USA] as his sub-text. I like to think that if the USA can survive centuries of rampant corruption then why shouldn 't we.
So I went through to the kitchen to wipe the drowsiness out of my spirit with a cup of spiced tea and became aware of a new phrase: “Malicious compliance”. A man on the radio was tal
king about “malicious compliance” with the “Skills Act” legislation. What on earth did he
mean?
It seemed that he was the chief executive of a so-called SETA [a Sectoral Training Authority], which is one of those amorphous jobs-for-cronies organisations [prolifically created to avoid solving the Skills crisis in the country while pretending to do just the opposite]. I spent five minutes listening to the man presenting an incomprehensible stream of jargon-loaded prevaricating obfuscation or more politely… bullshit, while the kettle boiled. I eventually worked out that he was blaming his customers for failing to achieve any growth in their communication skills.
I thought of the education minister’s speech on Monday or recently in which she railed against the cult of mediocrity that is paralysing the country’s efforts to promote the revolution. At the time I thought perhaps she was simply “Pandoring” to the rising tide of discontent sweeping the country over the non-delivery of almost all the promises, after listening to the SETA man I wasn’t so sure.
I felt that I was listening to a “shortbus” version of Mrs Malaprop, alive and well and thriving in the SETA sector. He had the now standard patter albeit bereft of stuttter… a collection of “baffle with bullshit statistics”, an implausible array of data confirming that he, the appointed and anointed supplier of communication training skills was unable to achieve any results because the “People” had elected ‘those who could not be trained’ to be their representatives.
It was, it seemed, “their” entire fault. “They”…, I was uncertain whether he meant the "People", their elected representatives or the employer , were, “maliciously compliant”, or was it now non-compliant while pretending to be compliant… I have no idea… he was incomprehensible in a way that is becoming increasingly fashionable.
According to him “nearly 50%” of all all his customers were illiterate and another, [instantly evaluated random percentage] were close to illiterate and while it was the right, he said, of the employers to send him illiterate people for processing it was not really fair to expect him to take time off from playing golf and fucking beautiful women to attempt to educate those who were beyond learning.
It took serious deductive reasoning to get that message because every sentence contained a litany of ‘malicious’ grammar and bizarre malapropisms. He didn’t really say that he was too busy playing golf and fucking beautiful women but it was somehow implied.
And yet somehow he gained my sympathy… He was quite obviously one of those who hadn’t joined the “Struggle” to live a fuck-free life of poverty. His revenge on the evil former oppressors was to transform and de-colonise the English language and render it as incoherent to me [and presumably other listeners] as it must have been originally to his ancestors. His epiphany was to contribute to a new Struggle to bankrupt the entire system [for which his SETA was responsible] imposed by the colonial masters and facilitate a return to a previous ‘golden age’ pastoral order rooted in the pre-defecane past.
Wow, I thought, struggling to liberate myself from post-colonial angst and return to the reality of the post-liberation 21st century with its newly emancipated priorities. I thought of Carl Hiaasen’s glib, smooth thinking easy talking public relations saturated hero character. At least his fictional Floridian thieving cronies had the savvy to hire expert bullshitters to present their obfuscating crap… Here was a man, appointed to his job of running training in communication for one of the dozen or more of these SETA things, [ I never did work out which one he represented and I'm not sure that it matters they all seem pretty moribund] that was not only inarticulate but also incomprehensible; and was simultaneously so deliciously arrogant in his contempt for the listening public that he could barely contain his lack of erudition.
I realised that I could never compete with this reality: I can never write language the way this man, who pillow fights with words, uses it. My numb brain was struggling with “malicious compliance”: he loved the phrase; much of what else he said was even less intelligible…. And this man earns about a million bucks a year for presenting such crap… with such role models who really anticipates that the SETA s can ever be other than bankrupt. I understood immediately how it came to be that one of them [the SETAs] had parted with about half a billion bucks to Mr Browns Fidentia scam… it was inevitable: the 'foxes were in charge of the henhouse' as they say and viva the days of our blessed relief.
I become depressed knowing that no fiction I ever write can approximately begin to grasp this surreal reality. Better I should retire and join the kleptocrat class, stealing whatever is available to be stolen before it is all gone. I realised sadly that notwithstanding my own alleged skill with words that I am no more than a semi-literate moron surrounded by thieves who have worked out that education is unimportant in a world where the subjunctive can be elevated to dynamic action and guilt can be finessed to bring wealth.
You can be the boss of a Sectoral Training authority without a shred of education… by the sounds of it. Perhaps, like fellow Struggle hero, Chippy Shaik, the man had a carefully plagiarised Doctorate in some arcane unintelligible field that qualified him to go on the radio and talk shit about nothing…. The scary thing is that no one is listening and nobody cares… how can they? We are all struggling to cope with the disintegrating society in which these plagiarisers are thriving.
Each day pompous men go on the radio on daily talk shows presenting themselves as experts to random radio presenters who pretend erudition, asking pre-scripted questions they are too incompetent, or is it too indifferent, to pretend that they are not reading from their carefully prepared page of notes… And no one takes a blind bit of notice.
We have all drifted into a state of apathy that holds such defective reasoning to pose as our intellectual superior; and to even refer to the man as a moron is somehow unfair and de
meaning of us. We must all grovel for the sins of our forefathers and defer to stupidity, prevarication and the covetous: because this is the right of the bold and the avaricious.
I realise suddenly that I am rambling: still numbed from my involuntary nap. No wonder the religious Right and the Righteous is convinced that we live in the “end of days”: that the sales of gas bott
les are on the rise: that a lawless disregard for the rules of the road is becoming de rigeur. They, Coetzee’s “barbarians”, are inside the walls. They are also inside our heads and make us doubt our own sanity.
What depressed me even more was the thought that this same collection of semi –literates are about to put legislation into place [the new Publications Act amendment] that will make it harder if not impossible to comment on such acquisitive stupidity and “malicious compliance”, or with the dictates of the rising kleptocracy. It is conceivable now that this blog could be declared undesirable and pronounced XX and banned, and that in years to come we will look back on this as a golden age.
I am even more depressed that I am becoming a simple minded grumpy old man, rueing my own lack of courage that I never had the chutzpah to bluff my way into a million rand a year job, talking shit to dull radio presenters: baffling a public that has lost all will to even listen to the pusillanimous incoherent chatter pouring from the airwaves… I realise at last that I welcome the electrical blackouts that cut me off from this ever-escalating wealth of inconsequential lies, chatter and irrelevancies pouring forth from a rising tide of pompous fools.
When I think of the lights going out every day all over town, traffic lights not working at ever more intersections, shopping centres closed on a Saturday morning due to electricy black outs, Enatis leaving us with deregistered vehicles, hospital trauma units closing down erratically, schoolgirls being mugged on busy streets in front of dispirited policemen, rioting citizenry etc, etc to a rising litany of discontent… I realise that this glibly incomprehensible so-called educationists is a metaphor that Carl Hiaasen can only dream of in his deliciously evocative rhetoric.
So I change stations to the rancorously soothing sounds of UJFM the station that has reduced such interviews and other news reports to an incoherent art form with no pretence to information, where they are young enough they brag, to break whatever rules still persist, or perhaps more accurately, to practice the new rules where incoherence rulz.
I go outside with my spiced tea and lose myself in the timeless rituals of Tai Chi Chuan and meditate on the meaning of No… thing.
Viva bloggers
NiK aka Blogroid
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