This past couple of weeks has brought the growing ‘problem’ of schoolchild violence into sharp perspective again. Ten days ago schoolboys at two upper-middle-class, established Monastic State schools [i.e. single sex schools], were involved in extra-mural violence of an unsupervised sort. The result: beatings, stabbings and death. Now that I have got my own form of school aggression out of my hair for the moment in the form of matric prelim’ assessments, at the school where I work on a part time basis, and the associated flood of paperwork that has kept me from this machine for weeks, I would like to comment on this ‘sudden’ phenomenon.her hand that situation has been, for me in any event, rare. I confiscated a fifteen-centimetre flick-knife off a tenth grade kid, who attempted to use it on me requiring me to hit him with a loose section of desk, for the first time in 1973. His parent’s attorney successfully sued for its return even though at that time it was illegal to own such a knife; and no ‘sporting’ knife over four inches [roughly nine centimetres] could be legally imported into the country. On the other hand it is possible that the headmaster, a pleasant, broken man, who was usually on his third or forth drink by first break, and eventually died some years later of cirrhosis, simply gave it back: rather than deal with some powerful parents. It happens.
That was a so-called White school under the old fascist model whereby young lads were thrashed with a stick [called a “cane”], and girls routinely submitted to public underwear inspections to establish that they were wearing regulation knickers.
My personal primary school experience [on the far east end of Ekuruleni] was one of violence of child on child with often only the rigorous intervention of some ”Onnie”: a man armed with a stick, to keep us from tearing each other apart. My personal high school experience was no better. I still remember with stark clarity a dozen or more occasions when I, the school geek, had to work up courage to tackle bullies who were making my life unbearable.
I was eight when I first used a knife on someone. I had saved up for it and bought it from a shop in town.… I was eight and the shopkeeper explained to me that when using a knife it is better to slash than to stab, but that the main purpose of owning a knife, he said enigmatically to me, was to cut a decent slice of a steak. He was an Engelsman from "over there", like me. He also knew it was normal for a kid to carry a knife.
Broadly though it was not a local “White”- thing: to use knives. It was fists and sometimes boots. I do have a scar on my head though from a blow from a piece of steel that I had mostly blocked with a stick before it hit me with intent to kill, during a gang fight in the park outside the Park Hotel. Then I was about fourteen. By the time I left school I was generally left alone. I was a kid who always fought ‘dirty’. I had been in more fights than most people had eaten breakfasts, and I was still the school geek, albeit a savagely rebellious one.
In the years following the Revolution, the so-called Model C schools were overwhelmed with guns and knives. The townships weren’t places where one used fists. Sensible older men carried knobkierries and in the neighbourhood next to where I live now the main weapon of choice was a sharpened bicycle spoke. When I moved to Jozi in ‘64 at the age of 17 I had to walk from Hillbrow to the corner of Troye and Commissioner to work, and was advised by all to avoid Noord Street and the infamous “murder mile” that lay across my path between the two places. Later I lived in a coldwater flat in Braamfontein where the Braamie gang held sway, and one had to tread carefully to avoid being whacked with a bicycle chain. I was so used to "treading carefully" that my nickname became "Cautious Katie".
During one year in that era immediately after the revolution though, I confiscated fifteen guns and an almost unlimited quantity of knives, at one of the places where I was working as a substitute Teacher. All of these weapons went to the “office” and were generally reclaimed later by their owners. As I have said schools are violent and scary places for many people. School's often have the children of notorious gangsters in their classrooms, and there have been schools in which I worked where it was expedient to carry two guns [so you had a spare in case the kids got one of them off you.].
And so the airwaves this past week have been filled with the usual anguished replays; of the same anguished replays; of the same anguished replays: as we dance yet again our agonised ritual “latest crisis’, which is simply an all-action replay of the same previous crisis with an altered cast. Surprisingly however on this occasion the MEC [Member of the Executive Council] for Education for the Gauteng [Zone One] administrative region decided to call the devil for what it was. She referred to “black learners” that, she said, “have become a menace to society:” an undoubted side-reference to more than just the killing of Mfundo “Chunky” Ntshangase last week. [City Press 23/09/07].
Recent headlines in the Sunday Times speak of record numbers of school information processing agents [formerly called “teachers”] taking stress leave. Death threats are routine in the “blackboard jungle”, itself a well-worn cliché from an earlier age of school violence: used with unconscious irony to illustrate a current issue: the “immanent crisis” in schools. Girls are apparently raped routinely in many schools and schoolgirl pregnancy is at a record high, and may even have been higher had so many girls not taken to carrying weapons.
According to the MEC a hugely disproportionate number of violent incidents in schools involve so-called “black” kids. David Maimela of the SA Student’s Congress disputed her remark as lacking scientific evidence. However I suspect that the good MEC can produce such hard evidence that would prove her statement to be no mere hypothesis.
While I would dispute that aggressive behaviour in SA schools is specifically a “black” thing [whatever “black” is], the probability that such aggression would be accompanied with lethal force using hard weaponry is more inclined, in my experience to be a “black” thing. I do not have a long term forecast on this remaining so however, and when I write a similar blog ten or so years from now I am sure that it will be to report the rising incidence of shooting deaths amongst white schoolkids as the next generation begin to copy the ruling peer-group model.
I no longer confiscate knives, I no longer work in the kind of school where it seems to be needed, and it is a pretty orthodox multi-cultural, multi-class school. In any event I do not have the legal right to search for them [nor do I want it… I didn’t join up to be a policeperson.].
Kids always used to tell me that they the weapons are needed as much for the journey as for the school. Since the random probability of being assaulted on the streets is relatively high I would not like to be the one who prevents a kid from protecting him/herself, even though I feel that the “Law of attraction” means that carrying a weapon may raise the likelihood of needing one.
“Bring back the cane” cry the “bringemuptough” lobby and the other team cry “spare-them-the-angst” of brutal compulsion.
So what then can this blogger add to the flames of anxiety sweeping the nation on this, amongst so many issues that seem never to be resolved?
Nothing.
The problem is insoluble. It was bad before; it is a disaster in the making now. Just as the architects of the hated Bantu Education System were in blind denial about what they were doing; so too the new administration is in blind denial that their beloved egalitarian, modern Outcomes based system is leading to an unintended outcome, that is rapidly approaching meltdown. This violence is not sporadic neither will it “go away”.
Unless a way can be found and found quickly to move the entire assessment based administrative burden that is paralysing the system onto the internet somehow and free the classroom manger to actually interact with the kids instead of spending their days madly completing forests of assessments and assessments and assessments that take weeks worth of hours and leave the kids free to roam... And no one is listening to this plea because this assessment obsession is at the heart of a system that is totalitarian in its implementation.
In addition the system uses the coercion of compulsory miseducation to achieve its outcomes, which are barely understood by its enforcers. There is no escape... this control is more total than the architects of Apartheid ever dreamed of in their wildest ideological fantasies. The only escape is the one we are witness too currently. Therefore when coercion is an input, violence is ordained as an outcome. The violence is also inevitable since kids are not stupid and know when a system is rigged against them. All this violence can be seen in class terms: i.e. How dare someone have a better shot at the golden ring than me; it isn’t fair and so I’ll kill the other fuckers and ‘they’ll’ be sorry.
The whole system favours elites and there is no alternative that an under performing kid can aspire to. Most kids under perform at some or other time.. fixing that is what teaching used to be about... now there isn't time in the frantic programme ordained by the new mistresses of wanton compulsory mis education have ordained.
This violence is a symptom of frustration, anxiety and straightforward envy founded on a dismal sense of loss and failure, and the blind knowledge that one is inherently superfluous. They are locked into a system that also actively discriminates against male performance models in favour of females; and so male violence is not only normal it is now inevitable.
Because of our history, the education business is dominated by women; and many of those in policy making positions planning and implementing this new system are resentiment loaded ladies. [Now there is a statement in need of scientific justification Mr Maimela.]
Resentiment is Nietzsche’s term. Note this is not the same word as resentment from which it is derived. He saw its extra dimension as reactionary... spite filled. I find it ironic that resentiment should be the core motivation behind so much school violence, in a place that has recently undergone an incomplete revolution. It suggests to me that we are not listening to the kids and so they are doing what they did in ’76. These are after all, the generation that grew up knowing that violence is the only way to get people’s attention. That is because they learned it at their parent’s knees. “Give me a child until its 7th year and it is mine for life” as the Jesuits’ famously observed. Since this generation never started school before it was 7, their parents had ample opportunity to breathe tales of liberation glory into their children’s heads. Today’s generation are the progeny of the ’76 rebellion.
It was the intention of the now ruling party to make the country ungovernable in their “liberation before education” campaign, [back in the late ’80 and early 90’s, remember.] and they built on the legacy of the ’76 children’s revolution. The government may have deconstructed that glorious event into a booze filled “Youth Day” on the 16th of June ‘76… when the world heard the children cry out for freedom, but this generation grew up on the tale..
This generation of freedom’s children have got the message. That the violence this time is inwardly directed is simply a function of frustration. There are no Casspirs to assault with rock and Molotov. Nonetheless it is there: Khutsong and a load of other places with forgettable and unpronounceable names that have become new dubious dustbins for the masses, are symptomatic objects of that frustration. The downtown Jozi street-traders can testify to that frustration after a few thousand kids rampaged downtown last month, [on Mr Maimela’s watch incidentally just for a piece of scientific evidence.] Last week a so-called “Cheeseboy”: “Chunky”, died as proof; as “cheeseboy” ate “cheeseboy”, in an awful and deadly illustration of the adage that revolutions devour their young.
There is also a rising tide of dead police officers.
What the children are telling us is that this government has, in their revolutionary fervour, introduced a supposedly modern education system that is systematically destroying hope for millions of kids [ and arguably working well for a limited number of nurds, geeks and swots from rich homes or with well resourced ones].
It is significant that this violence is spiking at the time when the first beneficiaries of this new system are in their penultimate ‘matriculation’ year. They are telling us that this system will not do, what we say it will do… Too many are inadequately prepared for what lies ahead. Too many are left alone to discover Newtonian physics for themselves; working it out in poorly supervised dysfunctional workgroups using textbooks that are mostly not worth the crappy paper they are, expensively, written upon.
They are angry at being a second, or is it now the third, generation sacrificed in the interest of a revolution that only seems to benefit the lucky “Cheeseboys”*.
They are discovering, too many of them, that they are superfluous to need and the new Eldorado represented by the revolutionary era is giving way to a desert of broken dreams.
How do you tell sixteen year old kids that there is nothing in the pot for them… In the past you could hit them and make them do it even if they didn’t want to and eventually enough would 'see the light' to go forth and be fruitful.
Now children have rights. They are unaware though that this includes the right to fail and be nobody in life, which is what many are discovering by osmosis. They are [correctly] untouchable… but that doesn’t alter the basic truth that most are superfluous to need and that after years of compulsory schooling they have no skills to lean on that are of any practical use in a world that simply no longer needs armies of educated clerks… How much education do you need to read a script off a computer screen in a call centre? Preferably not too much… just enough to have dulled the imagination that you will never need again.
Nonetheless this violence can be viewed as either a nihilistic denial of the new reality in the form of rejection: or as their call for help.
You must choose what you think it is.
*Cheeseboys: township slang for black boys who go the suburban model c or even better class schools; and can afford to eat cheese, a luxury for most ordinary people.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
The testimonies of an enumerator: episode 5
Legends of Urdos and Corinth Starr
If you’ve been following the Testimonies you can skip the next few paragraphs.
For those who have not yet read the testimonies the following represents a small synopsis of what you are about to read.
To start with everything you are about to read is fiction. The story posed in the fiction is even a fiction within a fiction and is a fictional, even fantastical, history of the world and specifically a place called Southern Azania [SA] during the period 2009-2019.
The “enumerator” of the title is believed to have been a census taker called Marak, living in roughly 2137 AD. [There is controversy over this dating procedure and so it is used interchangeable with other numbers] Some commentators have suggested that the enumerator was some form of Exile.
The Testimonies themselves were part of a parcel of what may loosely be called ‘documents’ discovered by a party of mineral explorers who were visiting the desert planet we call Urdos in search of the fabled Olivine resources which it was always believed existed in huge mother lodes on that sad planet.
The documents enabled us to confirm what scientists had always professed. That is that Urdos had once been a planet, abundant in life. Ultimately our ancestors had used it up and moved on leaving the remnant of the well-used environment to coalesce into dust.
What caused great excitement about the discovery of the document cache was that the period covered by this Enumerator encompasses the period when realisation became sentient: Urdos was in trouble. [You will remember that the documents were referred to in the press as “The scrolls of Monte Christo”, being a reference to the place where they were found as defined on the documents themselves, for as you would have surmised a desert has few place markers.]
Some historians see Corinth Starr and her revolution as the spark that accelerated the catastrophes that befell the planet. Others, more rational perhaps [if one should say that about an Historian] argued that hers was the only revolution that could have ridden out the storm that followed her accession to power.
Gramlich in particular argues that the planet had been experiencing increasing seismic activity for almost two generations before Starr was elected President of Southern Azania. She [Gramlich] continued, that “geographic change and seismic turmoil had taken an accelerating curve, after a series of so-called “Nuclear triple double taps”: explosions that took place in a region that bordered onto the plate structure of the planet.” * [ref: F Gramlich: The origins of chaos. Essay. extract from: The Legends of Urdos. Publ: 9870.]
Those who followed the story in the popular press will remember that Gramlich assembled an impressive battery of data demonstrating how the harmonic symmetry of the planet was jarred by an off-note vibration pattern that prompted a series of seismic events, which while small of themselves, were catastrophic for the humans on the planet, for its balance in the universe had been altered and existing patterns were altering, irrevocably as we now know.
What follows over 19 episodes is the story of how Corinth Starr came to power and what she did afterwards
5 The story of Starr the elder.
The Story so far
In the previous episode Corinth Starr the elder launched her vision of the true post- liberation society in an emerging Azanian Konfederacy, her specific mandate being to promote her principle of Basic Pay.
She presented her manifesto in the now famous Constitution Hill Indaba to acclamation and consternation: acclamation from her supporters and consternation from everybody else
The cynics claimed that Starr’s idea was to make the poor pay for their own development and then set them up so they’d lose everything to the thieving rich.
The cynics were not alone. The Greenists and other groupings, that held [prophetically as it turned out] that the earth was in trouble, and would start hitting back. These radicals saw humanity as virus-like, clawing into the body of Urdos, in ever increasing numbers, causing intolerable itching. They saw Corinth’s vision as crass opportunism.
She was exacerbating the problem; they cried…the poor, schmuck Poor would go into debt to fund an ongoing, ultimately unsustainable, chain of consumer behaviour that would only accelerate the planet’s race to destruction.
“More of the same”, said many. There were powerful voices amongst that part of the leadership, which represented strongly vested interests and honorary holdings, who articulated the argument that it was their very inability to access their wealth that saved the poor from sliding into abject destitution. [As if ordinary destitution was ok, said the cartoons in the weekly print press]. In other words being unable to register their shanties and traditional holdings was ‘good for them’. The ultimo cynics amongst the cynics (and those who felt somehow threatened by the whole idea) said that they found the argument strangely familiar, albeit wrapped up in another package.
There was remarkable unanimity amongst the entire range of oligarchs with which society was normally loaded. The idea of Bee Pee was caricatured and ridiculed. The regular writers in the popular press articulated a storm of debate, a great deal centered around the significance of dropping the idea contained in the word “Grant “, which had been dropped summarily from the BIG argument of the preceding years and had suddenly become a universal right: a move that had caught everyone flatfooted. The articulate class chewed over the change, talking endlessly.
“This market dependency syndrome that we’ve created will blow up the planet.” The spokespeople for the opposition were articulate, and comfortable for the most part.
Starr the elder taunted the arrogance of well-fed opponents denying the destitute a crust of bread because it wasn’t mouldy enough. Here was an position she could scorn. The pivot point to her assault on the power base
If you’ve been following the Testimonies you can skip the next few paragraphs.
For those who have not yet read the testimonies the following represents a small synopsis of what you are about to read.
To start with everything you are about to read is fiction. The story posed in the fiction is even a fiction within a fiction and is a fictional, even fantastical, history of the world and specifically a place called Southern Azania [SA] during the period 2009-2019.
The “enumerator” of the title is believed to have been a census taker called Marak, living in roughly 2137 AD. [There is controversy over this dating procedure and so it is used interchangeable with other numbers] Some commentators have suggested that the enumerator was some form of Exile.
The Testimonies themselves were part of a parcel of what may loosely be called ‘documents’ discovered by a party of mineral explorers who were visiting the desert planet we call Urdos in search of the fabled Olivine resources which it was always believed existed in huge mother lodes on that sad planet.
The documents enabled us to confirm what scientists had always professed. That is that Urdos had once been a planet, abundant in life. Ultimately our ancestors had used it up and moved on leaving the remnant of the well-used environment to coalesce into dust.
What caused great excitement about the discovery of the document cache was that the period covered by this Enumerator encompasses the period when realisation became sentient: Urdos was in trouble. [You will remember that the documents were referred to in the press as “The scrolls of Monte Christo”, being a reference to the place where they were found as defined on the documents themselves, for as you would have surmised a desert has few place markers.]
Some historians see Corinth Starr and her revolution as the spark that accelerated the catastrophes that befell the planet. Others, more rational perhaps [if one should say that about an Historian] argued that hers was the only revolution that could have ridden out the storm that followed her accession to power.
Gramlich in particular argues that the planet had been experiencing increasing seismic activity for almost two generations before Starr was elected President of Southern Azania. She [Gramlich] continued, that “geographic change and seismic turmoil had taken an accelerating curve, after a series of so-called “Nuclear triple double taps”: explosions that took place in a region that bordered onto the plate structure of the planet.” * [ref: F Gramlich: The origins of chaos. Essay. extract from: The Legends of Urdos. Publ: 9870.]
Those who followed the story in the popular press will remember that Gramlich assembled an impressive battery of data demonstrating how the harmonic symmetry of the planet was jarred by an off-note vibration pattern that prompted a series of seismic events, which while small of themselves, were catastrophic for the humans on the planet, for its balance in the universe had been altered and existing patterns were altering, irrevocably as we now know.
What follows over 19 episodes is the story of how Corinth Starr came to power and what she did afterwards
5 The story of Starr the elder.
The Story so far
In the previous episode Corinth Starr the elder launched her vision of the true post- liberation society in an emerging Azanian Konfederacy, her specific mandate being to promote her principle of Basic Pay.
She presented her manifesto in the now famous Constitution Hill Indaba to acclamation and consternation: acclamation from her supporters and consternation from everybody else
The cynics claimed that Starr’s idea was to make the poor pay for their own development and then set them up so they’d lose everything to the thieving rich.
The cynics were not alone. The Greenists and other groupings, that held [prophetically as it turned out] that the earth was in trouble, and would start hitting back. These radicals saw humanity as virus-like, clawing into the body of Urdos, in ever increasing numbers, causing intolerable itching. They saw Corinth’s vision as crass opportunism.
She was exacerbating the problem; they cried…the poor, schmuck Poor would go into debt to fund an ongoing, ultimately unsustainable, chain of consumer behaviour that would only accelerate the planet’s race to destruction.
“More of the same”, said many. There were powerful voices amongst that part of the leadership, which represented strongly vested interests and honorary holdings, who articulated the argument that it was their very inability to access their wealth that saved the poor from sliding into abject destitution. [As if ordinary destitution was ok, said the cartoons in the weekly print press]. In other words being unable to register their shanties and traditional holdings was ‘good for them’. The ultimo cynics amongst the cynics (and those who felt somehow threatened by the whole idea) said that they found the argument strangely familiar, albeit wrapped up in another package.
There was remarkable unanimity amongst the entire range of oligarchs with which society was normally loaded. The idea of Bee Pee was caricatured and ridiculed. The regular writers in the popular press articulated a storm of debate, a great deal centered around the significance of dropping the idea contained in the word “Grant “, which had been dropped summarily from the BIG argument of the preceding years and had suddenly become a universal right: a move that had caught everyone flatfooted. The articulate class chewed over the change, talking endlessly.
“This market dependency syndrome that we’ve created will blow up the planet.” The spokespeople for the opposition were articulate, and comfortable for the most part.
Starr the elder taunted the arrogance of well-fed opponents denying the destitute a crust of bread because it wasn’t mouldy enough. Here was an position she could scorn. The pivot point to her assault on the power base
Denial
For those who seek them the universe is full of signs. These signs are portents of what is coming along as we hurtle thru the multiverse at an unconceivable speed and those of us riding Gaia’s back spend our lives dodging all the slow moving flack that lies around in our path. The signs and portents are guides for us to dodge more and be ambushed less often.
The most deadly of all signs that blind us to the oncoming blights of stardust, gamma rays and leftover asteroid belts, of general flotsam that lurk in wait for us to come crashing through, is DENIAL.
We are almost unable to read denial, certainly in ourselves. How could I accept that a habit that has lived with me for so long that it has become comfortable is really the habit that smashes up my aspirations? I resist and deny… don’t I? And you? Don’t you…? Of course not, for you are never wrong are you? It is only I who am regularly wrong isn’t it?
It could well be that in twelve months time the entire bizarre business involving the Mc Cann’s and their missing child Madeleine may be perceived as a complex game of denial. The evidence is beginning to mount that something happened to the child, that the parents are overwhelmingly responsible for what happened, and that the entire oh so plausible global hunt for her was no more than an opportunistic cover-up exercise rooted in denial on the part pf the parents. Perhaps. [It is also possible that she was stolen from her bedroom by a genius child thief as Azaria was once stolen by a dingo; notwithstanding that her mother went to jail for her murder.]
In the same way the evidence for the re-racialisation of South Africa under the current administration is mounting and the denialist behaviour is increasingly reminiscent of the era that was supposed to have ended in 1994. If ever a philosophy had its roots in denial it was the old Apartheid thing… Who can ever forget those homburg-bearing, ill-fitting suit clad men trotting out their platitudes about how the so-called “blacks” actually appreciated apartheid; and relished the opportunities it gave dark citizens to engage themselves in far away dusty homelands. If that wasn’t denial what was.
I was reminded of that last week when the Malaysian foreign minister [interviewed on BBC’s Hardtalk programme] said in response to probing on the racist behaviour of the Malaysian government in respect of their treatment of their Chinese and Indian minorities. “They are allowed to have their own places of worship. And they are happy.” he said.
So denial had to be the order of the day when a furore was aroused by the observation that the inclusion of so-called “white” workers in an “ESOP” [employee share ownership programme] proposed as part of its transformat6ive black economic empowerment campaign would disqualify the employer the giant SASOL company from getting Brownie Points in the great black transformation game presently under way in South Africa [Southern Azania][SA].
Able spokespersons have been deployed at length from the DTI [Dept of trade and industry] to deny that they observation was meant to be racist. “That was not what we meant at all,” they cried. “Not what we meant at all.”
The most potent example of this drift to a new post-racist, neo-racism in South Africa and its accompanying denial behaviour, is the mounting clamour amongst well-placed stooges of the new emerging racially structured order or things. This subject matter is so-called “white” women. The call is to remove them from the list of those citizens who are supposed to receive preferential treatment in the workplace, in respect of job opportunities, because of their past oppression. Few people would deny that white women were generally denied the opportunity to advance in our pre-94 society. There is a considerable body of so-called White society today [in both SA and elsewhere] that still believes that a woman’s place is either on her back with her legs open or in the kitchen preparing to feed the other end of her “man”.
However it would seem so-called “white” women have proved somewhat too competitive for Mr Manyi, a so-called Black African male who is higher up the list mandated by the Employment Equity Act [EEA], of those persons deemed unable to gain preferment through the globally fashionable competitive means and who must as a result get preferential treatment. Is Mr Manyi effectively calling for preferential treatment for his own particular class over all those others who have also been downtrodden... of course... he may even be thinking male only provided it is his kind of male... the male dominant version of the new order is making a serious comeback with such gender put downs as virginity testing at traditional female subservient reed dance ceremonies.
In a world predicated as it is on brutal survival-of-the-fittest competition any system of administration that impedes the selection of the most able candidate for preferment will constitute a competitive barrier, no matter that it is regarded as morally correct. Markets take no account of morality they respond to moral hazard and perceived risk. Any system that rewards participants for factors other than performance begins the creep to moral hazard, and an eventual competitive crunch.
For instance; the Foreign Minister of Malaysia was unable to accept that Malaysia’s competitive position in the south east Asian economic sphere has been eroded over time because so many of its most talented citizens have moved next door and set up shop in competition. Denial means ignoring the fact that one persons moral righteousness is perceived by another person as an Achilles heel. The present market meltdown in the global economy
It is also true that some influential spokespersons for the State machine [in SA] have dismissed these demands [to discriminate against so-called ‘white’ women] as unrealistic and undesirable, and of course “unconstitutional”: as if the original EEA was in tune with the spirit of the Constitution. But it is equally true that their sensible opinions have been pretty well drowned out in the clamour that has swept the media waves over the past few weeks.
What is equally true however is that this current demand from the emerging, previously disadvantaged, nouveau race-lobby that so-called “white” women be struck off the list of affirmative beneficiaries of the Employment Equity Act, because they are apparently becoming either too prolific or too successfully competitive, poses an interesting dilemma for policy makers in our monopolistic one-party state.
The paradox is that the Employment Equity Act, an Act that completely discriminates against so-called “white” male talent, has not stopped the most talented [of said ‘males’] from progressing. Unfortunately a rising number are becoming successful elsewhere: the Malaysian experience is being repeated here. It is widely acknowledged by all but the Malaysian “Bumiputri” beneficiary Malay class in that country, that the export of talented Indian and Chinese citizens has been a source of fuel for the tigerish emergence of competitor nations in South Eat Asia.
There is also evidence mounting in South Africa that the least talented so-called ‘whites’ in the former, now disempowered, ruling class in South Africa are coalescing into a formative criminal underclass, and represent an emerging problem for this nouveau racist government that will return to haunt us all come 2020.
The double paradox would be that proscribing white women from reaping what meagre benefits are trickling their way off the empowerment bandwagon would turn so called “white” citizens into a de facto persecuted minority. This means that the outcome for those outraged racists like Mr Manyi, who has been in the forefront of this campaign, may well be different to what was envisaged.
What would be the outcome of formally defining the former oppressor class in this country as a persecuted minority, quite aside from the smug satisfaction that would accrue to the new neo-racist lobby.
By way of exploration: what has happened to the 4000 plus, so-called “white” farmers dispossessed of their properties in the land of the evergreen fantasy next door. We are told often enough about the hundred or so who went to Moz, Zambia and even Nigeria.
However that still leaves about 4000 unaccounted for. From all accounts very few of them are hanging around in Harare waiting for better days. And only a handful have tried their luck in other emerging African states. It seems, from persistent anecdotal reports, that they have evaporated into the global “White” diaspora, where their relatively scarce farm management skills may well have been welcomed, in places that struggle to attract farmers to that most difficult and unattractive trade.
There were originally some 300,000 so-called “white” persons in that delusional country before the persecution era got under way. While we rightly comment on the millions of black citizens of talent who have migrated out of the country in the wake of a system that discriminates against all but the Zezuru tribal grouping, we forget that nearly all those hated whiteys have also set up shop elsewhere. Today there are fewer than ten thousand left which, depending on your point of view, is either good or bad. However I know of very few who have left and joined the global diaspora that have not dramatically improved their lives and their conditions of life.
With White women ticked off the list of beneficiaries of the broad based redistribution process that is unfolding all around us, the field is thrown wide open for an exodus of, “shame:… poor-white refugees”. Everybody on the planet except us and maybe Malaysia is hunting for reasonable talent and battling to keep what they have: someone who can repair a motor car, stove, fridge, drain or fix the books, sell goods to customers; and all the other things that take place in this glorious virtual money world the so-called “white” person invented.
[Specifically, for those who take the preceding statement to be politically incorrect…It was invented by two Scotsmen: the well known Adam Smith and the less well known 18th century “philanderer, gambler, murderer and father of modern finance… John Law”]
So from the viewpoint of the racist clique that is mooting this change, the benefits will all pour their way. Rotten whitey is out of the picture and he can’t hide behind his bitches anymore and the main manne what count can get whatever loot they haven’t already earmarked, and the party can roll on for at least ten more years or so. [After all Mr Mugabe has kept a much smaller party going for 27 years not out.]
Any so-called “black” person over eighty will tell you that this [SA] was a racist society, dominated by “them” since ‘they’ came here and took over. Cynics might suggest that the core error of the Afrikaner clique who hijacked the country for forty four years was the codifying of a covertly racist system into an overt racist system, thereby letting an ancient genie out of the bottle and releasing the furies. That was the beginning of the end for the Afrikaner clique… forty four years is hardly epoch denting.
This is the same Pandora’s box that lies in wait for the proponents of this foolish idea abouiut delisting so-called ‘white’ women.. Open the box and create a persecuted minority and reveal your hand.
Mr Mugabe’s behaviour in Zimbabwe in waiting twenty years to play his race card revealed him as a man who negotiated in bad faith. Revolutionaries aside few people willingly negotiate with someone who is known to be a dishonest broker. The great South African rainbow nation so-called miracle was also created on the basis of a negotiated settlement. There are many who feel that the deal was a poisoned chalice. The current ruling clique is obviously becoming more blasé about the repercussions that markets hold in store for those who mess with this mirage we call the modern economic model. The Greeks called this mood “hubris” and the so-called “gods” always punished Hubris.
Those who negotiate in bad faith may well become personally enriched, but sooner or later the country itself will be made to pay the piper. In a brutal global marketplace no one chooses voluntarily to have dealings with those who have a reputation for sharp practice. Mr Chavez in Venezuela will make this uncomfortable discovery over the next decade, and we may well also rue the day we chose to base our new consensus on a revised interpretation of the Codesa Conference and the negotiated settlement we created in 1992.
I would say that it is arguable that the increasingly ruinous plight of the rump of the White minority in South Africa has played a salutary role in making a negotiated settlement between rival Iraqi factions in the Middle-East all but impossible. This ruinous evolution is not too noticeable in the affluent Northern suburbs of Jozi but it is manifestly apparent in places only thirty kilometres away.
The message is plain: Those who are stupid enough to give up power for a mess of pottage will soon discover they have no power at all. That is increasingly the lesson that outsiders will take from this proposed shift in our national consensus. This new oppression of the former ruling class will gradually prove embarrassing to those parties that tacitly supported the oppressed citizens in South Africa in their just struggle for “Liberty, equality and fraternity”, no matter how smug they may seem to be at the moment that everyone is getting their just deserts.
On the other hand becoming a persecuted minority could be immensely advantageous for that part of the white community that sees itself under siege in an ocean of crime, corruption and incompetence, as the system cracks under the strain of supporting increasing numbers of persons who believe that a job is a right without any responsibilities.
There are indications that nearly two million skilled and talented people have already evaporated from the country over the past thirteen years and one hears daily accounts of skills shortages that are apparently putting a brake on our attempts to reach a 6% growth rate. Those who have left are not exclusively from the despised “white” minority either; there are plenty of so-called beneficiaries of the new system that have taken the high road to a more peaceful life.
In his interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme this last week the Malaysian foreign minister played as adept a game of denial as any of our spokespersons here, when probed about the racist outcomes of that country’s Affirmative action programme: the model for our own. He dismissed the news as of no account that some major Funds managers in so-called Western markets were no longer putting money into Malaysia, in part because of the inherently destabilising effects of racially structured decision making in a global meritocratic market environment.
One remembers that Afrikaner politicians were equally dismissive of those who threatened financial hardship for the proponents of Apartheid. The present economic realignment taking place over the sub-prime meltdown will leave more than a few managers with a new risk averse profile; and places that court policies that are overtly divisive will lose position to those that are more solid, and local citizens will pay the penalty in the form of an interest rate structure [and other cost elements] about one hundred percent more expensive to operate in than those prevailing amongst many of our most able competitors.
“Nice” people will increasingly shun dealings with overt racists and those who bully their ‘victims’ This fate is befalling Israel who are finding few friend in dark times Gradually the only ‘friends’ the new partners of avarice will have left in a world made razor rapacious by the globalisation trend, will be those ‘honorary’ ‘former disadvantaged clusters called: ‘’the emerging Asian giants, who are themselves flexing 19th century, ‘robber-baron’ pretensions and somehow seem to have emerged from oppression with a more efficient, or perhaps useful, battery of skills than we have at our end of the planet; where we seem to have become bogged down in a form of proxy conflict called crime and corruption. But which may more appropriately represent an evolved form of Resentiment, to use Nietzsche’s term.
Those who ignore the signs that tripped us up in the past because they are blinded by the mote called denial are doomed to pass them again and again. There are rumours that the Mozambicans who grow cashew nuts struggle to break into markets ‘they’ [Mozambique] once controlled; because many of the markets today, thirty six years after the revolution, are supplied and dominated by the descendents of those who were dispossessed back then and driven out of their farms and holdings and presumably went off to grow these items elsewhere.
It was Groucho Marx I believe who said that one should always be polite to people when you are on your way up in the world since you never know when you are going to meet them again on your way back down.
Happy blogging
The most deadly of all signs that blind us to the oncoming blights of stardust, gamma rays and leftover asteroid belts, of general flotsam that lurk in wait for us to come crashing through, is DENIAL.
We are almost unable to read denial, certainly in ourselves. How could I accept that a habit that has lived with me for so long that it has become comfortable is really the habit that smashes up my aspirations? I resist and deny… don’t I? And you? Don’t you…? Of course not, for you are never wrong are you? It is only I who am regularly wrong isn’t it?
It could well be that in twelve months time the entire bizarre business involving the Mc Cann’s and their missing child Madeleine may be perceived as a complex game of denial. The evidence is beginning to mount that something happened to the child, that the parents are overwhelmingly responsible for what happened, and that the entire oh so plausible global hunt for her was no more than an opportunistic cover-up exercise rooted in denial on the part pf the parents. Perhaps. [It is also possible that she was stolen from her bedroom by a genius child thief as Azaria was once stolen by a dingo; notwithstanding that her mother went to jail for her murder.]
In the same way the evidence for the re-racialisation of South Africa under the current administration is mounting and the denialist behaviour is increasingly reminiscent of the era that was supposed to have ended in 1994. If ever a philosophy had its roots in denial it was the old Apartheid thing… Who can ever forget those homburg-bearing, ill-fitting suit clad men trotting out their platitudes about how the so-called “blacks” actually appreciated apartheid; and relished the opportunities it gave dark citizens to engage themselves in far away dusty homelands. If that wasn’t denial what was.
I was reminded of that last week when the Malaysian foreign minister [interviewed on BBC’s Hardtalk programme] said in response to probing on the racist behaviour of the Malaysian government in respect of their treatment of their Chinese and Indian minorities. “They are allowed to have their own places of worship. And they are happy.” he said.
So denial had to be the order of the day when a furore was aroused by the observation that the inclusion of so-called “white” workers in an “ESOP” [employee share ownership programme] proposed as part of its transformat6ive black economic empowerment campaign would disqualify the employer the giant SASOL company from getting Brownie Points in the great black transformation game presently under way in South Africa [Southern Azania][SA].
Able spokespersons have been deployed at length from the DTI [Dept of trade and industry] to deny that they observation was meant to be racist. “That was not what we meant at all,” they cried. “Not what we meant at all.”
The most potent example of this drift to a new post-racist, neo-racism in South Africa and its accompanying denial behaviour, is the mounting clamour amongst well-placed stooges of the new emerging racially structured order or things. This subject matter is so-called “white” women. The call is to remove them from the list of those citizens who are supposed to receive preferential treatment in the workplace, in respect of job opportunities, because of their past oppression. Few people would deny that white women were generally denied the opportunity to advance in our pre-94 society. There is a considerable body of so-called White society today [in both SA and elsewhere] that still believes that a woman’s place is either on her back with her legs open or in the kitchen preparing to feed the other end of her “man”.
However it would seem so-called “white” women have proved somewhat too competitive for Mr Manyi, a so-called Black African male who is higher up the list mandated by the Employment Equity Act [EEA], of those persons deemed unable to gain preferment through the globally fashionable competitive means and who must as a result get preferential treatment. Is Mr Manyi effectively calling for preferential treatment for his own particular class over all those others who have also been downtrodden... of course... he may even be thinking male only provided it is his kind of male... the male dominant version of the new order is making a serious comeback with such gender put downs as virginity testing at traditional female subservient reed dance ceremonies.
In a world predicated as it is on brutal survival-of-the-fittest competition any system of administration that impedes the selection of the most able candidate for preferment will constitute a competitive barrier, no matter that it is regarded as morally correct. Markets take no account of morality they respond to moral hazard and perceived risk. Any system that rewards participants for factors other than performance begins the creep to moral hazard, and an eventual competitive crunch.
For instance; the Foreign Minister of Malaysia was unable to accept that Malaysia’s competitive position in the south east Asian economic sphere has been eroded over time because so many of its most talented citizens have moved next door and set up shop in competition. Denial means ignoring the fact that one persons moral righteousness is perceived by another person as an Achilles heel. The present market meltdown in the global economy
It is also true that some influential spokespersons for the State machine [in SA] have dismissed these demands [to discriminate against so-called ‘white’ women] as unrealistic and undesirable, and of course “unconstitutional”: as if the original EEA was in tune with the spirit of the Constitution. But it is equally true that their sensible opinions have been pretty well drowned out in the clamour that has swept the media waves over the past few weeks.
What is equally true however is that this current demand from the emerging, previously disadvantaged, nouveau race-lobby that so-called “white” women be struck off the list of affirmative beneficiaries of the Employment Equity Act, because they are apparently becoming either too prolific or too successfully competitive, poses an interesting dilemma for policy makers in our monopolistic one-party state.
The paradox is that the Employment Equity Act, an Act that completely discriminates against so-called “white” male talent, has not stopped the most talented [of said ‘males’] from progressing. Unfortunately a rising number are becoming successful elsewhere: the Malaysian experience is being repeated here. It is widely acknowledged by all but the Malaysian “Bumiputri” beneficiary Malay class in that country, that the export of talented Indian and Chinese citizens has been a source of fuel for the tigerish emergence of competitor nations in South Eat Asia.
There is also evidence mounting in South Africa that the least talented so-called ‘whites’ in the former, now disempowered, ruling class in South Africa are coalescing into a formative criminal underclass, and represent an emerging problem for this nouveau racist government that will return to haunt us all come 2020.
The double paradox would be that proscribing white women from reaping what meagre benefits are trickling their way off the empowerment bandwagon would turn so called “white” citizens into a de facto persecuted minority. This means that the outcome for those outraged racists like Mr Manyi, who has been in the forefront of this campaign, may well be different to what was envisaged.
What would be the outcome of formally defining the former oppressor class in this country as a persecuted minority, quite aside from the smug satisfaction that would accrue to the new neo-racist lobby.
By way of exploration: what has happened to the 4000 plus, so-called “white” farmers dispossessed of their properties in the land of the evergreen fantasy next door. We are told often enough about the hundred or so who went to Moz, Zambia and even Nigeria.
However that still leaves about 4000 unaccounted for. From all accounts very few of them are hanging around in Harare waiting for better days. And only a handful have tried their luck in other emerging African states. It seems, from persistent anecdotal reports, that they have evaporated into the global “White” diaspora, where their relatively scarce farm management skills may well have been welcomed, in places that struggle to attract farmers to that most difficult and unattractive trade.
There were originally some 300,000 so-called “white” persons in that delusional country before the persecution era got under way. While we rightly comment on the millions of black citizens of talent who have migrated out of the country in the wake of a system that discriminates against all but the Zezuru tribal grouping, we forget that nearly all those hated whiteys have also set up shop elsewhere. Today there are fewer than ten thousand left which, depending on your point of view, is either good or bad. However I know of very few who have left and joined the global diaspora that have not dramatically improved their lives and their conditions of life.
With White women ticked off the list of beneficiaries of the broad based redistribution process that is unfolding all around us, the field is thrown wide open for an exodus of, “shame:… poor-white refugees”. Everybody on the planet except us and maybe Malaysia is hunting for reasonable talent and battling to keep what they have: someone who can repair a motor car, stove, fridge, drain or fix the books, sell goods to customers; and all the other things that take place in this glorious virtual money world the so-called “white” person invented.
[Specifically, for those who take the preceding statement to be politically incorrect…It was invented by two Scotsmen: the well known Adam Smith and the less well known 18th century “philanderer, gambler, murderer and father of modern finance… John Law”]
So from the viewpoint of the racist clique that is mooting this change, the benefits will all pour their way. Rotten whitey is out of the picture and he can’t hide behind his bitches anymore and the main manne what count can get whatever loot they haven’t already earmarked, and the party can roll on for at least ten more years or so. [After all Mr Mugabe has kept a much smaller party going for 27 years not out.]
Any so-called “black” person over eighty will tell you that this [SA] was a racist society, dominated by “them” since ‘they’ came here and took over. Cynics might suggest that the core error of the Afrikaner clique who hijacked the country for forty four years was the codifying of a covertly racist system into an overt racist system, thereby letting an ancient genie out of the bottle and releasing the furies. That was the beginning of the end for the Afrikaner clique… forty four years is hardly epoch denting.
This is the same Pandora’s box that lies in wait for the proponents of this foolish idea abouiut delisting so-called ‘white’ women.. Open the box and create a persecuted minority and reveal your hand.
Mr Mugabe’s behaviour in Zimbabwe in waiting twenty years to play his race card revealed him as a man who negotiated in bad faith. Revolutionaries aside few people willingly negotiate with someone who is known to be a dishonest broker. The great South African rainbow nation so-called miracle was also created on the basis of a negotiated settlement. There are many who feel that the deal was a poisoned chalice. The current ruling clique is obviously becoming more blasé about the repercussions that markets hold in store for those who mess with this mirage we call the modern economic model. The Greeks called this mood “hubris” and the so-called “gods” always punished Hubris.
Those who negotiate in bad faith may well become personally enriched, but sooner or later the country itself will be made to pay the piper. In a brutal global marketplace no one chooses voluntarily to have dealings with those who have a reputation for sharp practice. Mr Chavez in Venezuela will make this uncomfortable discovery over the next decade, and we may well also rue the day we chose to base our new consensus on a revised interpretation of the Codesa Conference and the negotiated settlement we created in 1992.
I would say that it is arguable that the increasingly ruinous plight of the rump of the White minority in South Africa has played a salutary role in making a negotiated settlement between rival Iraqi factions in the Middle-East all but impossible. This ruinous evolution is not too noticeable in the affluent Northern suburbs of Jozi but it is manifestly apparent in places only thirty kilometres away.
The message is plain: Those who are stupid enough to give up power for a mess of pottage will soon discover they have no power at all. That is increasingly the lesson that outsiders will take from this proposed shift in our national consensus. This new oppression of the former ruling class will gradually prove embarrassing to those parties that tacitly supported the oppressed citizens in South Africa in their just struggle for “Liberty, equality and fraternity”, no matter how smug they may seem to be at the moment that everyone is getting their just deserts.
On the other hand becoming a persecuted minority could be immensely advantageous for that part of the white community that sees itself under siege in an ocean of crime, corruption and incompetence, as the system cracks under the strain of supporting increasing numbers of persons who believe that a job is a right without any responsibilities.
There are indications that nearly two million skilled and talented people have already evaporated from the country over the past thirteen years and one hears daily accounts of skills shortages that are apparently putting a brake on our attempts to reach a 6% growth rate. Those who have left are not exclusively from the despised “white” minority either; there are plenty of so-called beneficiaries of the new system that have taken the high road to a more peaceful life.
In his interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme this last week the Malaysian foreign minister played as adept a game of denial as any of our spokespersons here, when probed about the racist outcomes of that country’s Affirmative action programme: the model for our own. He dismissed the news as of no account that some major Funds managers in so-called Western markets were no longer putting money into Malaysia, in part because of the inherently destabilising effects of racially structured decision making in a global meritocratic market environment.
One remembers that Afrikaner politicians were equally dismissive of those who threatened financial hardship for the proponents of Apartheid. The present economic realignment taking place over the sub-prime meltdown will leave more than a few managers with a new risk averse profile; and places that court policies that are overtly divisive will lose position to those that are more solid, and local citizens will pay the penalty in the form of an interest rate structure [and other cost elements] about one hundred percent more expensive to operate in than those prevailing amongst many of our most able competitors.
“Nice” people will increasingly shun dealings with overt racists and those who bully their ‘victims’ This fate is befalling Israel who are finding few friend in dark times Gradually the only ‘friends’ the new partners of avarice will have left in a world made razor rapacious by the globalisation trend, will be those ‘honorary’ ‘former disadvantaged clusters called: ‘’the emerging Asian giants, who are themselves flexing 19th century, ‘robber-baron’ pretensions and somehow seem to have emerged from oppression with a more efficient, or perhaps useful, battery of skills than we have at our end of the planet; where we seem to have become bogged down in a form of proxy conflict called crime and corruption. But which may more appropriately represent an evolved form of Resentiment, to use Nietzsche’s term.
Those who ignore the signs that tripped us up in the past because they are blinded by the mote called denial are doomed to pass them again and again. There are rumours that the Mozambicans who grow cashew nuts struggle to break into markets ‘they’ [Mozambique] once controlled; because many of the markets today, thirty six years after the revolution, are supplied and dominated by the descendents of those who were dispossessed back then and driven out of their farms and holdings and presumably went off to grow these items elsewhere.
It was Groucho Marx I believe who said that one should always be polite to people when you are on your way up in the world since you never know when you are going to meet them again on your way back down.
Happy blogging
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf
Sometime last week I overheard an impassioned plea from that fellow Swerdlow, who broadcasts theatre and movie critiques on the radio. I hadn’t listened to the context; all I got was a plea to “save theatre in Johannesburg”. Go and see some live theatre over the next two weeks, he said, if you want to save live theatre in Johannesburg, or something to that effect. I was moved.
I was once a fanatical fan of the theatre. I even had a part-ownership of an immensely, internationally successful theatre company: The Sundown Theatre Company, for a number of years. I’ve played Mark Anthony, Frederick Nietzsche and Arthur Bell, the Whiskey man, the latter in live impro’ theatre. I even won a few bits and pieces of illusory instants and some gratuitously favourable reviews from respected critics. My company produced the first ever multiracial production of Othello on the Continent, and I directed a production of Soyinka’s work, “Kongi’s Harvest” that spawned an entire community theatre movement. Eventually my partner went to Australia and I came here and discovered that there was barely any theatre at all in Jozi, that amounted to much. I pottered a bit.
I took a show to Grahamstown in ’87, it played to full houses and toured around the local neighbourhood for a year. It was a one man, double bill, called SollyK. In other words I played both parts, one under my own name and one, under the name AN Akter. My favourite review for that show was from the fellow who said “a tour de force… I was half way through the second piece before I realised that AN Akter was the same person who played in the first piece.” I had achieved my goal: the total immersion of self into the character to the extent that the hidden "me" was almost obliterated; and it had been recognised.
So I retired. Always quit when you are ahead. The audiences for real theatre had almost finally died. When they all go to Grahamstown it looks like a lot; but there are amasses of isolates; lonely people out there starving in the suburbs. The inevitable effect of the playwright’s international boycott was to kill the Theatre, which was what it was supposed to do. There was nothing left by the end of the eighties but one-dimensional “tits n bums” stuff… congenial formulaic pap to distract, maybe even misdirect, the masses… and of course the all-consuming “Protest theatre” with its strident one dimensional polemic; still wailing. I trained as an economist, Indifference curves are a part of my bloodstream.
I had no intention of ending up like the late Bill Whatsisname, who dropped dead the other day at a young age: an artistic genius, crushed by the overwhelming amount of crap he had to perform to earn a random buck. I’d sucked the best from the marrow.
So I moved on to more interesting, more substantial avenues. [I am though being currently tempted with an offer to play Socrates, I suspect the director wants to workshop the thing, although she assures me there is a script with traditional chorus and voices. I am most skeptical about this new collectivist approach to writing that has insidiously become our substitute for creative genius, so I don’t know how I feel about that Socrates thing yet. He is one of the few roles I would come out of retirement to play. And anyway, Socrates, like Nietzsche, would be a private performance for a guest audience… everything by invitation only. There is no mass market for Socrates … for better or worse. However should you come to see Socrates, and I shall give you an invitation, then you won’t see me: for I shall have become Socrates, in the same way that I became Nietzsche, Marc Anthony: “Pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth that I am meek and gentle with these… butchers”, the “fiery Tybalt… and a long line of others.
Anyway…I am obviously becoming old and maudlin… I ramble.]
So, frankly, I was largely unaware that there was any ‘real’ live theatre left in Johannesburg. To me, Theatre is the serious stuff… The “tits n bums” fluffy, musical frolics that pass for theatre in most people’s minds, I think of simply as, live and diversionary, invariably agreeable, entertainment… it is not Theatre. Theatre is frequently disagreeable.
Real theatre is the stuff of the mind: moving awareness through powerful and convincing, realistic ‘Stanislavskian’ performance, sometimes, wierd and random means; on others, and always solid text and a potent sub-text..
Real theatre was never “big” at any time in Jozi’s city history; Stanislavsky is too demanding for a town dedicated to generating quick turnover. Nonetheless it did have a small and passionate following, like most normal major cities, that is until; it was murdered by passionate revolutionaries who, like all autocrats, rushed to close the doors to awareness.
So I was surprised by Swerdlow’s passionate plea, and I thought okay… why not ‘do our bit’? And if we were looking for food for the mind then who better than Albee; and what could be more absorbing than this giant domestic tragedy about a woman’s conflict between her love for her father and obsessive need to impress him, and “Daddy’s Girl’s” intense disappointment with the way her life had evolved; and the traps she had thus created out of her life. She is a character playing, with an acute unawareness, the game of “if it weren’t for you”: one of the most deadly of all our human games.
Thus, primed; a couple of nights ago I went with my own [youngest] daughter and her friends to see “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” [by Edward Albee] at the Market Theatre, downtown: not my favourite nighttime journey; but I’ll brave it for Albee.
She [my daughter] and her friends found the play absorbing, for some it was their first experience of serious theatre. They were entertained. It was a good, if somewhat dark, comedy they said. For myself I was disappointed. I felt suckered, and they were cheated. I thought we were going to see a professional performance of Albee’s Virginia Woolf, instead we saw a production by Janice Honeyman of another play with the same name and a different theme. I was crudely subjected to something reduced to the trite. In its worst moments [there were some excellent moments] it was as bad as some of the worst ‘amdram’, ‘Art of coarse acting’ thespishness it has been my misfortune to see in years.
I didn’t hear what Swerdlow actually said about this play, if he ever said anything. I walked in on his plea. I do hear him routinely savaging almost every movie that appears on circuit. I would regard any fulsome praise from Swerdlow for this ineffectual interpretation of Virginia Woolf as reflecting poorly on Swerdlow’s reputation. It would reveal him as something of a poseur… knocking all the foreign filmmakers while praising the people who bought him lunch last week. Still I didn’t hear what, or if, he said anything: so perhaps he also said it was a deeply flawed production.
Before I continue I should say that I have over the course of my life seen a number of different performances of this play. More specifically I have seen the definitive Richard Burton/ Elizabeth Taylor version about four times, and at least three amateur or semi- professional productions in different parts of the world plus a stunning interpretation produced by my competition in the Theatre business, way back when. I should also say that had the performance, featuring Sean Taylor in the lead role of George; and Fiona Ramsay playing Martha, been performed by, say, the Roodepoort Amateur Dramatic Society [assuming there is such an organisation] then I would have said “Bravo”: well tried.
But it wasn’t. What we saw was allegedly a professional production for which the actors were presumably paid. Well sorry; I feel I should have my money back. If this mangled interpretation is what we are to expect from a rejuvenating theatre structure then I am not sure I want to support it.
As far as I could work out Virginia Woolf is a failed production derived from a failed vision. It is entertaining and lively, and everybody on stage has a great deal of fun. It is almost ‘Commercial’. It is however directed by a theatrical dilettante with the vision of a pantomime specialist.
When and if, I go to the theatre I want to see theatre: not pantomime… an art form that I despise. The Director Janice Honeyman lacked either the vision or the guts to play this text for real and settled instead for a mincing attempt at high camp comedy, something the text was not designed for. The result was that half the cast [of four] were doing their intense ‘method structured’ thing immersed in the pain of the text and doing it well; and the other half were in some other production that was somewhere between Happy families and The Fairy Queen Panto show. The result was to distort the play and subtract from its power by reducing it to an absurd piece of kitchen sink banality.
For those unfamiliar with Albee’s “Virginia Woolf”: it is a savage, brutal and terrifyingly realistic interpretation of a dysfunctional marriage. We [SA] are a society with one of the world’s highest rates of spousal abuse arguably, so we should know a great deal about dysfunctional, abusive marriages.
What we were presented with was a dysfunctional interpretation of one of the finest examples of modern realism in the theatrical lexicon, a play of immense power in which the title roles are forever mediated by the legendary performances of Burton and Taylor.
As I said, I have seen this play performed at various different venues over the past three decades; and have never seen it as poorly interpreted as it was at the market theatre last night. Frankly I found it testimony to the starvation induced by the long theatre boycott of our country that so many members of the audience actually rose to their feet at the end to applaud the performers, presumably for their endurance in handling the demanding three hour script, perhaps because they were relieved at being able to stand at last, and sadly because, being a young audience they knew no better… It was significant that older members of the audience remained seated.
Why do I believe it was dysfunctional?
First off, the play is a serious piece of realist theatre with a great deal of bitter irony, which is often unexpectedly humorous. When you laugh, you laugh for relief from the unbearable tension induced by Albee’s antagonistic lead players not because we are watching farce.
Ms Honeyman’s interpretation has the title role of George, well played by Sean Taylor who plays for real and is completely believable. In fact he is superb, with some issues related to vocal range being his core blemish. On the other hand he is not the main lead character: Martha is. Martha, played by Fiona Ramsay is a legendary character. Martha is Leona Helmsley on steroids, the “Queen of mean” on a bad rotten day. Martha’s character does not veer between ‘nice guy’ and ‘little miss nasty’. At her best she is mean, vicious and spiteful… and she just gets worse and worse and worse like someone uncontrollably vomiting: one of the play’s potent symbols, until the ultimate dénouement and the unraveling: when she discovers the possibility, an uncertain possibility, of redemption.
Ramsey simply doesn’t cope with this … Or perhaps it is Honeyman who doesn’t cope. Ramsey makes a valiant effort, but she is not living in her part, she slips in and out of character and we are all too aware that she is madly ‘acting’. Maybe she is jumping around doing a dozen other gigs each day and she has difficulty staying focused. She plays the role as “Little miss Nice girl” with a happy breezy smile that pops up irritatingly, often enough to give the lie to the violence we are witnessing. It’s as though she or Honeyman the Director, thinks the play is a drawing room comedy with a bit of ‘nasty’ now and again: “Hello we are going to have fun with the Guests”, and the audience is confused, whether we are in a comedy or a tragedy… not knowing .
Maybe Ramsey is simply miscast. When there is only one actress in town it is hardly possible to play everything just because there is no one else. She demonstrated neither the gravitas nor the vocal range to cope with this most demanding of roles. I regret that, because I had always considered her to be one of the few remaining heavies left in town.
Maybe this interpretation was Honeyman’s genuflection to the tide of “female-as-male-dominated- victim” syndrome that is part of our national conversation. It was an error; on a par with changing the character of Shylock because you didn’t want to offend Jewish sensibilities. The effect was [ironically] to turn Taylor into the Star and simultaneously make him the ‘bad guy’.
Ramsay thus gives a lightweight uncommitted walk-thru performance; littered with coy little ‘smiley faces’ suggesting that this conflict to which we are witness is simply a charade to entertain their guests: thereby completely losing the plot, sub-text and all.
Martha is not a games player, everything she does is for real. At a practical level the character [Martha], as created by Albee, is too inherently unaware of herself to conceive of consciously "games playing": she does it reflexively, like we all do. … Her vicious, mean, devious character is mediated by her obsession with her father and her rage; that her choice of husband has so completely disappointed her father: and therefore terminally humiliated her. Her feelings for her husband are submerged; one could say, “swamped” by her humiliation. She is locked into her patterns of behaviour and can no more see herself as others see her than you or I can see ourselves. This is what makes her an inherently tragic character. Ms Ramsey is simply too ‘nice’. Her character becomes an object of pity not tragedy, and that puts us into a completely different genre.
One notices that Janice Honeyman the director of this performance is simultaneously, or maybe contemporaneously, directing her annual pantomime. One suspects that her lack of commitment to the harsh, demanding interpretive world of method performance is fatally undermined by this amateurish conflict of interest. This conflict is demonstrated most grotesquely in her lackadaisical interpretation of the third character in this four hander: Nick, played by Nicholas Pauling.
Pauling has an evident yearning to play the traditional fairy queen, or similar in one of Honeyman’s pantomimes; maybe it will pay better. He hams his way recklessly through the script with a feckless, camp abandonment, posturing and pouting on a scale that would be better suited to the Barnyard, than to the Market. He was embarrassing.
To compound the directorial error: the forth character in this four part ensemble, “Honey”, played with committed competence by Erica Wessels, has to perform with a script that has been carefully mangled to completely eviscerate her role… For some inexplicable reason Honeyman has chosen to excise two of her scenes from the text. These are two critical ‘explanatory’ scenes. The effect of the excisions is that she is reduced to a one-dimensional cipher, and we, the audience, are left in bemused wonder at her condition. We are therefore unable to deduce that this second, younger couple’s relationship mirrors, faithfully the tracks followed by their seniors.
Inevitably Honeyman’s interpretation plays along one octave, when the text demands the entire keyboard.
I am not going to dwell on the awfulness of the fake American voices adopted by the entire cast. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the events happen in the USA so why these roaming dialects? I don’t understand why South African actors who are juggling half a dozen jobs at a time, attempt to perform in a language they are not competent to explore, nor prepared to devote time to perfecting… we do listen to the real thing every day on TV. This production could and should have been set in Jo'burg. Presumably Honeyman was so intent on how much money she could garner from the Christmas Panto’ that it never occurred to her that a locally set Virginia Woolf could blow the city apart.
I am also puzzled that Honeyman chose to set the refrain “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” to the seemingly obvious “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf” tune that Albee originally had in mind; when copyright diktats [Disney own the rights to the “Big Bad Wolf” music] have always determined that the refrain is set to “Here we go around the mulberry bush”… Presumably Disney has waived their interest.
So in conclusion; using the Burton/Taylor combo as the definitive, “ten out of ten” version, that mediates all subsequent interpretations of this grim and formidable piece of work, I would award Sean Taylor an 8 for his interpretation, with caveats to his surprisingly limited vocal range, another directorial error, since a man of his obvious commitment, skill and experience would surely have been able to extend it, where it was demanded from the text; had it been called for. Ms Ramsay gets a 2. The character called Nick played by Pauling gets nought, zero, zilch: in a genuine market we would have pelted him with tomatoes. Erica Wessels who plays Honey managed a creditable 7.
Janice Honeyman gets a 1 for effort.
Do I think, having seen this that we should abandon the idea of viewing live shows, and notwithstanding Swerdlow’s emotional plea, let the theatre succumb to its most obvious death throes? No… we must persevere and hope it gets better… it is our human condition. We must nurture the gentle flame.
And in spite of what I have said at the beginning and throughout, I do think you should see this production, if only for the rare experience of Mr. Albee’s brilliant script, and Mr. Taylor’s generally competent, absorbing and enjoyable interpretation of it.
Keep on blogging
Other work by NiK can be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
I was once a fanatical fan of the theatre. I even had a part-ownership of an immensely, internationally successful theatre company: The Sundown Theatre Company, for a number of years. I’ve played Mark Anthony, Frederick Nietzsche and Arthur Bell, the Whiskey man, the latter in live impro’ theatre. I even won a few bits and pieces of illusory instants and some gratuitously favourable reviews from respected critics. My company produced the first ever multiracial production of Othello on the Continent, and I directed a production of Soyinka’s work, “Kongi’s Harvest” that spawned an entire community theatre movement. Eventually my partner went to Australia and I came here and discovered that there was barely any theatre at all in Jozi, that amounted to much. I pottered a bit.
I took a show to Grahamstown in ’87, it played to full houses and toured around the local neighbourhood for a year. It was a one man, double bill, called SollyK. In other words I played both parts, one under my own name and one, under the name AN Akter. My favourite review for that show was from the fellow who said “a tour de force… I was half way through the second piece before I realised that AN Akter was the same person who played in the first piece.” I had achieved my goal: the total immersion of self into the character to the extent that the hidden "me" was almost obliterated; and it had been recognised.
So I retired. Always quit when you are ahead. The audiences for real theatre had almost finally died. When they all go to Grahamstown it looks like a lot; but there are amasses of isolates; lonely people out there starving in the suburbs. The inevitable effect of the playwright’s international boycott was to kill the Theatre, which was what it was supposed to do. There was nothing left by the end of the eighties but one-dimensional “tits n bums” stuff… congenial formulaic pap to distract, maybe even misdirect, the masses… and of course the all-consuming “Protest theatre” with its strident one dimensional polemic; still wailing. I trained as an economist, Indifference curves are a part of my bloodstream.
I had no intention of ending up like the late Bill Whatsisname, who dropped dead the other day at a young age: an artistic genius, crushed by the overwhelming amount of crap he had to perform to earn a random buck. I’d sucked the best from the marrow.
So I moved on to more interesting, more substantial avenues. [I am though being currently tempted with an offer to play Socrates, I suspect the director wants to workshop the thing, although she assures me there is a script with traditional chorus and voices. I am most skeptical about this new collectivist approach to writing that has insidiously become our substitute for creative genius, so I don’t know how I feel about that Socrates thing yet. He is one of the few roles I would come out of retirement to play. And anyway, Socrates, like Nietzsche, would be a private performance for a guest audience… everything by invitation only. There is no mass market for Socrates … for better or worse. However should you come to see Socrates, and I shall give you an invitation, then you won’t see me: for I shall have become Socrates, in the same way that I became Nietzsche, Marc Anthony: “Pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth that I am meek and gentle with these… butchers”, the “fiery Tybalt… and a long line of others.
Anyway…I am obviously becoming old and maudlin… I ramble.]
So, frankly, I was largely unaware that there was any ‘real’ live theatre left in Johannesburg. To me, Theatre is the serious stuff… The “tits n bums” fluffy, musical frolics that pass for theatre in most people’s minds, I think of simply as, live and diversionary, invariably agreeable, entertainment… it is not Theatre. Theatre is frequently disagreeable.
Real theatre is the stuff of the mind: moving awareness through powerful and convincing, realistic ‘Stanislavskian’ performance, sometimes, wierd and random means; on others, and always solid text and a potent sub-text..
Real theatre was never “big” at any time in Jozi’s city history; Stanislavsky is too demanding for a town dedicated to generating quick turnover. Nonetheless it did have a small and passionate following, like most normal major cities, that is until; it was murdered by passionate revolutionaries who, like all autocrats, rushed to close the doors to awareness.
So I was surprised by Swerdlow’s passionate plea, and I thought okay… why not ‘do our bit’? And if we were looking for food for the mind then who better than Albee; and what could be more absorbing than this giant domestic tragedy about a woman’s conflict between her love for her father and obsessive need to impress him, and “Daddy’s Girl’s” intense disappointment with the way her life had evolved; and the traps she had thus created out of her life. She is a character playing, with an acute unawareness, the game of “if it weren’t for you”: one of the most deadly of all our human games.
Thus, primed; a couple of nights ago I went with my own [youngest] daughter and her friends to see “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” [by Edward Albee] at the Market Theatre, downtown: not my favourite nighttime journey; but I’ll brave it for Albee.
She [my daughter] and her friends found the play absorbing, for some it was their first experience of serious theatre. They were entertained. It was a good, if somewhat dark, comedy they said. For myself I was disappointed. I felt suckered, and they were cheated. I thought we were going to see a professional performance of Albee’s Virginia Woolf, instead we saw a production by Janice Honeyman of another play with the same name and a different theme. I was crudely subjected to something reduced to the trite. In its worst moments [there were some excellent moments] it was as bad as some of the worst ‘amdram’, ‘Art of coarse acting’ thespishness it has been my misfortune to see in years.
I didn’t hear what Swerdlow actually said about this play, if he ever said anything. I walked in on his plea. I do hear him routinely savaging almost every movie that appears on circuit. I would regard any fulsome praise from Swerdlow for this ineffectual interpretation of Virginia Woolf as reflecting poorly on Swerdlow’s reputation. It would reveal him as something of a poseur… knocking all the foreign filmmakers while praising the people who bought him lunch last week. Still I didn’t hear what, or if, he said anything: so perhaps he also said it was a deeply flawed production.
Before I continue I should say that I have over the course of my life seen a number of different performances of this play. More specifically I have seen the definitive Richard Burton/ Elizabeth Taylor version about four times, and at least three amateur or semi- professional productions in different parts of the world plus a stunning interpretation produced by my competition in the Theatre business, way back when. I should also say that had the performance, featuring Sean Taylor in the lead role of George; and Fiona Ramsay playing Martha, been performed by, say, the Roodepoort Amateur Dramatic Society [assuming there is such an organisation] then I would have said “Bravo”: well tried.
But it wasn’t. What we saw was allegedly a professional production for which the actors were presumably paid. Well sorry; I feel I should have my money back. If this mangled interpretation is what we are to expect from a rejuvenating theatre structure then I am not sure I want to support it.
As far as I could work out Virginia Woolf is a failed production derived from a failed vision. It is entertaining and lively, and everybody on stage has a great deal of fun. It is almost ‘Commercial’. It is however directed by a theatrical dilettante with the vision of a pantomime specialist.
When and if, I go to the theatre I want to see theatre: not pantomime… an art form that I despise. The Director Janice Honeyman lacked either the vision or the guts to play this text for real and settled instead for a mincing attempt at high camp comedy, something the text was not designed for. The result was that half the cast [of four] were doing their intense ‘method structured’ thing immersed in the pain of the text and doing it well; and the other half were in some other production that was somewhere between Happy families and The Fairy Queen Panto show. The result was to distort the play and subtract from its power by reducing it to an absurd piece of kitchen sink banality.
For those unfamiliar with Albee’s “Virginia Woolf”: it is a savage, brutal and terrifyingly realistic interpretation of a dysfunctional marriage. We [SA] are a society with one of the world’s highest rates of spousal abuse arguably, so we should know a great deal about dysfunctional, abusive marriages.
What we were presented with was a dysfunctional interpretation of one of the finest examples of modern realism in the theatrical lexicon, a play of immense power in which the title roles are forever mediated by the legendary performances of Burton and Taylor.
As I said, I have seen this play performed at various different venues over the past three decades; and have never seen it as poorly interpreted as it was at the market theatre last night. Frankly I found it testimony to the starvation induced by the long theatre boycott of our country that so many members of the audience actually rose to their feet at the end to applaud the performers, presumably for their endurance in handling the demanding three hour script, perhaps because they were relieved at being able to stand at last, and sadly because, being a young audience they knew no better… It was significant that older members of the audience remained seated.
Why do I believe it was dysfunctional?
First off, the play is a serious piece of realist theatre with a great deal of bitter irony, which is often unexpectedly humorous. When you laugh, you laugh for relief from the unbearable tension induced by Albee’s antagonistic lead players not because we are watching farce.
Ms Honeyman’s interpretation has the title role of George, well played by Sean Taylor who plays for real and is completely believable. In fact he is superb, with some issues related to vocal range being his core blemish. On the other hand he is not the main lead character: Martha is. Martha, played by Fiona Ramsay is a legendary character. Martha is Leona Helmsley on steroids, the “Queen of mean” on a bad rotten day. Martha’s character does not veer between ‘nice guy’ and ‘little miss nasty’. At her best she is mean, vicious and spiteful… and she just gets worse and worse and worse like someone uncontrollably vomiting: one of the play’s potent symbols, until the ultimate dénouement and the unraveling: when she discovers the possibility, an uncertain possibility, of redemption.
Ramsey simply doesn’t cope with this … Or perhaps it is Honeyman who doesn’t cope. Ramsey makes a valiant effort, but she is not living in her part, she slips in and out of character and we are all too aware that she is madly ‘acting’. Maybe she is jumping around doing a dozen other gigs each day and she has difficulty staying focused. She plays the role as “Little miss Nice girl” with a happy breezy smile that pops up irritatingly, often enough to give the lie to the violence we are witnessing. It’s as though she or Honeyman the Director, thinks the play is a drawing room comedy with a bit of ‘nasty’ now and again: “Hello we are going to have fun with the Guests”, and the audience is confused, whether we are in a comedy or a tragedy… not knowing .
Maybe Ramsey is simply miscast. When there is only one actress in town it is hardly possible to play everything just because there is no one else. She demonstrated neither the gravitas nor the vocal range to cope with this most demanding of roles. I regret that, because I had always considered her to be one of the few remaining heavies left in town.
Maybe this interpretation was Honeyman’s genuflection to the tide of “female-as-male-dominated- victim” syndrome that is part of our national conversation. It was an error; on a par with changing the character of Shylock because you didn’t want to offend Jewish sensibilities. The effect was [ironically] to turn Taylor into the Star and simultaneously make him the ‘bad guy’.
Ramsay thus gives a lightweight uncommitted walk-thru performance; littered with coy little ‘smiley faces’ suggesting that this conflict to which we are witness is simply a charade to entertain their guests: thereby completely losing the plot, sub-text and all.
Martha is not a games player, everything she does is for real. At a practical level the character [Martha], as created by Albee, is too inherently unaware of herself to conceive of consciously "games playing": she does it reflexively, like we all do. … Her vicious, mean, devious character is mediated by her obsession with her father and her rage; that her choice of husband has so completely disappointed her father: and therefore terminally humiliated her. Her feelings for her husband are submerged; one could say, “swamped” by her humiliation. She is locked into her patterns of behaviour and can no more see herself as others see her than you or I can see ourselves. This is what makes her an inherently tragic character. Ms Ramsey is simply too ‘nice’. Her character becomes an object of pity not tragedy, and that puts us into a completely different genre.
One notices that Janice Honeyman the director of this performance is simultaneously, or maybe contemporaneously, directing her annual pantomime. One suspects that her lack of commitment to the harsh, demanding interpretive world of method performance is fatally undermined by this amateurish conflict of interest. This conflict is demonstrated most grotesquely in her lackadaisical interpretation of the third character in this four hander: Nick, played by Nicholas Pauling.
Pauling has an evident yearning to play the traditional fairy queen, or similar in one of Honeyman’s pantomimes; maybe it will pay better. He hams his way recklessly through the script with a feckless, camp abandonment, posturing and pouting on a scale that would be better suited to the Barnyard, than to the Market. He was embarrassing.
To compound the directorial error: the forth character in this four part ensemble, “Honey”, played with committed competence by Erica Wessels, has to perform with a script that has been carefully mangled to completely eviscerate her role… For some inexplicable reason Honeyman has chosen to excise two of her scenes from the text. These are two critical ‘explanatory’ scenes. The effect of the excisions is that she is reduced to a one-dimensional cipher, and we, the audience, are left in bemused wonder at her condition. We are therefore unable to deduce that this second, younger couple’s relationship mirrors, faithfully the tracks followed by their seniors.
Inevitably Honeyman’s interpretation plays along one octave, when the text demands the entire keyboard.
I am not going to dwell on the awfulness of the fake American voices adopted by the entire cast. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the events happen in the USA so why these roaming dialects? I don’t understand why South African actors who are juggling half a dozen jobs at a time, attempt to perform in a language they are not competent to explore, nor prepared to devote time to perfecting… we do listen to the real thing every day on TV. This production could and should have been set in Jo'burg. Presumably Honeyman was so intent on how much money she could garner from the Christmas Panto’ that it never occurred to her that a locally set Virginia Woolf could blow the city apart.
I am also puzzled that Honeyman chose to set the refrain “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” to the seemingly obvious “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf” tune that Albee originally had in mind; when copyright diktats [Disney own the rights to the “Big Bad Wolf” music] have always determined that the refrain is set to “Here we go around the mulberry bush”… Presumably Disney has waived their interest.
So in conclusion; using the Burton/Taylor combo as the definitive, “ten out of ten” version, that mediates all subsequent interpretations of this grim and formidable piece of work, I would award Sean Taylor an 8 for his interpretation, with caveats to his surprisingly limited vocal range, another directorial error, since a man of his obvious commitment, skill and experience would surely have been able to extend it, where it was demanded from the text; had it been called for. Ms Ramsay gets a 2. The character called Nick played by Pauling gets nought, zero, zilch: in a genuine market we would have pelted him with tomatoes. Erica Wessels who plays Honey managed a creditable 7.
Janice Honeyman gets a 1 for effort.
Do I think, having seen this that we should abandon the idea of viewing live shows, and notwithstanding Swerdlow’s emotional plea, let the theatre succumb to its most obvious death throes? No… we must persevere and hope it gets better… it is our human condition. We must nurture the gentle flame.
And in spite of what I have said at the beginning and throughout, I do think you should see this production, if only for the rare experience of Mr. Albee’s brilliant script, and Mr. Taylor’s generally competent, absorbing and enjoyable interpretation of it.
Keep on blogging
Other work by NiK can be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Bureaucracy, August holidays: and the old Achilles heel.
There is a sea change sweeping the planet presently. This change brings with it the reek of disaster for many; and a gradual drift into a new era of bloc behaviour. This is happening, perhaps as an inevitable outcome of rapid paced globalisation. Or maybe it is an equally inevitable outcome of the rise of corporate capitalist power on a scale even the majestic Ayn Rand could not have conceptualised: Mercantilism on steroids.
It may even be that the real seeds of disaster for many of the planet’s occupants lie in the bureaucratic structures that have come into existence to serve our modern society and these labyrinthine global corporatocracies. These bureaucracies have seemingly become self-serving to an extent that we only really notice when disaster strikes and nothing happens, as we noticed two years ago with Katrina, two weeks ago with an earthquake in Peru and most recently in Greece where the country blazed while the bureaucrats snoozed..
Not that there is anything new about bureaucracy or its ability to paralyse action. It was after all the core theme of Ms Rand’s disturbingly prophetic book “Atlas Shrugged”. It also doesn’t matter where you are in the world the suffocating dead hand of bureaucracy is making your life miserable somehow, somewhere.
This sea change on the planet is also a post 9/11 thing; bringing with it America’s revealed impotence in Iraq. We are witness to the growing threat of a protectionist backlash from the USA. Having erred so spectacularly in the Middle East they now show signs of pulling off the world stage in something of a huff. Perhaps the bureaucrats in Washington are unable to handle the asymmetrical conflict in Iraq. Taking Katrina, the post-invasion failures in Iraq and the reported disintegration of its infrastructure the sense that America is bureaucratically paralysed is disturbingly evident to anyone who has tried using their airline system lately [or anyone else’s for that matter]
So what has this got to do with August?
Think about this past August. It was a pretty packed month, so much happened that it is hard to remember even the key things, if there can be key things in a world of chaos where a butterfly flapping in Peru as they say [or perhaps more appositely an earthquake crashing in Peru] can impact on a man crashing his car into a tree 10,000 kilometres away… that’s the theory anyway.
Okay. So the minor points then were a sharp global financial mini-meltdown as a load of seriously disturbed lending practices came home to roost. The contagion raged for days before someone somewhere did something to ease the pain for a moment. Undoubtedly this period of “correction” is not over.
Then there were the Greek fires, that raged uncontrollably for days while all those charged with putting them out were looking for the means to do so. According to a number of Greek holiday returnees interviewed on Wednesday this week in Jozi by one of my sources: “No one knew what to do and no one would make any decisions.”
In between this somewhere, that new Russian autocrat Putin lodged a spectacular claim on the Arctic region that had the planet floundering… and the corporate bureaucrats of all those governments implicitly involved blustered instantly before collapsing into a lethargic dis-response. True to misdirected form the bureaucrats dithered over Canada’s claim to the newly unfrozen Northwest Passage and ignored the rude Mr Putin or perhaps they, being inherently timid yes men [sorry, yes persons] will desperately avoid the bully.
At a far more minor and personal scale a little boy playing soccer with his mates on the grounds of a Liverpool Public drinking house [in the UK] was, apparently randomly, shot dead on ‘his’ playground by, allegedly, a teenage boy. Sky TV has railed against the rising tide of youth violence occurring in Britain and a local report here on various radio stations this august month spoke of rising youth anger and violence in SA, where during this past week more than 60 Metro Police were called to stop a gang fighting with knives and broken bottles at [ironically] Liverpool Secondary school, and a group of boys at Four Ways school were stabbed in a random argument, allegedly over a two rand coin [roughly 14 US cents]. [Presumably we should be happy that the weaponry was so “traditional” one often expects AK47’s, although these were used to slaughter a number of policemen locally]
Elsewhere mobs of schoolchildren rampaged through the city streets, put roadblocks up in different parts of the country and forced schools in poor neighbourhoods to close down completely in some regions for a few weeks. The education department managed to rouse themselves after about a fortnight to get a court interdict against the striking student but other than that no one wants to deal with their problem…. Perhaps their problem cannot be dealt with?
I would suggest that all of these events are symptomatic of the increasingly dead hand of bureaucracy and what happens when things go wrong.
Which brings us back to August.
For us here in the South there is nothing all that spectacular about August, is there? It’s the month when we struggle to escape winter. It’s the dry firestorm month. And it’s private school holidays. Rumour has it that the overwhelming majority of our new leadership in SA send their kids to some of the many thousands of private schools that have proliferated in SA since “94. Perhaps that is why no one noticed that the schools in poor neighbourhoods were on strike.
On the other side of the planet: the big part where most of the world’s action takes place, August is holiday month deluxe. The summer holidays are not the best time of the year for a crisis in the Northern hemisphere. The First World War for instance started in August, so did the second, if one assumes that it formally started with Hitler’s ultimatum to Poland over the Danzig corridor that took place on August 29th, following weeks of ineffectual negotiations. Some argue that Hitler chose the time on purpose.
In August everyone important is away in some fashionable place on holiday, and if they aren’t then; according to “Alex” the apocryphal Business Day cartoonist, they are not taking calls: in case someone realises they aren’t away.
There are historians who argue that the complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations during that fateful few weeks between the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 was a consequence of the fact that almost every important decision making person was either on holiday or preparing to go on holiday that August and was hence incommunicado.
Similarly we could infer that the financial fatcats who have been creaming billions in illusory video money over the past few years of glorious excess, are slowly realising that they are [relatively] poor [suddenly]. You will remember that the fall in the market happened in two stages. One senses that the first assault occurred while the boss was off somewhere on his motorised sailing boat and the first round of was handled by standardised computer sell triggers with flunkeys overseeing the crisis.
Then later when many had dragged themselves back to reality and the chaps at the Fed got in from the rest camps at which they were lagging, there was a sudden second wave, and, one suspects once the sobered and renewed boss class gets around to seriously evaluating the reality of the new situation we will see the market decline further until it returns to value rather than some fanciful pretentious imaginary model, as Mr Buffett put it this week..
In Greece the problem was much like what we witnessed two years ago [during August] when Katrina destroyed … what was that place again… ah it’s gone… I can’t remember … a big American city.
Greece blazed and no one could be told what to do, so no one [other than the affected citizens] was permitted to act. Interestingly the Economist observed this week that most of the reconstruction work in that Katrina destroyed Gulf city is driven by private initiative: the bureaucracy having collapsed in a corruption mired heap.
The issue of rising youth violence in Britain and South Africa [and maybe other places as well] is more subtle, but is arguably due to the encroaching dead hand of bureaucracy that has effectively eradicated all hope of preferment for millions of poor and disadvantaged citizens, who find themselves in bleak circumstances propped up with the reasonably valid belief that advancement has more to do with connections than merit.
Ironically the bureaucracy was intended to do exactly the opposite.
For those who watch those ghastly paeans to human sacrifice that we call reality television the process whereby ‘bureaucracy’ grinds out the most assertive, difficult or spontaneous contestants, is an illuminating example of what happens inside bureaucratic structures. The winner is most frequently the best of the mediocrities. The one who sucks up the most or offends the least. Maybe this is inevitable.
It certainly seems to be true of the circumstance that finds us struggling to cope with adversity, particularly in the holiday season. To the extent that bureaucracies all over the world are increasingly loaded with people who “fit in” or “get along” and to the extent that the encroaching tentacles of the Bureaucratic corporate State become ever more real to that extent are we paralysed by an absence of leadership when the wheels come off the plan, and things go wrong.
If there has been one phrase that has cropped up routinely this month whether on the McLachlan group’s evaluation of the infrastructure crisis that faces the USA to the financial market meltdown, to comment on the Greek fires problem and certainly in respect of our own response to the growing schools crisis in our own country it is this idea of an absence of leadership.
And this is inevitable… Our bureaucratically structured world does not want leaders who announce their intention to change the world…look what we got with Dubya… it calls for negotiators. As I write this, a man called Kreuger [sic] is telling an interviewer on CNBC Asia that he doesn’t lead his team [he is a regional chief executive for BMW in Asia] rather he works with them as one of the team and they negotiate their strategies together. It goes without saying that a corrolary to this epidemic of corporatised decision making through intense negotiation is also mediated by the ever encroaching issue of legal liability for a wrong decision so that all to often lower order “flunkeys” dare not make decisions because it could nmean the end of their careers and in an age of declining employment opportunities that alone is a powerful disincentive to action.
And this is excellent. Except that when a hurricane hits town and the president is chilling on his farm [sorry, ranch] nothing happens and plenty of people die. When market’s meltdown and the punters are on break the meltdown continues, the fires burn and the kids break the schools. Under these conditions of stress the combination of bureaucracy, inept performance, cronyism and the all-engulfing global cancer of corruption renders almost all action nugatory.
There is nothing new about bureaucracies, as I mentioned before it is arguable that bureaucratic breakdown contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. However it is the sheer reach of bureaucracy in the digitalised wired age in which we now live that has rendered so many lower order operatives in “the system” impotent in the absence of direct instructions and simultaneously we are being assailed by a global epidemic of intensive disasters.
It has long been policy for many organisations that their executives do not travel together on the same aircraft in case of disaster. Perhaps the bureaucrats of the world need to start changing their holiday habits as well… cancel all leave from July to November hey… ja well no fine… didn’t the tsunami trigger happen on Christmas day when all the planet was on holiday? In fact come to think about it the bureaucrats at the top, who seem to be the only people allowed to make any decisions anymore for unplanned events, seem to be permanently on holiday.
Ayn Rand saw this collectivised decision making disintegrating as the source of her grande novel; she wrote a timeless script, based on the legend of Achilles.
Perhaps Eliot put it best when he wrote, “this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper”.
Keep on Blogging
NiK aka Blogroidnik the Blogospherian.
NiK’s work can also be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
It may even be that the real seeds of disaster for many of the planet’s occupants lie in the bureaucratic structures that have come into existence to serve our modern society and these labyrinthine global corporatocracies. These bureaucracies have seemingly become self-serving to an extent that we only really notice when disaster strikes and nothing happens, as we noticed two years ago with Katrina, two weeks ago with an earthquake in Peru and most recently in Greece where the country blazed while the bureaucrats snoozed..
Not that there is anything new about bureaucracy or its ability to paralyse action. It was after all the core theme of Ms Rand’s disturbingly prophetic book “Atlas Shrugged”. It also doesn’t matter where you are in the world the suffocating dead hand of bureaucracy is making your life miserable somehow, somewhere.
This sea change on the planet is also a post 9/11 thing; bringing with it America’s revealed impotence in Iraq. We are witness to the growing threat of a protectionist backlash from the USA. Having erred so spectacularly in the Middle East they now show signs of pulling off the world stage in something of a huff. Perhaps the bureaucrats in Washington are unable to handle the asymmetrical conflict in Iraq. Taking Katrina, the post-invasion failures in Iraq and the reported disintegration of its infrastructure the sense that America is bureaucratically paralysed is disturbingly evident to anyone who has tried using their airline system lately [or anyone else’s for that matter]
So what has this got to do with August?
Think about this past August. It was a pretty packed month, so much happened that it is hard to remember even the key things, if there can be key things in a world of chaos where a butterfly flapping in Peru as they say [or perhaps more appositely an earthquake crashing in Peru] can impact on a man crashing his car into a tree 10,000 kilometres away… that’s the theory anyway.
Okay. So the minor points then were a sharp global financial mini-meltdown as a load of seriously disturbed lending practices came home to roost. The contagion raged for days before someone somewhere did something to ease the pain for a moment. Undoubtedly this period of “correction” is not over.
Then there were the Greek fires, that raged uncontrollably for days while all those charged with putting them out were looking for the means to do so. According to a number of Greek holiday returnees interviewed on Wednesday this week in Jozi by one of my sources: “No one knew what to do and no one would make any decisions.”
In between this somewhere, that new Russian autocrat Putin lodged a spectacular claim on the Arctic region that had the planet floundering… and the corporate bureaucrats of all those governments implicitly involved blustered instantly before collapsing into a lethargic dis-response. True to misdirected form the bureaucrats dithered over Canada’s claim to the newly unfrozen Northwest Passage and ignored the rude Mr Putin or perhaps they, being inherently timid yes men [sorry, yes persons] will desperately avoid the bully.
At a far more minor and personal scale a little boy playing soccer with his mates on the grounds of a Liverpool Public drinking house [in the UK] was, apparently randomly, shot dead on ‘his’ playground by, allegedly, a teenage boy. Sky TV has railed against the rising tide of youth violence occurring in Britain and a local report here on various radio stations this august month spoke of rising youth anger and violence in SA, where during this past week more than 60 Metro Police were called to stop a gang fighting with knives and broken bottles at [ironically] Liverpool Secondary school, and a group of boys at Four Ways school were stabbed in a random argument, allegedly over a two rand coin [roughly 14 US cents]. [Presumably we should be happy that the weaponry was so “traditional” one often expects AK47’s, although these were used to slaughter a number of policemen locally]
Elsewhere mobs of schoolchildren rampaged through the city streets, put roadblocks up in different parts of the country and forced schools in poor neighbourhoods to close down completely in some regions for a few weeks. The education department managed to rouse themselves after about a fortnight to get a court interdict against the striking student but other than that no one wants to deal with their problem…. Perhaps their problem cannot be dealt with?
I would suggest that all of these events are symptomatic of the increasingly dead hand of bureaucracy and what happens when things go wrong.
Which brings us back to August.
For us here in the South there is nothing all that spectacular about August, is there? It’s the month when we struggle to escape winter. It’s the dry firestorm month. And it’s private school holidays. Rumour has it that the overwhelming majority of our new leadership in SA send their kids to some of the many thousands of private schools that have proliferated in SA since “94. Perhaps that is why no one noticed that the schools in poor neighbourhoods were on strike.
On the other side of the planet: the big part where most of the world’s action takes place, August is holiday month deluxe. The summer holidays are not the best time of the year for a crisis in the Northern hemisphere. The First World War for instance started in August, so did the second, if one assumes that it formally started with Hitler’s ultimatum to Poland over the Danzig corridor that took place on August 29th, following weeks of ineffectual negotiations. Some argue that Hitler chose the time on purpose.
In August everyone important is away in some fashionable place on holiday, and if they aren’t then; according to “Alex” the apocryphal Business Day cartoonist, they are not taking calls: in case someone realises they aren’t away.
There are historians who argue that the complete breakdown in diplomatic negotiations during that fateful few weeks between the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 was a consequence of the fact that almost every important decision making person was either on holiday or preparing to go on holiday that August and was hence incommunicado.
Similarly we could infer that the financial fatcats who have been creaming billions in illusory video money over the past few years of glorious excess, are slowly realising that they are [relatively] poor [suddenly]. You will remember that the fall in the market happened in two stages. One senses that the first assault occurred while the boss was off somewhere on his motorised sailing boat and the first round of was handled by standardised computer sell triggers with flunkeys overseeing the crisis.
Then later when many had dragged themselves back to reality and the chaps at the Fed got in from the rest camps at which they were lagging, there was a sudden second wave, and, one suspects once the sobered and renewed boss class gets around to seriously evaluating the reality of the new situation we will see the market decline further until it returns to value rather than some fanciful pretentious imaginary model, as Mr Buffett put it this week..
In Greece the problem was much like what we witnessed two years ago [during August] when Katrina destroyed … what was that place again… ah it’s gone… I can’t remember … a big American city.
Greece blazed and no one could be told what to do, so no one [other than the affected citizens] was permitted to act. Interestingly the Economist observed this week that most of the reconstruction work in that Katrina destroyed Gulf city is driven by private initiative: the bureaucracy having collapsed in a corruption mired heap.
The issue of rising youth violence in Britain and South Africa [and maybe other places as well] is more subtle, but is arguably due to the encroaching dead hand of bureaucracy that has effectively eradicated all hope of preferment for millions of poor and disadvantaged citizens, who find themselves in bleak circumstances propped up with the reasonably valid belief that advancement has more to do with connections than merit.
Ironically the bureaucracy was intended to do exactly the opposite.
For those who watch those ghastly paeans to human sacrifice that we call reality television the process whereby ‘bureaucracy’ grinds out the most assertive, difficult or spontaneous contestants, is an illuminating example of what happens inside bureaucratic structures. The winner is most frequently the best of the mediocrities. The one who sucks up the most or offends the least. Maybe this is inevitable.
It certainly seems to be true of the circumstance that finds us struggling to cope with adversity, particularly in the holiday season. To the extent that bureaucracies all over the world are increasingly loaded with people who “fit in” or “get along” and to the extent that the encroaching tentacles of the Bureaucratic corporate State become ever more real to that extent are we paralysed by an absence of leadership when the wheels come off the plan, and things go wrong.
If there has been one phrase that has cropped up routinely this month whether on the McLachlan group’s evaluation of the infrastructure crisis that faces the USA to the financial market meltdown, to comment on the Greek fires problem and certainly in respect of our own response to the growing schools crisis in our own country it is this idea of an absence of leadership.
And this is inevitable… Our bureaucratically structured world does not want leaders who announce their intention to change the world…look what we got with Dubya… it calls for negotiators. As I write this, a man called Kreuger [sic] is telling an interviewer on CNBC Asia that he doesn’t lead his team [he is a regional chief executive for BMW in Asia] rather he works with them as one of the team and they negotiate their strategies together. It goes without saying that a corrolary to this epidemic of corporatised decision making through intense negotiation is also mediated by the ever encroaching issue of legal liability for a wrong decision so that all to often lower order “flunkeys” dare not make decisions because it could nmean the end of their careers and in an age of declining employment opportunities that alone is a powerful disincentive to action.
And this is excellent. Except that when a hurricane hits town and the president is chilling on his farm [sorry, ranch] nothing happens and plenty of people die. When market’s meltdown and the punters are on break the meltdown continues, the fires burn and the kids break the schools. Under these conditions of stress the combination of bureaucracy, inept performance, cronyism and the all-engulfing global cancer of corruption renders almost all action nugatory.
There is nothing new about bureaucracies, as I mentioned before it is arguable that bureaucratic breakdown contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. However it is the sheer reach of bureaucracy in the digitalised wired age in which we now live that has rendered so many lower order operatives in “the system” impotent in the absence of direct instructions and simultaneously we are being assailed by a global epidemic of intensive disasters.
It has long been policy for many organisations that their executives do not travel together on the same aircraft in case of disaster. Perhaps the bureaucrats of the world need to start changing their holiday habits as well… cancel all leave from July to November hey… ja well no fine… didn’t the tsunami trigger happen on Christmas day when all the planet was on holiday? In fact come to think about it the bureaucrats at the top, who seem to be the only people allowed to make any decisions anymore for unplanned events, seem to be permanently on holiday.
Ayn Rand saw this collectivised decision making disintegrating as the source of her grande novel; she wrote a timeless script, based on the legend of Achilles.
Perhaps Eliot put it best when he wrote, “this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper”.
Keep on Blogging
NiK aka Blogroidnik the Blogospherian.
NiK’s work can also be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
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