OBE founders on Sub-Prime meltdown
Weblog
17 November
I heard on the radio that the government was reviewing the idea of the outcomes based education [OBE] system that reaches its climax this year with the so-called Matric Exam in South Africa. This is the final exam that sets out to evaluate and assess the performance of 600,000 kids who have just finished what was to all intents and purposes a storm of learning. That is it assesses the quality of the 6 out of 20 kids who made it through the grid from grade 1 to grade 12 in order to find the 1 % who will become the kernels of tomorrows leadership cadres
I find I have mixed feelings. I am filled with admiration for the sheer volume of work that this years Matrics represent. At the same time I am reminded of that classic comedy movie if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. Then I see a potentially fatal flaw in this scheme of things. The new matric curriculum is rather like a smorgasbord dinner where the guests taste a little bit of everything, remember, perhaps, the odd stand out dish, and then collapse exhausted into a deep sleep… from which they awaken with post-binge amnesia, and remember almost nothing of the meal other than whether it was fun or not.
The main difference between the smorgasbord dinner and our new smorgasbord education process is that every mouthful is to be assessed in terms of whether it was competently chosen, selected, tasted, spat out or eaten, as my friend Bergie puts it, having been involved with the process since its inception: “Too much emphasis is placed on correct administration, instead of ensuring that the outcomes have actually been met.” I’m sure that the organisers of the system would say that correct administration would ensure correct outcomes: for most of the learners. We will soon find out.
The kids are known formally as Learners, because they are there to learn… preferably by themselves and/or by co operation with others in their groups, with guidance, and help from the class manager, which completely changes their job from what it was in, say 1971, or even 1993. Then the Teacher led the learning process. Now the ‘classroom outcomes mediator’ sets the journey and then follows it. This in itself is a transformational change so radical that most of our society is unaware of its progress. One thing for which little credit has been shown is that the new ‘teacher’ needs to know vastly more about their designated learning area [‘subject’: in old language] than most ‘old school’, inaptly named “teachers”, are able to deliver.
There are more fancy words like facilitation and mediation, which apply to what they do. These suggest a more hands off approach to the schooling process than we are familiar with in our popular mythology of the classroom. So a modern ‘teacher’ is like a big classroom monitor who also manages the process and extracts learning excellence from the young humans in their charge… [And still has to be a teacher in the old fashioned sense because that is what they do…]. It is a fascinating and truly inspirational journey.
In effect the kids should be left alone to puzzle through things and figure out what they mean. Anyway no matter how it goes the results will not show up for years and by the time they do there will be almost no one who remembers how it was when the system produced the kinds of skills and knowledge needed for the old society.
This system is supposed to produce the minds and skills needed to make a high tech 21st century society work and function and adapt to the range of changes that face us; from alternate fuel transformation and biotechnology, to the greening of the planet: and coping with those shifts in the planets alignment with the multiverse that have induced so-called climate change.
So for now this is the system we have got and the authority is going to have to learn how to achieve the outcomes with eighty percent less paperwork because the outcome if they don’t is that they will have no classroom managers by 2020. As it is South Africa’s schools are coping, with the help of an increasing number of well-trained Zimbabwean teachers who, ironically do not follow the OBE system.
Will it work… will it produce that 5 –10 percent of future leaders and separate out the dross that is doomed to go nowhere… and what about the super-dross, those who fell by the wayside. And what happens to them? How does this almost unbelievable expense, about a quarter of the national budget, help the 1,4 million kids who stopped being learner on the way from grade 1… and who have just vanished into a collectivist maw?
Right now, notwithstanding an unemployment rate that sits in the upper twenty percent range the economy is short of about a quarter million trained and skilled personnel in all walks from accountants to aircraft technicians, electricians, plumbers, teachers and medical workers. The rate of attrition outweighs the rate of replacement by a considerable margin. Curiously the shortages of labour have not resulted in higher wages in those categories, if anything wages have declined: but that is another story altogether not to mention that it is a puzzle.
After years of figuring it out I declare that this super-controlled, elitist oriented, OBE system is too complicated, too soon, to produce the desired result. I also accept that the model that it replaced was too awful to remember. The results we are about to be shown will be massaged to make them credible and we know that we [the world] face a global economic meltdown because of a universal desire to ignore reality in the face of the inevitability of a sub prime meltdown.
OBE is in fact foundering on a sub-prime meltdown as millions of kids abandon the system and wreak their unruly revenge. By the time we have figured that out it may well be too late to be useful. Perhaps the philanthropic Mr Shuttleworth, who’s efforts in the field of digital education have featured in the press recently, will find a way to automate the learning and assessment process and leave everyone time for the real learning that takes place in schools.
KISS… the word that means, “Keep it Simple… Stupid” applies here.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Can Barak Obama change the world?
Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly had other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned through our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible, but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system: which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm.
Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… does contribute significantly to making this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The [US] Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. It's like cutting off a leg to service the body. The blind revenge factor is high, and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.Cheers
!nik is the Blogospherian.
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly had other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned through our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible, but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system: which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm.
Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… does contribute significantly to making this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The [US] Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. It's like cutting off a leg to service the body. The blind revenge factor is high, and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.Cheers
!nik is the Blogospherian.
The emperor is dead all hail the emperor.
Weblog: 9th November 2008
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.
2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.
The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.
Cheers
The Blogospherian.
Jozi
In my blogpiece “Joe the plumber” [see: earlier blog] I referred, among other things, to our newly beloved emperor of the Firmian planet, President elect Barak Obama, as a “plausible idiot”. I also suggested, you may remember that John Mc Cain was hovering on senility; and could die before the end of his term and did we really want to be lumbered with ‘that [ignorant] woman’. But neither of the latter got to be president and BO did.
I received some flak for that from people who felt I was too harsh. So: I have no issues with the man, my response was related to his performance in the debate: he had an opportunity to land a heavy blow that would stand him in good stead this time next year when everyone started hating him [maybe]and he ‘dropped it’. Did he drop it out of choice or by design or…quite possible … because... as a man who is not an economist, and quite frankly has other things on his mind, he, and his advisors simply do not understand the problem? …. Seems odd but we have learned our lifetimes that what we often thought was impossible turned out to be not only possible but prosaic.
So before I start I would like to add my congratulations to BO on his great achievement and note that he beat 12 other people for the job including some other black persons. He got 52 %of the vote and the other 12 people [some women] shared the other 48%. It is also possible that only an idiot would take on this job knowing that the deck is distinctly troublesome.
One other thing before we continue. Apparently some 53% of eligible voters in the United States of America [Firmia] voted; of whom marginally more than half voted for BO, the new President to be. So 52% of 53% is not a huge amount. It is not as if he achieved anything that remarkable [for all that he was the first black man to be elected President ] given all the hype and action… unprecedented in a nation awash with, and accustomed to, hype and action. Obviously his achievement does have a particular significance but that does not detract from how I perceived him.
So 47% of people did not think enough of the man to vote at all, and only slightly more than half preferred him to the “Addams family”.
The ‘Titanic’ is sinking. It has vast momentum to keep it lumbering for a good time but is taking water way above what it should. The two major parties in the USA are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a yin yang construct. Their purpose: To maintain and preserve the superstructure of the Vessel: the bank-debt contrived global financial illusion. Or if you prefer, the basic casino structured environment called the global financial system which is at heart, an illusion..
Please understand that in saying this I am not indicating disapproval. This is the system that works… or rather worked. The fundamental ‘self interest’ based motivation, of which Adam Smith wrote, has however mangled itself on an ocean of new distrust; and trust between humans once broken takes a long time to heal: far too slowly for a world predicated on instant communication and electronic money transfers that happen at the speed of thought.
The State now moves to centre stage in this new era, and has to take the place of the distrust, and it must become the guarantor of trust… the private sector, in the form of the so called “Cattle herder’ category [the financial services sector of the economy] has so completely screwed up their relationships, that they cannot even trust themselves nor each other. That they have lost a significant amount of credibility is inevitable. The State has now to become the guarantor of their trust and Mr Obama could be the man to exploit that advantage to a degree almost unimaginable even now.
But: back to the idiot thing and what it was that BO missed and why it revealed a gap in his expectation. Bear in mind that my comment was in the context of a debate. As [ I hope] we know, the essence of debate is rebuttal and counter argument.
Mr John “Vietnam Joe” Mc Cain raised the idea that Mr Obama was intending to raise taxes. You all heard him repeat this at rallies. Now he said it in the debate. Mr Obama did not use a riposte or a rebuttal but rather, skirted around the issue. This is understandable; it is a thorny issue and he is going to raise taxes: he has almost no choice. That is… none if he remains locked into the ancient, now punished, paradigm. Some margin exists if he takes the opportunity posed by the orders in disarray. He could take his party's original Jacksonian Revolution motivation: and give it steam it never had before, but uniquely does have now. Barak Obama is in a 'never before' position to bring a revolution to fruition that will totally change everything we have ever done.
So he was, to me, an idiot for passing up the essential rebuttal. Since you probably don’t remember what it was it should have gone something like this:
Vietnam Joe: I’m this tough American hero who’s been in the trenches and I say you [BO] don’t create wealth you redistribute it… You are going to steal Joe the Plumber’s wealth You’re a gonna raise them taxes.
BO I see: You do realise don’t you that your party… the so called party of ‘small government’ and ‘keep the taxes down’, just this month landed the country with a one trillion dollar back tax charged on all the goodies of your era, in arrears… So before you say that I’m [maybe] going to do the deed in the future let us not forget [respectfully] that it has already been done.
There are some variations on this … had he his wits about him “Cowboy Jack” Mc Cain would have [respectfully] pointed out that the de-regulation era began with that genius Clinton.
To which…
BO: Sure… but he left a 600 billion dollar surplus for the people and your guys stuck us for a trillion dollars worth of debt before October and now hit us with a trillion more this month.
He could then, depending on how he wanted to take the debate, have gone for the
kill shot whatever it was to be.
So like a coach who stands on the sidelines and watches his player fumble the shot
and hit the crossbar, my response, [derived from my decades of judging debates
around the region where I live], was ‘You idiot!’.
Debating is an intellectual contact sport and where the contenders are evenly matched, as they were, opportunities to land a telling blow are limited… his failure to take the opportunity
made him thus… an idiot.
Later of course I reviewed my response. He obviously skipped around the subject. He
was following a script. Of course [Smacks forehead: silly me!]: the entire show was
carefully scripted. ‘If he says this you say this; if he says that stay away from that:
that is a the fiery pit’. That is Tax. It is a fiery pit.
So does that make him a double idiot? a ventriloquist’s dummy?
What if neither he nor his handlers understood the nature of the curse that stands in his way ? BO has just inherited the most poisoned chalice ever received by any US President this past eighty years.
Right now I see a man being set up as a stooge by powerful vested interests. Does he take the opportunbity fate has provided or does he fumble the shot… much depends on who he asks to do his bidding. Do they [the minions] understand that we have reached one of history’s [our story’s] great turning points.
My hope, and that I am sure of all the rest of humanity, is that he proves them all wrong: and does actually bring change… Does contribute significantly to makeing this a more caring world. His margin for movement however, is so constrained as to make any attempt based on existing precedents at managing this type of economic change almost doomed to be stillborn: and in the holocaust of chaos that potentially awaits us in the wake of this current financial tsunami he could simply blow away on the wind and become a one term president… a ruined man.
Or he could do what a handful of his predecessors have done over the past two centuries. He could grasp the nettle with which he been provided and stun his enemies with it.
His formula would have to be counter-intuitive. This would mean he would have to do what no one expects… He would have to not only cut taxes but completely and radically change the entire philosophic base on which we consider tax.
He has two windows of opportunity right now that would enable a fast thinking, fast moving new president to act in an unprecedented manner.
1. The Government now owns a vast chunk of the financial cash flow system and can impose a
tough bargain.
2. Electronic money transfer is now a global reality.
The dramatic move would be to eradicate the existing concept of a tax on income, which breeds untold levels of corruption and creates so much distortion it is almost unfathomable and increasingly unmanageable.
It is only because we have a large body of opinion that sees the present progressive tax system as a way of punishing those who acquire wealth that we cannot see that it is an immensely inefficient way to raise the revenue needed to run societies. The blind revenge factor is high and while it used to be that there was no other way: that is no longer a valid argument.
Barak Obama could go down in history as the man who implemented the idea of replacing traditional income tax with a mini-micro levy on money transfers: going directly into the banking system, on which he now has a lien; and by taking a tiny drop of blood, and using the power of mass numbers, generate a routine regular stream of cash flow into the regulatory system that people will wonder why they never did that in the first place. [And you know they couldn’t because we did not run the world then on lightning fast electronic transfers.].
It is time to review Shambrook’s concept of the Total Economic Activity Levy as the inevitable evolution of the tax construct.
Now while i hope BO can deliver in this; my cynical observation is that he doesn’t understand it and that in the same way that he dropped the ball with his debate riposte, he will be diverted from the ball again by clever obfuscation, by economists with a vested interest in their present philosophies; and gradually my critics will have to reluctantly agree that the man was simply a ‘plausible idiot’.
For now of course we must give him sway… wait for an end to the hype and see what he can really deliver.
So for the moment we must believe in the hope that he says he believes in.
Cheers
The Blogospherian.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood
I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed and i count few people as friend.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to market networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, from many different places: all 'outies', who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the "wild fastnesses" of the region meet the equally "wild fastnesses" of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins; speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings; and nourished ourselves on healthy libations of nutricious liquids... I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again in this world.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed and i count few people as friend.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to market networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, from many different places: all 'outies', who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the "wild fastnesses" of the region meet the equally "wild fastnesses" of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins; speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings; and nourished ourselves on healthy libations of nutricious liquids... I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again in this world.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
In Memoriam: Ed Eastwood.
I began my blog this week with the idea that I would comment on the momentous changes sweeping the planet at this moment. In the world at large the biggest story is the global financial meltdown that will change the world, as we have known it, irrevocably.
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
It will bring with it the change agent known as Barack Obama who, unless some unintended intervention occurs, will, by next week, become the new leader of the global economy, with an agenda for change that could either paralyse the planet or bring us to a new promised land.
At home we are witnessing what would have been unthinkable only a year or two ago… The disintegration of the national ruling party and its fragmentation into competing vested interest groupings which may bring us to our own promised land: or may take us to a place we would rather not experience.
However all these thoughts were, this morning, overwhelmed with the arrival of the news that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Edward Eastwood aka Eduardo, or just plain Ed to most people, Edor to some; succumbed bravely to fatal lung cancer and apparently died, more or less as I was celebrating my 62nd birthday, earlier this past week. Ed, will be sorely missed by his friends and those who loved him.
I have never been a person who made friends easily. Growing up in a small town in the hell that was South Africa in the 1950’s was not conducive to friendship: more commonly friendships were invariably a prelude to betrayal, in a society wracked by the emotionally destructive guilt associated with denouncement and sell out to the evil practice of apartheid. Those scars have never healed. I count few persons among my friends.
I’m sure we all know the natural joy devolving from genuine friendships. They spring naturally from some spiritual affinity. They are uncompromised by those sub-textual, vested interests, which inevitably colour our adult associations: partisan friendship in an age devoted to marketing networking. Invariably the deepest friendships arise from our innocent years: when we are children, or perhaps students; before the harsh reality of harsh reality afflicts our judgements and turns us into bitter fellow travellers.
Eduardo was part of my student world… a world I have, in essence, refused to leave. He was a part of the Braamfontein Circle: a group of completely disparate friends, fellow undergrads’, who bonded, living on the edge of chronic poverty and permanent delight, in the festering, transforming, slum neighbourhood of Braamfontein; that bordered our great university: Wits, during those tumultuous years at the backend of the Sixties. We were pioneer squatters then, in the days before that word became germane to our development.
Like all such friendships ours endured even though we seldom saw each other and, notwithstanding the era of instant communication, spoke even more rarely. Ed travelled to the east and later worked as a factotum for the great Irish writer JP Donleavy who described Ed as a man who walked ‘many manic miles’: something Ed would refer to with great joy.
He returned to his native Limpopo province where he became an icon of the historical conservation industry, preserving, and lovingly capturing, the works of the many unknown and forgotten artists who plied their art on hundreds of rock walls all over the northern Limpopo region over many thousands of years.
Some five years ago we spent ten days together on the Makgabeng Plateau in the furthurest corner of our country; where the 'wild fastnesses' of the region meet the equally 'wild fastnesses' of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Here Eduardo had uncovered a glorious treasure trove of previously unknown rock paintings; and swore me to a secrecy about the place that I only now break. I can do this since he has subsequently published his superb magnum opus to those unknown wanderers whose works so prolifically litter the untrod corners of our country.
He met me at a service station cum bus stop on the outskirts of Makhado, the town in which he lived in the Limpopo. For many years he was the town ‘gardener’ and architect of the flowering glory that makes Makhado such a unique and memorable place. He was gently ironic about the controversial name change from the old SA name to the new/old name. It was given, he said, to respect an ancient warlord of the region, known and feared amongst minority groups in the area as one who would cast his enemies [the sad minorities] off the top of Hanglip: the mountain edge that towers and broods eerily over the town.
After briefly stopping, only to change to a prepped vehicle standing-by at his homestead on Bluegum Drive: up on the mountain some call sacred, we set off for the Makgabeng. Ed was the only other person I have ever known who was happy to toddle along at 60 Kph on a two hundred kilometre journey. It gave us time to natter about all those thousand things from walruses to sealing wax talked of by Lewis Carroll, stopping here and there at places familiar to him, where we consumed superbly dried wors: and other regional delicacies, both liquid and solid. Of course we talked for days about the world and its origins and speculated on the thoughts that made the paintings. I grieve that I shall not enjoy such a journey again.
Ed’s stunningly crafted book “Capturing the Spoor”, in which he collaborated with his beloved second wife Cathelijne, goes to the heart of Ed’s search for meaning in our deeply troubled country. His understanding of, and insight into, the metaphors that motivated those unknown artists, who expressed their anguish, and even their panic, at the changes that overcame their hunting grounds over a period of thousands of years: kaleidoscoping into our own age: was humbling. His sense of the mystery, at the nature of their world, now almost completely gone, will be sorely missed by his inopportune passing.
Ed Eastwood was not only my friend, and a man of extraordinary clarity of vision, who helped to facilitate some of the needed healing in our society; but he was uniquely a poet, almost the only other poet I have ever known. It is therefore as one poet to another that I close this memoriam to a dear friend by quoting one of my favourite pieces of his work.
Splitting Rooikrans Logs
Definition
of folded strata
Truly of earth
Tormented by the fires
As minds are. Built
and doomed
over the wing of time
Somehow
this tortured grain
is woven with my flow
of thought
Tempered in drought
and ice, bearer of leaf,
seed open to the wind
linked inexplicably
in the web of my Karma
Humbly then,
i give you as sacrifice
to the fire.
Edward Eastwood
Dirt roads, rivers and seas 28/3/86
RIP
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)