The fun part of the hysteria last week [or was it the week before] over the 2500 high school girls who became pregnant in Gauteng last year was the way the Education department carefully, and reasonably, absolved themselves of responsibility for the events. The listeners to Five FM largely absolved the ed dept as well with about two thirds of callers to the popular morning drive through programme blaming both parties to the event giving rise to the pregnancy- the 'fuckees' in fact.
I think overall that that was a reasonable response, in the same way that I don't think that the government can be responsible for the crime wave, notwithstanding that alleged high levels of corruption may well provide a guiding spirit to facilitate the growth of the 'gimmee' philosophy.
Obviously the ed dept can't be blamed if a couple of kids are shagging each other during break, after break or after school- there was no suggestion in the reports that the girls had all been raped by lust crazed educators although there were suggestions that many of them may have gotten pregnant by alleged 'sugar daddies'. Nonetheless I do feel a case can be made for blaming the State for the pregnancies and the crime and the fact that huge numbers of kids are apparently dropping out of school along the way to the so-called Matric exam [the national senior certificate]. The school experience has become less personal somehow through an obsession with bureaucratic process.
All too many kids are into dope, booze and sex and all too many teachers are so harassed with completing the paperwork on the continuous assessment of what skills and outcomes the darlings are discovering today, that the entire learning thing has become secondary and the supervision more cursory by default. I would have suggested that it was an unintended outcome and have suggested this in the past. Now though after a series of interactions this week I am not so sure- The question that is foremost in my mind on reviewing this journey, that I shall now take you upon is why is the educator and the information that was good enough for Nelson Mandela no longer good enough for his descendents?
One of the core rationales that I have been given over the past year when I spent a period of time undergoing some training in the new obsession assessment was that it is no longer enough for a child to demonstrate that it is smarter than its cellphone.
The old system cherished memory and the new system cherishes self reliance and aims top foster creative thought- the first signs are not good for the efficacy of this system and after what I have found out this week I believe more and more that the new system with its overwhelming burden of labour to distract the so-called 'educator' is producing a generation of no nothing, mall informed sweethearts.
This opinion is not entirely based on my continuous amazement at the general ignorance of anything outside movies film stars movies and fashion as represented by the continuity announcers, particularly, on UJFM, which as you know is my favourite radio station. One would have thought that a broad general knowledge would have been derigeur for the job but perhaps there are not a great many takers. Plus the young presenters, broadly freedom's children are perfectly indicative of our age. In many ways they personify what Nietszsche said waay back about the new youth: 'At first they will be more ignorant than the educated men of the present, for they will have UNLEARNT much-' Based on what I learned this week I think el Frederico N would be chortling in his grave.
Something odd has happened in the new age in our Post-revolutionary area. School has become so complex and problematic that huge numbers of kids are opting out, dropping out and generally giving up on the whole idea and the pregnancies and the unwanted children that accompany them are both compounding this and are simultaneously a symptom thereof. For these children it is as Nietzsche continued:
' - their hallmark from the educated point of view will be just their lack of science [knowledge], their indifference and inaccessibility to all the good and famous things-'
In the past week I have spoken with three unrelated people in random unplanned meeting who all in one way or another have an involvement in education matters.
The first person is involved in skills upgrading in a rural part of the country. She spoke of an absence of resources, of overcrowded classrooms, of school classrooms under trees, of schools without latrines, and when I suggested that this was surely no longer a norm but represented isolated instances she muttered the word 'Potemkin'.
Potemkin? I asked
Yes- he was the guy who invented the ultimate 'spin', creating fake villages to indicate a happy population when Queen Catherine [the Great] came to visit her domains over which he held some sway. He lined her route with illusions of happy villages and villagers and she never saw the wastelands ocross the hillsides or down in the dales.
So you are suggesting that the public is being lied to I asked
Hmmf she grunted and refused to commit herself further, citing irreconcilable issues with her own conscience. She was, she thought, grabbing the money and running with it for 'consultancy' services, because like everyone else she has to pay the rent and send her kids to school and so on. Simultaneously she was enraged over the glaring inadequacies of the new system after more than a decade of liberation; and more money pumped into education over the period 1994 till now than quite possibly over the preceding century.
There is plenty of money for grandiose parties, she said venomously, and events where hordes of 'dignitaries turn up to some grande events like basketball tournaments and school soccer contests all 'Potemkinly' constructed to create the illusion of progress, and everyone gluttonises their fill and no one ever pays any attention to the kids.
But, she said, the real truth is that fewer than 6% of candidates are passing maths and science in the annual matric assessment rituals and a fair chunk of that figure comes from a handful of privileged schools. And that figure has not changed over the past ten years. If anything the results are getting worse.
Perhaps what we see here is the secret bitter legacy of apartheid, I suggested.
'Maybe you're right after all she sighed reluctantly and I grinned a grin the Cheshire cat would have died for.
We've known each other since a first year tut class forty years ago, and later we were part of an illegal squat in an apartment block in Braamfontein at the red hot end of the sixties. She has always regarded me as a polite form of fascist, and rarely makes contact of her own free will. Every few years I bump into her and we bring each other up to date on shared friends and family events- and of course the world of current affairs as they affect each of us. Perhaps from her perspective I am a polite form of fascist- I am an unashamed libertarian economist and promoter of the free market system which means I promote the truth of the Market to always trump the opinions of the Commune.
As a libertarian democrat though I have always preferred to accept that 'folks are queer', as they say in the Welsh valleys, and I have pragmatically learned to live with the likely possibility that when people say one thing, they often mean something else; and that lying was an integral part of the resistance struggle, and a habit built up over three hundred years will not alter in less than another three hundred. My old friend belongs to that 'eternal hope' school of disbelief and enjoys being disappointed when expectations are dashed.
But that wasn't strictly what we were talking about. That was simply a comment on the sub-text of her remark. How we live always with expectations and consequent judgements. Way back in the early days of the revolution there was a massive regrouping of positions and roles as the struggle exiles returned and had to muscle in on the locals who had stayed to fight the good fight at home- gradually the exiles won out and one remembers the fear amongst those who were uncertain of a place- in an abyss. The secret legacy of apartheid was losing your job as a struggle hero once the problem [of the apartheid thing was solved.] In a world where jobs are scarce one hangs on to what one has got.
I know you, she said, and I hate the fact that you seem to be right again. As long as the problem of 'no schools' exists; or few resources, or disintegrating standards of performance, are the norm, everyone will be employed in solving the problem-
Solving it will result in redeployment or worse redundancy- for simple people this is a deadly equation and actually in my opinion reasonable.
That is why she is always so exasperated- the worst part of scepticism is that it is so Pyrrhic as a reader recently observed about another blog.
Perhaps that maths and science figure will double over the next thirty years I said, by way of consolation, this new system needs time to bed in. Privately some things have always puzzled me. Where do the textbooks and the blankets go?
Every year millions of textbooks are printed and distributed [I believe] to schools all over the country. By the end of the year they all seem to have vanished and need to be replaced. On the other hand I have seen books [ my children's for instance when they were at school] that seemed to have been through ten or twelve pairs of hands before they were in current use. I'm sure there is a rational explanation but I would like to know what it is - Do millions of textbooks go to feed bonfires each year end, do they become doorstoppers and the basis of paper mache dolls- where do the textbooks go overnight- and of course I do understand that in some so called 'learning areas' the content is changing by the month necessitating a completely new round of textbooks annually-What a curious business no wonder vast amounts of money and other resources are "vanished" each year.
And the blankets seem to disappear as well. Each year millions of blankets are collected for the poor and dispossessed and by next year they've all disaapeared-Yet I still have blankets in my house that I used in that Braamfontein squat nearly forty years ago-a tad threadbare but nonetheless still serviceable, so I'm sure they were 'built to last' as they say..
It's no use doubling the rate of maths and science passes in thirty years she said, we need it to double next year. She replied with that delightful martyred tone that aggrieved liberal ladies like to assume: raising the backs of their hands to their forehead. 'Oh dear we have tried and the natives are so uncooperative.' Swoon.
I left her to ponder the inequities of her random life and not wishing to offend her by suggesting that failure to perform was a normal part of life for most people, and why should the ed dept people be exceptions to that rule, I went off in search of a nutritious guzzle of Windhoek at one of my favourite beer dispensaries.
While nourishing myself thus in Braamfontein's old Kitchener Room, and slurping up the delicious Falkland calamari's served up in that excellent establishment, I engaged in conversation with a man who said he taught some esoteric form of science at the local Uni' and had recently returned from a journey that sounded like the worst advertisement for air travel since 9/11 rendered air travel the most horribly efficient way to go from a to b.
After listening to the man's description of queuing in a series of snaking intersecting lines, not knowing for long periods of time whether he was heading for Jozi or had inadvertently stumbled into the line-up for Moscow, I asked him why a rational scientist like himself would subject himself to such a ghastly ordeal, which sounds as though it would completely undo all the stress relieving expense of a holiday abroad.
No I went to a conference he explained and it was paid for so that made it easier.
Probing further regarding the conference there didn't seem to be any particular outcome except that he had had luck meeting people who were pursuing similar veins of research to his.
Which was, I asked?
He smiled the smile of a man who has a secret joke and is about to pounce on you. 'Proving to vast numbers of people that the world is not flat.' he said.
'Yeah right.' I tossed back with the disbelief my baby would reveal if I said that there was really no such thing as "All Stars".
You are joking? I said after he was quiet for a while.
I wish I were. It is a huge problem with underdevelopment that a staggering number of people still believe the earth is flat- they've never had any reason to believe otherwise.
Well most people on the planet have never used a telephone either so I imagine it doesn't matter...they are not going to tell anyone... are they?
That comment come from the Accountant, another regular at the pub who was unhappy that i was monopiolising the flat earth man. The accountant said that he didn't care if people thought the earth was flat as long as they could read Virgil.
I suppose that the next thing you are going to tell me is that these people are teaching maths and science in the system, I was sarcastic: two sad lefties in one day was a bit scary. When lefties become cynics we are in trouble. If the people who believe in change are in despair then whither progress.
Well you didn't hear it from me- he said eventually, sounding grumpy.
I changed the subject. If you were in India for a science education conference what is the buzz on this idea the minister tossed out some months ago about hiring a parcel of south Asian Underemployed scimath teachers and bringing them here to uplift the masses.
The old scientist became quite perky at that question and hared off into a discourse about how India shared so many values with SA and has a more established tradition of democratic governance. He also claimed that the government was actively pursuing the idea and was attempting to engage people with a sound grasp of English as well which was unlikely to be all that useful in the majority of our local schools where English is not just a foreign language but something almost exotic.
Then he delved off into contextual issues and said that he doubted that the Indian doctors were likely to be much more useful than the Cuban doctors who had encountered many difficulties in the practical implementation of their tasks- More Potemkinisms I thought. The Cubans were a subject we all stayed clear of and hoped we never had to be attended by one.
The revolution requires that we set our standards lower so that all people can aspire to reach them i said, stirring the pot slightly.
Well then you must start to accept that the world is flat, he replied.
Then he left us to go to adjoining drinking place where he didn't have to mix with peasant people who were not at the university and thought the idea that there were hordes of people who genuinely believed the earth to be flat was hysterical.
The following day I relayed Flatearther's tale to a man who edits scientific textbooks. He told me that a high school science book, on which he had recently been working had been, not only rejected by some relevant steering committee, but also banned.
Wow was it that bad I asked. He has been telling me for years that the standard of textbook he had to edit was a terrifying testimony to the glaring inadequacies of the writers, so it didn't strike me as odd.
Actually, he said, I thought it would be rejected on the diagrams used, which were often inappropriate - The theory was pretty sharp for a change. But they accepted the pictures and said that the theory was too often inconclusive and was filled with inaccuracies. They said mainly though, that it was filled with assumptive inconclusive statements.
I didn't know that you could have inconclusive statements in science or maths I said- I thought inconclusive statements were the prerogative of my own discipline - economics where we always joke that they ask the same questions every year in the examinations - they simply alter the answers. On the other hand I'm more of an economic historian because I was never a great boff in mathematics; so perhaps you can have inconclusive statements.
So give me an example I asked.
Okay here's one he tossed back. The book contains a definition of something called an 'inelastic collision' - It says: 'If two bodies collide and then move on together as one compound object such a collision is called Inelastic.'
So what was inconclusive about that statement? I asked it seems pretty obvious.
Well that is what worries me, he replied, I don't know.
There is a trend he said towards indigenous science and indigenous mathematics, he said -
You mean there is more than one science and more than one mathematics? I was surprised but not incredulous I've lived long enough to expect anything as normal. I've heard from other sources that contemporary science textbooks refer to grain bins for grain storage and diggings holes in the ground for grain storage, on the basis that grain silos are a thing of the "white controlled" past and that storage holes in the ground are a valid context for the rural kids who have no toilets classrooms or textbooks.
So what will this mean if the government brings out hordes of south Asian maths and science teachers, which I understand is under consideration. I asked.
'They'll be fucked' he said, not intending me to take the word literally. There's an 'intelligent design' feel to most of the newer textbooks: almost 'And in de beginning dere were trees and stones man-.' I figured Jamaica was in now we were hoping to lift the world cup in that place and he was watching too much teevee.
By the way, he said: I also think we may find ourselves in competition with the Americans for left-over South Asian schoolteachers because, from what I'm reading elsewhere, the trend against maths and science has become so deeply rooted in that country, in part prompted by the 'intelligent design' lobby that they could actually be shifting towards the long post-imperial decline that has so deeply afflicted other great nations in the past. 'Dey entering de long sleep´ he said 'Dey rely for years now on expat teachers and since 9/11 de immigration people make it harder to recruit dem - you know de Americans dey tink everyone's a terrorist, forgetting dat dey de biggest terrorists mon'.
Okay- I didn't want to pursue that journey I was still trying to figure out how the inelastic collision could relate to inelastic supply.
Over the weekend I read an article in the January [2007] edition of 'The Teacher' [newspaper] in which one David Macfarlane takes issue with the Edu' minister's alleged evasiveness in dealing with the declining performance of schoolkids following last year's disappointing results. [Opening Pandor{a}'s box] He confirmed what my old friend said about the less than 6% of kids passing maths and science although he refers to a new realism after years of absolute Potemkinising by the previous minister. He didn't comment on where the 6% had been schooled.
Inferring from Macfarlane's article and not ignoring the random observation of three unrelated education professionals I now suspect that my optimistic assertion that pass rates in scimath could double in the next thirty years is probably just that- optimistic.
How does this help us to face a future that must be based on the exploitation of such know-how that accompanies a deep understanding of maths and science? I don't have an answer and it bothers me that maybe we have entered into a regressive period of knowledge rejection; as part of a rejection process we seem to be undergoing deep down against western values. Why else for instance do we tacitly support the machination of a tyrant next door to us and prevaricate over the conditions in Myann Mar [Burma] [sic].
I do think that the nation is being poorly served though by whatever strategy is in place. 6% of last year's Matrics graduated with maths and science and in all probability more than half that number came from private schools funded by after tax income from parents. That 6% amounts to considerably less than 25000 people.
According to Macfarlane we need 20,000 teachers a year just to replace the ones leaving the profession. We also need tens of thousands of accountants, civil engineers, electrical engineers, local government specialists in areas like water reticulation and sewage removal and a whole battery of other technically competent citizens and according to a SASOL spokesperson recently all these skills are in grievous global undersupply- so we are competing with richer countries for these scarce people as well.
The really troubling part of this whole story though is that this pitiful 6% outpouring of talent from our edu-system really represents less than 1% of all the kids who started the journey to Matric 2006 back in 1995. More than seventy percent of kids drop out before they get to the end of the journey- 2500 last year from pregnancy alone in one province. And the education department acted surprised when they 'found out' last year about the drop out rate - like what were they doing for twelve years? And this broadly incompetent collective seems to consider itself blameless.
Let us get it straight. The education department has produced a system that seems to produce one maths matriculant for every two hundred enrolments this hardly seems a paragon of productive output given that this function absorbs about a quarter of Mr Manuel's budget..
So after all that, what are we, the taxpayer, getting for our money aside from a bundle of pregnant schoolgirls?
Keep on bloggi' folks.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
27 is a powerful number
27 is the number of years President Mandela was in gaol before he became president.
27 is the number of years since I wrote the piece of poetry below in march 1980 regarding the immanent accession to power of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe who has imprisoned his entire people in a web of horror for 27 years next month.
Curiously enough, my name NiK means 27 in a memory enhancing structure known as 'The Major System'; whereby the number 2 is represented by the letter N and the number 7 is represented by the letter K [see how many sevens you can find in K] [consonants by the way, are silent]. 27 is also the designated name of one of the country's longest established prison gangs. The number 27 pops up fairly often in the lotto and is also my birth date. It also [my specific birth date 27] has apparently some significance amongst those who are into the occult-. Currently however its interest lies in the Mugabe factor.
I am not going to say much about the Roz. I've said plenty over the years and so have many others. I believe he is doing exactly what he said he would do 27 years ago in the same way that Adolf Hitler explained in Mein Kampf [my edition published in 1927] that he was going to implement a final solution for the Jews. The fact that no one chose to believe either of them is not their fault.
27 years ago I heard the announcement on the radio that Mugabe's Zanu party had won the election in Zimbabwe and the meeting I was attending at the time ended abruptly. Later that morning I walked across town back to my office. - Salisbury, soon to be Harare, was as silent as the grave. There were no jubilant supporters on the streets, nor on the road home that day; although later the thug gangs appeared and made it obvious that a new era had dawned. The movie Mad Max could have been shot on that day- that is how deserted the city was. We all knew that the future would be awful and not being financially well positioned for the cataclysm to come I went home packed my family into an oversized sardine can and left the country almost immediately. We had to wait somewhere near the border for a few weeks while the dog's anti rabies shots matured to fruition. Many warehouses storing the goods of evacuating families were firebombed. They were anxious weeks.
The year before the election I had directed a piece of live theatre in a city centre open-air venue. It was a two weeklong performance of Wole Soyinka's disturbing play about a Mugabe type dictator's brutal rule in a mythical African country. The play is called Kongi's Harvest. The night before the show opened I caused consternation amongst my cast when I announced, as part of what I intended to be a stirring motivational speech, that they were taking part in a unique opportunity. Such a play with such a disturbing message about the corruption of power would certainly never have been allowed by the proto fascist Smith regime. Everybody agreed.
Many of our earlier shows: Sartre's No Exit, Ionescu's The lesson, Journey's end, Boesman and Lena and the Blood Knot for instance had to pass a special pre-performance trial. We performed solely for the benefit of a censorship committee sent by the government to decide if we were presenting potentially subversive material. By Kongi time the censorship committee was history.
They would never have approved Kongi's Harvest [which I produced in spite of the authors objections and refusal to grant rights-I was that convinced of the importance of the message of the play for the future of Zimbabwe that I defied the ban imposed by a man I revere as the Shakespeare of Afrika; and paid the royalties due, to the national theatre association for distribution to the great man when things eventually became sensible again. I did hear years later that he came to Harare and met with members of the cast].
I then suggested to my cast that it was probable that Kongi's Harvest would be banned by any incoming nationalist administration. My all-black cast of about forty players revolted. They raged, ranted and walked off the set, accusing me of the all to familiar cry of racism, as our President has done again this week in the curious belief that only white people worry about criminals.
The cast demanded that I apologise for suggesting that a future black administration would ever abuse the rights of the citizenry as the Smith regime had done. I said that I regretted that I had to tell them the truth; that the probability they were doomed to suffer indefinitely was more than 90%. I eventually got them back on stage and the show enjoyed a patchy response from a less than enthusiastic populace. The theme was too real.
After I left Zimbabwe for good, I did return twice for exploratory visits and on each occasion was appalled at the disintegration of a once ordered society. Surely it wasn't that hard to keep the thing running? Two years after independence my lead actor Christopher Chisvu produced a knocked off version of Kongi's Harvest. It was banned on the opening night and Christopher became one of the first who had to go into exile to escape the repressive Mugabe.I was later accosted by a man at the Norwood pick n Pay who told me that he had a message from Chisvu and the remnants of my cast...I was forgiven: they now understood... It was, as a reader recently observed, a Pyrric victory.
By 1982 the stench of fear was tangible in the Harare atmosphere. A delightful but anonymous former fan of my theatre company, a man who suffered a deformity in the form of a hunchback was murdered that year by CIO [Central Intelligence Organisation] agents in Beit Bridge when they set out to 'straighten his hump'.
During the intervening period North Korean trained troops massacred close to half a million citizens of an unfashionable part of the country, either through direct action or through subsequent famine. The evil perpetrated by this powerblighted regime over the past 27 years is longstanding and legion. The eventual list of victims, of what has been a Zimbabwean holocaust, will grossly outnumber the great wall of the heroes that we are busy constructing here in Tshwane.
The great problem with modern democracy seems to be the equal access to thieving by all and sundry. Under the previous system [ in repressive Smith's Rhodesia] looting of the State chest was relatively limited to a handful of rumoured 'landlords'. Nonetheless in spite of his fascist behaviour, only a decade back the crafty Roz had fooled everyone outside the country into a belief that Zim' was an emerging player on the world stage. Like so many of today's capitalist businesses who are in bed today with the anti democratic government of the People's Republic of China there were plenty of profit makers who enjoyed a short term boost from Mugabe's lack of public accountability.
And then whammo- he implemented the policy he'd outlined before 1980, to which I referred in the poem below. The poem was banned by a British government administration hell bent on handing power to the nastiest man around and getting the hell out of the action. Only sceptics like myself had ever believed Mugabe would engage in the scorched earth policies that followed his election reverses in 2000: scorched earth for him, and, one suspects, relief from our own government. [One has to assume our government's tacit support for a policy of national suicide involves some twisted revolutionary logic].
Frankly I think Mugabe decided like the spoilt child he is that if the people were not going to play with him then he was going home and talking has toys with him. 'I'll break the country and then you'll be sorry'. Of course our government's response may well be Machiavellian. Given our national propensity for monopolies a vigorous and thriving Zimbabwe was an impediment to our adventures north of the Zambezi. The Roz's fit of temper suits us perfectly [in a non-humanitarian sense].
The probability that Zimbabwe can be restored to full service effectiveness again during this century is close to improbable. A century of capital acquisition has been destroyed. It is 'Close to impossible' because the most practical solution would be improbable: the complete deregulation and privatisation of the entire State with concomitant open borders. Even then it would be debateable. The era when ordinary decent criminals were sent out to colonise the 'new world' are long gone. Many of the country's trained and skilled people have been snatched up by a world that is experiencing its own critical skills shortages.
Today's most probable 'knowledge' imports will be Chinese and possible south Asian groups. If I were a fiction writer, which I am, then I would have some 50,000 Chinese 'workers' operating in Zimbabwe by 2011. China has a surplus of some forty million men due to the unintended consequence of their one child policy, and it would be a fun move to stick 50,000 soldiers disguised as traders and more traders, who could at the right moment appropriate the State by proxy- it may already have happened. There will be no mass return to the homeland by Zim exiles as many, such as those promoting the local 'homecoming revolution', fondly envisage.
Does this mean that I think Mr Mugabe is in danger of immanent expulsion from the Presidency?
No I don't, I give the probability of his overthrow no more than 2 on a scale where 0 equals dull improbability and 100 equals comprehensive certainty.
What I have always found interesting though is the way that, right from the outset Zanu PF has mirrored all the evil ways of the old Apartheid regime in their Zimbabwe reign. The pace of horror was accelerated though, for the evil apartheid regime needed three decades via Sharpeville and other bad things to mature to the full horror represented by the Biko murder in 1976. ZanuPF emerged from the election fully matured as an evildoer. Today the Roz called on the world to 'Go Hang'. When told of Biko's death our own faceless flunky government gangster representative famously told the world that the death 'left him cold'.
Nonetheless the beginnings are there- The people must suffer enough to rebel and ordinary common people in our continent have acquired an almost infinite capacity for suffering. That was the point reached by places like Rumania and Ukraine and even pre-2006 Lebanon, which may yet fail to survive the Hezbollah inspired hurricane destruction of Israel's bullying credibility as a regional superpower last year.
Ultimately the world has cared less about much more important places than Zimbabwe, and it is almost inevitable that the opposition has to start funding their own 'resistance' campaign- They do not really seem to have the stomach for it which is good for us to their south. A civil war to our north would impact badly on our emerging regional dominance, by virtue of creating a pretty solid barrier.
It is most unlikely that Mr Mugabe will live forever; he will almost certainly live another 3 years because we are sure he is anxious to make thirty. Thirty is a much luckier number for Bob the Roz than 27. 30 is tomorrow and we all know tomorrow's never come. In the meantime he has to figure out a plan to eradicate his opposition before they can regroup and he should achieve that- Playing by the rules always serves those best who bend the rules to their purpose, whilst denying their opposition the latitude to do the same. Still: here's hoping 27 proves seminal for the Roz notwithstanding my scepticism.
Election Manifesto.
It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.
No it's
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They've all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre................
.NiK(1980)
Published ...Sting Magazine, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now
Zimbabwe) Banned by the British Interim
Administration...1980:
A faceless British foreign office type at government house,
Part of the interim administration that stepped in when
the Smith regime collapsed in 1980 and submitted to a
national referendum, told me my poem was in 'bad form'.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll's ' Lobster Quadrille.'
Keep on bloggin'
27 is the number of years since I wrote the piece of poetry below in march 1980 regarding the immanent accession to power of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe who has imprisoned his entire people in a web of horror for 27 years next month.
Curiously enough, my name NiK means 27 in a memory enhancing structure known as 'The Major System'; whereby the number 2 is represented by the letter N and the number 7 is represented by the letter K [see how many sevens you can find in K] [consonants by the way, are silent]. 27 is also the designated name of one of the country's longest established prison gangs. The number 27 pops up fairly often in the lotto and is also my birth date. It also [my specific birth date 27] has apparently some significance amongst those who are into the occult-. Currently however its interest lies in the Mugabe factor.
I am not going to say much about the Roz. I've said plenty over the years and so have many others. I believe he is doing exactly what he said he would do 27 years ago in the same way that Adolf Hitler explained in Mein Kampf [my edition published in 1927] that he was going to implement a final solution for the Jews. The fact that no one chose to believe either of them is not their fault.
27 years ago I heard the announcement on the radio that Mugabe's Zanu party had won the election in Zimbabwe and the meeting I was attending at the time ended abruptly. Later that morning I walked across town back to my office. - Salisbury, soon to be Harare, was as silent as the grave. There were no jubilant supporters on the streets, nor on the road home that day; although later the thug gangs appeared and made it obvious that a new era had dawned. The movie Mad Max could have been shot on that day- that is how deserted the city was. We all knew that the future would be awful and not being financially well positioned for the cataclysm to come I went home packed my family into an oversized sardine can and left the country almost immediately. We had to wait somewhere near the border for a few weeks while the dog's anti rabies shots matured to fruition. Many warehouses storing the goods of evacuating families were firebombed. They were anxious weeks.
The year before the election I had directed a piece of live theatre in a city centre open-air venue. It was a two weeklong performance of Wole Soyinka's disturbing play about a Mugabe type dictator's brutal rule in a mythical African country. The play is called Kongi's Harvest. The night before the show opened I caused consternation amongst my cast when I announced, as part of what I intended to be a stirring motivational speech, that they were taking part in a unique opportunity. Such a play with such a disturbing message about the corruption of power would certainly never have been allowed by the proto fascist Smith regime. Everybody agreed.
Many of our earlier shows: Sartre's No Exit, Ionescu's The lesson, Journey's end, Boesman and Lena and the Blood Knot for instance had to pass a special pre-performance trial. We performed solely for the benefit of a censorship committee sent by the government to decide if we were presenting potentially subversive material. By Kongi time the censorship committee was history.
They would never have approved Kongi's Harvest [which I produced in spite of the authors objections and refusal to grant rights-I was that convinced of the importance of the message of the play for the future of Zimbabwe that I defied the ban imposed by a man I revere as the Shakespeare of Afrika; and paid the royalties due, to the national theatre association for distribution to the great man when things eventually became sensible again. I did hear years later that he came to Harare and met with members of the cast].
I then suggested to my cast that it was probable that Kongi's Harvest would be banned by any incoming nationalist administration. My all-black cast of about forty players revolted. They raged, ranted and walked off the set, accusing me of the all to familiar cry of racism, as our President has done again this week in the curious belief that only white people worry about criminals.
The cast demanded that I apologise for suggesting that a future black administration would ever abuse the rights of the citizenry as the Smith regime had done. I said that I regretted that I had to tell them the truth; that the probability they were doomed to suffer indefinitely was more than 90%. I eventually got them back on stage and the show enjoyed a patchy response from a less than enthusiastic populace. The theme was too real.
After I left Zimbabwe for good, I did return twice for exploratory visits and on each occasion was appalled at the disintegration of a once ordered society. Surely it wasn't that hard to keep the thing running? Two years after independence my lead actor Christopher Chisvu produced a knocked off version of Kongi's Harvest. It was banned on the opening night and Christopher became one of the first who had to go into exile to escape the repressive Mugabe.I was later accosted by a man at the Norwood pick n Pay who told me that he had a message from Chisvu and the remnants of my cast...I was forgiven: they now understood... It was, as a reader recently observed, a Pyrric victory.
By 1982 the stench of fear was tangible in the Harare atmosphere. A delightful but anonymous former fan of my theatre company, a man who suffered a deformity in the form of a hunchback was murdered that year by CIO [Central Intelligence Organisation] agents in Beit Bridge when they set out to 'straighten his hump'.
During the intervening period North Korean trained troops massacred close to half a million citizens of an unfashionable part of the country, either through direct action or through subsequent famine. The evil perpetrated by this powerblighted regime over the past 27 years is longstanding and legion. The eventual list of victims, of what has been a Zimbabwean holocaust, will grossly outnumber the great wall of the heroes that we are busy constructing here in Tshwane.
The great problem with modern democracy seems to be the equal access to thieving by all and sundry. Under the previous system [ in repressive Smith's Rhodesia] looting of the State chest was relatively limited to a handful of rumoured 'landlords'. Nonetheless in spite of his fascist behaviour, only a decade back the crafty Roz had fooled everyone outside the country into a belief that Zim' was an emerging player on the world stage. Like so many of today's capitalist businesses who are in bed today with the anti democratic government of the People's Republic of China there were plenty of profit makers who enjoyed a short term boost from Mugabe's lack of public accountability.
And then whammo- he implemented the policy he'd outlined before 1980, to which I referred in the poem below. The poem was banned by a British government administration hell bent on handing power to the nastiest man around and getting the hell out of the action. Only sceptics like myself had ever believed Mugabe would engage in the scorched earth policies that followed his election reverses in 2000: scorched earth for him, and, one suspects, relief from our own government. [One has to assume our government's tacit support for a policy of national suicide involves some twisted revolutionary logic].
Frankly I think Mugabe decided like the spoilt child he is that if the people were not going to play with him then he was going home and talking has toys with him. 'I'll break the country and then you'll be sorry'. Of course our government's response may well be Machiavellian. Given our national propensity for monopolies a vigorous and thriving Zimbabwe was an impediment to our adventures north of the Zambezi. The Roz's fit of temper suits us perfectly [in a non-humanitarian sense].
The probability that Zimbabwe can be restored to full service effectiveness again during this century is close to improbable. A century of capital acquisition has been destroyed. It is 'Close to impossible' because the most practical solution would be improbable: the complete deregulation and privatisation of the entire State with concomitant open borders. Even then it would be debateable. The era when ordinary decent criminals were sent out to colonise the 'new world' are long gone. Many of the country's trained and skilled people have been snatched up by a world that is experiencing its own critical skills shortages.
Today's most probable 'knowledge' imports will be Chinese and possible south Asian groups. If I were a fiction writer, which I am, then I would have some 50,000 Chinese 'workers' operating in Zimbabwe by 2011. China has a surplus of some forty million men due to the unintended consequence of their one child policy, and it would be a fun move to stick 50,000 soldiers disguised as traders and more traders, who could at the right moment appropriate the State by proxy- it may already have happened. There will be no mass return to the homeland by Zim exiles as many, such as those promoting the local 'homecoming revolution', fondly envisage.
Does this mean that I think Mr Mugabe is in danger of immanent expulsion from the Presidency?
No I don't, I give the probability of his overthrow no more than 2 on a scale where 0 equals dull improbability and 100 equals comprehensive certainty.
What I have always found interesting though is the way that, right from the outset Zanu PF has mirrored all the evil ways of the old Apartheid regime in their Zimbabwe reign. The pace of horror was accelerated though, for the evil apartheid regime needed three decades via Sharpeville and other bad things to mature to the full horror represented by the Biko murder in 1976. ZanuPF emerged from the election fully matured as an evildoer. Today the Roz called on the world to 'Go Hang'. When told of Biko's death our own faceless flunky government gangster representative famously told the world that the death 'left him cold'.
Nonetheless the beginnings are there- The people must suffer enough to rebel and ordinary common people in our continent have acquired an almost infinite capacity for suffering. That was the point reached by places like Rumania and Ukraine and even pre-2006 Lebanon, which may yet fail to survive the Hezbollah inspired hurricane destruction of Israel's bullying credibility as a regional superpower last year.
Ultimately the world has cared less about much more important places than Zimbabwe, and it is almost inevitable that the opposition has to start funding their own 'resistance' campaign- They do not really seem to have the stomach for it which is good for us to their south. A civil war to our north would impact badly on our emerging regional dominance, by virtue of creating a pretty solid barrier.
It is most unlikely that Mr Mugabe will live forever; he will almost certainly live another 3 years because we are sure he is anxious to make thirty. Thirty is a much luckier number for Bob the Roz than 27. 30 is tomorrow and we all know tomorrow's never come. In the meantime he has to figure out a plan to eradicate his opposition before they can regroup and he should achieve that- Playing by the rules always serves those best who bend the rules to their purpose, whilst denying their opposition the latitude to do the same. Still: here's hoping 27 proves seminal for the Roz notwithstanding my scepticism.
Election Manifesto.
It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.
No it's
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They've all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre................
.NiK(1980)
Published ...Sting Magazine, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now
Zimbabwe) Banned by the British Interim
Administration...1980:
A faceless British foreign office type at government house,
Part of the interim administration that stepped in when
the Smith regime collapsed in 1980 and submitted to a
national referendum, told me my poem was in 'bad form'.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll's ' Lobster Quadrille.'
Keep on bloggin'
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Who was John Perlman anyway
In the most absolute sense of the 'breaking news business' John Perlman is history, and so why are we now talking about him? Who was this guy who has captured the headlines in almost every major newspaper around town this past month [according to the billboards hung up on poles all over the city]. Not one [of the regulars] at any of my various favourite watering holes canvassed this week had ever heard of him; although many could tell me that Manchester United was thinking of selling Christiano Renaldo to Real Madrid for sixty million euros - For those who never heard him as well as those who loved his work:
Fare thee well John Perlman, master radio broadcaster: may the road ahead of you swell with possibility.
Some months ago I mentioned in one of my blogs how I was faced with a quandary. The two, arguably finest broadcasters in the country, albeit in different genres, were abruptly going to be sitting in the same time slot. You'll remember that Gareth Cliff moved from the pm drive time slot to the am drive time slot on five FM-. [for my offshore readers we refer to name players on South Africa's/South Azania's/ SA's daily broadcast radio stations- one, John Perlman, presenting the serious BBC style 'news and news analysis daily dredge report', the other, Gareth Cliff, the incisive fluff and froth presenter of the: 'don't-give-a-fuck-anyway-I-can't-do-anything-about-it-so-why-depress-myself- when I can just rip it off.' station called five FM]
I was in a true dilemma, in fact a triple dilemma because neither station plays the best popular music on radio- that honour goes to UJFM the new University of Johannesburg station that is 'young enough to bend the rules' their music is great and they play all the most glorious music from this renaissance in rock that we are having in our country today, their continuity is often delightful and sometime outrageous, their series on the use of sexual appliances this week was hysterical and entertained me through some of the worst traffic conditions we've had in the city since forever during the longest heatwave we've had since forever. They even have unusual and intriguing news broadcasts although their news reading skills suck.
Which is where Perlman is the extreme professional and has no peer in this country, notwithstanding that there are many competent broadcasters. I wouldn't quite put him in the same league as CNBC's Maria Bartiromo because no matter how good he is he still carries the sub-text of servility towards the 'big political' machine; and the knowledge of his own political impotence blocked his vocal clarity at times- there is no voice as truly free as the voice of a real freeborn human.
It is sad though since he was the best of the best to think that the future of news broadcasting and interviewing in 'the Beloved Country' is going to trend toward that higgledy piggeldy approach to pronunciation, enunciation and general confused clarity of thought [if I may construct such an oxymoron] that we are 'eared' with: most grotesquely by UJ, but evident no matter which station one surfs through [as right I'll make an exception for Classic FM, which hardly qualifies as popular radio though.].
I resolved my own problem back then [and still do] by surfing through from Five to UJ to SAFM AMLive depending on what was happening at the time- the guy who does Classic in the morning is just too paternalistically poncy for me to handle in traffic that early; so when everything sucks on the above three, which it does from time to time, I switch to the six cd shuttle and play something from the "100 best Baroque" series that I gave myself for Christmas.
Perlman was always superb, except when he had a stressful run and he forgot to do his breathing exercises and his voice would rise an octave or so and he would become stridently assertive in the manner of the soon to depart leader of the 'official' opposition. It is rather intriguing, while mentioning, how all these plaintively assertive high profile liberals [the Oppenheimers, Leon and now Perlman ] are decamping their roles in our society- as if clearing the decks- for what?
Notwithstanding Perlman's undoubted skill as an interrogative broadcaster his programme has always been a funereal exercise in terminal depression- This is not due to any fault on his part; he always attemped to force some kind of intellectual response from the daily litany of deadbeat lightweight voices that populate the programme's content. There are regulars of course that don't fall into that category. I don't miss Martin Creamer's "Engineering News" which is always worth a hearing: always some fascinating nugget of information to tease away at the imagination on a routine basis; and the same goes for that enthusiastic fellow who does the internet news and events slot.
I find the fellow, Swerdlow, who does the film reviews a tad cramped and slightly over the top camp; and have learned that when he really doesn't like a movie it is often worth seeing, and what he does like is often boring as shit. Nonetheless he is entertaining and his use of the Beloved language is that of a wordsmith master: every bit is competent as Perlman, and, unless his piece happens to coincide with Gareth Cliff's deliciously satiric 'Days of our Mourning[sic] Morning', I enjoy listening to him. On the other hand Cliff trumps Swerdlow hands down- the one being a creator the other simply a critic and a natural predatory destroyer- of which type the world is overwhelmed as Honey Santana* would have said. [Nature Girl-Karl Hiaasen]
Perlman's favourite film critic[Swerdlow], who doubles for him sometimes on the various occasion that Perlman has been off duty over the years, is inclined towards a slightly kugel whine however when he is required to put some pressure on his interviewees, and it gives him a grovelling quality: that may well be part of his neural programming- I would imagine you would have to be something of a 'grovelleur' to survive this long in the alleged rascist trending atmosphere that is supposedly SABC*. Today. [South African Broadcasting Corporation, the de facto monopoly broadcaster, if you're an offshore reader].
The silence from the cronyist political hierarchy about Perlman's departure has been clamorous and one suspects enraged chagrin at Trevor Manuel's almost tearful parting last week when Perlman conducted his last post-budget interview.
One almost had the sense that Manuel [The National finance minister] hugged the fellow with brimful tears of sorrow. There is simply no one else in radio today who has/had Perlman's insightful intellect and light delicate touch. Mr Manuel is undeniably the true hero of our Revolution without whom [and not neglecting the role played by Maria Ramos] without whom we would be in such economic shit that the present rate of slaughter on the streets would be a mere aperitif. He recognised Perlman's excellence and having nothing to hide loved the way Perlman could tease out the most arcane elements in his annual offering regarding how he spends OUR money. Both of course understood that there are holes in the plan that should be carefully ignored.
For this was for Perlman the damming weakness of his show. He demanded accountability, and could find little. He was always dammed because his programme has for years been strewn with the residual stench of broken promises, lies and the unspeakably enthusiastic ineptitude of a daily litany of 'breaking news' stories in which the interviewees become less and less credible; leaving us uneasily with that nagging thought about the old Titanic sailing blithely on toward the waiting iceberg.
Perlman held up a mirror and obviously there were people who didn't want to look at themselves that way- The strutting peacocks walking about in tawdry feathers were too often revealed - on the other hand if you could cut it with Perlman you should be a made person, for your cocoon of lies and prevaricated evasions were impervious to reason.
Now I no longer have the problem of what to listen to in the morning I can hop comfortably from Five to UJ depending on whether Cliff is having a moment or my daughter's in the car. After I drop her off at varsity, it's UJ all the way, although I often have to jump stations when the news is on. The pronunciations on the UJ news bulletins are so bad that the consequent distraction, attempting to fathom the meaning of the news item so badly mangled is conducive to traffic accidents. As you know Cape Town, Jozi or Dubai are places where literally hell is on wheels and if one's concentration is not almost totally focussed on what the fool in front/behind/beside you is about to do you will find yourself unwillingly the source of the gridlock referred to on 'jam line'.
Seven years ago I wrote the following piece below about John Perlman and published it in my collection Marginal Man published online earlier this decade [and will be back online soon]. He was less practiced then and would often work himself up about the daily litany of failure that formed the basis of our daily fare on SAFM.
On that particular day he was remonstrating with some avuncular arsehole about the fact that his organisation had billions to spend on so-called 'job-creation' and had created no jobs other than those held by the aforementioned avuncular arsehole and his politically connected cronies. [As my regular readers will know I don't believe politicians are capable of creating jobs but that is for a different blog, and time has borne out this hypothesis since as at the last occasion Perlman interviewed the 'job creation' specialists the jobless rate had in fact risen notwithstanding that we manipulate the statistics to 'prove' that it is falling].
27/7/00
AM LIVE on Malperformance*
If you construct your
Worldview from a place
Within the confines of a
Conjecture then
Getting things done means
Sublimating a self, of which
You are in any event unaware
In an attempt to deal with the world
As it isn't.
This work done by all the
Armies of 'help uplift the helpless'
Specialists: whether Aid, AIDS or other
Community outreach activities which now
Proliferate become ultimately self serving by
Default of eternal recurrence. How to change this
Is the dilemma faced by the individual in society. The
Individual in a free society is free to live as it was or change
Only we ourselves
Can decide whether
We should change.
And then, change to what?
From where? And how do we keep moving.
To call for instant change
To habits that took generations to construct
Is as irrational as tossing grains
Of sand one by one into a leaky forty gallon drum
And then demanding to know ten
Minutes later why the job is incomplete.
The job's the thing. The pay is always
Incomplete; There is no such thing as
Enough
Money
And all these people who are
Organizing these myriad fruitlessly
Ineffective batteries of commissions,
Committees, stakeholders, revolver holders,
Card holders and general handholders have
Involved themselves precisely in order to solve
Their own personal employment problems
By inventing the 'issue solving' mechanism in the
First place. No rational person would seriously attempt
To truly 'solve' the problem being addressed so intimately: for they would then become unemployed.
.NiK(2000)
* [ readers note] The morning host for a popular radio news programme is prone to tetchiness when self serving systemic flunkeys rationalise their failure to deliver on political promises. Some days the failures pile up: he forgets that his role is largely symbolic
Keep on bloggin'
loves ya all
NiK
Fare thee well John Perlman, master radio broadcaster: may the road ahead of you swell with possibility.
Some months ago I mentioned in one of my blogs how I was faced with a quandary. The two, arguably finest broadcasters in the country, albeit in different genres, were abruptly going to be sitting in the same time slot. You'll remember that Gareth Cliff moved from the pm drive time slot to the am drive time slot on five FM-. [for my offshore readers we refer to name players on South Africa's/South Azania's/ SA's daily broadcast radio stations- one, John Perlman, presenting the serious BBC style 'news and news analysis daily dredge report', the other, Gareth Cliff, the incisive fluff and froth presenter of the: 'don't-give-a-fuck-anyway-I-can't-do-anything-about-it-so-why-depress-myself- when I can just rip it off.' station called five FM]
I was in a true dilemma, in fact a triple dilemma because neither station plays the best popular music on radio- that honour goes to UJFM the new University of Johannesburg station that is 'young enough to bend the rules' their music is great and they play all the most glorious music from this renaissance in rock that we are having in our country today, their continuity is often delightful and sometime outrageous, their series on the use of sexual appliances this week was hysterical and entertained me through some of the worst traffic conditions we've had in the city since forever during the longest heatwave we've had since forever. They even have unusual and intriguing news broadcasts although their news reading skills suck.
Which is where Perlman is the extreme professional and has no peer in this country, notwithstanding that there are many competent broadcasters. I wouldn't quite put him in the same league as CNBC's Maria Bartiromo because no matter how good he is he still carries the sub-text of servility towards the 'big political' machine; and the knowledge of his own political impotence blocked his vocal clarity at times- there is no voice as truly free as the voice of a real freeborn human.
It is sad though since he was the best of the best to think that the future of news broadcasting and interviewing in 'the Beloved Country' is going to trend toward that higgledy piggeldy approach to pronunciation, enunciation and general confused clarity of thought [if I may construct such an oxymoron] that we are 'eared' with: most grotesquely by UJ, but evident no matter which station one surfs through [as right I'll make an exception for Classic FM, which hardly qualifies as popular radio though.].
I resolved my own problem back then [and still do] by surfing through from Five to UJ to SAFM AMLive depending on what was happening at the time- the guy who does Classic in the morning is just too paternalistically poncy for me to handle in traffic that early; so when everything sucks on the above three, which it does from time to time, I switch to the six cd shuttle and play something from the "100 best Baroque" series that I gave myself for Christmas.
Perlman was always superb, except when he had a stressful run and he forgot to do his breathing exercises and his voice would rise an octave or so and he would become stridently assertive in the manner of the soon to depart leader of the 'official' opposition. It is rather intriguing, while mentioning, how all these plaintively assertive high profile liberals [the Oppenheimers, Leon and now Perlman ] are decamping their roles in our society- as if clearing the decks- for what?
Notwithstanding Perlman's undoubted skill as an interrogative broadcaster his programme has always been a funereal exercise in terminal depression- This is not due to any fault on his part; he always attemped to force some kind of intellectual response from the daily litany of deadbeat lightweight voices that populate the programme's content. There are regulars of course that don't fall into that category. I don't miss Martin Creamer's "Engineering News" which is always worth a hearing: always some fascinating nugget of information to tease away at the imagination on a routine basis; and the same goes for that enthusiastic fellow who does the internet news and events slot.
I find the fellow, Swerdlow, who does the film reviews a tad cramped and slightly over the top camp; and have learned that when he really doesn't like a movie it is often worth seeing, and what he does like is often boring as shit. Nonetheless he is entertaining and his use of the Beloved language is that of a wordsmith master: every bit is competent as Perlman, and, unless his piece happens to coincide with Gareth Cliff's deliciously satiric 'Days of our Mourning[sic] Morning', I enjoy listening to him. On the other hand Cliff trumps Swerdlow hands down- the one being a creator the other simply a critic and a natural predatory destroyer- of which type the world is overwhelmed as Honey Santana* would have said. [Nature Girl-Karl Hiaasen]
Perlman's favourite film critic[Swerdlow], who doubles for him sometimes on the various occasion that Perlman has been off duty over the years, is inclined towards a slightly kugel whine however when he is required to put some pressure on his interviewees, and it gives him a grovelling quality: that may well be part of his neural programming- I would imagine you would have to be something of a 'grovelleur' to survive this long in the alleged rascist trending atmosphere that is supposedly SABC*. Today. [South African Broadcasting Corporation, the de facto monopoly broadcaster, if you're an offshore reader].
The silence from the cronyist political hierarchy about Perlman's departure has been clamorous and one suspects enraged chagrin at Trevor Manuel's almost tearful parting last week when Perlman conducted his last post-budget interview.
One almost had the sense that Manuel [The National finance minister] hugged the fellow with brimful tears of sorrow. There is simply no one else in radio today who has/had Perlman's insightful intellect and light delicate touch. Mr Manuel is undeniably the true hero of our Revolution without whom [and not neglecting the role played by Maria Ramos] without whom we would be in such economic shit that the present rate of slaughter on the streets would be a mere aperitif. He recognised Perlman's excellence and having nothing to hide loved the way Perlman could tease out the most arcane elements in his annual offering regarding how he spends OUR money. Both of course understood that there are holes in the plan that should be carefully ignored.
For this was for Perlman the damming weakness of his show. He demanded accountability, and could find little. He was always dammed because his programme has for years been strewn with the residual stench of broken promises, lies and the unspeakably enthusiastic ineptitude of a daily litany of 'breaking news' stories in which the interviewees become less and less credible; leaving us uneasily with that nagging thought about the old Titanic sailing blithely on toward the waiting iceberg.
Perlman held up a mirror and obviously there were people who didn't want to look at themselves that way- The strutting peacocks walking about in tawdry feathers were too often revealed - on the other hand if you could cut it with Perlman you should be a made person, for your cocoon of lies and prevaricated evasions were impervious to reason.
Now I no longer have the problem of what to listen to in the morning I can hop comfortably from Five to UJ depending on whether Cliff is having a moment or my daughter's in the car. After I drop her off at varsity, it's UJ all the way, although I often have to jump stations when the news is on. The pronunciations on the UJ news bulletins are so bad that the consequent distraction, attempting to fathom the meaning of the news item so badly mangled is conducive to traffic accidents. As you know Cape Town, Jozi or Dubai are places where literally hell is on wheels and if one's concentration is not almost totally focussed on what the fool in front/behind/beside you is about to do you will find yourself unwillingly the source of the gridlock referred to on 'jam line'.
Seven years ago I wrote the following piece below about John Perlman and published it in my collection Marginal Man published online earlier this decade [and will be back online soon]. He was less practiced then and would often work himself up about the daily litany of failure that formed the basis of our daily fare on SAFM.
On that particular day he was remonstrating with some avuncular arsehole about the fact that his organisation had billions to spend on so-called 'job-creation' and had created no jobs other than those held by the aforementioned avuncular arsehole and his politically connected cronies. [As my regular readers will know I don't believe politicians are capable of creating jobs but that is for a different blog, and time has borne out this hypothesis since as at the last occasion Perlman interviewed the 'job creation' specialists the jobless rate had in fact risen notwithstanding that we manipulate the statistics to 'prove' that it is falling].
27/7/00
AM LIVE on Malperformance*
If you construct your
Worldview from a place
Within the confines of a
Conjecture then
Getting things done means
Sublimating a self, of which
You are in any event unaware
In an attempt to deal with the world
As it isn't.
This work done by all the
Armies of 'help uplift the helpless'
Specialists: whether Aid, AIDS or other
Community outreach activities which now
Proliferate become ultimately self serving by
Default of eternal recurrence. How to change this
Is the dilemma faced by the individual in society. The
Individual in a free society is free to live as it was or change
Only we ourselves
Can decide whether
We should change.
And then, change to what?
From where? And how do we keep moving.
To call for instant change
To habits that took generations to construct
Is as irrational as tossing grains
Of sand one by one into a leaky forty gallon drum
And then demanding to know ten
Minutes later why the job is incomplete.
The job's the thing. The pay is always
Incomplete; There is no such thing as
Enough
Money
And all these people who are
Organizing these myriad fruitlessly
Ineffective batteries of commissions,
Committees, stakeholders, revolver holders,
Card holders and general handholders have
Involved themselves precisely in order to solve
Their own personal employment problems
By inventing the 'issue solving' mechanism in the
First place. No rational person would seriously attempt
To truly 'solve' the problem being addressed so intimately: for they would then become unemployed.
.NiK(2000)
* [ readers note] The morning host for a popular radio news programme is prone to tetchiness when self serving systemic flunkeys rationalise their failure to deliver on political promises. Some days the failures pile up: he forgets that his role is largely symbolic
Keep on bloggin'
loves ya all
NiK
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