I thought that the South African Minister of Health, Dr, Mrs Manto 'Whatsername' Tshabalala-Msimang won her tussle with the leader of the Independent Democrats on radio this past week. She vigorously defended her 'vegetable' stand at the world AIDS congress held recently in Toronto. Mrs de Lille was a usefully deferential foil for revealing an aggressive human who simply fills the airwaves with vituperation and makes any probing of her position an exercise in attrition. I think de Lille took the radio equivalent of a good Zindane headbutt every so often for daring to be out of place. I also don't think the Minister can be fired for allegedly not doing her job properly, as Minister of Health, because the impression I got from her most assertive and simultaneously evasive handling of herself in that tussle was that she was implicitly following orders.
What are these orders? Who gives the orders?
Firstly the winning Party that appointed her as Minister 'gives orders' - The Minister's Party won the last election with more than 70 % of the votes and they are doing what their mandate demands-making a better life for all, except apparently for recidivists who have contracted AIDS. In practical terms the Party applies the 'Vision thing' and she follows the broad guidelines set by the party, as implemented by her boss the President. We are regularly told this by sundry party apparatchik spokespersons who also lecture us as frequently on the role of collective responsibility as an instrument to ensure that no-body ever gets blamed for things.
This inconvenient disease [HIVAIDS] was not planned for in the Struggle manifesto and it seems it must be conveniently ignored through persuasive acts of denial, and even welcomed if it helps the Party achieve its long-term goal of making a better life for [nearly] all its followers. It is possible that this is happening but that the news is being buried in a pile of rhetoric and the government's own growing credibility problem.
In the old days before the transformation we had some 3.6 % population growth annually [in SA]: the population actually doubled over the twenty-year period '74 to '94 [which says something we shan't dwell on about the nutritional standards of the day]. At the same time the economic 'real' growth rate was less than 1 % per annum over that time [excluding allowing for inflation]. This meant that over time each citizen was becoming significantly poorer. According to fairly regular reports to this effect in the daily business press the average income earner is not as well off today as an income earner at their same level was in 1981 [in SA specifically although there are many other examples of places that have regressed economically while going allegedly going forward].
However: a STATS fellow on Perlman's morning radio show remarked recently that the population growth rate was now 1,7% [I recollect no reference to declining rates or comment he simply gave the number that jumped out of the airwaves into my awareness]. Now [assuming the STATS fellow was right] if we have a 1,7 % population growth rate and currently a 4,9 % economic growth rate [quarterly non-adjusted rate reported this week] then the whole country is getting [three percent or so] better off each year that this equation persists and the Party is effectively fulfilling its mandate, appearances notwithstanding.
In other words we are slowly clawing our way from the Poo notwithstanding the devastation caused by this disease.
3.6 to 1.7 over about fifteen years is pretty good going and usually is an indicator of an improved standard of living on a considerable enough scale to have a dramatic effect It seems that there is a trend towards fewer children per family but not enough perhaps to account for such a dramatic short-term decline in population growth.
According to ongoing press reports some two million people in SA have already died [prematurely the Treatment Action Campaign: TAC, activists argue] of AIDS related causes. One suspects that these figures are as ephemeral as the population ones and the Sowetan is publishing fewer pages of dead people every Friday. Arguably, the mounting death rate seems to reinforce the usefulness of such a dramatic decline notwithstanding the repulsive nature of its implications.
When one recollects that the philosophical underpinnings of our ruling Party's mission: to create a better life for all in our society, are rooted in the Leninist doctrine that the 'ends justify the means' then implicitly permitting a mass elimination of what may be [unfairly] called society's more superfluous citizens, is proving to be an effective growth strategy. In other words the policy seems implicitly to be 'if you can't afford your own ARV's then you should die quickly please'. Part of the disease pathology is that people die slowly though and not pleasantly.
Logically our President can't actually come out and say that that 'Thins' sickness is self- inflicted, for the most part, through negative sexual behaviour and practices. The Pres cannot actually say [can he] that if you can't afford the medicine you should practice large-scale masturbation: or suffer the consequences of your intemperate actions and die soon.
There are far too many examples of collateral damage anyway in respect of unsuspecting housewives with wandering HIV laced husbands; and blood transfusion recipients of bad contaminated blood, not to mention huge numbers of rape victims and children born afflicted. Nonetheless broadly speaking if you don't want AIDS do not have unprotected sex! Especially with multiple partners; and what is the point of having a democracy if you cant get to fuck who you want when you want how you want-Being free means having the right to foul up if you want to.
That's the problem for the Pres with being in the 'nice guy' party. To say something like what I've just suggested rather seriously dents the whole human rights culture that motivated the ruling party's thrust to power in the first place. This conflict between what is said and what is done [over a range of policy issues] is in no small part the reason why South Africa is attracting a subtly more critical global audience than it has been used to over the past decade. The President's realism is leading him into a brutal territory and creates discomfort in a world which seeks to be ever 'nicer' to everyone in general-on the basis that one never knows when the tolling bell 'tolls for thee' to mangle Hemingway.
We know from our past history that dictatorial trends always follow attempts to rationalise the irrational and the government's position on HIV/ AIDS is fundamentally irrational
However, the President is dammed if he does and dammed if he doesn't and is therefore in an invidious position. Basically an afflicted HIV positive person is doomed to die. Anti-retrovirals simply prolong the time scale to the inevitable; and so he is under intense pressure to supply them. Apparently too, the anti-retrovirals [ARV's] that are widely available are designed to treat the HIV sub-type B strain [which is where the most lucrative end of the market is] and most of Sub-Saharan Africa [including us] experiences sub type C HIV apparently; and so ARV drugs that start out problematic will become even more problematic as drug resistant strains of the virus mutate into existence, something the government apparently regards as inevitable, given our prior experience with other drugs to treat our worsening incidence of Malaria and Tuberculosis; and because part of the problem with this HIV virus is its rapid and constant mutation rate.
Simultaneously the government is deliberately failing to fund research into a medical solution, presumably because they don't want to. I have heard people argue that a change of attitude on the part of the SA Govt to treating this disease could fuel an intense inflow of foreign investment by drug companies eager to exploit our comparative advantage developed over two decades into HIV research. And we do apparently have a serious comparative advantage where it counts- developing therapeutics to prevent HIV access to the body in the first place. But such research needs money and with Government unwilling to even acknowledge that the problem really exists it is inevitable that the private sector prefers to fund other things.
Ironically, a place that was always a colonial outpost from the POV of everything from comics to football rules suddenly finds itself at the 'centre of empire' and our old habits of simply appropriating research from the colonial parent is no longer appropriate to an age where we have become the epicentre of the change. Where the change to be fought is ours alone. So in the same way that we have obfuscated building new power stations, new roads, transportation nodes, introducing competition to the telecoms sector and, and, and: we are choosing to do nothing about this pandemic but hold endless meetings to discuss more meetings about meetings yet to come. And when we do act we set up vegetable stands to demonstrate our opposition to the virus, where our sophisticated audience expects some serious power play. We are being perceived as a nation of talkers with increasingly dramatic execution issues.
Thus it would seem that the good Manto is a smokescreen. For those happy people who do not know who this intriguing person is or why her bizarre behaviour is under an 'inscrutable scroot' [a form of scrutiny-Goon Show circa 1950's] This medical doctor, Dr Manto cum brutally styled Mashonisa* type thuggish politician has a strange predilection for non-scientific medicine for someone allegedly trained as a scientist-for what is a medical doctor if not a scientist extraordinaire. [* Mashonisa: a 'heavy' used for carrying out unpleasant tasks like for instance collecting money.]
Dr Manto is accused this week in the wake of her Toronto 'veggie' exposé, of promoting vegetables and 'magic' muti as her government's palliatives to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic which is having a particularly damaging effect on her jurisdiction. Her response to Mrs de Lille's attack demonstrated a conviction that veggies and traditional muti were as good as anything yet contrived given that there is no real cure for this disease coming from anywhere at the moment, and she asserted that her roll out program for ARV's was the envy of the world.
We can deduce from the verbal exchange that Dr Manto has a three point strategy for dealing with the pandemic. Better nutrition [garlic is good for you], sangoma's [traditional doctors] expenses should be claimable on medical aid now, and anti-retrovirals are approved of and form part of the strategy for combating the effects of the so-called 'Syndrome' [HIV/aids]. There is some alleged foot-dragging over the ARV's. It was hard to see what the fuss was all about-the stand never made it to the visual media apparently, well not around here anyway, and there is seemingly a huge fuss from almost the entire planet about her veggies.
Perhaps the real truth is that this disease is currently incurable and the medicines those suffering from it demand are too expensive to take without government help. One senses that rational democrats can see a barrage of precedent based demands that could flood the health services with demands for treatments for cancer, diabetes [a pandemic in the making we heard on another Perlman debate] and others from A to Z: once the precedent of supplying drugs to combat the unwanted effects of sexual behaviour becomes de rigueur.
So the Health Minister has been set to play Lear's Fool, distracting attention from the real horror, by presenting us with a committed employee who follows orders to the point of buffoonery and who brazenly prevaricates on the subject of anti-retroviral treatment because she has to-and loudly promotes a weird combination of vegetable nutrients and traditional remedies in the forlorn hope that improving basic diet will help to alleviate the vulnerability that contributes so effectively to the disease's continued growth.
And out of all this the country is prospering, change is taking place at a remarkable rate notwithstanding a great deal of whining to the contrary-Unfortunately though, there is a potential flaw in the plan-not all those who are leaving so prematurely are superfluous persons; this is becoming particularly noticeable amongst the sub-continent's agricultural workforce, and accounts for many nurses doctors and teachers, and as many are discovering you cannot train replacements for key people fast enough to compensate for the cost of them dying-Eventually this cost has to catch up with the growth figures somehow-hopefully it will be in that 'long run' when Mr Keynes predicts that we'll all be dead anyway.
The Health Minister is an ironic eye in a tragic storm.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Tail wags dog
A man with whom I share my birthday anniversary once wrote about raging against the dying of the light, I have raged, and will undoubtedly continue to rage against the slow insidious dying of the light. And when I think of how little I really have to rage against-well relative to those who have been truly hard done by-some few slights- then I can understand that those who experienced those slights on a grand scale could RAGE and plunge the world into chaos. So, seeking refuge, I thought I would tell you about my friend Thomas; and his wife, and their dog and what happened to them all when they decided to leave Africa-
Nothing-
Oh you say-[either Oh! or Oh?] and check your reaction there-why did you turn the page? Were you expecting a tale of ghastly disaster-were you simply curious-decide now.
I never knew Thomas's missus or his dog. The man was a congenial chap that I encountered professionally, about eighteen months ago; and who was visiting this part of the world on a two-year contract from Europe. Earlier this year he was apparently invited by his employers to attend a two-day workshop on changes that had to be introduced to the practice of his profession, to accord with this overwhelming battery of new regulatory legislation with which we are being inundated these days.
What it was specifically is irrelevant-whether you are an accountant, a banker or a doctor, a tinker, tailor or schoolteacher these days there are comprehensive batteries of new rules to break your heart appearing with such frequency that, people like my bank manager, for instance, are being given ultimatums- 'Update yourself formally by year end or go'. [I offered help in patterning the learning process: the idea of losing my bank manager brought me out in hives]
Thomas chose to go. He walked in his boss's office on the Monday following the conference and resigned. He terminated his contract six months before time rather than learn a new system that he found not only incomprehensible but also insulting. Whatever the merits of this position is, again, irrelevant.
He announced that he intended to drive home. Since he now had months of free time on his hands, and his wife had become attached to the dog that had apparently barked at some of those bad people who seem to flock around us all, like vultures around a corpse, and saved her and Thomas from an unwelcome experience, he decided to drive home, and take both his wife and the dog-a pavement special modified from a Jack Russel base-along with him. Like Frodo the hobbit in Lord of the Rings he decided to have an adventure.
Home was about eleven thousand kilometres away from here in Jozi in the southern end of Zone One, or the not quite so Southern end of Africa if you prefer.
Most of the people I've ever known [and I haven't known many] who drove to Europe via Africa went in top of the range four wheel drive, robustly designed, rather chunky looking, and in my limited experience, thoroughly uncomfortable vehicles.
Thomas had one of those low end of the market 'pavement special' type SUV's -you know the kind that looks pretty in suburbia and conveys an air of chic while also boasting some four wheel drive features amongst the cup holders and the turbo boost, just in case the opportunity arose to mount some pavement to escape a rampaging hijacker or putrefying traffic gridlock situation.
He took his SUV to some car accessory crowd and for a modest fee [Thomas was paid in Euros which made him a most well-paid fellow] they equipped his pavement special with racks and ribs and stuff on which to hang the usual paraphernalia one attaches to a vehicle you intend to drive through the equivalent of the Kalahari-on-steroids.
And then he drove straight up the 'road' from Jozi to Alexandria in five weeks without a hitch, a major breakdown, being robbed, mugged or even extorted to the point of attrition. And they went through many places we hear regularly to be bad, disreputable and dysfunctional. He did have some inconveniences registering the car to put it onto a boat to sail down the Nile to Aswan, because, apparently, Sudan had no roads at all to cover that part of the journey-Presumably the Nile 'lobby' opposes road building as a job protection racket. Interestingly he reached the Sudan in three weeks. The balance of the journey took two and included more tourist things and 'inconveniences'.
I say interestingly because we all know that Afro Pessimism is chiefly targeted at that part of Africa south of the Sudan...and this region was almost hassle free.
The roads generally, he said, were bad. In places he could barely make twenty kilometres an hour. Nonetheless, he added, given that the roads in his own Euroland were pretty clogged up with traffic when he got there, 20kph was actually quick. Although there were some minor bureaucratic inconveniences in the Sudan-and one or two other places- mainly at borders it was nothing he hadn't anticipated. In fact it all went almost exactly as he predicted when we had guzzled a farewell heap of perfectly prepared Falkland calamari, followed by their orgasmic baked camembert at the Kitchener Room in Braamfontein a few days before he left. [We met there rather than in his local sports bar on the West Rand because I thought he would enjoy the increasingly rare ambience of an old 'traditional' Jozi mining-era pub in one of the few remaining mining era hotels. And he did.[it's in the Milner Park hotel for those of you who don't know Braamfontein or never went to Jimmy's Inn when you were at Wits.]. He assured me that driving through Africa could not be worse than driving in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron curtain.
I asked him how he figured he would get a dog all the way to Europe and he assured me again that he had all the required documentation, inoculations and whatever other etceteras one needed to have to move dogs through Africa. He is a thorough man. I was sceptical and envisaged the dog becoming someone's lunch.
So if nothing happened to Thomas then why am I telling you this? The news is that 'nothing happened'-The cloud of nationalistic based horror that has blanketed our continent for a long time seems to be lifting-and Thomas's journey is some of the evidence.
And; simply because I have been increasingly astounded with each passing email at the pleasurable nature of his drive home, especially given how thoroughly unpleasant airline travel has become over the past fortnight. [Airline travel has to be the worst form of travel-it gets you there quick all right, but in terrible pain.]
Afro-pessimism has become such an ingrained idea that I, and many other of Thomas's battery of associates, co-workers and newly acquired friends, both here and in his home territory had been aghast when we all heard what he intended to do: using a modified 'street car' 'nogal'[also].
And it turned out fantastic-'The journey of a lifetime' as he put it-if it wasn't for the manufacturers badge emblazoned on the back of his vehicle I would pop a picture of Thomas, Mrs Thomas and Dog Thomas [plus vehicle] on the net -I particularly like the one posing next to a Kenyan sign stating that he was 'on the Equator'.
So-some bad, bad roads-extended potholes really-many modestly bad roads-some easily repaired punctures, some occasional bureaucratic inconveniences-although nothing not already noted and prepped from some relevant guide book -some tummy bugs from consuming refreshments from dubious sources-nothing fatal or that couldn't be alleviated through standard methods. All in all pretty normal holiday experiences, and it was he said less arduous than driving to Cape Town-[which he did in the last Christmas rush-hour when, as we know, up-country folk like to blast the cobwebs from their engines and rev off the clock in their general annual lemming stampede to be at either end of the country-first. He found driving to [and from ] Cape Town more stressful than driving through Africa]. Along the way on his journey he met friendly cheerful and generally optimistic people who were happy to see him and sell him things, and things and things. Seems like the 'convert all handy trees into wooden giraffes' trees is a widespread phenomenon.
And the most truly astounding part [for me] was that the dog made it all the way 'home' too.
Cheers
NiK has recently self-published a practical handbook on the intimate art of collecting payments from reluctant customers...it can be found on http://www.newvoices.co.za/BOOK_7WAYS.htm
Nothing-
Oh you say-[either Oh! or Oh?] and check your reaction there-why did you turn the page? Were you expecting a tale of ghastly disaster-were you simply curious-decide now.
I never knew Thomas's missus or his dog. The man was a congenial chap that I encountered professionally, about eighteen months ago; and who was visiting this part of the world on a two-year contract from Europe. Earlier this year he was apparently invited by his employers to attend a two-day workshop on changes that had to be introduced to the practice of his profession, to accord with this overwhelming battery of new regulatory legislation with which we are being inundated these days.
What it was specifically is irrelevant-whether you are an accountant, a banker or a doctor, a tinker, tailor or schoolteacher these days there are comprehensive batteries of new rules to break your heart appearing with such frequency that, people like my bank manager, for instance, are being given ultimatums- 'Update yourself formally by year end or go'. [I offered help in patterning the learning process: the idea of losing my bank manager brought me out in hives]
Thomas chose to go. He walked in his boss's office on the Monday following the conference and resigned. He terminated his contract six months before time rather than learn a new system that he found not only incomprehensible but also insulting. Whatever the merits of this position is, again, irrelevant.
He announced that he intended to drive home. Since he now had months of free time on his hands, and his wife had become attached to the dog that had apparently barked at some of those bad people who seem to flock around us all, like vultures around a corpse, and saved her and Thomas from an unwelcome experience, he decided to drive home, and take both his wife and the dog-a pavement special modified from a Jack Russel base-along with him. Like Frodo the hobbit in Lord of the Rings he decided to have an adventure.
Home was about eleven thousand kilometres away from here in Jozi in the southern end of Zone One, or the not quite so Southern end of Africa if you prefer.
Most of the people I've ever known [and I haven't known many] who drove to Europe via Africa went in top of the range four wheel drive, robustly designed, rather chunky looking, and in my limited experience, thoroughly uncomfortable vehicles.
Thomas had one of those low end of the market 'pavement special' type SUV's -you know the kind that looks pretty in suburbia and conveys an air of chic while also boasting some four wheel drive features amongst the cup holders and the turbo boost, just in case the opportunity arose to mount some pavement to escape a rampaging hijacker or putrefying traffic gridlock situation.
He took his SUV to some car accessory crowd and for a modest fee [Thomas was paid in Euros which made him a most well-paid fellow] they equipped his pavement special with racks and ribs and stuff on which to hang the usual paraphernalia one attaches to a vehicle you intend to drive through the equivalent of the Kalahari-on-steroids.
And then he drove straight up the 'road' from Jozi to Alexandria in five weeks without a hitch, a major breakdown, being robbed, mugged or even extorted to the point of attrition. And they went through many places we hear regularly to be bad, disreputable and dysfunctional. He did have some inconveniences registering the car to put it onto a boat to sail down the Nile to Aswan, because, apparently, Sudan had no roads at all to cover that part of the journey-Presumably the Nile 'lobby' opposes road building as a job protection racket. Interestingly he reached the Sudan in three weeks. The balance of the journey took two and included more tourist things and 'inconveniences'.
I say interestingly because we all know that Afro Pessimism is chiefly targeted at that part of Africa south of the Sudan...and this region was almost hassle free.
The roads generally, he said, were bad. In places he could barely make twenty kilometres an hour. Nonetheless, he added, given that the roads in his own Euroland were pretty clogged up with traffic when he got there, 20kph was actually quick. Although there were some minor bureaucratic inconveniences in the Sudan-and one or two other places- mainly at borders it was nothing he hadn't anticipated. In fact it all went almost exactly as he predicted when we had guzzled a farewell heap of perfectly prepared Falkland calamari, followed by their orgasmic baked camembert at the Kitchener Room in Braamfontein a few days before he left. [We met there rather than in his local sports bar on the West Rand because I thought he would enjoy the increasingly rare ambience of an old 'traditional' Jozi mining-era pub in one of the few remaining mining era hotels. And he did.[it's in the Milner Park hotel for those of you who don't know Braamfontein or never went to Jimmy's Inn when you were at Wits.]. He assured me that driving through Africa could not be worse than driving in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron curtain.
I asked him how he figured he would get a dog all the way to Europe and he assured me again that he had all the required documentation, inoculations and whatever other etceteras one needed to have to move dogs through Africa. He is a thorough man. I was sceptical and envisaged the dog becoming someone's lunch.
So if nothing happened to Thomas then why am I telling you this? The news is that 'nothing happened'-The cloud of nationalistic based horror that has blanketed our continent for a long time seems to be lifting-and Thomas's journey is some of the evidence.
And; simply because I have been increasingly astounded with each passing email at the pleasurable nature of his drive home, especially given how thoroughly unpleasant airline travel has become over the past fortnight. [Airline travel has to be the worst form of travel-it gets you there quick all right, but in terrible pain.]
Afro-pessimism has become such an ingrained idea that I, and many other of Thomas's battery of associates, co-workers and newly acquired friends, both here and in his home territory had been aghast when we all heard what he intended to do: using a modified 'street car' 'nogal'[also].
And it turned out fantastic-'The journey of a lifetime' as he put it-if it wasn't for the manufacturers badge emblazoned on the back of his vehicle I would pop a picture of Thomas, Mrs Thomas and Dog Thomas [plus vehicle] on the net -I particularly like the one posing next to a Kenyan sign stating that he was 'on the Equator'.
So-some bad, bad roads-extended potholes really-many modestly bad roads-some easily repaired punctures, some occasional bureaucratic inconveniences-although nothing not already noted and prepped from some relevant guide book -some tummy bugs from consuming refreshments from dubious sources-nothing fatal or that couldn't be alleviated through standard methods. All in all pretty normal holiday experiences, and it was he said less arduous than driving to Cape Town-[which he did in the last Christmas rush-hour when, as we know, up-country folk like to blast the cobwebs from their engines and rev off the clock in their general annual lemming stampede to be at either end of the country-first. He found driving to [and from ] Cape Town more stressful than driving through Africa]. Along the way on his journey he met friendly cheerful and generally optimistic people who were happy to see him and sell him things, and things and things. Seems like the 'convert all handy trees into wooden giraffes' trees is a widespread phenomenon.
And the most truly astounding part [for me] was that the dog made it all the way 'home' too.
Cheers
NiK has recently self-published a practical handbook on the intimate art of collecting payments from reluctant customers...it can be found on http://www.newvoices.co.za/BOOK_7WAYS.htm
Sunday, August 13, 2006
7 Ways to get your money...without resorting to violence or the law
It was my intention to write a blog about my new book [published pseudanonymously] and tell you all about how wonderful it is and why you should go to my web site and read about it and buy it if you found a need for it, but when I woke up this morning it was to a feeling of profound ennui-[ennui: a feeling of weariness, arising from lack of occupation or lack of interest in present scenes and surrounding objects: listlessness; boredom; tedium. [Websters]....
I am reminded once again of whatisname, Camus, who found himself unable to take any interest in anything and couldn't remember if his mother had died today, yesterday or some other time. There is a web address for my new book somewhere in this blog that you can leap to if you wish to avoid reading about my state of mind-
I feel as if I just climbed mount Everest and now I'm sitting on the top and I know that I have to start climbing down again and frankly I couldn't be bothered. I should be loaded with elation but I'm not, I should be smug about my great achievement, but I'm not. I should be surrounded with enthusiastic people who can't wait to help me with my downhill climb but I'm not.
I realise that I'm just another Joe out there pushing his own limits that are to all intents and purposes meaningless to others. After all why should anyone care what I do as long as I didn't get in their faces for some trivial reason-Is this the face of depression and isn't it true that depression is normal. It is the desire to achieve and do things that is the real cause of humanity's woes-or is that simply a depressive's rationalisation.
Oh shit -pass the bottle. Let us leave all this magma receding crust of life on the edge and go fishing for a good fuck to damp the stress out of waiting for the end of waiting.
What is the truth? I'm sixty soon, I have no job, no money and few prospects [one actually-this book I'm going to tell you about.]. This is not really an issue since I have never had a job, well a real job anyway-the kind that brought untold riches to those corporate fuckers who were brutally ruthless enough to hang on to their jobs for the entire journey and wind up at sixty with wealth and the ulcers to go with it. It stands to reason therefore that I never had much money either, except what could be scraped out of the system through craft, cunning and devious extraction- and as for prospects: enough said.
I belong to that part of the sixties generation-the baby boomers-that 'dropped out' after deducing that the 'system' was a crock of illusional shit. We were known as the 'educated unemployables'-kids from working class backgrounds diluted with enough middle class fantasy to believe that our education meant we were special and of course we weren't. The 'system' required that we put away our delusions and focus on the 'big picture'. We were only marginally ready to roll into the system except that we weren't...we were actually unemployable and remained so.
So in the forty three years that have elapsed since I wrote the final exam at one of the old system's least useful high schools-one of those places that thought education and playing rugby were synonymous activities-I have done many things-acquired an immense, pleasurable and inherently useless 'further' education, fathered three wonderful and excessively successful young humans, sustained a marriage to the same person over more than three and a half decades, mastered the thirty two step form in Tai Chi, and forgotten many other forms, and participated in a string of congenial, albeit generally not particularly lucrative ventures-For instance I once owned a part- share in a successful theatre company-long since consigned to the dustbin of history but nonetheless in its time an organisation that received favourable mention in many international journals, won many awards for adventurous work [we produced the first multiracial Othello on the continent no matter what Janet Suzman claims] and even took performances {Fugard: The Island, Master Harold and the Boys] to the Edinburgh festival-the theatre equivalent of Mecca.
I also took a one man show to the Grahamstown festival that was carefully ignored for reasons of political correctness by the fashionable media, since I was neither black nor a well established whitey, but which show nonetheless played out to packed houses in competition with both of the above.
It is only the market that matters, in my opinion; and when the average 'house' on the so-called 'fringe' at Grahamstown consists of less than ten persons in the audience, to play to full houses every night for ten days [once word of mouth took its effect] was a satisfying conclusion [a full house being a couple of hundred people]. The run was extended to accommodate the demand for seats-it was most cool.
Being so satisfied and noting that the odds were heavily stacked against the theatre as the new society unravelled itself, I retired after that apogee, and apart from a moment of madness in 2000 when I agreed to play the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, to commemorate the centenary of that poet philosopher's demise, in a role that seriously impacted on my life, I have scorned the theatre ever since and have no regrets since my instinct was entirely accurate and the theatre has generally died, along with the audiences. [In case you're wondering I don't regard that frothy, self-indulgent crap I witnessed last week at the Barnyard in Cresta as theatre-the theatre was a place of ideas- and we haven't had too many ideas in our society over the past few decades.]
My most entertaining moments over these past few decades came randomly-For instance, I entered my Grahamstown play in a BBC world wide playwriting competition and was phoned by an executive of the BBC one morning and told that my play was in the top ten out of forty thousand entries and they needed to know if I was black or white so they could make their recommendations-It was a pretty 'in your face' request I thought When I said I was white his disappointment was tangible and he rang off and that was the last I heard of the thing-ho hum-
I had a similar 'lights on' moment a decade ago when I submitted a proposal for a thirteen part drama series to the newly liberated SATV. It was a series conceived at the request of a group of black wannabe filmmakers who needed a script to start their climb to wealth and riches. We'd worked together on some forgettable film set and they were a cool and creative bunch of dudes. I received a letter from the SATV crew accepting the script and please come to make arrangements-When I walked in the door the commissioning bureaucrat saw me and without thinking, or perhaps arrogantly, blurted out- 'I didn't know you were an 'Englishman' ' [code for Whitey] and that was it: the script was 'spiked'. My black associates had no political credibility; they were simply film people who knew about making movies; they weren't politicians.
I notice from the 'Rich people list' published in the Sunday Times last week that there are plentiful supplies of Political hatchet men who have used their struggle credentials to garner delightfully obscene wealth based on no more substantial skill than 'being connected' [perhaps that is a substantial skill after all]. None of them are making movies-in fact they don't really seem to be making anything useful at all, except money.]
I later gave the script away to an American crowd who recast my 'suffering' citizens as migrant Mexican workers [on my suggestion] and maybe they even made a successful movie-the advantage of being a drop-out retired hippie is that it didn't matter.
The real pleasure of blogging is that I don't have to take shit from any semi-literate arsehole who happens to have sucked enough cocks in his life to put himself into a gatekeeping role where he can pretend to be a someone, and make fuckloads of money out of ripping off the hard working schmucks who really believe that the 'system' is going to treat them fairly. I even have my own personal web-site where I can say what I like, in addition to a number that belong to others where I can also 'tell it like it is': my way. And if I'm wrong I don't care, although I do notice that I am not often wrong-which is sad in a way. That's the trouble with telling the truth-no one really wants it do they?
So here I am going on sixty and still relatively 'jobless', prospect-less [apart from my new book] and without a large reserve of superfluous cash. I decided that it was time to pander to 'the system' before I find myself completely destitute.
I decided to write a book that deals with one of the market economy's most secret activities, an activity that I have been engaged in over many years, albeit like the theatre, I'm now retired from that shit.. For some reason no one else ever seems to have made a crack at this topic. I could speculate as to why and of course I might be wrong-I sometimes think that many of the people who write on the subject of business have more of an academic appreciation of the subject than hard practice, the people who are generally 'skat ryk' successful at the hard practice of business seldom write books -or like Alan Greenspan they hire ghostwriters.
Since I have lived a life 'on the edge' as it were, the only real appreciation of business that I have ever had has been in the field of hard practice-There is one end of the business spectrum where bullshit and political connections count for fuck all. Not that it matters since that is not the end where the big bucks are made out of stock options and bonuses and such like-but it is the place where a person such as myself: a generally anti-social, misanthropic, over-educated, unemployable citizen can eke out a more than comfortable existence-The world to which I refer is the hard-sell world of direct, door to door selling and its equally hard-arsed counterpart, the collection of money, due from reluctant debtors.
I wasn't sure if this would be a good move but I needed something that would pay better than Blogging, without selling out my values [what, do I still have values he asks himself?] to some fucked up corporate arseholes who would massage my work until it became the same mealy mouthed incomprehensible shit we find daily, plaguing the pages of the local press and elsewhere.
So I wrote and self-published a book called '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law'. Since I've retired from that line of business I don't mind sharing what I learned along the way to success, my way.
My optimism seems to have been correctly placed. Last time I self-published a book it was a skiet, skop and verspoeg [for offshore readers 'Shoot, kick and spit far] crime story called the Buffalo Hunters-a broken narrative tale about a gang of carjackers [buffalo hunters]. I sold it as the most violent, sexually graphic piece of writing published to date in SA, which it was and perhaps still is.
I printed a thousand copies and it took me four years to sell them all. Some were sold through the odd 'Exclusives' outlets, most I sold the same way I sold everything else: door to door and face to face.
This time however, with '7 Ways', I sold out my first consignment in under ten days and I am sure that this will be more popular than that previous book was-I learned a lot about self-publishing since then-most importantly that I needed help and a change of author name to something less obviously associated with the former increasingly despised ruling class of humans- and that has made all the difference. -That and the fact that getting money out of one's customers is the most problematic issue facing any businessperson in this country today-in fact it must be a generally global problem since the whole consignment was bought by book chains that don't exist in our sunny place.
If you want to see what the book is about you can find it at Http://newvoices.co.za/book_7 Ways.htp You are warned that it isn't easy to purchase online at this particular site. For logical reasons you can't just use a credit card and buy it online-you must follow a complex procedure. Anyway maybe you can order it through Amazon or Kalahari where such sophisticated measures do exist-assuming of course you have a need for a handbook on debt collecting [or more broadly on how to get your own way in everything] I don't really mind since this book just sells perfectly face to face-in fact having sold [and collected] more than four hundred million bucks worth of general shit in my non-career, this is the first product I've ever had where my closing rate is close to one hundred percent with every call. I love my book.
Eventually this book, which I refer to as 'an airport reading room book' will be on the local bookstore shelves, although it is more probable that you will find it at the increasingly harassed airports of the world where more and more people will be waiting around for aeroplanes and this book will be almost the only thing you'll be allowed to take on board in your transparent 'baggie'.
In the meantime the first consignment is gone, the second is on the way and is mostly pre-sold and the good feeling that went with that is over and I am faced with the fact that all that huge effort is done: I have reached the top of Everest and faced with the knowledge that I must soon begin the downhill climb the only sound that I hear is the sound of one hand clapping and that hand is my own.
I shall practice tai chi and rest my soul.
I am reminded once again of whatisname, Camus, who found himself unable to take any interest in anything and couldn't remember if his mother had died today, yesterday or some other time. There is a web address for my new book somewhere in this blog that you can leap to if you wish to avoid reading about my state of mind-
I feel as if I just climbed mount Everest and now I'm sitting on the top and I know that I have to start climbing down again and frankly I couldn't be bothered. I should be loaded with elation but I'm not, I should be smug about my great achievement, but I'm not. I should be surrounded with enthusiastic people who can't wait to help me with my downhill climb but I'm not.
I realise that I'm just another Joe out there pushing his own limits that are to all intents and purposes meaningless to others. After all why should anyone care what I do as long as I didn't get in their faces for some trivial reason-Is this the face of depression and isn't it true that depression is normal. It is the desire to achieve and do things that is the real cause of humanity's woes-or is that simply a depressive's rationalisation.
Oh shit -pass the bottle. Let us leave all this magma receding crust of life on the edge and go fishing for a good fuck to damp the stress out of waiting for the end of waiting.
What is the truth? I'm sixty soon, I have no job, no money and few prospects [one actually-this book I'm going to tell you about.]. This is not really an issue since I have never had a job, well a real job anyway-the kind that brought untold riches to those corporate fuckers who were brutally ruthless enough to hang on to their jobs for the entire journey and wind up at sixty with wealth and the ulcers to go with it. It stands to reason therefore that I never had much money either, except what could be scraped out of the system through craft, cunning and devious extraction- and as for prospects: enough said.
I belong to that part of the sixties generation-the baby boomers-that 'dropped out' after deducing that the 'system' was a crock of illusional shit. We were known as the 'educated unemployables'-kids from working class backgrounds diluted with enough middle class fantasy to believe that our education meant we were special and of course we weren't. The 'system' required that we put away our delusions and focus on the 'big picture'. We were only marginally ready to roll into the system except that we weren't...we were actually unemployable and remained so.
So in the forty three years that have elapsed since I wrote the final exam at one of the old system's least useful high schools-one of those places that thought education and playing rugby were synonymous activities-I have done many things-acquired an immense, pleasurable and inherently useless 'further' education, fathered three wonderful and excessively successful young humans, sustained a marriage to the same person over more than three and a half decades, mastered the thirty two step form in Tai Chi, and forgotten many other forms, and participated in a string of congenial, albeit generally not particularly lucrative ventures-For instance I once owned a part- share in a successful theatre company-long since consigned to the dustbin of history but nonetheless in its time an organisation that received favourable mention in many international journals, won many awards for adventurous work [we produced the first multiracial Othello on the continent no matter what Janet Suzman claims] and even took performances {Fugard: The Island, Master Harold and the Boys] to the Edinburgh festival-the theatre equivalent of Mecca.
I also took a one man show to the Grahamstown festival that was carefully ignored for reasons of political correctness by the fashionable media, since I was neither black nor a well established whitey, but which show nonetheless played out to packed houses in competition with both of the above.
It is only the market that matters, in my opinion; and when the average 'house' on the so-called 'fringe' at Grahamstown consists of less than ten persons in the audience, to play to full houses every night for ten days [once word of mouth took its effect] was a satisfying conclusion [a full house being a couple of hundred people]. The run was extended to accommodate the demand for seats-it was most cool.
Being so satisfied and noting that the odds were heavily stacked against the theatre as the new society unravelled itself, I retired after that apogee, and apart from a moment of madness in 2000 when I agreed to play the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, to commemorate the centenary of that poet philosopher's demise, in a role that seriously impacted on my life, I have scorned the theatre ever since and have no regrets since my instinct was entirely accurate and the theatre has generally died, along with the audiences. [In case you're wondering I don't regard that frothy, self-indulgent crap I witnessed last week at the Barnyard in Cresta as theatre-the theatre was a place of ideas- and we haven't had too many ideas in our society over the past few decades.]
My most entertaining moments over these past few decades came randomly-For instance, I entered my Grahamstown play in a BBC world wide playwriting competition and was phoned by an executive of the BBC one morning and told that my play was in the top ten out of forty thousand entries and they needed to know if I was black or white so they could make their recommendations-It was a pretty 'in your face' request I thought When I said I was white his disappointment was tangible and he rang off and that was the last I heard of the thing-ho hum-
I had a similar 'lights on' moment a decade ago when I submitted a proposal for a thirteen part drama series to the newly liberated SATV. It was a series conceived at the request of a group of black wannabe filmmakers who needed a script to start their climb to wealth and riches. We'd worked together on some forgettable film set and they were a cool and creative bunch of dudes. I received a letter from the SATV crew accepting the script and please come to make arrangements-When I walked in the door the commissioning bureaucrat saw me and without thinking, or perhaps arrogantly, blurted out- 'I didn't know you were an 'Englishman' ' [code for Whitey] and that was it: the script was 'spiked'. My black associates had no political credibility; they were simply film people who knew about making movies; they weren't politicians.
I notice from the 'Rich people list' published in the Sunday Times last week that there are plentiful supplies of Political hatchet men who have used their struggle credentials to garner delightfully obscene wealth based on no more substantial skill than 'being connected' [perhaps that is a substantial skill after all]. None of them are making movies-in fact they don't really seem to be making anything useful at all, except money.]
I later gave the script away to an American crowd who recast my 'suffering' citizens as migrant Mexican workers [on my suggestion] and maybe they even made a successful movie-the advantage of being a drop-out retired hippie is that it didn't matter.
The real pleasure of blogging is that I don't have to take shit from any semi-literate arsehole who happens to have sucked enough cocks in his life to put himself into a gatekeeping role where he can pretend to be a someone, and make fuckloads of money out of ripping off the hard working schmucks who really believe that the 'system' is going to treat them fairly. I even have my own personal web-site where I can say what I like, in addition to a number that belong to others where I can also 'tell it like it is': my way. And if I'm wrong I don't care, although I do notice that I am not often wrong-which is sad in a way. That's the trouble with telling the truth-no one really wants it do they?
So here I am going on sixty and still relatively 'jobless', prospect-less [apart from my new book] and without a large reserve of superfluous cash. I decided that it was time to pander to 'the system' before I find myself completely destitute.
I decided to write a book that deals with one of the market economy's most secret activities, an activity that I have been engaged in over many years, albeit like the theatre, I'm now retired from that shit.. For some reason no one else ever seems to have made a crack at this topic. I could speculate as to why and of course I might be wrong-I sometimes think that many of the people who write on the subject of business have more of an academic appreciation of the subject than hard practice, the people who are generally 'skat ryk' successful at the hard practice of business seldom write books -or like Alan Greenspan they hire ghostwriters.
Since I have lived a life 'on the edge' as it were, the only real appreciation of business that I have ever had has been in the field of hard practice-There is one end of the business spectrum where bullshit and political connections count for fuck all. Not that it matters since that is not the end where the big bucks are made out of stock options and bonuses and such like-but it is the place where a person such as myself: a generally anti-social, misanthropic, over-educated, unemployable citizen can eke out a more than comfortable existence-The world to which I refer is the hard-sell world of direct, door to door selling and its equally hard-arsed counterpart, the collection of money, due from reluctant debtors.
I wasn't sure if this would be a good move but I needed something that would pay better than Blogging, without selling out my values [what, do I still have values he asks himself?] to some fucked up corporate arseholes who would massage my work until it became the same mealy mouthed incomprehensible shit we find daily, plaguing the pages of the local press and elsewhere.
So I wrote and self-published a book called '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law'. Since I've retired from that line of business I don't mind sharing what I learned along the way to success, my way.
My optimism seems to have been correctly placed. Last time I self-published a book it was a skiet, skop and verspoeg [for offshore readers 'Shoot, kick and spit far] crime story called the Buffalo Hunters-a broken narrative tale about a gang of carjackers [buffalo hunters]. I sold it as the most violent, sexually graphic piece of writing published to date in SA, which it was and perhaps still is.
I printed a thousand copies and it took me four years to sell them all. Some were sold through the odd 'Exclusives' outlets, most I sold the same way I sold everything else: door to door and face to face.
This time however, with '7 Ways', I sold out my first consignment in under ten days and I am sure that this will be more popular than that previous book was-I learned a lot about self-publishing since then-most importantly that I needed help and a change of author name to something less obviously associated with the former increasingly despised ruling class of humans- and that has made all the difference. -That and the fact that getting money out of one's customers is the most problematic issue facing any businessperson in this country today-in fact it must be a generally global problem since the whole consignment was bought by book chains that don't exist in our sunny place.
If you want to see what the book is about you can find it at Http://newvoices.co.za/book_7 Ways.htp You are warned that it isn't easy to purchase online at this particular site. For logical reasons you can't just use a credit card and buy it online-you must follow a complex procedure. Anyway maybe you can order it through Amazon or Kalahari where such sophisticated measures do exist-assuming of course you have a need for a handbook on debt collecting [or more broadly on how to get your own way in everything] I don't really mind since this book just sells perfectly face to face-in fact having sold [and collected] more than four hundred million bucks worth of general shit in my non-career, this is the first product I've ever had where my closing rate is close to one hundred percent with every call. I love my book.
Eventually this book, which I refer to as 'an airport reading room book' will be on the local bookstore shelves, although it is more probable that you will find it at the increasingly harassed airports of the world where more and more people will be waiting around for aeroplanes and this book will be almost the only thing you'll be allowed to take on board in your transparent 'baggie'.
In the meantime the first consignment is gone, the second is on the way and is mostly pre-sold and the good feeling that went with that is over and I am faced with the fact that all that huge effort is done: I have reached the top of Everest and faced with the knowledge that I must soon begin the downhill climb the only sound that I hear is the sound of one hand clapping and that hand is my own.
I shall practice tai chi and rest my soul.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
The petition to save the animals
On one of the days when i was running around the city i went to a place where i encountered a gang of about twelve whittery twittery ten[ish] year old girls who had gathered with great excitement around a counter where there was a petition that they were all signing.
"What are you doing?" i asked one of them. A chorus came back "We are signing a petition to save the Animals." they said, with that wonderful ferocious certainty that is the sole province of ten years olds. Their voices rang with strident clarity as i walked on down the empty hallway and as their phrases bounced against the bare winter walls without warning the words came straight at me and i managed to catch most of them before they flew off.
The Petition to save the Animals
Love the animals
love them all
love the ones that slither and crawl.
Love the cats
that snarl and claw
love the dog
behind the door
Love the elephants
with their trunks
love the smelly
naughty skunks.
Has the bell rung?
Has the fat duck sung?
Is time running out
for everyone
No we say we love them all
and those who ask this
must be in thrall
to the emptiness behind
the wall.
The bell has rung
the deed is done
we covered the world with everyone
If they can't pay rent
they were not meant
to stay on here for the main event...
They have to go!
No No No
We want to hear you cry
that all the animals must not die
so bring them back into
our towns
those Lions and Tigers bearing frowns
Love the animals
love them all
especially those that
slither and crawl.
.NiK[06]
"What are you doing?" i asked one of them. A chorus came back "We are signing a petition to save the Animals." they said, with that wonderful ferocious certainty that is the sole province of ten years olds. Their voices rang with strident clarity as i walked on down the empty hallway and as their phrases bounced against the bare winter walls without warning the words came straight at me and i managed to catch most of them before they flew off.
The Petition to save the Animals
Love the animals
love them all
love the ones that slither and crawl.
Love the cats
that snarl and claw
love the dog
behind the door
Love the elephants
with their trunks
love the smelly
naughty skunks.
Has the bell rung?
Has the fat duck sung?
Is time running out
for everyone
No we say we love them all
and those who ask this
must be in thrall
to the emptiness behind
the wall.
The bell has rung
the deed is done
we covered the world with everyone
If they can't pay rent
they were not meant
to stay on here for the main event...
They have to go!
No No No
We want to hear you cry
that all the animals must not die
so bring them back into
our towns
those Lions and Tigers bearing frowns
Love the animals
love them all
especially those that
slither and crawl.
.NiK[06]
Friday, August 11, 2006
The death of a thousand cuts
This phrase, 'death of a thousand cuts' has popped up various times this past week in my general reading and has been applied variously by disparate sources to the struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians over the ownership of the lands in the Middle East that are occupied by Israel and claimed by hard-line Palestinians. It was also used in reference to the alleged 'struggle' of Pakistani inspired 'informal warriors' to gain control of Indian controlled Kashmir.
I have also seen the phrase pop up with reference to the four decades old conflict in Columbia that remains otherwise an enigma to me, and to the struggle of Tamils in Sri Lanka where presumably the citizenry watch cricket while the taps run dry.
Death of a thousand cuts is a phrase that could also apply to any of the hundreds of struggles all over the planet by disaffected groups fearing extinction. In many of these places these conflicts seems to have become a symbiotic thing. A disturbed relationship between a and b.
Perhaps the Chinese concept of the 'death of a thousand cut' was what Chairman Mao had in mind when he wrote in his little red book about how the so-called asymmetrical warfare model of conflict that he did so much to perfect could be likened to a war of the flea against the dog, although I understand he did also use the metaphor of likening the guerrilla to a fish swimming in the water-the water in this case being 'the people'.
To extend that metaphor one could suggest that the present Israeli strategy of handling the 'fish' is to dynamite the water surrounding it. In the same way that Mr Zindane the football playing chap who immortalised himself in the World Cup by retaliating to some stimulus intended to disturb him. I have no idea who the prat was who used such bad words on Mr Zindane that he cracked: he was nev er called into question. This demonstrates that the retaliator gets all the publicity whilst the instigator gets off without a warning.
So be it with Israel and Hezbollah. What more stimulus could one have than the theft of one's troops, or the murder of one's citizens by people with a fucked up-agenda who throw missiles at you and interpret any attempt at negotiation as weakness, to be exploited for gain. This bullying collection of irrationalist gunmen called Hezbollah have not been called to account either for activities that have the calculated purpose of achieving that which they have proclaimed their intention to do, the destruction of a sovereign State.
Now personally were I an Israeli and I lived next door to people who denied my right to exist after about a century of co-existence and a holocaust then I would take the view that anything within bombing distance that was not officially in my team should be caused to remove itself to someplace else. When faced with this level of implacability then it would be necessary, I suspect, to 'sanitise ' any place that could hit me with a rocket.
The problem is that I no longer think Israel has the capability to do this. In fact I don't think the United States has this capability either. The death of a thousand cuts trumps the Nation State. This inevitably means that the rules of engagement have to be amended to deal with the water surrounding the fish and this is what we are witnessing. This is not a viable strategy it is the strategy of suicide on a scale greater than anything we have ever imagined possible.
The logic of this position is that we are in a game that is in play. The enemies of the State of Israel have made numerous pronouncements over an extended period of time that it is their intention to destroy the place.. The President of Iran says it so often it has almost become a mantra. Well this is like the president of South Africa who has made such disparaging comments over time about white people in his country that he is now 'surprised' at the increasingly brutal forms of murder that are taking place in the country. Ironically this uptick in resentment is not only affecting the murder of members of the former ruling class, but members of the new ruling class as well. There's an old saying that one should be careful what one wishes for lest your wish be granted and you find that that wasn't what you meant-at all. Do we really want to se the fall of Israel? And what will it mean?
I hear on the news that the Columbians have taken a decision to figure out an arrangement of some kind with the various competing bands of disaffected people in Columbia. Presumably this is because the place must be bleeding badly after forty something years of draining conflict. Something similar seems to have been taking place in Sri Lanka- notwithstanding a stalemate of sorts over a blocked water supply line. [One notes as an aside this use of an increasingly strategic tool...water].
Perhaps when the combatants are fighting over access to spoils, as they seem to be in both those latter two countries then there is room to negotiate [eventually] but when the object of the dispute lies within the realms of the irrational then no compromise is conceivable and ultimately the dog might fight back and destroy itself and the fleas. I' am sure that history would be loaded with such tales were we actually to have recorded and cared to remember them. Right now we are witnessing the Israeli dog roaring impotently at the fleas.
The death of a thousand cuts starts with the first lie, mostly about alleged land theft. Israel is the current symbol of this process, of dispossession and lying about it, come to full fruition. If Columbia is on about four hundred cuts Israel is on a thousand plus, not to mention the wounds not yet healed from the time of the great holocaust.
Being neither Jewish, Islamic nor Arab my interest in the region's intractable conflict is essentially self-serving. As a citizen living in a developing country attempting to come to terms with its own shit, I perceive all parties in this conflict as threatening. These middle eastern cave dwellers seem no more than representative of various gangs of hoodlums and thugs masquerading under the banner of righteousness. They have between them hijacked the rising prosperity of the planet for the forth or fifth time in the past sixty years. Frankly I don't give a shit about any of them-if they haven't had the fucking nounce to sort out their shit over sixty odd years then they can go and get fucked for all I care-My concern here is that they are messing with our scene and we don't need that.
I [plus you] am now paying more for petrol, for our credit purchase repayments and for a whole batch of other things, which lie at the heart of our own fraught transformation process. This means we have less money to spend on having fun and going shopping and the costs of transformation strategies are going to rise proportionately. -and it is largely the fault of this collective gang of priest driven irreconcilable bullies variously called Hezbollah, and its sponsors in Iran and elsewhere.
Worse, their behaviour is prompted by a desire not only to destroy Israel but to destroy our modern way of life with its freedom, its I pods and its grand fantasies. If evil could be said to walk with us then it is this pestilential Irrationalist ideology that represents evil in its most tangible form.
The unwillingness of the middle eastern region to come to terms with the reality of Israel, coupled with the fawning appeasement derived behaviour of the oil seeking world is placing this wonderful fantasy bubble represented by our consumerist driven property based 'system' at risk-which will inevitably be worse for all the planet's little people than it will be for all the fatties.
It was machiavelli who hundreds of years ago formulated his hypothesis on international power relations and his founding principle was that you could do almost anything to a human and they would generally lick your hand but take away a human's property and the human will become an implacable foe. I understand that Plato wrote something similar when he quoted Sophocles, in his final speech before taking the hemlock he was obliged to swallow to complete his own death sentence. A rotating jury of the Athenian Senate sentenced him to death by self-administered hemlock for preaching piety.
Incidentally Joseph Heller makes the entertaining point that just over half the Senate voted to find Sophocles guilty. When it came to pronouncing sentence three quarters of the Senate voted for the death penalty. Some eighty senators who had voted him innocent nonetheless voted in favour of the death penalty-
Today, in the same way as then the planet's mass media is siding with the more brutal gang of ideologues in this middle eastern melee-demanding the self immolation of Israel as sacrifice for its own inadequacies-'throw another twig on the sun, Eccles' . The campaign against the existence of Israel is growing apace. The alleged Hezbollah/Syrian/Iranian 'axis of evil', totalitarian dictatorships, have combined with the forth estate against the only democracy in the Middle East, while all the while the same media are preaching elsewhere the selfless nature of the democratic process [unless of course where they are 'doing deals' with the human rights violating, unelected government of China]. It is as if the so-called free world were actively supporting Adolf Hitler to overthrow England.
There is obviously a final moment in this process of a thousand cuts when there is still sufficient life left in the dog, for the dog to turn on all around in its final death throes and wreak havoc, I think Mao referred to this period as well.
Thus we are seeing troops and tanks and bombs and jets and refugees but we are not yet seeing the failure. Either Israel's intelligence is defective, or bombs don't work, or the Hezbollah is reinforced by an even tougher brand of fighter from the Iranian revolutionary guards, as a correspondent for Jane's fighting weekly claims, or the cumulative cost of all the previous 'cuts' has left the animal weakened in ways it is only just grasping. Whatever the reason the image of invincibility presented by the Israeli army for the past sixty years is terminally dented, in the same way that the invincible image of its big brother protector, the USA has also been dented in Iraq.
The suicide bomber's goal is to kill ten 'enemy' for every 'soldier' immolated. This is done from hiding places tucked in between the 'people'-the water in which the fish swim. The Israeli response is to drain the pond.
The difference for Israel is that on its previous incursion into Lebanon their period of occupation endured for nearly two decades and ultimately failed.. On this occasion they have been bombing all around them for more than three weeks, the place is bleeding from every gaping wound and yet the rockets keep coming and will keep coming until Israel is no more. Fleas usually outlive dogs although they are no where near as useful.
It is perhaps, time for us all to soberly evaluate the previously unthinkable -what if Israel loses this game of survival? The repercussions of Israel's pending defeat at the hands of a totalitarian ideology, which would take us all back to a Taliban inspired ghetto existence could be such as to retard the development of the human race for another thousand year sleep.
This irrationalist ideology propounded by the Iranian Revolutionary Council [among others], which threatens our secular world from the gates of hell itself would require the destruction of three quarters of the planet's citizenry in the implementation. There is no evidence to date that this antediluvian philosophy can produce anything other than mausoleums and poppy fields, and that only to feed those who have the wherewithal to demand it. The present market economic system, that is so fashionably despised by such a curious amalgam of allies, supports around six billion people-most of whom will have to go. And in their place: an empty piety.
Should this campaign between the mass media, appeasing politicians of all persuasions, and the fascist fundamentalists who seek to eradicate one desperate threat to their ideology, unexpectedly produce an unanticipated disaster-the collapse of Israel, then the present unfamiliar sight of designer clad refugees scurrying off to Lebanese bomb shelters as though picking their way through the rubble to the 'mall', like some horror promo campaign out of Benneton, will become an avalanche of disintegrating expectations and shredded fantasy. 'Armageddon we've been a waitin' what took you so long to get here?'
The appalling truth behind the Chinese promise of a thousand cuts is that it is so completely true.
I have also seen the phrase pop up with reference to the four decades old conflict in Columbia that remains otherwise an enigma to me, and to the struggle of Tamils in Sri Lanka where presumably the citizenry watch cricket while the taps run dry.
Death of a thousand cuts is a phrase that could also apply to any of the hundreds of struggles all over the planet by disaffected groups fearing extinction. In many of these places these conflicts seems to have become a symbiotic thing. A disturbed relationship between a and b.
Perhaps the Chinese concept of the 'death of a thousand cut' was what Chairman Mao had in mind when he wrote in his little red book about how the so-called asymmetrical warfare model of conflict that he did so much to perfect could be likened to a war of the flea against the dog, although I understand he did also use the metaphor of likening the guerrilla to a fish swimming in the water-the water in this case being 'the people'.
To extend that metaphor one could suggest that the present Israeli strategy of handling the 'fish' is to dynamite the water surrounding it. In the same way that Mr Zindane the football playing chap who immortalised himself in the World Cup by retaliating to some stimulus intended to disturb him. I have no idea who the prat was who used such bad words on Mr Zindane that he cracked: he was nev er called into question. This demonstrates that the retaliator gets all the publicity whilst the instigator gets off without a warning.
So be it with Israel and Hezbollah. What more stimulus could one have than the theft of one's troops, or the murder of one's citizens by people with a fucked up-agenda who throw missiles at you and interpret any attempt at negotiation as weakness, to be exploited for gain. This bullying collection of irrationalist gunmen called Hezbollah have not been called to account either for activities that have the calculated purpose of achieving that which they have proclaimed their intention to do, the destruction of a sovereign State.
Now personally were I an Israeli and I lived next door to people who denied my right to exist after about a century of co-existence and a holocaust then I would take the view that anything within bombing distance that was not officially in my team should be caused to remove itself to someplace else. When faced with this level of implacability then it would be necessary, I suspect, to 'sanitise ' any place that could hit me with a rocket.
The problem is that I no longer think Israel has the capability to do this. In fact I don't think the United States has this capability either. The death of a thousand cuts trumps the Nation State. This inevitably means that the rules of engagement have to be amended to deal with the water surrounding the fish and this is what we are witnessing. This is not a viable strategy it is the strategy of suicide on a scale greater than anything we have ever imagined possible.
The logic of this position is that we are in a game that is in play. The enemies of the State of Israel have made numerous pronouncements over an extended period of time that it is their intention to destroy the place.. The President of Iran says it so often it has almost become a mantra. Well this is like the president of South Africa who has made such disparaging comments over time about white people in his country that he is now 'surprised' at the increasingly brutal forms of murder that are taking place in the country. Ironically this uptick in resentment is not only affecting the murder of members of the former ruling class, but members of the new ruling class as well. There's an old saying that one should be careful what one wishes for lest your wish be granted and you find that that wasn't what you meant-at all. Do we really want to se the fall of Israel? And what will it mean?
I hear on the news that the Columbians have taken a decision to figure out an arrangement of some kind with the various competing bands of disaffected people in Columbia. Presumably this is because the place must be bleeding badly after forty something years of draining conflict. Something similar seems to have been taking place in Sri Lanka- notwithstanding a stalemate of sorts over a blocked water supply line. [One notes as an aside this use of an increasingly strategic tool...water].
Perhaps when the combatants are fighting over access to spoils, as they seem to be in both those latter two countries then there is room to negotiate [eventually] but when the object of the dispute lies within the realms of the irrational then no compromise is conceivable and ultimately the dog might fight back and destroy itself and the fleas. I' am sure that history would be loaded with such tales were we actually to have recorded and cared to remember them. Right now we are witnessing the Israeli dog roaring impotently at the fleas.
The death of a thousand cuts starts with the first lie, mostly about alleged land theft. Israel is the current symbol of this process, of dispossession and lying about it, come to full fruition. If Columbia is on about four hundred cuts Israel is on a thousand plus, not to mention the wounds not yet healed from the time of the great holocaust.
Being neither Jewish, Islamic nor Arab my interest in the region's intractable conflict is essentially self-serving. As a citizen living in a developing country attempting to come to terms with its own shit, I perceive all parties in this conflict as threatening. These middle eastern cave dwellers seem no more than representative of various gangs of hoodlums and thugs masquerading under the banner of righteousness. They have between them hijacked the rising prosperity of the planet for the forth or fifth time in the past sixty years. Frankly I don't give a shit about any of them-if they haven't had the fucking nounce to sort out their shit over sixty odd years then they can go and get fucked for all I care-My concern here is that they are messing with our scene and we don't need that.
I [plus you] am now paying more for petrol, for our credit purchase repayments and for a whole batch of other things, which lie at the heart of our own fraught transformation process. This means we have less money to spend on having fun and going shopping and the costs of transformation strategies are going to rise proportionately. -and it is largely the fault of this collective gang of priest driven irreconcilable bullies variously called Hezbollah, and its sponsors in Iran and elsewhere.
Worse, their behaviour is prompted by a desire not only to destroy Israel but to destroy our modern way of life with its freedom, its I pods and its grand fantasies. If evil could be said to walk with us then it is this pestilential Irrationalist ideology that represents evil in its most tangible form.
The unwillingness of the middle eastern region to come to terms with the reality of Israel, coupled with the fawning appeasement derived behaviour of the oil seeking world is placing this wonderful fantasy bubble represented by our consumerist driven property based 'system' at risk-which will inevitably be worse for all the planet's little people than it will be for all the fatties.
It was machiavelli who hundreds of years ago formulated his hypothesis on international power relations and his founding principle was that you could do almost anything to a human and they would generally lick your hand but take away a human's property and the human will become an implacable foe. I understand that Plato wrote something similar when he quoted Sophocles, in his final speech before taking the hemlock he was obliged to swallow to complete his own death sentence. A rotating jury of the Athenian Senate sentenced him to death by self-administered hemlock for preaching piety.
Incidentally Joseph Heller makes the entertaining point that just over half the Senate voted to find Sophocles guilty. When it came to pronouncing sentence three quarters of the Senate voted for the death penalty. Some eighty senators who had voted him innocent nonetheless voted in favour of the death penalty-
Today, in the same way as then the planet's mass media is siding with the more brutal gang of ideologues in this middle eastern melee-demanding the self immolation of Israel as sacrifice for its own inadequacies-'throw another twig on the sun, Eccles' . The campaign against the existence of Israel is growing apace. The alleged Hezbollah/Syrian/Iranian 'axis of evil', totalitarian dictatorships, have combined with the forth estate against the only democracy in the Middle East, while all the while the same media are preaching elsewhere the selfless nature of the democratic process [unless of course where they are 'doing deals' with the human rights violating, unelected government of China]. It is as if the so-called free world were actively supporting Adolf Hitler to overthrow England.
There is obviously a final moment in this process of a thousand cuts when there is still sufficient life left in the dog, for the dog to turn on all around in its final death throes and wreak havoc, I think Mao referred to this period as well.
Thus we are seeing troops and tanks and bombs and jets and refugees but we are not yet seeing the failure. Either Israel's intelligence is defective, or bombs don't work, or the Hezbollah is reinforced by an even tougher brand of fighter from the Iranian revolutionary guards, as a correspondent for Jane's fighting weekly claims, or the cumulative cost of all the previous 'cuts' has left the animal weakened in ways it is only just grasping. Whatever the reason the image of invincibility presented by the Israeli army for the past sixty years is terminally dented, in the same way that the invincible image of its big brother protector, the USA has also been dented in Iraq.
The suicide bomber's goal is to kill ten 'enemy' for every 'soldier' immolated. This is done from hiding places tucked in between the 'people'-the water in which the fish swim. The Israeli response is to drain the pond.
The difference for Israel is that on its previous incursion into Lebanon their period of occupation endured for nearly two decades and ultimately failed.. On this occasion they have been bombing all around them for more than three weeks, the place is bleeding from every gaping wound and yet the rockets keep coming and will keep coming until Israel is no more. Fleas usually outlive dogs although they are no where near as useful.
It is perhaps, time for us all to soberly evaluate the previously unthinkable -what if Israel loses this game of survival? The repercussions of Israel's pending defeat at the hands of a totalitarian ideology, which would take us all back to a Taliban inspired ghetto existence could be such as to retard the development of the human race for another thousand year sleep.
This irrationalist ideology propounded by the Iranian Revolutionary Council [among others], which threatens our secular world from the gates of hell itself would require the destruction of three quarters of the planet's citizenry in the implementation. There is no evidence to date that this antediluvian philosophy can produce anything other than mausoleums and poppy fields, and that only to feed those who have the wherewithal to demand it. The present market economic system, that is so fashionably despised by such a curious amalgam of allies, supports around six billion people-most of whom will have to go. And in their place: an empty piety.
Should this campaign between the mass media, appeasing politicians of all persuasions, and the fascist fundamentalists who seek to eradicate one desperate threat to their ideology, unexpectedly produce an unanticipated disaster-the collapse of Israel, then the present unfamiliar sight of designer clad refugees scurrying off to Lebanese bomb shelters as though picking their way through the rubble to the 'mall', like some horror promo campaign out of Benneton, will become an avalanche of disintegrating expectations and shredded fantasy. 'Armageddon we've been a waitin' what took you so long to get here?'
The appalling truth behind the Chinese promise of a thousand cuts is that it is so completely true.
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