this. The idea; that people who base their philosophy on the right to murder, promote murder and facilitate its occurrence should have the capability to impose their insanity through the blackmail of a nuclear threat is so abhorrent that both secularists, and the general range of competing irrationalists on the opposing range of teams will inevitably bind together to eradicate the threat before it is manifest. This is already apparent in an unprecedented show of solidarity from hitherto erstwhile opponents. Ordinary decent citizens of mullah county who just happen to be locked into that particular imposed worldview but otherwise just get on with their lives as best they can are going to find their world soon turned upside down if we are not immensely cautious at this time.
Sadly what the big book never mentions is that Armageddon is just another place where everything stopped while the rest of the world moved on. When the 'raptures' have come and gone and the alleged 144000 people have vanished, there will still be six billion of us sitting around, gaaning aan, with our beers and vintage wines watching it all on Teevee. Our real universe is bigger than these competing crowds of petty priests can ever imagine from their clouded consciousness. It is our destiny to explore it.
The alternative would be like turning the lights off.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
Soccer and the Presidential third term
With all the talk about the soccer team this week almost no one has noticed that the old three terms and more issue has surfaced again regarded our beloved el Presidente.
With regard to soccer team what can one say that hasn't already been said? A whole load of people actually took the trouble to go to the International airport and boo the team when it came home. That takes the kind of rage that goes beyond comment.
Perhaps it's time to set aside this predilection we have for putting some 'pigmentally challenged' duffer in charge of coaching the international team. Old Ted Whatisname is a well-meaning fellow but obviously he hasn't got what it takes to make magic and only managed to turn stickmen into prima donnas. Perhaps too it is time we realised that by calling our team some fancy name for BOYS it is ultimately inevitable they will fall when they play men.
Frankly I don't much care for soccer or cricket and only slightly for the new type of professional rugby to which we are still having so much difficulty adjusting. I did once go to a soccer match. It was during my second year at Wits back in '68 and I went with some soccer mad classmates. A team called Durban City played a team called Rangers at a place called the Rand Stadium. It was an important game apparently and the place was packed and I'm not too wild about crowds of people in one place. According to the newspaper the next day there were more than twenty thousand pigmentally challenged people at the match.
The newspaper didn't say 'pigmentally challenged' by the way, since the phrase hadn't been invented. In fact the colour of the crowd was assumed. I mention it today because it would be inconceivable to me to have as many as twenty 'pigmentally challenged' human beings at a major soccer match these days never mind twenty thousand. .
The dark strapping young fellows who play the game today with such zest and verve, earning more in a week than my grandfather, a nineteenth century professional athlete earned in his entire career, have grown up in a world where the Pale Male is a loser, and any recommendation made by a 'Paley' is shrugged off as inconsequential, sometimes politely more often not. Courtesy and good manners have no place in a democracy since they imply obligation and freeborn citizens have no need to feel obligation to anyone. They are not owned and no one is more important than they are.
Add to this that our society has become so subliminally racist following half a decade or so of overt racist legislation that appointing yet another 'Paley' to the job will be a simple waste of time.
And talking of 'time' ,we already look as if we have tossed the idea of having the Gautrain ready for 2010, assuming it ever gets onto its obsolete nineteenth century railway lines. There is in addition no indication beyond the now almost platitudinous promises that the stadia are on route to construction, or reconstruction or whatever is supposed to happen. The country is cruising towards the big event on a sea of bland promises and failed illusions -
'We did our best' we say and what was it Sean Connery's character says about 'doing their best' 'Why is it that losers always whine on about doing their best.'
It seems now an appropriate time to formalise the process of 2010 preparation and remover 'Whitey' from the loop altogether. This development of the team must be driven by those who know the minds of the players and Ted and his ilk have demonstrated signally that they don't.
It is small wonder that the President's yes men are mooting the idea that the president should have a third term. The sense of impending panic to which I have been referring for some time now is becoming more tangible. Who is there that a good man can trust to take over the job of being coach to the team: president to the nation.
Curiously with regard to El Presidente incumbentis, the devil one knows may be better than the wild cards that lurk in the sidelines. What offended everyone about the soccer team was that they thought more about their paycheck than the honour of supporting their country. Yet every role model they could look to for inspiration in our rapidly commoditising society is rooted in gimme, I wannit, and fuck you get out of my trough.
Those young soccer men were right to be more concerned about being paid than about honour. The entire process of selection to play at that level appears to be so completely arbitrary and rooted in preferences that the entire team could be changed from game to game and the likelihood of career ending injuries accompany each game. Therefore sensible and assertive and presumably talented persons want everything they can get up front before the action, rather like sensible prostitutes.
As for whether the President should go for a third term, one only has to look at that pale shadow of his former lying self to see what a third term is doing to that Pommie chap Phony Haire.
Everything has gone wrong for Phony since he took on the heavy mantle for a third session. Poor chap looks more and more like a wastrel furtive ferret caught masturbating in a public toilet every time he opens his mouth in public, which he should do less often. Even his eye patterning movements have taken on the shiftiness that one associates with overt duplicity, he can barely hide the empty hollow ring of his words every time he opens his mouth.
It would be better for the incumbent to leave while one is ahead on points. Our President's status is currently sealed. He is the one who brought the African Parliament to Gauteng making us truly the Zone One of Africa. This is his lasting legacy to us who barely comprehend its strategic and long-term importance. Whatever else he achieved will be relatively ephemeral as fickle citizens become ever more cynical about the doings and screwings of that much to be despised class of animal called el Politician.
In looking at both these issues one has to ask- what will change to make anything different 'next time'.
With regard to soccer team what can one say that hasn't already been said? A whole load of people actually took the trouble to go to the International airport and boo the team when it came home. That takes the kind of rage that goes beyond comment.
Perhaps it's time to set aside this predilection we have for putting some 'pigmentally challenged' duffer in charge of coaching the international team. Old Ted Whatisname is a well-meaning fellow but obviously he hasn't got what it takes to make magic and only managed to turn stickmen into prima donnas. Perhaps too it is time we realised that by calling our team some fancy name for BOYS it is ultimately inevitable they will fall when they play men.
Frankly I don't much care for soccer or cricket and only slightly for the new type of professional rugby to which we are still having so much difficulty adjusting. I did once go to a soccer match. It was during my second year at Wits back in '68 and I went with some soccer mad classmates. A team called Durban City played a team called Rangers at a place called the Rand Stadium. It was an important game apparently and the place was packed and I'm not too wild about crowds of people in one place. According to the newspaper the next day there were more than twenty thousand pigmentally challenged people at the match.
The newspaper didn't say 'pigmentally challenged' by the way, since the phrase hadn't been invented. In fact the colour of the crowd was assumed. I mention it today because it would be inconceivable to me to have as many as twenty 'pigmentally challenged' human beings at a major soccer match these days never mind twenty thousand. .
The dark strapping young fellows who play the game today with such zest and verve, earning more in a week than my grandfather, a nineteenth century professional athlete earned in his entire career, have grown up in a world where the Pale Male is a loser, and any recommendation made by a 'Paley' is shrugged off as inconsequential, sometimes politely more often not. Courtesy and good manners have no place in a democracy since they imply obligation and freeborn citizens have no need to feel obligation to anyone. They are not owned and no one is more important than they are.
Add to this that our society has become so subliminally racist following half a decade or so of overt racist legislation that appointing yet another 'Paley' to the job will be a simple waste of time.
And talking of 'time' ,we already look as if we have tossed the idea of having the Gautrain ready for 2010, assuming it ever gets onto its obsolete nineteenth century railway lines. There is in addition no indication beyond the now almost platitudinous promises that the stadia are on route to construction, or reconstruction or whatever is supposed to happen. The country is cruising towards the big event on a sea of bland promises and failed illusions -
'We did our best' we say and what was it Sean Connery's character says about 'doing their best' 'Why is it that losers always whine on about doing their best.'
It seems now an appropriate time to formalise the process of 2010 preparation and remover 'Whitey' from the loop altogether. This development of the team must be driven by those who know the minds of the players and Ted and his ilk have demonstrated signally that they don't.
It is small wonder that the President's yes men are mooting the idea that the president should have a third term. The sense of impending panic to which I have been referring for some time now is becoming more tangible. Who is there that a good man can trust to take over the job of being coach to the team: president to the nation.
Curiously with regard to El Presidente incumbentis, the devil one knows may be better than the wild cards that lurk in the sidelines. What offended everyone about the soccer team was that they thought more about their paycheck than the honour of supporting their country. Yet every role model they could look to for inspiration in our rapidly commoditising society is rooted in gimme, I wannit, and fuck you get out of my trough.
Those young soccer men were right to be more concerned about being paid than about honour. The entire process of selection to play at that level appears to be so completely arbitrary and rooted in preferences that the entire team could be changed from game to game and the likelihood of career ending injuries accompany each game. Therefore sensible and assertive and presumably talented persons want everything they can get up front before the action, rather like sensible prostitutes.
As for whether the President should go for a third term, one only has to look at that pale shadow of his former lying self to see what a third term is doing to that Pommie chap Phony Haire.
Everything has gone wrong for Phony since he took on the heavy mantle for a third session. Poor chap looks more and more like a wastrel furtive ferret caught masturbating in a public toilet every time he opens his mouth in public, which he should do less often. Even his eye patterning movements have taken on the shiftiness that one associates with overt duplicity, he can barely hide the empty hollow ring of his words every time he opens his mouth.
It would be better for the incumbent to leave while one is ahead on points. Our President's status is currently sealed. He is the one who brought the African Parliament to Gauteng making us truly the Zone One of Africa. This is his lasting legacy to us who barely comprehend its strategic and long-term importance. Whatever else he achieved will be relatively ephemeral as fickle citizens become ever more cynical about the doings and screwings of that much to be despised class of animal called el Politician.
In looking at both these issues one has to ask- what will change to make anything different 'next time'.
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