The Mail & Guardian newspaper published what they called “the Race Issue” over the Heritage Day long weekend. Reading it one had a rather surreal feeling that the key issue was the “White Issue” or even “the Wit Gevaar” [danger from persons known as “White”, for offshore readers{O.R.}]. It was rather a shock fifteen years after the revolution to discover that white people still apparently controlled all important aspects of life…and blacks were really no more than servants. I hadn’t realised that. I, we, thought we were just getting on with the pursuit of happiness in a post democratic dispensation.
Watching the news channels one so rarely sees a white person in any position of apparent influence these days it was all to easy to forget that the entire edifice of post liberation South Africa is apparently really a giant smokescreen behind which evil white elites still determine all the real truths of our existence.
I found that the big elephants: Xenophobic race attacks and their aftermath mostly unresolved, Lindela detention camp race profiling, unresolved Somali trader murders, 3500 unresolved [mainly] Afrikaner farm murders for instance contemporary race issues were ignored, in favour of beating an old, old, old drum. I worry that some ‘Truman’s World/ Matrix” miasma has swept us all along into a state of suspended belief: that we are frozen like yoghurt, in a time warp. I suppose it was Heritage Day after all… not Outcome day.
So I wrote a short letter to the M&G, well after I had written a long letter and then one somewhere in between. You my dear reader can browse through whichever you wish and ignore what you don’t like.
To the Editor [Letter #3]
Thank you for this interesting Heritage Day: “Race Issue”, edition of your newspaper, which has had me stomping around all weekend pondering how to react without gaaning on and on. My final conclusion is that the entire edifice is little more than a well-wrought navel gazing retrospective, in which you focus mainly on beating a cripple called Hubris cowering prostrate on the floor, while carefully ignoring the big mean elephants who are making sure s/he never gets up again.
Eventually I felt immensely sad thinking about how a ballsy sharp fanged pit bull newspaper called the Weekly Mail, has in our older years morphed into a rather long winded elderly, timid bulldog, with worn down chompers and a bad case of grumpy old man syndrome.
Sincerely
theblogospherian
PS: I did arrive at this conclusion after writing a long ‘gaan aan’ denotative discursive piece in the belief that most modern readers lack the imagination to understand anything unless it is spelt out in laborious detail… this after all being your trademark style, and me being a probably pedantic schoolteacher [whoops sorry forgot the Newspeak: ie; learning skills outcomes mediator] .
Afterwards, since the weekend was dragging on interminably and I was procrastinating on the real tasks in front of me, I wrote a more connotative exploration of your contribution … well admittedly I had consumed a great deal of congenial liquids.
I am not going to bore you with those possibly predictably tedious insights, or more probably tendentious perorations. I understand you are a busy person and I am probably the real grumpy old man.
So I’ll put them instead on the new unknown blog I’ve had to compile since you did away with Amagama and it’s unremembered [better] predecessor Blogspot; and I’ll thank you at the same time for your courtesy in sending me my entire file from those sites in a form that even an aging technomoron like myself was able to reproduce, even if I am still stumbling around trying to figure out how it all works. If you are interested you’ll find it all on: Http://theblogospherian.blogspot.com … If I had the faintest idea of how to get it onto your Thoughtleader, I may well have gone that route instead: assuming I would have been ‘invited’.
Best regards
Nicholas
Letter #1
This is the long tendentious discursive letter: warning: this may become boring.
The Editor
The Mail & Guardian 26/9/09 Re: The “race Issue”.
To whom it concerns
I have just ploughed through your Race Issue supplement and am left with a deep sense of depression and not a little puzzlement at what seems to be a profound depth of denial on the part of most of your contributors. I hope that what follows does not seem to be a rant… it is not intended to be.
First: the depression. Some fourteen years ago I [self] published a crime novel called The Buffalo Hunters, in which, under the misguided influence of [pre-Disgrace] J M Coetzee, I set out to completely obliterate the words White and Black from my 98,000 word text… The reasons for this are not germane to this contribution, although I have no issue with discussing it at some other occasion and they were in any event published in the Penguin collection “Soweto inside out” some years ago. The Buffalo Hunters sold a thousand copies, mostly by me, door-to-door, and attracted bemused responses from local critics most of whom pretended it hadn’t been written. So, for instance I eliminated white lies, black eyes, black marks and white knights and any other reference, however oblique, that associated those colours with people and values. I thought, mistakenly, I also admit now, especially in the light of this disturbing “Race Issue”, that we were entering a non-racial era, and that i was writing for an emerging non-racial audience that never actually materialised: as your correspondent Mr Ngcobo so poignantly observed in his recent Sunday Times peeve.
Later I wrote and published [on the Internet under the pen name Jakari] a follow up novel on the same lines… In the Ashanti Raider no key character was racially profiled, I carefully mixed up all the metaphors so that no one amongst the cast could be readily identified as one race or the other; and in our new non-racial society no publisher would even glance at the text, since, apparently, it had no generic stereotypes upon which “the reader” could hang its prejudices, and pre-determined interpretations… In this I ran deeply into ingrained behaviour and became effectively a social pariah.
Foolishly, then, I believed, along with many others, who supported the 1992, Yes vote, and the subsequent constitutional dispensation, that we were on our way to a non-racial society and a rosy future in which all persons would be equal and we could go forth and conquer the world. We know now of course that this idea was an illusion, that we [naively perhaps and equally perhaps, for many, in rat trapped desperation] negotiated with those who carefully masked their [understandable] hatred and, like Mr Mugabe, simply bided their time until that rage, pent up over 300 years, could not be suppressed any longer; and burst out in the form of a racially enraged President, and the emerging vindictive, retributive onslaught of a newly empowered elite, as a result of which that part of the White community that could do so, fled.
This means, to move from my sense of depression to my sense that many of your contributors are in a state of denial that the population demographic figure you quote on page 23 is of dubious veracity. In other words the idea that the white population [of post-democratic South Africa] is [now] as much as 9.1% of the total is an old and somewhat Potemkinist statistic… the more likely probability is hinted at by the figure for the decline in white tertiary enrolments to 23%. It is more likely that the [so-called] White population is now closer to 7% and falling [ironically in 1952 it was 23% by the way, although that too may have been more Potemkinist than we are wont to imagine]. As evidence in support of this contention the Economist newspaper published a reasonably verifiable report five years ago, to the effect that an evaluation of immigration statistics into five English speaking countries revealed that some 1,3 million persons had migrated from SA between 1994-2000. Of course not all of this entire exodus was White, and the Economist report was never mentioned in our media. At the time of the 1992 Referendum the White population was put at 5, 2 million. Adding, conservatively, another 500,000 émigré’s to the Economist evaluation over the intervening nine years, would give us a current figure of under four million honkeys even allowing for natural increase.
There is also a curiously prevalent assumption that the rest of the greater population’s growth has remained stagnant for at least a decade which, notwithstanding the HIV/AIDS toll, is absurd given the relatively greater birth-rate of the greater Black community, [which actually doubled in size between ’74 and ’94, so great was the level of oppression that no one had anything else to do], plus the [unacknowledged] high level of black refugee migration into South Africa over the past fifteen years.
To elaborate; for instance, fifteen years ago I had four black kids in my matric class [final school leaving year class for O.R.] plus one Chinese, and the rest were white. In 2010 I won’t have a single white kid in my final year matric Business class and only a handful in my lower grades: although the school would nominally be classed as a former ‘white’, so-called ‘private’ school.
By the way these kids along with hundreds of other black kids I have the pleasure of working with over the past fifteen years in a variety of social environments as a temporary part time teacher, all seemed pretty well fed, and frequently sport elaborate and expensive hairstyles; and while some don’t have cell’phones they can all find their way around Facebook more efficiently than I can, and are for the most part better informed than most of their white peers, who increasingly reveal the deleterious effects of large scale loss of complementary peers. I don’t want to add to that because I have no wish nor need to offend anyone.
To continue: Twenty years ago there were no black families living on my street. Three years ago when I helped draft a street petition to obliterate an unruly, abusive, disruptive, informal drinking establishment, operating from hijacked premises in the street, mine was one of only four white families out of the 140 households in the street. Never mind Mr Brandon Huntley, I can tell you when I walk down my street I stand out like a “sore thumb”.
Presumably the 136 new households have traded Mr Mngxitama’s [a correspondent] rather obscure “grammar of black suffering”, which I presume to reside somewhere in the experience of pre-colonial feudal Africa, for the “white grammar of suffering” in the form of mortgage bonds, hire purchase debt, pension schemes, medical aids and rapid upward mobility aspirations [In every respect of which, I might add they have one up on me, who still poddles about in a rusted decrepit 1978 Volksie Beetle on long term loan from an old friend, who now functions as a migrant surgical worker in a euro zone country hospital, having become unemployable in his homeland as a result of the new anti-white person discrimination.]
Now it may be that I’m wrong, and that all the former white residents just moved across town; but frankly I think you are all in deep denial about this “white” thing. My point here is that the game is over… You don’t need this “beat on whitey’ “Race Issue” series, because the game has been played, and we are simply in extra time, before the penalty shoot out with a crook goalie on the white side. Black won this event…BEE…[Black economic empowerment] rulz. The current ‘struggle’ is a sleight of hand illusion… an exercise in misdirection… the sands of time are moving inexorably towards the overwhelming black hegemony no matter how tightly whitey seems to be keeping his fist on the tiller.
Confusingly the strange problem today is less, white residual knee jerk, and often born-again, racism, but emerging, hotly denied, black racism, black exceptionalism, exclusivism and general xenophobia, in the face of huge competition for elusive opportunity.
The main reason why you still seem intent on fighting the issue is because the final ramparts have not yet been breached, or as Mr Ngcobo [a correspondent] asserts with a bravely un African allusion: “…before we storm the Bastille”. Nonetheless this will happen… 15 years is but a blink in the eye of history. Another 15 and the white component will reach around five percent before drifting lower. Then, whiteys you will see will either be those standing at robots [OR: SA speak for traffic lights] holding placards saying: “I am Hungry”, or more probably, Mr Mashele’s * residual white working class grimly smiling our shit eating smiles and trading with each other; or they will be his super rich ‘Weberian’ economically empowered minority who don’t need to leave their compounds, except to hang out in places that only other rich [but black] people can afford to go to. Either way both white groups will be relatively invisible, as are the whites in Kenya, Uganda and other more francophone regions of the continent. [* another correspondent][This idea incidentally that “secret cabals of elites” control the country’s destiny is so old it dates back to before Rhodes and provides… like religion, a comfortable scapegoat for idle thought.]
To conclude: Your grandchildren will look at you with incredulity when you tell them 30 years from now that the whole place was once run by whiteys… because the only whiteys they’ll be familiar with will most probably be tourists and the Robot sentries. And it’s no use trotting out the old “we love South Africa it’s our home” bit… Surplus people have migrated for centuries in pursuit of opportunity, that’s how we all got here in the first place.
Thus the newly superfluous white middle class is pretty well on its way. Mr Mashele’s alleged ‘white elites’ no longer need them, they seem to have “the new black grammar of suffering” to exploit. So the white exodus is not going to stop, short of the Apocalypse: it can’t; they have no choice: the economy is effectively shrinking, a fact masked by stealth inflation, massive debt funded State expenditure and inadequate electricity supply. This together with the expanding nature of BEE means that opportunities for white upwardly mobile aspirants who don’t have access to connections or hereditary wealth are shrinking even faster, while the outside world is truly “alive with possibility’”: current recession notwithstanding.
The trend line is irreversible. The decision to re-racialise our country [with racially prescriptive legislation] has been taken and the die is well cast. The fact that the M&G has seen fit to run this ‘Race Issue’ series is testimony to it. It cannot be stopped; and won’t be stopped because the Africanist agenda rules and the vested interests it carries with it are absolute until the next revolution [which, as we have been told will not happen until after the arrival of the next Messiah]. Those who witnessed the recent film version of Coetzee’s novel: Disgrace” know what the [foreign] director saw, more clearly than we want to: White people are today, in reality, no more than spectators now, at this final feast where the goodies are being redistributed. This is notwithstanding the pretentious “skaam* making” toy toying* Western Cape Premier, Helen “Queen Canute” Zille [someone for whom I did not vote by the way, Ms Dodd*.] [*another contributor][OR Skaam = Afrikaans= shame ,embarrassment… what your kids feel when you take them to school in an inappropriate motor vehicle. Toy toying: a curious shuffle type dance movement that characterizes protest demonstration behaviors in SA]
In case you think I’m being a negative alarmist, bear in mind that the present, post- Africanist-agenda, white population of Zimbabwe is today less than five percent of the 1970 pre-independence figure. Anecdotally there are more Chinese citizens in Zimbabwe today than white people. The Black agenda has triumphed gloriously and now needs to prove it can deliver on the promise of the better life without the honkeys, very few of whom, will ever return, no matter how much nostalgia they feel: that for which they are nostalgic no longer exists… And anyway Africa doesn’t have a monopoly on trees even if it does have one on sunsets.
I could gaan aan but I won’t, this is all well-worn territory. [* OR: Gaan aan: Afr: to agonise endlessly beyond a point of tedium]
What should be really worrying you’re various contributors, is not, whether White people are polite to you in the workplace Mr Mateboge* [we aren’t actually polite to anyone really, why do you think the motivation industry never runs out of customers?] because that is really not important: we are no longer important. What is important is what you think of yourselves, as Mr Mngxitama so confusingly, post-structurally asserts.
The real issue behind the misdirected handshake is why all the black guys who have become obscenely wealthy over the past fifteen years on the untold billions that have evaporated from the public purse since 1994, have not been piling more black owned and empowered businesses onto the JSE, which, in case you didn’t notice [again], has declined from some 700 listed companies in 1994 to about 360 now. Or, why black controlled competition commissions are unable/unwilling to tackle the growth strangling oligopolies that reinforce “the grammar of black suffering” [whatever that evocative phrase means].
There are no rules, I believe, other than the chains in your own minds, to stop black owned businesses from achieving success in a black owned country run exclusively by black people are there? There don’t seem to be any that apply to former black universities, which seem to this casual observer, to be carefully avoiding any [so-called: OR] ‘transformation’ agendas. There are black clubs that refuse to admit white patrons albeit no putative ‘white’ one is allowed to refuse anyone, [in fact so-called ‘white’ clubs no longer exist by law] so why shouldn’t we have many more exclusively black businesses? [Denial again, perhaps]. Of course there is the sub-textual open conspiracy of socialist trade union/big business collaborationist agenda to make life so impossible for small, emerging [especially black] businesses that many are stillborn at birth, or, later, strangled by embittered and corrupt State officials… at least according to many of my many new black neighbours.
Then what else should be really worrying your contributors in our post Polokwane [O.R. see earlier blogs] era where we Whitey’s are reduced to mere spectators, is that, Mr Manuel aside, there is no apparent plan to deal with the post 2010 story, which is almost here and gone. Does no one perhaps want to acknowledge that Mr Manual’s vision for 2025 could be the year of total Black ascendancy… all the hated whiteys gone at last, or at least, relegated to oblivion? I am sure you could just pay us all to leave; [there’s a vision] it would be so much less angst filled, and probably cheaper than struggling with this dubious Africanist agenda, which, like its Afrikaner inspired Apartheid forbear, promises only extended misery, in a forthcoming era of low to stagnant economic growth. At least you would be able to focus on where we are going rather than endlessly agonising over where we have been.
The primary reason why your various contributors have angst about whitey and his alleged control of the working environment is simply because the decision that was taken years ago, to go for the re-distribution of the existing pie, instead of building the biggest pie possible, has been successful; and the shrunken residue is now being grudgingly fought over by those who are still on the outside trying to oust those grimly hanging onto the inside. The yawning wage gap between elites and the rest of us has more to do with an historical undersupply of clever, talented, skilled black management workers, relative to the artificial demand created by legislative fiat, bidding up the price of their labour, than it has to do with white intransigence: [just the iron, economic law of scarcity in practice that we teach in 9th grade]. It also has more to do with the reality that political connections and cadre deployment are more important than knowledge, for emerging black management workers.
However when Mr Manyi* has his way, and he will; and the fat cat Corporates are forced to shed white knowledge workers, because the shrunken pie does not allow for growth, then gradually, but inevitably, the truth, that this resurgent race issue is simply a smokescreen, will become apparent. [* Manyi: new political commissar of Labour: intent on bulldozing demographic employment quotas on all ‘non-compliant’ businesses ie 93 % all level must be ‘black’]
Thus the 2019 September Heritage weekend edition of your newspaper [assuming it survives a possible democracy meltdown, when black opposition parties become strong enough, to challenge the current hegemonic dispensation, as they will; and/or the world itself does not succumb to the post-depression apocalypse predicted in my new novel “The Jonker Memorandum”] will be about the issue between those workers who belong to the Party [limited membership only] and those who do not. Race will no longer be an issue at all, except as an ongoing knee jerk diversion for those who are too blind to notice that [again regrettably] almost the only whites left are the tourists.
So can you please prove me wrong?
Sincerely:
theblogospherian
Letter # 2
This was the final straw: written in a state of delusional hysteria
My Grandmother’s cousin
My late grandmother had a first cousin who played violin in an orchestra on a ship called the Titanic, and according to family legend the band played on while the ship went down with most of the passengers because, as is well known, the boat didn’t have enough lifeboats for everyone
After reading the M&G “Race Issue” supplement, with its curiously old fashioned ranting on the issue of ‘bad whitey’s, in bed on Heritage Day, over a few guzzles of vodka, I fell into an exhausted and deeply troubled sleep during which I had a most disturbed dream. In my dream my extended, late violinist, relative came to me and told me, what he said, was the real story, about the sinking of the Titanic.
He said, that some time before that fateful meeting with a largely submerged iceberg there had been a revolt on board the ship. Apparently the poor people who travelled in the lower decks, known as “steerage”, were incensed. It seems they had not been invited to a concert on the upper decks being held to celebrate the current state of the ‘Blue Riband’ record-breaking journey, at that particular point in time. They took over the ship and deposed the captain and most of the older members of the crew.
At the precise moment when the iceberg alarm was sounded, a huge debate was raging amongst the newly emancipated passengers, regarding who should qualify to sit in the front seats at the concert. The main point of unanimity was that all the deposed rich folk on the upper decks should be expelled, and stand on the wind exposed deck, while those who had been disadvantaged by the absence of music in their lives, got to see the concert instead.
Therefore at the time of the ignored warning, but before the ship hit the iceberg, orders had already been issued that the expelled passengers, were not wanted on board at all; and were to leave the ship; they were thus busy being loaded onto the lifeboats when the actual impact occurred.
Meanwhile down n the ballroom the argument continued to rage over which were the best chairs; and whether they should be repainted into the newly fashionable red toned hues that were being touted as the future of design, by the more militant members. The departee’s: Colonels John Astor and Archibald Gracie attempted to convince the steerage passengers that they were in immanent danger, but they ignored him and insisted that the orchestra play the Marseillaise, which struck up just as the icy ocean poured across the ballroom. The band being trapped with all the steerage passengers simply played on
Colonel Archibald was later rescued hanging onto a newly painted railing: the rest went down with the ship… The rich people who were tossed out of the ballroom onto the main upper decks were rescued by passing ships.
Then my grandmother’s cousin went on to tell me that Ninety-seven years later, a country on the south end of the remote African continent found itself sailing in the troubled waters of the greatest financial meltdown in the history of the human race. Leaders everywhere on the planet were desperately seeking ways to stave off universal bankruptcy, and the treacherous under tips of the ravaging icebergs of financial failure were littered about like corpses on a battlefield. Simultaneously the world’s climates were everywhere undergoing terrifying changes. The general chaos of the financial meltdown was exacerbated by constant flooding, fires and terrible storms. The world, he said, was entering a time prophesied as Apocalyptic.
Fortunately though, the country’s leadership had substituted grand lies for bold action. The populace, knowing that their leaders lied about most things chose to believe them anyway. Lying was fashionable and acceptable, a comfortable legacy of the politics of resistance to oppression..
The global dilemma was declared irrelevant to their own agendas. Most importantly, they had to argue over who should have the best seats at a forthcoming concert at the country’s most important airport. They were going to welcome home a victorious, albeit troubled young suffragette, who had recently won a gruelling contest against embittered and jealous opposition.
The country’s most promising young firebrand leader had sworn to rally support against those who were the enemies of the young person and therefore the State, and had plotted against them both. These people were publicly castigated for their non-attendance at the concert, notwithstanding that they were not invited anyway. Other leaders distracted the populace from global floods with the issue of generous promissory notes while knowing they had left the doors open, to allow the water in: and the people cheered and called for the doors to be opened wider….
I woke up in a cold detoxifying sweat and fell off the bed reaching blindly for the vodka bottle that had fallen onto the floor.
Farewell cruel world
Theblogospherian.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Path dependency, trends and other viral connectivities.
weblog September 24 2009
Jozi
Every month or so I go off to a chiropractor who adjusts my neck and straightens out the odd kink, and for a day or two everything is clear, my eyeballs see without strain and the energy flow through my body is as it should be. Then gradually [or even suddenly as the case may be] the old fault lines reassert themselves, and I fall out of alignment, until the old headaches return, the toothaches grow more bold; the sinuses re-block themselves, and it becomes time again to have it all adjusted again. I call it routine maintenance.
So is it with our society. We can lower the top, raise the bottom, squeeze the middle: but all the old kinks return, because there are always so many actions we take without noticing their effect; so many little steps that are taken without conscious thought. Like trees we just grow, and without the splints of corrective force our natures will take us where we are wont to go. So the paths we choose become the paths we know, and to say otherwise is to forget we made a choice somewhere, sometime: thinking we were going somewhere else, when our paths converged upon a choice of destination
Thus without knowing, we take the gentlest paths down the most convenient slopes, to the bottom where the going is easiest.
In a forest only the tallest trees can reach the sun: thrusting through the crowded thickets.
So it is with humans… Lies and denials through the politics of resistance, ill fit the aspirations of assertive growth, and like the kinks in my neck they will return at every unconscious moment when our awareness slips, and when we find ourselves baulked..
I have just finished a first browse through a new book called ‘False Economy’ by one
Alan Beattie of the Financial Times [London]. The basis of Mr Beattie’s premise is
that the difference between success and failure or atrophy, for the countries of the
world lies in the effectiveness with which they iron out the kinks and/ or the choices
they make in economic policy, that ultimately determine whether the country goes
forward or remains mired in a depressed state of stasis. Sometimes these choices are
recent as they would be with say, South Africa [which he doesn’t discuss], and more
often they are ancient, as they are with Russia, which he does.
His central image is the difference between the Giant Panda, a creature that somehow
morphed into an evolutionary cul de sac, and which cannot survive without state
support, and the household moggie[pussycat]; that super adaptive creature that has
become a ubiquitous part of all the world’s societies… the ultimate survivalist.
In his entertaining, and seemingly well researched tome [albeit poorly referenced] Mr
Beattie reminds us that it is the power of vested interest that supplies the almost
insurmountable “kinks” that prevent the movement of a society towards its holy grail
of super-development. He draws on a series of examples from, for instance the power
of an absentee landed gentry in Argentina, putting limits on that country’s growth, so
that the country, at one time, quite recently, the potential competitive equivalent of the
USA, has gradually stagnated into a third class power. At the other end of the scale he
describes how the vested interests of corrupt border customs procedures limit the
development of African states, particularly those that are landlocked.
His key phrase is a concept called ‘Path Dependence’ a phrase that rings resonantly of
Robert Frost’s classic piece “The road not taken”… “Two roads diverged in a wood”
and we took the path, unlike Frost, that was more travelled on… and that “has made
all the difference.”
Beattie made no comment in his exhaustive range of analysis regarding the paths that
the newly democratised South African State opted for in its post apartheid evolution.
Had he done so he would certainly have found fruitful ‘grist to his mill’ in the body of
racially inspired legislation that have epitomised the new State’s route to the future a
route predicated on past experience, and which seem more than likely to mire the
country in stagnation and frustration.
South Africa is a country that, unable to shake of its heritage of discriminative
legislation, passed new legislation to affirm those previously disadvantaged by the
racist apartheid era. Thus it has created an elite class of so-called “black diamonds’
who have racked up their pay to astronomical levels, exploiting to the full the
immutable laws of supply and demand … ie legislation requires that [so-called] black
empowered executives fill upper level positions in all organisations. However for
historical reasons the supply of such persons is extremely limited [and will continue
to be, see below].
Thus all manner of managerial workers now enjoy pay levels that even modestly
successful entrepreneurs can only dream of… For instance: the former Town Clerk of
old whose pay scale was on a par with the local school headmaster has now been
retitled as a Town Manager and earns five or six time the wage of the luckless
schoolmaster… some even earn more than the State President..
There is of course no real shortage of [so-called] black persons to take the post of
Headmaster, [or more appropriately in our enlightened times: head teacher] so
Headmasters remain poorly paid as do all educators, and other low
level workers, who are generally in ample supply, relative to demand.
In fact, in order to cement the place at the top of those persons fortunate enough to
have acquired some body of qualification somewhere, the education system has itself
been carefully demolished in the guise of an “improved” new post revolutionary
system. This system is so brilliant at developing the country’s potential that of some
two million children who started school under the new system in 1996 fewer than one
thousand were found to be sufficiently numerate to cope with the demands of a
university science education 13 years later. Not more than six thousand were of a
literate enough standard to cope with the demands of a university career.
Not only is the new system unable to produce school leavers of a reasonable standard
but all the teacher training institutions were closed, the technical colleges were
merged into universities and the national system of apprenticeships tossed out in
favour of an army of tax financed training bodies, that, to date, have [allegedly] barely
trained as many citizens in fifteen years as were produced in a single year under the
old discredited system. The party apparatchiks [known as “cadres”] who have been
seconded to run all these training bodies, and most other training institutions [and just
about everything else that qualifies as a sinecure], have what Beattie would describe
as an unacknowledged vested interest in ‘failure’ since too many well trained black
citizens will bring down the price of black managerial labour. An unwillingness to
compete is identified as a contributing source of atrophy in the existence of many less
successful economies.
Interestingly South Africa would represent a fascinating example to Mr Beatty of a
developing State that is in fact un-developing or de-developing. Over a period of
seventy years the country, at one time poised to compete favourably with the
emerging Australian State in the 1940’s, has morphed into an under-developing state
as a direct result of just such an unwillingness to compete firstly in the form of the
Apartheid State and now more latterly in the form of the new Affirmative State.
For instance: over the period 1994- 2009, the contribution of the manufacturing
sector to the Gross domestic product has declined from 24% to 14% and falling. The
country has become a net food importing country. The only sectors of the economy
showing signs of growth are those in government services. Even commodity output,
Beattie’s notorious “Resource curse” is in net decline. Routinely higher inflation rates
than those of trading partners means higher than standard interest rate patterns which
inhibit local investment and damage export opportunities, by causing an abnormal
strengthening of the exchange rates.
In 2008, the country was driven into recession principally because the electricity
supply agency failed to upgrade its supply capacity, to cope with even the modest
growth target that were achieved at the height of an [in retrospect] artificial “boom”,
inspired more by the circular process of selling off assets to comply with the legal
requirement for [so-called] Black ownership, than because of any real investment
growth.
The conclusions Beattie arrives at in his “surprising economic history of the world” is
that the various success stories that punctuate the path of human development are
almost exceptions to the rule, that once a vested interest group gains control over a
decision path, the probability of a change is so remote that stagnation is almost
fore-ordained. There is a good reason why my chiropractor can afford to send his kids
across the world to go to school; he knows that my neck will continue to be
troublesome no matter that he straightens it out every few weeks or so, and that I and
the rest of his customers, will have a continuing need for his services.
Jozi
Every month or so I go off to a chiropractor who adjusts my neck and straightens out the odd kink, and for a day or two everything is clear, my eyeballs see without strain and the energy flow through my body is as it should be. Then gradually [or even suddenly as the case may be] the old fault lines reassert themselves, and I fall out of alignment, until the old headaches return, the toothaches grow more bold; the sinuses re-block themselves, and it becomes time again to have it all adjusted again. I call it routine maintenance.
So is it with our society. We can lower the top, raise the bottom, squeeze the middle: but all the old kinks return, because there are always so many actions we take without noticing their effect; so many little steps that are taken without conscious thought. Like trees we just grow, and without the splints of corrective force our natures will take us where we are wont to go. So the paths we choose become the paths we know, and to say otherwise is to forget we made a choice somewhere, sometime: thinking we were going somewhere else, when our paths converged upon a choice of destination
Thus without knowing, we take the gentlest paths down the most convenient slopes, to the bottom where the going is easiest.
In a forest only the tallest trees can reach the sun: thrusting through the crowded thickets.
So it is with humans… Lies and denials through the politics of resistance, ill fit the aspirations of assertive growth, and like the kinks in my neck they will return at every unconscious moment when our awareness slips, and when we find ourselves baulked..
I have just finished a first browse through a new book called ‘False Economy’ by one
Alan Beattie of the Financial Times [London]. The basis of Mr Beattie’s premise is
that the difference between success and failure or atrophy, for the countries of the
world lies in the effectiveness with which they iron out the kinks and/ or the choices
they make in economic policy, that ultimately determine whether the country goes
forward or remains mired in a depressed state of stasis. Sometimes these choices are
recent as they would be with say, South Africa [which he doesn’t discuss], and more
often they are ancient, as they are with Russia, which he does.
His central image is the difference between the Giant Panda, a creature that somehow
morphed into an evolutionary cul de sac, and which cannot survive without state
support, and the household moggie[pussycat]; that super adaptive creature that has
become a ubiquitous part of all the world’s societies… the ultimate survivalist.
In his entertaining, and seemingly well researched tome [albeit poorly referenced] Mr
Beattie reminds us that it is the power of vested interest that supplies the almost
insurmountable “kinks” that prevent the movement of a society towards its holy grail
of super-development. He draws on a series of examples from, for instance the power
of an absentee landed gentry in Argentina, putting limits on that country’s growth, so
that the country, at one time, quite recently, the potential competitive equivalent of the
USA, has gradually stagnated into a third class power. At the other end of the scale he
describes how the vested interests of corrupt border customs procedures limit the
development of African states, particularly those that are landlocked.
His key phrase is a concept called ‘Path Dependence’ a phrase that rings resonantly of
Robert Frost’s classic piece “The road not taken”… “Two roads diverged in a wood”
and we took the path, unlike Frost, that was more travelled on… and that “has made
all the difference.”
Beattie made no comment in his exhaustive range of analysis regarding the paths that
the newly democratised South African State opted for in its post apartheid evolution.
Had he done so he would certainly have found fruitful ‘grist to his mill’ in the body of
racially inspired legislation that have epitomised the new State’s route to the future a
route predicated on past experience, and which seem more than likely to mire the
country in stagnation and frustration.
South Africa is a country that, unable to shake of its heritage of discriminative
legislation, passed new legislation to affirm those previously disadvantaged by the
racist apartheid era. Thus it has created an elite class of so-called “black diamonds’
who have racked up their pay to astronomical levels, exploiting to the full the
immutable laws of supply and demand … ie legislation requires that [so-called] black
empowered executives fill upper level positions in all organisations. However for
historical reasons the supply of such persons is extremely limited [and will continue
to be, see below].
Thus all manner of managerial workers now enjoy pay levels that even modestly
successful entrepreneurs can only dream of… For instance: the former Town Clerk of
old whose pay scale was on a par with the local school headmaster has now been
retitled as a Town Manager and earns five or six time the wage of the luckless
schoolmaster… some even earn more than the State President..
There is of course no real shortage of [so-called] black persons to take the post of
Headmaster, [or more appropriately in our enlightened times: head teacher] so
Headmasters remain poorly paid as do all educators, and other low
level workers, who are generally in ample supply, relative to demand.
In fact, in order to cement the place at the top of those persons fortunate enough to
have acquired some body of qualification somewhere, the education system has itself
been carefully demolished in the guise of an “improved” new post revolutionary
system. This system is so brilliant at developing the country’s potential that of some
two million children who started school under the new system in 1996 fewer than one
thousand were found to be sufficiently numerate to cope with the demands of a
university science education 13 years later. Not more than six thousand were of a
literate enough standard to cope with the demands of a university career.
Not only is the new system unable to produce school leavers of a reasonable standard
but all the teacher training institutions were closed, the technical colleges were
merged into universities and the national system of apprenticeships tossed out in
favour of an army of tax financed training bodies, that, to date, have [allegedly] barely
trained as many citizens in fifteen years as were produced in a single year under the
old discredited system. The party apparatchiks [known as “cadres”] who have been
seconded to run all these training bodies, and most other training institutions [and just
about everything else that qualifies as a sinecure], have what Beattie would describe
as an unacknowledged vested interest in ‘failure’ since too many well trained black
citizens will bring down the price of black managerial labour. An unwillingness to
compete is identified as a contributing source of atrophy in the existence of many less
successful economies.
Interestingly South Africa would represent a fascinating example to Mr Beatty of a
developing State that is in fact un-developing or de-developing. Over a period of
seventy years the country, at one time poised to compete favourably with the
emerging Australian State in the 1940’s, has morphed into an under-developing state
as a direct result of just such an unwillingness to compete firstly in the form of the
Apartheid State and now more latterly in the form of the new Affirmative State.
For instance: over the period 1994- 2009, the contribution of the manufacturing
sector to the Gross domestic product has declined from 24% to 14% and falling. The
country has become a net food importing country. The only sectors of the economy
showing signs of growth are those in government services. Even commodity output,
Beattie’s notorious “Resource curse” is in net decline. Routinely higher inflation rates
than those of trading partners means higher than standard interest rate patterns which
inhibit local investment and damage export opportunities, by causing an abnormal
strengthening of the exchange rates.
In 2008, the country was driven into recession principally because the electricity
supply agency failed to upgrade its supply capacity, to cope with even the modest
growth target that were achieved at the height of an [in retrospect] artificial “boom”,
inspired more by the circular process of selling off assets to comply with the legal
requirement for [so-called] Black ownership, than because of any real investment
growth.
The conclusions Beattie arrives at in his “surprising economic history of the world” is
that the various success stories that punctuate the path of human development are
almost exceptions to the rule, that once a vested interest group gains control over a
decision path, the probability of a change is so remote that stagnation is almost
fore-ordained. There is a good reason why my chiropractor can afford to send his kids
across the world to go to school; he knows that my neck will continue to be
troublesome no matter that he straightens it out every few weeks or so, and that I and
the rest of his customers, will have a continuing need for his services.
On viewing the film "Disgrace": J M Coetzee
August 2009
In the brief “film guide” summations, Theresa Smith, film critic for the Star Tonite newspaper in Jozi writes about the film version of J M Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, that it is “Bleak and austere, but gripping because of nuanced performances and … it’s just as depressing.”
Having recently seen the film I cannot improve much on that summation. Nonetheless I cannot remember the last time an entire audience sat in stunned silence right through to the end of the credits and then left the cinema without a sound. This was our collective experience a few nights ago after witnessing this disturbing and haunting piece of work.
Notwithstanding this the screenwriter and director have tweaked Coetzee’s original prophetic vision of the white dilemma in a black controlled South Africa. When the book was first published in 1999 South Africa was still the “rainbow Nation” in which it was believed by the relatively unconscious white community that the future belonged to all its inhabitants.
A decade later that illusion has been shattered and to be a so-called “Lily-White is to be the subject of increasing discrimination and resentment as the great expectations that accompanied the transition to a democratic society have been shattered on the backwash of reality and in the aftermath of Polokwane that great ‘shattering’ which is still resonating through our post revolutionary society heralding the next phase of the “struggle”: that between the latent dark force of African feudalism: Coetzee’s theme and the driving forces of African liberation.
And this new phase of the struggle excludes the beleaguered white community much to the confusion of those sleepyheads who did not understand Coetzee’s “impertinent” message in the first place. Such “whitey’s” who appear in the film version of the book [excluding Professor Lurie and his daughter Lucy: the central characters] are either rapidly degenerating bit part players: Bill n Bev oscillating toward their trailer trash destination or as spectral spectators at a cape town farce… the window dressage extras, playing out their role in the shadows. There is no sense of the second revolution under way to the north.
But the violence is real. Thousands of unspeakably brutal farm murders since the book’s debut, underlined by the gratuitous murder of a young ‘Lucy clone’ woman on an isolated smallholding north of Jozi last week: slaughtered for her cellphone and her television set, underlined the reality of white powerlessness in the face of black rage and retribution and the empty awful Horror, that so completely destroyed Conrad’s character nearly a century earlier .
Since the publication of Disgrace, as many as one and a half million whites have fled South Africa for uneasy and discomforted security in other lands, and a million more will reluctantly vanish over the next fifteen years leaving only the rich established extras with too much to lose and the emerging trailer trash with nothing to hope for. [This is not something ever mentioned in polite media circles of course]
No wonder the audience sat rooted in horror at the awful truth our own dilemma. Movies are supposed to suspend reality not drive it home and so one cannot see this movie ever making to the general circuit. White sleepyheads will resist seeing it and the black majority will find it incomprehensible at best and racist at worst.
Theresa Smith’s summation was too kind: the movie is not just depressing it is a formula for suicide; which for many white aging South African’s will ultimately represent their only escape from Conrad’s “horror”, as it is unfortunately for increasing numbers of isolated beached white Zimbabweans, a country where the remaining white citizenry is now considerably outnumbered by the formerly non-existent, now rapidly growing Chinese community..
When I first read Disgrace I reeled in my own horror at the awful bleakness of Coetzee’s vision and I wrote a short review of my own in a poetic form and published it on my website at that time.It was a year [2000] when I was on a “write a poem a day” mission. I published it again later, in 2005, as part of my collection “Rehearsing Nietzsche” [ now also published on Blogroid.wordpress and eventually on this blogger site]
Watching the film I had the sense I had been Googled by the screen-writer, for reasons that are only evident to poets. Because the reason for this would not be evident to you my dear reader, i have re-published the blog i first published at the beginning of the decade on my original website Williamsonreport, and it now follows on this blog under the heading "On first reading J M Coetzee's Disgrace". I discontinued that website after some five years partly because of irreconcilable differences with the service provider and mainly because of legislation changes in my country of origin that would have subjected me to possible censorship and other State controls.
Happy blogging
In the brief “film guide” summations, Theresa Smith, film critic for the Star Tonite newspaper in Jozi writes about the film version of J M Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, that it is “Bleak and austere, but gripping because of nuanced performances and … it’s just as depressing.”
Having recently seen the film I cannot improve much on that summation. Nonetheless I cannot remember the last time an entire audience sat in stunned silence right through to the end of the credits and then left the cinema without a sound. This was our collective experience a few nights ago after witnessing this disturbing and haunting piece of work.
Notwithstanding this the screenwriter and director have tweaked Coetzee’s original prophetic vision of the white dilemma in a black controlled South Africa. When the book was first published in 1999 South Africa was still the “rainbow Nation” in which it was believed by the relatively unconscious white community that the future belonged to all its inhabitants.
A decade later that illusion has been shattered and to be a so-called “Lily-White is to be the subject of increasing discrimination and resentment as the great expectations that accompanied the transition to a democratic society have been shattered on the backwash of reality and in the aftermath of Polokwane that great ‘shattering’ which is still resonating through our post revolutionary society heralding the next phase of the “struggle”: that between the latent dark force of African feudalism: Coetzee’s theme and the driving forces of African liberation.
And this new phase of the struggle excludes the beleaguered white community much to the confusion of those sleepyheads who did not understand Coetzee’s “impertinent” message in the first place. Such “whitey’s” who appear in the film version of the book [excluding Professor Lurie and his daughter Lucy: the central characters] are either rapidly degenerating bit part players: Bill n Bev oscillating toward their trailer trash destination or as spectral spectators at a cape town farce… the window dressage extras, playing out their role in the shadows. There is no sense of the second revolution under way to the north.
But the violence is real. Thousands of unspeakably brutal farm murders since the book’s debut, underlined by the gratuitous murder of a young ‘Lucy clone’ woman on an isolated smallholding north of Jozi last week: slaughtered for her cellphone and her television set, underlined the reality of white powerlessness in the face of black rage and retribution and the empty awful Horror, that so completely destroyed Conrad’s character nearly a century earlier .
Since the publication of Disgrace, as many as one and a half million whites have fled South Africa for uneasy and discomforted security in other lands, and a million more will reluctantly vanish over the next fifteen years leaving only the rich established extras with too much to lose and the emerging trailer trash with nothing to hope for. [This is not something ever mentioned in polite media circles of course]
No wonder the audience sat rooted in horror at the awful truth our own dilemma. Movies are supposed to suspend reality not drive it home and so one cannot see this movie ever making to the general circuit. White sleepyheads will resist seeing it and the black majority will find it incomprehensible at best and racist at worst.
Theresa Smith’s summation was too kind: the movie is not just depressing it is a formula for suicide; which for many white aging South African’s will ultimately represent their only escape from Conrad’s “horror”, as it is unfortunately for increasing numbers of isolated beached white Zimbabweans, a country where the remaining white citizenry is now considerably outnumbered by the formerly non-existent, now rapidly growing Chinese community..
When I first read Disgrace I reeled in my own horror at the awful bleakness of Coetzee’s vision and I wrote a short review of my own in a poetic form and published it on my website at that time.It was a year [2000] when I was on a “write a poem a day” mission. I published it again later, in 2005, as part of my collection “Rehearsing Nietzsche” [ now also published on Blogroid.wordpress and eventually on this blogger site]
Watching the film I had the sense I had been Googled by the screen-writer, for reasons that are only evident to poets. Because the reason for this would not be evident to you my dear reader, i have re-published the blog i first published at the beginning of the decade on my original website Williamsonreport, and it now follows on this blog under the heading "On first reading J M Coetzee's Disgrace". I discontinued that website after some five years partly because of irreconcilable differences with the service provider and mainly because of legislation changes in my country of origin that would have subjected me to possible censorship and other State controls.
Happy blogging
On first reading Disgrace.
December 2000
What follows is a repeat of my december 2000 blog on a former now defunct websiteHello destiny.
“JM Coetzee has sold out to the literary establishment.” That was my first reaction on reading Disgrace some years ago.
Along with many others of his admirers I felt, perhaps unfairly, that his shift from post- structuralist to modern poetic realist was possibly more motivated by the need for a pension than the demands of his craft.
I had not read Disgrace, when it first came out for the same reason that I don’t read Harry Potter, because I was wrapping up some work of my own. However late in 2000, some of my colleagues from the English department, at the school where I teach part-time in the business department, asked me if I would please read Coetzee’s new novel, and help them out with some thoughts, perhaps, for teaching the book to the Matrics [School leaving class] the following year. The book had, as you know simply ‘leapt’ into prominence, and there was, it seemed, a shortage of reviews, ‘n things said about it.
I was at that time engaged in a personal goal quest, I called the “Millennium Gap”©, to give me space between one book and the next. So I was recording my own history of that memorable year, by writing some piece of poetic construction each day through the year 2000: often in response to the events of the day, sometimes other things. In December, after the year had ended, Disgrace became part of my daily fodder in a voracious drive to feed that anxious need. It produced two pieces of work (of the 826 for the year) the first on the 17th of December 2000, and the following final piece on the 20th December that year.
I don’t think that my colleagues, who are sensible ladies, found my pieces enjoyable. I heard that the occasional student who got hold of them found them weird, and perhaps they are. I don’t know. I liked them. They were the responses of a poet (myself) who found an influential voice suddenly singing off key…Like Mick Jagger deciding to do a country concert with Dolly Parton: why would he do that?
It was also a poetic response to a piece of work that ‘klapped’ me at a visceral level.
I recognised the rage, had felt it before, in 1980…and was disturbed by the highly specific denotative brutality of its imagery. I felt ultimately that the shift from post-structuralism, with its presentation of meaning through use of archetypes had been displaced by a populist dispersal of less than useful stereotypes: the presentation of the easily accessible sign, so accessible it is unnoticed and serves to reinforce those concepts we seek to undermine.
I could also say that, naturally, I would feel this. When I decided to write a series of novels, as a way of displacing the effects of a bad incident in my life, and because I was finding myself reaching a dark place as a poet, I found inspiration in Coetzee’s style (and that of Milan Kundera, Herman Charles Bosman and Elmore Leonard, not to mention Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and some others on a list too long to mention.) His style is that of a poet and seemed to me the most natural way for a poet to write prose.
On the other hand, were I an arrogant, self serving, self centred writer, who promotes his own work on the Internet, to anyone who can still read, then I cannot speak ill of a man who finally after many years moved over to the place where the big bucks are. After all he leaves me as the only remaining (self-styled) post-structuralist writer left on the South African (non- Afrikaner) writer’s block (pun intended) (Unless there are a few others out there like me plumbing the empty reaches of cyberspace…Howzit dudes.)
So what does this mean…Since JM Coetzee has achieved his purpose, and more power to his elbow, I felt I would resuscitate my poem essays from the back end of December 2000 and pop them onto today’s ‘Bloggo’ for your tastelessy literary pleasure. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary that may be represented in the two pieces (which contain overlapping images by the way) I do wish him well to enjoy the long hard fruits of labour.
Enjoy
17/12/00
On First reading JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.
I have just recoiled from
Reading a section of this Disgrace.
Recoiled from the horror of
Professor Lurie’s search
For truth; an unintelligible search
As most searches of this nature tend to be.
The search has immobilised him
He has become a voyeur of his own life,
Watched in slow motion. He is immobilized
In a way reminiscent of Camus’ Outsider…”Mother died yes-
Terday, or perhaps it was the day before, I don’t remember.”
Or was that my recollection of a recollection.
This man’s passive response to the urgings of his nature
As opposed to his intellect
May represent a rejection through awareness
Of the endless repetition of the events in his
Otherwise dreary day.
An empty man inhabiting
the sterile confines of Apollonian Cape Town:
the place where life is an illusion.
Sex severs his connection. Bad sex severs it badly,
And he retreats from his intellectual void to
The Chthonian* origins
Of the Eastern Cape- metaphorical place of struggle.
A place of wildest nature and societal absence.
There he experiences the Dionysian night, coming
Face to face with his karma
As his burning body transforms him into a
Physical outcast to mirror his
Inner disgrace.
He seems though to be as unaffected by this trauma as he
Was by the one which exiled him to this place,
Where the fruits of acquisition are being redistributed
Amongst the newly victorious.
The death of the Apollonian nightmare and
The return to chthonian primitivism as Paglia
May have termed it
Is Coetzee’s vision of the New South Africa, some years
Down
The
Line.
Rape is the deed that reflects
An absence of society: society in decay in Cape Town,
Society fizzling about in violence and disarray, in the Eastern Cape.
The absence of society brings out the dogs in man.
In Coetzee’s vision Society must not
be confused with Community, they may be different.
Coetzee’s Community is Patrilineal.
Petrus becomes a metaphor for the ‘primitive archetype’ but
Denotatively, African, chief, presiding over his subjects
Whom he can apparently order
To be fucked at will.
The Eastern Cape represents that return to African despotism
Which is ‘our’ (white/Coetzee’s) sole knowledge
Of pre-colonial, feudal Africa…There is no democracy
where a man has the right to be born
a king.
In this place our protagonist must pay obeisance to the
New gods of liberation…his guilt…a trivial fuck- not a grand fuck
Basically a fuckless fuck; for never does
A man fuck with less enthusiasm than does the abstract professor.
In his state of dispassion he is most passionate about a prostitute;
The student Melanie is his Lolita with spots
and stained
underwear. He has “congress” whatever that is
with a vet, who “succours’ him.
The man is dead. He
Studies, desultorily, the life
Of a dead romantic poet, Byron, who went
Off to die in a fit of ennui.
An abstract intellectual he has seen through the superfluity
Of Apollonian western society, and like the virgin
Who believed in father Charismas and the truth of the universe,
He sulks at his own revelation and sets out to spoil the illusion.
Coetzee’s Barbarians are now within
The walls…their ways those of the dark Chthonian night
Underground and in the full grip of
Nature.
They shoot the raging dogs, fuck white lesbians, impregnate them and turn them into subservient vassals.
Lurie’s sole response to all the chaos about him
Is to prep the corpses of dogs for burial: dealing
With death in the most brutal
Of its manifestations.
We are all vassals of a sort: true freedom is impossible
And so Lurie too becomes a vassal.
.NiK(00)
Later, after I had digested the book in its totality and admired the perfectly crafted images, I wrote a second piece, again, like the first, under the simultaneous influence of Camille Paglia, who’s monumental works I was reading contemporaneously, also voraciously, also feeding the poetic grist.
It came as no surprise to hear this week that Coetzee had moved offshore to that land of eternal retirement, Australia.
On Further reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee under
the influence of Camille PagliaColleague Carla demands
to know
“Why the dogs?”
in a note, written on the back inside
cover of the book.
“What’s with the dogs?”
Be they: dogs of war,
loyal dogs, kraal dogs, “my dog goes
before me for the crocodile” expendable
dogs,
mark out territory dogs?
Lurie’s daughter is marked out territory. Allegedly,
black men have come to her house, (Coetzee emerges here from
the closet – the Barbarians at the
gate are now demonstrably BLACK)
and have, apparently against her will,
entered the ‘chthonian’ darkness
of her vagina: thus has she possessed
them… and Coetzee reveals the ancient angst;
“will you let your daughter marry blacks!”:
a trusty
theme.
Who stakes a claim on whom, when the territory
is marked?
Then. The Lurie girl, is more than just a White woman.
While Lurie is a common enough name for birds,
Lurie is more archetypically Jewish, as is Isaacs;
Boerjood, perhaps, but the flavour is
Jewish nonetheless.
Is Ms Lurie a sign for a new addition
to the ranks of castaway minorities:
the marginalized and temporary sojourner?
Of course Isaacs could be a “Kaapse man”; we
know him only as another emasculated male, along with the pathetic Bill Shaw,
who
cowers from the ‘Groot Baas’*, Lurie…himself (Lurie) so emasculated,
he is reduced to fucking whores and post-adolescent
infants.
Both father, an aging homme fatale, and his phlegmatic earth-mother
incarnate daughter, screw up catastrophically
over sex.
The centrality of the story hovers around variations on a fuck: an
almost trite metaphor.
This activity is sometimes coyly referred to as “making love”,
there is an occasional ‘congress’, and
an alluded rape is dealt with
at a level of equally coy disassociation.
Lurie fucks (“makes love to”) a prostitute
in the opening scene he then proceeds to “spend the night”
with a young student who demonstrates a
most marginal degree
of satisfactory compliance. Not really knowing what to do
the apparently shell-shocked/ impressionable,
tentative, acolyte submits to
passionless penetration…in a sense she lets
him ‘fuck her a bit’. For a while; she plays Patty Hearst to his
Lord of the Manor: she possesses him
and then spews him out as less than before, as Paglia may have put it.
In the process of his engagement with Melanie
(his Lolita) we
discover that Lurie
fucks serially: secretaries, colleagues, wives of colleagues
random veterinary surgeons, friends of his wife’s,
auntie Joan Cobbley n all.
Curiously these are desolate encounters: they are
entered into with joyless abandon: it is his ‘job’,
which he performs on autopilot.
This sense of detached fornication is extended to
a “square” object called ‘Bev’, which has a useful hole in it and
which,
“succours” him.
It is a “show” thing.
a duty fuck: Lurie, the Labrador
hovering around a bitch long enough to generate a pity fuck,
before commencing to kill off the competition.
Luries’ sex drive demands rhythmic routine:
obeisance to a programme churning in his drivers:
almost if not quite, “fuck by numbers”.
By contrast his daughter is a doughy lump…a featureless
failed lesbian who is well and truly, allegedly, raped;
an act performed offstage and hinted at:
a level of discretion more commonly associated
with the
lavatory into which
Lurie is thrust to burn, smothered in lighter fuel:
something not at all cooll: burn baby burn..
Strangely Lurie does not become traumatized by this event (being burned). Like
Camus’ Outsider he
has become so anaesthetized from
existence that he has lost any sense of self.
Instead he tyrannizes over detail. He becomes
immersed in perceived inconsistencies
in the behaviour
of
one,
Petrus:
a newly advantaged, previously disadvantaged, person
who now, it seems, has exercised rights
of Prima Nocte…Droit de Seigneur: the new
lord is evident, “nou maak n lě vir die
swart baas*.” .
There is, after all, no overwhelming
evidence
to suggest that anybody else did it, is there?
there are implications: men who came and shot the dogs
and went off with
the woman. Nonetheless they are
Only accusations. No further evidence is led.
No charges laid. Lurie however assumes that Petrus had gone away
and accuses him of lying. Petrus a guileful,
disingenuous yet engaging man quite reasonably allows, that
one may suspect what one wishes…if you do not
ask the right questions then the answers you receive
will deceive those who wish to be deceived.
The issue of the boy Pollux, ironically named
for a mythical hero, and of course, a ‘bright
star’,
is then a red herring, diverting
Lurie away from the probable real truth: that Petrus
penetrated the Lurie persona.
The dogs are shot, so that they
will not trouble the new owner, no longer a guest, in future,
when day has dawned.
It is obvious that access to David’s daughter’s
chthonian stronghold (cunt, for those who are still confused)
is the key to her continued existence
on the farm…she is reduced to a vassal, another irony, in a cycle of
abuse and abusing:
a shift in role, doubly pernicious with that Jewish moniker.
In (my novel) the Buffalo Hunters*, Jodas defends his decision
to shoot his own, semi-feral, cat; on grounds that using a vet desensitises
us to the real world…the real ‘chthonian night’ as Paglia*
would call it, and also call it a
‘shit place’, in need of society.
By these standards the
man who shoots the dogs
is a MAN in the most traditional sense .
Similarly, Lurie also has a need to prove that he is a man, his sex drive notwithstanding:
so he helps a local vet, the square object called Bev,
(which is only two letters away from box…a familiar metaphor for cunt)
kill stray dogs by anaesthetic process, moving somnambulistically by chthonian
degrees from the anaesthesia
of Communication 101…The professor has
graduated to god’s assistant, fucking the instrument of death itself,
in place of some other, spotty, in-exuberant, post-pubescent, country piece.
So what about the failed former lesbian post-modern-crypto-hippie-
allegedly-raped daughter?
Well she’s ok. Whomsoever it turned out to be, should she choose to
fine tune her ‘surviving victim’
personae then
she has access to someone who will
(perhaps regularly or inevitably) want to come around
on a doggish jaunt
and give her what she may or may not want.
Assuming she could (reluctantly) drop her victim attitude of passive acceptance
she could sequentially begin to exploit her power,
generate Kugelish demands and
the unnamed ‘rapist/s’ will KAK.
Most probably this will not happen.
Coetzee is taking us on a journey into Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence:
the past eternally doomed to repeat itself. “again and again times
without number...***”
Lurie is Coetzee’s Prufrock
extended to purposeless extinction.
He is left finally to deal with issues of death
and dissolution neither of which interfere
with, nor interface with, his deterministic dispassion.
Do we care…at the end we are exhausted and dispirited: the
crumbs we [assuming I write/read in my capacity as ‘honky’) are offered
in this tale
are meagre indeed: acceptance of a new Feudalism and
dealing with dead dogs. Wow
This Coetzee, out in the open
with the ‘in your face
ness’ of Disgrace is yet another version of the “horror”.
Conrad’s ghost haunts Coetzee, revealed in the “slim Jan”
mechanisms of his paranoia with Petrus whose ‘truth’
consists in the deliberate alteration of a ‘lie’.
Lies are important to Coetzee’s theme, lies papering on older lies on further
lies burnishing
the grandest lie of all: that elegant illusion we call, Civilization.
Petrus the “dark person” lies, specifically over
Pollux. Otherwise he is evasive...the archetypical ‘shifty’ darkie telling the former oppressor
what the oppressor needs to know: Rresistance politics – truth: subject to expedience.
Lurie, at his ‘trial’ asserts that “the girls statement
is right.”
He exercises his right to say no more, to say
nothing that may incriminate him further
or less: the truth, but not the whole truth.
He will say nothing to confess motive, and therefore guilt.
Petrus simply lies and thus obviates guilt.
They are both men after all and a “fuck’s a fuck ou pelly”* except of course
that it isn’t: there’s all that old eternal family history stuff
Clogging up the old chthonian pipes.
This central theme, the relativity of truth, remains the most profound
regarding the conundrum in
which Lurie has found himself. Self absorption
in a world of illusions is fatal to
professional well being.
Coetzee implies this to be the Achilles heel of the former, now
It seems, doomed,
Neo-Appolonia: metaphorically depicted through Cape Town and
it’s not so, too so, Liberal Arts University.
Some years into the revolution
the Luries have discovered the expendable nature of truth:
that they (assume former oppressor) lived forever in Carroll’s Alicetown
with people whom they (oppressor) did not and do not know;
and who ‘lie’ to prevent access to who they are, or aren’t,
as the case may be.
Ultimately therefore we discover that there are no codes in
Luries’ former relationships with entities of
“Colour”, which can facilitate his ability to
identify a good ‘dog’, from a bad ‘dog’ in his
transfixed escape to a ‘new’ pre-democratic
neighbourhood.
So he disposes of them all in his new preoccupation
with different minutae:
technoman fucks dogs in an emerging neo-Feudalist society…that
which was temporarily
intruded upon
by the Apollonian transforming dream.
.NiK(00)
Nicholas Williamson. aka .NiK. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst, 2106. RSA/Azania.
formerly blogged on www.Williamsonreport.co.za [now transformed to http://blogroid.wordpress.com and theblogospherian.blogspot.com ]
•Buffalo Hunters, The: Zone One (Gauteng) crime fiction poetry by Nicholas Williamson see: Blogroid
•Paglia. Camille: Sex and Violence. The Sexual Personae. See also Chthonian.
•Chthonian: Paglian term used to denote the rich all pervading attractiveness and compulsion of things ‘natural’ and preferably unmentionable in polite society: viz: piss, shit, menstruation, childbirth: the curse of nature’s monthly call in the case of woman, dragging her back from the lofty heights of imagination to the wracked intensity of bodily function and the dark functioning of body fluid exchanges.
•Nietzsche, Friederich (Fritz): Thus also Spake Zarathustra. Birth of Tragedy.
•Carroll. Lewis; Alice in Wonderland.
•A fuck’s a fuck ou pelly: slang SA it doesn't matter where or how you get it it's good.
•Appolonia: after Apollo…God of Reason, purity and beauty. Near first of the “sky cults” (Paglia) see Nietzsche…Birth of Tragedy.
•***The Gay (now called Joyous) Science: F. Nietzsche Ch 341
•* Groot baas…Afr: main person seriously important
•“Maak n le vir die ****baas” Afr metaphor repr: “Open your legs and let this important person fuck you.”
•Kaapse man: a man of the Cape, of mixed racial heritage..
What follows is a repeat of my december 2000 blog on a former now defunct websiteHello destiny.
“JM Coetzee has sold out to the literary establishment.” That was my first reaction on reading Disgrace some years ago.
Along with many others of his admirers I felt, perhaps unfairly, that his shift from post- structuralist to modern poetic realist was possibly more motivated by the need for a pension than the demands of his craft.
I had not read Disgrace, when it first came out for the same reason that I don’t read Harry Potter, because I was wrapping up some work of my own. However late in 2000, some of my colleagues from the English department, at the school where I teach part-time in the business department, asked me if I would please read Coetzee’s new novel, and help them out with some thoughts, perhaps, for teaching the book to the Matrics [School leaving class] the following year. The book had, as you know simply ‘leapt’ into prominence, and there was, it seemed, a shortage of reviews, ‘n things said about it.
I was at that time engaged in a personal goal quest, I called the “Millennium Gap”©, to give me space between one book and the next. So I was recording my own history of that memorable year, by writing some piece of poetic construction each day through the year 2000: often in response to the events of the day, sometimes other things. In December, after the year had ended, Disgrace became part of my daily fodder in a voracious drive to feed that anxious need. It produced two pieces of work (of the 826 for the year) the first on the 17th of December 2000, and the following final piece on the 20th December that year.
I don’t think that my colleagues, who are sensible ladies, found my pieces enjoyable. I heard that the occasional student who got hold of them found them weird, and perhaps they are. I don’t know. I liked them. They were the responses of a poet (myself) who found an influential voice suddenly singing off key…Like Mick Jagger deciding to do a country concert with Dolly Parton: why would he do that?
It was also a poetic response to a piece of work that ‘klapped’ me at a visceral level.
I recognised the rage, had felt it before, in 1980…and was disturbed by the highly specific denotative brutality of its imagery. I felt ultimately that the shift from post-structuralism, with its presentation of meaning through use of archetypes had been displaced by a populist dispersal of less than useful stereotypes: the presentation of the easily accessible sign, so accessible it is unnoticed and serves to reinforce those concepts we seek to undermine.
I could also say that, naturally, I would feel this. When I decided to write a series of novels, as a way of displacing the effects of a bad incident in my life, and because I was finding myself reaching a dark place as a poet, I found inspiration in Coetzee’s style (and that of Milan Kundera, Herman Charles Bosman and Elmore Leonard, not to mention Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and some others on a list too long to mention.) His style is that of a poet and seemed to me the most natural way for a poet to write prose.
On the other hand, were I an arrogant, self serving, self centred writer, who promotes his own work on the Internet, to anyone who can still read, then I cannot speak ill of a man who finally after many years moved over to the place where the big bucks are. After all he leaves me as the only remaining (self-styled) post-structuralist writer left on the South African (non- Afrikaner) writer’s block (pun intended) (Unless there are a few others out there like me plumbing the empty reaches of cyberspace…Howzit dudes.)
So what does this mean…Since JM Coetzee has achieved his purpose, and more power to his elbow, I felt I would resuscitate my poem essays from the back end of December 2000 and pop them onto today’s ‘Bloggo’ for your tastelessy literary pleasure. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary that may be represented in the two pieces (which contain overlapping images by the way) I do wish him well to enjoy the long hard fruits of labour.
Enjoy
17/12/00
On First reading JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.
I have just recoiled from
Reading a section of this Disgrace.
Recoiled from the horror of
Professor Lurie’s search
For truth; an unintelligible search
As most searches of this nature tend to be.
The search has immobilised him
He has become a voyeur of his own life,
Watched in slow motion. He is immobilized
In a way reminiscent of Camus’ Outsider…”Mother died yes-
Terday, or perhaps it was the day before, I don’t remember.”
Or was that my recollection of a recollection.
This man’s passive response to the urgings of his nature
As opposed to his intellect
May represent a rejection through awareness
Of the endless repetition of the events in his
Otherwise dreary day.
An empty man inhabiting
the sterile confines of Apollonian Cape Town:
the place where life is an illusion.
Sex severs his connection. Bad sex severs it badly,
And he retreats from his intellectual void to
The Chthonian* origins
Of the Eastern Cape- metaphorical place of struggle.
A place of wildest nature and societal absence.
There he experiences the Dionysian night, coming
Face to face with his karma
As his burning body transforms him into a
Physical outcast to mirror his
Inner disgrace.
He seems though to be as unaffected by this trauma as he
Was by the one which exiled him to this place,
Where the fruits of acquisition are being redistributed
Amongst the newly victorious.
The death of the Apollonian nightmare and
The return to chthonian primitivism as Paglia
May have termed it
Is Coetzee’s vision of the New South Africa, some years
Down
The
Line.
Rape is the deed that reflects
An absence of society: society in decay in Cape Town,
Society fizzling about in violence and disarray, in the Eastern Cape.
The absence of society brings out the dogs in man.
In Coetzee’s vision Society must not
be confused with Community, they may be different.
Coetzee’s Community is Patrilineal.
Petrus becomes a metaphor for the ‘primitive archetype’ but
Denotatively, African, chief, presiding over his subjects
Whom he can apparently order
To be fucked at will.
The Eastern Cape represents that return to African despotism
Which is ‘our’ (white/Coetzee’s) sole knowledge
Of pre-colonial, feudal Africa…There is no democracy
where a man has the right to be born
a king.
In this place our protagonist must pay obeisance to the
New gods of liberation…his guilt…a trivial fuck- not a grand fuck
Basically a fuckless fuck; for never does
A man fuck with less enthusiasm than does the abstract professor.
In his state of dispassion he is most passionate about a prostitute;
The student Melanie is his Lolita with spots
and stained
underwear. He has “congress” whatever that is
with a vet, who “succours’ him.
The man is dead. He
Studies, desultorily, the life
Of a dead romantic poet, Byron, who went
Off to die in a fit of ennui.
An abstract intellectual he has seen through the superfluity
Of Apollonian western society, and like the virgin
Who believed in father Charismas and the truth of the universe,
He sulks at his own revelation and sets out to spoil the illusion.
Coetzee’s Barbarians are now within
The walls…their ways those of the dark Chthonian night
Underground and in the full grip of
Nature.
They shoot the raging dogs, fuck white lesbians, impregnate them and turn them into subservient vassals.
Lurie’s sole response to all the chaos about him
Is to prep the corpses of dogs for burial: dealing
With death in the most brutal
Of its manifestations.
We are all vassals of a sort: true freedom is impossible
And so Lurie too becomes a vassal.
.NiK(00)
Later, after I had digested the book in its totality and admired the perfectly crafted images, I wrote a second piece, again, like the first, under the simultaneous influence of Camille Paglia, who’s monumental works I was reading contemporaneously, also voraciously, also feeding the poetic grist.
It came as no surprise to hear this week that Coetzee had moved offshore to that land of eternal retirement, Australia.
On Further reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee under
the influence of Camille PagliaColleague Carla demands
to know
“Why the dogs?”
in a note, written on the back inside
cover of the book.
“What’s with the dogs?”
Be they: dogs of war,
loyal dogs, kraal dogs, “my dog goes
before me for the crocodile” expendable
dogs,
mark out territory dogs?
Lurie’s daughter is marked out territory. Allegedly,
black men have come to her house, (Coetzee emerges here from
the closet – the Barbarians at the
gate are now demonstrably BLACK)
and have, apparently against her will,
entered the ‘chthonian’ darkness
of her vagina: thus has she possessed
them… and Coetzee reveals the ancient angst;
“will you let your daughter marry blacks!”:
a trusty
theme.
Who stakes a claim on whom, when the territory
is marked?
Then. The Lurie girl, is more than just a White woman.
While Lurie is a common enough name for birds,
Lurie is more archetypically Jewish, as is Isaacs;
Boerjood, perhaps, but the flavour is
Jewish nonetheless.
Is Ms Lurie a sign for a new addition
to the ranks of castaway minorities:
the marginalized and temporary sojourner?
Of course Isaacs could be a “Kaapse man”; we
know him only as another emasculated male, along with the pathetic Bill Shaw,
who
cowers from the ‘Groot Baas’*, Lurie…himself (Lurie) so emasculated,
he is reduced to fucking whores and post-adolescent
infants.
Both father, an aging homme fatale, and his phlegmatic earth-mother
incarnate daughter, screw up catastrophically
over sex.
The centrality of the story hovers around variations on a fuck: an
almost trite metaphor.
This activity is sometimes coyly referred to as “making love”,
there is an occasional ‘congress’, and
an alluded rape is dealt with
at a level of equally coy disassociation.
Lurie fucks (“makes love to”) a prostitute
in the opening scene he then proceeds to “spend the night”
with a young student who demonstrates a
most marginal degree
of satisfactory compliance. Not really knowing what to do
the apparently shell-shocked/ impressionable,
tentative, acolyte submits to
passionless penetration…in a sense she lets
him ‘fuck her a bit’. For a while; she plays Patty Hearst to his
Lord of the Manor: she possesses him
and then spews him out as less than before, as Paglia may have put it.
In the process of his engagement with Melanie
(his Lolita) we
discover that Lurie
fucks serially: secretaries, colleagues, wives of colleagues
random veterinary surgeons, friends of his wife’s,
auntie Joan Cobbley n all.
Curiously these are desolate encounters: they are
entered into with joyless abandon: it is his ‘job’,
which he performs on autopilot.
This sense of detached fornication is extended to
a “square” object called ‘Bev’, which has a useful hole in it and
which,
“succours” him.
It is a “show” thing.
a duty fuck: Lurie, the Labrador
hovering around a bitch long enough to generate a pity fuck,
before commencing to kill off the competition.
Luries’ sex drive demands rhythmic routine:
obeisance to a programme churning in his drivers:
almost if not quite, “fuck by numbers”.
By contrast his daughter is a doughy lump…a featureless
failed lesbian who is well and truly, allegedly, raped;
an act performed offstage and hinted at:
a level of discretion more commonly associated
with the
lavatory into which
Lurie is thrust to burn, smothered in lighter fuel:
something not at all cooll: burn baby burn..
Strangely Lurie does not become traumatized by this event (being burned). Like
Camus’ Outsider he
has become so anaesthetized from
existence that he has lost any sense of self.
Instead he tyrannizes over detail. He becomes
immersed in perceived inconsistencies
in the behaviour
of
one,
Petrus:
a newly advantaged, previously disadvantaged, person
who now, it seems, has exercised rights
of Prima Nocte…Droit de Seigneur: the new
lord is evident, “nou maak n lě vir die
swart baas*.” .
There is, after all, no overwhelming
evidence
to suggest that anybody else did it, is there?
there are implications: men who came and shot the dogs
and went off with
the woman. Nonetheless they are
Only accusations. No further evidence is led.
No charges laid. Lurie however assumes that Petrus had gone away
and accuses him of lying. Petrus a guileful,
disingenuous yet engaging man quite reasonably allows, that
one may suspect what one wishes…if you do not
ask the right questions then the answers you receive
will deceive those who wish to be deceived.
The issue of the boy Pollux, ironically named
for a mythical hero, and of course, a ‘bright
star’,
is then a red herring, diverting
Lurie away from the probable real truth: that Petrus
penetrated the Lurie persona.
The dogs are shot, so that they
will not trouble the new owner, no longer a guest, in future,
when day has dawned.
It is obvious that access to David’s daughter’s
chthonian stronghold (cunt, for those who are still confused)
is the key to her continued existence
on the farm…she is reduced to a vassal, another irony, in a cycle of
abuse and abusing:
a shift in role, doubly pernicious with that Jewish moniker.
In (my novel) the Buffalo Hunters*, Jodas defends his decision
to shoot his own, semi-feral, cat; on grounds that using a vet desensitises
us to the real world…the real ‘chthonian night’ as Paglia*
would call it, and also call it a
‘shit place’, in need of society.
By these standards the
man who shoots the dogs
is a MAN in the most traditional sense .
Similarly, Lurie also has a need to prove that he is a man, his sex drive notwithstanding:
so he helps a local vet, the square object called Bev,
(which is only two letters away from box…a familiar metaphor for cunt)
kill stray dogs by anaesthetic process, moving somnambulistically by chthonian
degrees from the anaesthesia
of Communication 101…The professor has
graduated to god’s assistant, fucking the instrument of death itself,
in place of some other, spotty, in-exuberant, post-pubescent, country piece.
So what about the failed former lesbian post-modern-crypto-hippie-
allegedly-raped daughter?
Well she’s ok. Whomsoever it turned out to be, should she choose to
fine tune her ‘surviving victim’
personae then
she has access to someone who will
(perhaps regularly or inevitably) want to come around
on a doggish jaunt
and give her what she may or may not want.
Assuming she could (reluctantly) drop her victim attitude of passive acceptance
she could sequentially begin to exploit her power,
generate Kugelish demands and
the unnamed ‘rapist/s’ will KAK.
Most probably this will not happen.
Coetzee is taking us on a journey into Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence:
the past eternally doomed to repeat itself. “again and again times
without number...***”
Lurie is Coetzee’s Prufrock
extended to purposeless extinction.
He is left finally to deal with issues of death
and dissolution neither of which interfere
with, nor interface with, his deterministic dispassion.
Do we care…at the end we are exhausted and dispirited: the
crumbs we [assuming I write/read in my capacity as ‘honky’) are offered
in this tale
are meagre indeed: acceptance of a new Feudalism and
dealing with dead dogs. Wow
This Coetzee, out in the open
with the ‘in your face
ness’ of Disgrace is yet another version of the “horror”.
Conrad’s ghost haunts Coetzee, revealed in the “slim Jan”
mechanisms of his paranoia with Petrus whose ‘truth’
consists in the deliberate alteration of a ‘lie’.
Lies are important to Coetzee’s theme, lies papering on older lies on further
lies burnishing
the grandest lie of all: that elegant illusion we call, Civilization.
Petrus the “dark person” lies, specifically over
Pollux. Otherwise he is evasive...the archetypical ‘shifty’ darkie telling the former oppressor
what the oppressor needs to know: Rresistance politics – truth: subject to expedience.
Lurie, at his ‘trial’ asserts that “the girls statement
is right.”
He exercises his right to say no more, to say
nothing that may incriminate him further
or less: the truth, but not the whole truth.
He will say nothing to confess motive, and therefore guilt.
Petrus simply lies and thus obviates guilt.
They are both men after all and a “fuck’s a fuck ou pelly”* except of course
that it isn’t: there’s all that old eternal family history stuff
Clogging up the old chthonian pipes.
This central theme, the relativity of truth, remains the most profound
regarding the conundrum in
which Lurie has found himself. Self absorption
in a world of illusions is fatal to
professional well being.
Coetzee implies this to be the Achilles heel of the former, now
It seems, doomed,
Neo-Appolonia: metaphorically depicted through Cape Town and
it’s not so, too so, Liberal Arts University.
Some years into the revolution
the Luries have discovered the expendable nature of truth:
that they (assume former oppressor) lived forever in Carroll’s Alicetown
with people whom they (oppressor) did not and do not know;
and who ‘lie’ to prevent access to who they are, or aren’t,
as the case may be.
Ultimately therefore we discover that there are no codes in
Luries’ former relationships with entities of
“Colour”, which can facilitate his ability to
identify a good ‘dog’, from a bad ‘dog’ in his
transfixed escape to a ‘new’ pre-democratic
neighbourhood.
So he disposes of them all in his new preoccupation
with different minutae:
technoman fucks dogs in an emerging neo-Feudalist society…that
which was temporarily
intruded upon
by the Apollonian transforming dream.
.NiK(00)
Nicholas Williamson. aka .NiK. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst, 2106. RSA/Azania.
formerly blogged on www.Williamsonreport.co.za [now transformed to http://blogroid.wordpress.com and theblogospherian.blogspot.com ]
•Buffalo Hunters, The: Zone One (Gauteng) crime fiction poetry by Nicholas Williamson see: Blogroid
•Paglia. Camille: Sex and Violence. The Sexual Personae. See also Chthonian.
•Chthonian: Paglian term used to denote the rich all pervading attractiveness and compulsion of things ‘natural’ and preferably unmentionable in polite society: viz: piss, shit, menstruation, childbirth: the curse of nature’s monthly call in the case of woman, dragging her back from the lofty heights of imagination to the wracked intensity of bodily function and the dark functioning of body fluid exchanges.
•Nietzsche, Friederich (Fritz): Thus also Spake Zarathustra. Birth of Tragedy.
•Carroll. Lewis; Alice in Wonderland.
•A fuck’s a fuck ou pelly: slang SA it doesn't matter where or how you get it it's good.
•Appolonia: after Apollo…God of Reason, purity and beauty. Near first of the “sky cults” (Paglia) see Nietzsche…Birth of Tragedy.
•***The Gay (now called Joyous) Science: F. Nietzsche Ch 341
•* Groot baas…Afr: main person seriously important
•“Maak n le vir die ****baas” Afr metaphor repr: “Open your legs and let this important person fuck you.”
•Kaapse man: a man of the Cape, of mixed racial heritage..
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Weblog
Jozi
22 April 2009There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.
For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.
Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.
It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated publicly sponsored mass transport system and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.
Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage where it is over -commoditised and the return on capital is negative. It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens lined. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].
Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.
Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.
The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross town routes linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again, we are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an edge city and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.
A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.
Jozi
22 April 2009There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.
For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.
Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.
It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated publicly sponsored mass transport system and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.
Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage where it is over -commoditised and the return on capital is negative. It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens lined. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].
Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.
Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.
The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross town routes linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again, we are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an edge city and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.
A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.
The great BRT Taxi war.
Weblog
Jozi
21 April 2009
There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.
For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.
Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.
It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated, publicly sponsored, mass transport system; and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.
Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage, where it is over-commoditised and the return on capital is negative.
It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane [known as Gautrain] by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens linked. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].
Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.
Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.
The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means, mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross-town routes, linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again. We are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an Edge city so is Tswane, and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.
A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.
Jozi
21 April 2009
There is a quaintly Luddite quality to the South African Taxi Industries belated response to the impending introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport System and its impact on their revenue stream. In the general babble it is difficult to evaluate whether much consultation took place, and quite possibly it didn’t; probably to forestall an inevitable opposition to an inevitable event.
For offshore readers South Africa’s/Azania’s most important cities: Cape Town, the national legislative capital, Tshwane, the national executive capital and Jozi [The Big J] : the magnificently materialistic financial capital of the continent, have for decades been dependent on a savage breed of entrepreneur: predatory in every sense of the essential capitalist spirit; for the mass movement of less affluent citizens who need to commute daily to and from work, and perform other chores.
Globally prestigious newspapers like for instance the economist have over the decades written paeans about one of the world’s most successful [so-called] Black capitalist developments and by and large it is a justified source of pride.
It leapt into a gap presented by the disintegration of the sclerotic Apartheid era cronyist dominated, publicly sponsored, mass transport system; and provides fast, efficient, time dependent citizen movement. They are also terrifying to fellow road users, through whose space many hurtle with reckless abandonment,[and always did: my childhood was shot through with the reality of crossing the road in front of my parents house, to the park beyond, dodging speeding taxing driving lunatics in big Plymouths, Dodges, Chevrolets and Ford Galaxies.] The annual death toll from minibus taxis crashes with other road users, or just passing furniture, probably makes up a large part of the annual road slaughter that is part and parcel of an era of mass movement. Personally I prefer to use routes that are less populated with minibus taxis unless I feel specifically, the need for an adrenaline rush.
Nowadays it is an over traded and frequently violent industry in the ‘slippery slope’ stages of its product life cycle. It is being forced by legislative fiat to modernise its fleet, at about the time in a product life cycles stage, where it is over-commoditised and the return on capital is negative.
It managed to see off the prospective competition from the new high-speed rail line being created between Jozi and Tshwane [known as Gautrain] by seeing to it that it only drew audiences from the private car sector. It is now faced with competition from an unanticipated source; a mass movement bus rapid transit system that runs on dedicated high-speed routes that are being carved out on all the major arteries serving the Big J [presumably all over Tshwane and Cape Town too.].
One remembers that there was a time when stagecoaches kept the cities and the citizens linked. They fell prey to the coming of trains in the late 19th century. Presumably ‘they did not go quietly’ into that dark night. The same is true for the taxi industry facing regulation and competition. There has been violence, sticks are routinely waved, shots are routinely fired in rage, frustration or whatever and now the new President has agreed to simply stop the whole business for awhile until the election is over [technically he is only the new president after the election, which is a foregone conclusion unless something remarkable happens over the next 48 hours. So I am making an assumptive statement].
Of course next week when the election is over the BRT process will continue, Contracts are signed, work is in progress; the entire region is being routinely disrupted by a battery of roadwork programmes, that are well under way; and are fortuitously helping to propel us along the upper surface of this Great Global Recession, gripping the planet currently. To stop this BRT process now could have catastrophic financial repercussions and would undoubtedly impact on exchange rates and market confidence.
Then there is the question as to whether the interests of the State are synonymous with those of an unelected business consortium? We await Mr Z’s position after the election when I am sure the entire matter will be delegated to people who will simply carry on regardless. This is a pattern of behaviour that has become predictable and impervious. Why abandon a winning formula? Especially when you have just been given what, subject to an unanticipated “Lie” factor, looks to be an 80% majority.
The real answer here is that the minibus taxi has reached its commoditisation date and must yield to the more efficient system. That does not by any means, mean the end of the taxi industry. Rather that the smart money will move to something more lucrative. Others will search out niche markets and cross-town routes, linking parts of the city that currently require multiple journeys to reach. They will have to practice running around the web rather than down the main lanes to the hub and out again. We are in any event no longer that type of city really… We are an Edge city so is Tswane, and most city planning hasn’t worked that out yet.
A big competitive issue will be to improve the quality of the journey and develop more credibility and exploit the natural advantages the minibus has over the BRT; Nimbleness, flexibility, linking routes between BRT lines. That is how you deal with market competition… not by demanding protection from progress.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The Knowledge economy and SA's election
The Knowledge Economy Rulz
I was struck the other day by a news item that in a nutshell summarised the opportunity and dilemmas inherent in this great global economic meltdown.
First though let me say that I didn’t feel that the current election campaign was turning out to be anything other than an anti-climax. There is no point in listening to the welter of messages being sent out by our motley crew of parties and contenders.
Perhaps there is a contest and the election date itself will reveal a ‘moment of truth’ as we like to pander it, but at this moment there are about a dozen parties all sounding the same as the current ruling party and one party that seems to be marginally different… By this time next week we will know that the majority will rule and that one swimming upstream will either have been brutally rejected or surprisingly strengthened.
I find everyone’s policies incoherent. I presume they are deliberately incoherent. They reflect the truth of our age: a truth we hate to acknowledge. There are no solutions to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
The reason why there are no solutions is because ‘we’ [those who are in public office] are not working for the common good, as would be supposed, when remunerated from the common pot, but rather every opportunity seeking individual who joined the Struggle with the intention of achieving personal enrichment, seeks to build a lavish lifestyle [according to their fancies] from controlling access to real opportunity. This can only occur at the expense of the poor and ultimately it will cripple the nation no less than has been empirically demonstrated so many times over the past century in so many failed states, that it is actually boring.
The news item that caught my attention in a puzzled way was broadcast out of Bloomberg TV. Briefly it consisted of a story and an interview. The subject, a mid-life American male former construction company owner who had seen his business collapse following the real estate bust in the U.S. and had re-skilled as an independent currency trader.
I was forcibly struck in full force by the reality that we live in a knowledge based economy. The story explained how currency trading had become a big field of endeavour and the volume of daily trades in a wide range of such financial instruments as the euro, yen, ruble, sterling and of course dollars, had doubled over the past few years, and was a huge sum by any of today’s inflated standards.
As recently as a decade or so ago currency dealing, or as it was more arcanely known “arbitrage”, was a skill passed down from father to son over generations and was always a source of huge wealth to a limited pool of people who sensibly did not display their wealth [much] and thus were able to live happy rich and anonymous lives, unlike the vast mass of humanity who live poor and anonymously whether happy or not. George Soros, for instance also interviewed this past weekend on Bloomberg, will always inspire awe as the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, such was the rarity of the skill.
Now a construction entrepreneur can 'take a course', he said, learn the ropes from expert sources and when interviewed was up at some 03.00 hours trading euros in an Australian market which he later sold somewhere else in the world. Now that is serious re-skilling and the market is providing the man with his opportunity as it always did… he simply shifted markets because he had access to knowledge.
America being what it is with a sluice way full of funny money pouring into the economy in tranches of trillions, a huge percentage of those losing jobs in the old pre-2009 economy will re-skill within the year and be re constructing their lives in a new, emerging and completely different world. There is something odd about trading a productive lifestyle building homes for people, to becoming one of an army living symbiotically off certain core lubrication points in the non-real part of the economy: the money part, but ultimately that is what the knowledge economy is all about.
The dilemma for those of us in developing country’s where the majority of our voters will never even conceptualise arbitrage, albeit they could all confuse it with arbitration, is that the Chinese strategy of undermining the American dollar by pricing their currency at about a twenty percent discount to the dollar; and then fixing the price so the dollar couldn’t shake it off, was to annihilate our [S.A’s] rather subsidy dependent textile industry, through flooding the country with ridiculously cheap, Chinese imports at the expense of both the Chinese worker and ours.
There is no quick fix, like learning currency manipulation to solve the employment conditions of former machinists and other clothing industry workers wiped out by the Chinese invasion. Sadly most will never work again. Similarly the hosts of warlike men dancing and chanting about our new emerging President may well find that like front line troops in all conflicts once the war is over they become superfluous to need; and while some may become remittance men, the rest will subside back into a sea of workless anonymity without the skills to construct their own lives out of nothing, as the construction man [and a million or so of his peers] will be able to do.
We are in recession now and have during boom times been barely creating enough jobs to even marginally dent the army of aspirant work seeking persons, who otherwise have no way out of poverty other than through criminal activities. We are no longer a society, which sees self-development as the solution to unemployment, those who now control the fortunes of the ruling party are of an essentially kollektivist mindset; and we are about to elect a populist leader who is promising things that cannot be under our present circumstances other than through actions that may well destroy the State itself, in any seriously productive form.
We remember I think that the last election was noted for posters proclaiming: “ vote for us we’ll bring jobs and wealth”. It was true that some people gained immense wealth beyond all dreams of avarice. For the rest it was ‘tata ma chance’ with the State controlled lottery with its State controlled winners. And that hasn’t happened on a scale sufficient to have any lasting impact. Right now we are shedding jobs much faster than they can be “created”: as entire industries struggle to survive the greatest financial meltdown in recorded history.
Frankly the last thing this country needs right now is a government that wants to emulate Hugo Chavez or worse and the only way that cannot happen is if every eligible voter goes to the polls next Wednesday and votes for change.
As many of you know this blog’s cynical definition of democracy enlarges on Churchill’s famous assertion that all government is bad, democracy is simply the best form of bad, by widening the frame to include the idea that democracy is about the citizen having an implicit, enforceable right to routinely change the gathered vultures who flock daily to the largesse table in search of easy pickings. [I would call them thieves but there is an election brewing and I wouldn’t like to be rude to those few people of integrity who, I am certain, exist in every party.] And it is time for a feeding frenzy adjustment.
Frankly I think it is time for a total change of government, even if it ends up as a coalition type of relatively unstable government… After all, Italy for instance, has virtually had no stable government for about sixty years and managed to be prosperous and successful; that is, until a couple of months ago when Sylvio [their prime Fatcat] passed a law making him immune to prosecution; and look at the shock wave that caused: an entire town fell down.
The Americans proved last year that they could vote for a dramatic change. Now is not the time to vote for a party with a covert Kollektivist agenda. We have no choice but to go with the market economy, it is the only form of economic activity that even partially solves the problem of superfluous human lives, and the market economy in the 21st century is a knowledge economy. So go and vote for change next Wednesday.
I was struck the other day by a news item that in a nutshell summarised the opportunity and dilemmas inherent in this great global economic meltdown.
First though let me say that I didn’t feel that the current election campaign was turning out to be anything other than an anti-climax. There is no point in listening to the welter of messages being sent out by our motley crew of parties and contenders.
Perhaps there is a contest and the election date itself will reveal a ‘moment of truth’ as we like to pander it, but at this moment there are about a dozen parties all sounding the same as the current ruling party and one party that seems to be marginally different… By this time next week we will know that the majority will rule and that one swimming upstream will either have been brutally rejected or surprisingly strengthened.
I find everyone’s policies incoherent. I presume they are deliberately incoherent. They reflect the truth of our age: a truth we hate to acknowledge. There are no solutions to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
The reason why there are no solutions is because ‘we’ [those who are in public office] are not working for the common good, as would be supposed, when remunerated from the common pot, but rather every opportunity seeking individual who joined the Struggle with the intention of achieving personal enrichment, seeks to build a lavish lifestyle [according to their fancies] from controlling access to real opportunity. This can only occur at the expense of the poor and ultimately it will cripple the nation no less than has been empirically demonstrated so many times over the past century in so many failed states, that it is actually boring.
The news item that caught my attention in a puzzled way was broadcast out of Bloomberg TV. Briefly it consisted of a story and an interview. The subject, a mid-life American male former construction company owner who had seen his business collapse following the real estate bust in the U.S. and had re-skilled as an independent currency trader.
I was forcibly struck in full force by the reality that we live in a knowledge based economy. The story explained how currency trading had become a big field of endeavour and the volume of daily trades in a wide range of such financial instruments as the euro, yen, ruble, sterling and of course dollars, had doubled over the past few years, and was a huge sum by any of today’s inflated standards.
As recently as a decade or so ago currency dealing, or as it was more arcanely known “arbitrage”, was a skill passed down from father to son over generations and was always a source of huge wealth to a limited pool of people who sensibly did not display their wealth [much] and thus were able to live happy rich and anonymous lives, unlike the vast mass of humanity who live poor and anonymously whether happy or not. George Soros, for instance also interviewed this past weekend on Bloomberg, will always inspire awe as the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992, such was the rarity of the skill.
Now a construction entrepreneur can 'take a course', he said, learn the ropes from expert sources and when interviewed was up at some 03.00 hours trading euros in an Australian market which he later sold somewhere else in the world. Now that is serious re-skilling and the market is providing the man with his opportunity as it always did… he simply shifted markets because he had access to knowledge.
America being what it is with a sluice way full of funny money pouring into the economy in tranches of trillions, a huge percentage of those losing jobs in the old pre-2009 economy will re-skill within the year and be re constructing their lives in a new, emerging and completely different world. There is something odd about trading a productive lifestyle building homes for people, to becoming one of an army living symbiotically off certain core lubrication points in the non-real part of the economy: the money part, but ultimately that is what the knowledge economy is all about.
The dilemma for those of us in developing country’s where the majority of our voters will never even conceptualise arbitrage, albeit they could all confuse it with arbitration, is that the Chinese strategy of undermining the American dollar by pricing their currency at about a twenty percent discount to the dollar; and then fixing the price so the dollar couldn’t shake it off, was to annihilate our [S.A’s] rather subsidy dependent textile industry, through flooding the country with ridiculously cheap, Chinese imports at the expense of both the Chinese worker and ours.
There is no quick fix, like learning currency manipulation to solve the employment conditions of former machinists and other clothing industry workers wiped out by the Chinese invasion. Sadly most will never work again. Similarly the hosts of warlike men dancing and chanting about our new emerging President may well find that like front line troops in all conflicts once the war is over they become superfluous to need; and while some may become remittance men, the rest will subside back into a sea of workless anonymity without the skills to construct their own lives out of nothing, as the construction man [and a million or so of his peers] will be able to do.
We are in recession now and have during boom times been barely creating enough jobs to even marginally dent the army of aspirant work seeking persons, who otherwise have no way out of poverty other than through criminal activities. We are no longer a society, which sees self-development as the solution to unemployment, those who now control the fortunes of the ruling party are of an essentially kollektivist mindset; and we are about to elect a populist leader who is promising things that cannot be under our present circumstances other than through actions that may well destroy the State itself, in any seriously productive form.
We remember I think that the last election was noted for posters proclaiming: “ vote for us we’ll bring jobs and wealth”. It was true that some people gained immense wealth beyond all dreams of avarice. For the rest it was ‘tata ma chance’ with the State controlled lottery with its State controlled winners. And that hasn’t happened on a scale sufficient to have any lasting impact. Right now we are shedding jobs much faster than they can be “created”: as entire industries struggle to survive the greatest financial meltdown in recorded history.
Frankly the last thing this country needs right now is a government that wants to emulate Hugo Chavez or worse and the only way that cannot happen is if every eligible voter goes to the polls next Wednesday and votes for change.
As many of you know this blog’s cynical definition of democracy enlarges on Churchill’s famous assertion that all government is bad, democracy is simply the best form of bad, by widening the frame to include the idea that democracy is about the citizen having an implicit, enforceable right to routinely change the gathered vultures who flock daily to the largesse table in search of easy pickings. [I would call them thieves but there is an election brewing and I wouldn’t like to be rude to those few people of integrity who, I am certain, exist in every party.] And it is time for a feeding frenzy adjustment.
Frankly I think it is time for a total change of government, even if it ends up as a coalition type of relatively unstable government… After all, Italy for instance, has virtually had no stable government for about sixty years and managed to be prosperous and successful; that is, until a couple of months ago when Sylvio [their prime Fatcat] passed a law making him immune to prosecution; and look at the shock wave that caused: an entire town fell down.
The Americans proved last year that they could vote for a dramatic change. Now is not the time to vote for a party with a covert Kollektivist agenda. We have no choice but to go with the market economy, it is the only form of economic activity that even partially solves the problem of superfluous human lives, and the market economy in the 21st century is a knowledge economy. So go and vote for change next Wednesday.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wot a shower
I thought of writing about the end of the never, never trial of Mr Jacob Zuma, President-in-waiting of South Africa but it was such an anti climax i was left thougthtless.
I wondered instead about the Brian Rix farce qualities of the entire affair, but a Rix farce always has a plausible resolution, which is known beforehand to the audience. Does Mo Shaik’s revelation to the nation at some place in Tschwane [sic] count as bringing the audience into the unravelling plot, or was that too close to the denouement to count as creating farce: hmm more commonly used with tragedy.
And then there is this anti-climatic discovery that the entire case was a fabrication conspired by our own Rosenkranz and Guildenstern [sic]. This strange conclusion, whereby about a hundred million rand [not really much money is it?] is spent to discover via a random mysterious audio tape delivered via unofficial/unorthodox means that the entire business was an NPA conspiracy, hatched by a couple of flunkeys in the system and not the Butler everyone has suspected all along. No wonder the man is now sitting in an aggrieved circumstance offstage albeit not yet in the Green Room. This ending was not at all farce like. It has a distinctly continental even French touch. It’s more like the kind of ending one should have in a pink panther movie, where credulity has already been so overstretched that R&G are simply the comic relief.
So: the unanswered questions. Why was there a rumour that the NPA was proposing to charge Mr Z with more than 700 counts of what should now, appropriately in our newly transformed society, be [so-called] Black-collar-crimes? Did those huge files we kept seeing in foto glimpses on Tee vee in the hands of the prosecution simply contain malicious gossip? Was telling the nation about it all over these years that we have been bored with this saga also malicious gossip and shouldn’t those who perpetrated and broadcast such gossip be hunted down and apprehended? Will Rosenkranz and Guildenstern be hunted down? Will they mysteriously become, as they were in Hamlet? Or will they simply have to lay low in exile for awhile until everyone has forgotten that there were ever unfavourable thoughts about the new beloved leader, say by later today?
When Mr Shaik was found guilty of supplying more than R2,000,000 bucks to Mr Z did this not imply that the money had been received by the latter, or is that, unproven and therefore, he is innocent of using the money to finance the school fees of his many children [which is of course as it should be shouldn’t it ] and maintaining a lifestyle, in conflict with his declared income… Ah that too is unproven and therefore like the personal affairs of all persons a private matter [again as it should be] is out of bounds for discussion.
The great thing about winning this marathon struggle is the ten-year After-party that is our forcoming attraction. Have a great life Msholozi [sic] with your wondrous Machini wami [sic] Those guys in the G20 are all lining up to have a foto-op with you at the next big summit. They would have all buckled under the strain, well maybe not Mr Putin or that tough little Frenchman, but you are undoubtedly "The man": chutzpah deluxe..
Better to be a man about whom questions are asked than one about whom the answers are known.
Final question. Could this oddball ending be improved with a close out shot of Mr Z taking a shower?
Blogroid
I wondered instead about the Brian Rix farce qualities of the entire affair, but a Rix farce always has a plausible resolution, which is known beforehand to the audience. Does Mo Shaik’s revelation to the nation at some place in Tschwane [sic] count as bringing the audience into the unravelling plot, or was that too close to the denouement to count as creating farce: hmm more commonly used with tragedy.
And then there is this anti-climatic discovery that the entire case was a fabrication conspired by our own Rosenkranz and Guildenstern [sic]. This strange conclusion, whereby about a hundred million rand [not really much money is it?] is spent to discover via a random mysterious audio tape delivered via unofficial/unorthodox means that the entire business was an NPA conspiracy, hatched by a couple of flunkeys in the system and not the Butler everyone has suspected all along. No wonder the man is now sitting in an aggrieved circumstance offstage albeit not yet in the Green Room. This ending was not at all farce like. It has a distinctly continental even French touch. It’s more like the kind of ending one should have in a pink panther movie, where credulity has already been so overstretched that R&G are simply the comic relief.
So: the unanswered questions. Why was there a rumour that the NPA was proposing to charge Mr Z with more than 700 counts of what should now, appropriately in our newly transformed society, be [so-called] Black-collar-crimes? Did those huge files we kept seeing in foto glimpses on Tee vee in the hands of the prosecution simply contain malicious gossip? Was telling the nation about it all over these years that we have been bored with this saga also malicious gossip and shouldn’t those who perpetrated and broadcast such gossip be hunted down and apprehended? Will Rosenkranz and Guildenstern be hunted down? Will they mysteriously become, as they were in Hamlet? Or will they simply have to lay low in exile for awhile until everyone has forgotten that there were ever unfavourable thoughts about the new beloved leader, say by later today?
When Mr Shaik was found guilty of supplying more than R2,000,000 bucks to Mr Z did this not imply that the money had been received by the latter, or is that, unproven and therefore, he is innocent of using the money to finance the school fees of his many children [which is of course as it should be shouldn’t it ] and maintaining a lifestyle, in conflict with his declared income… Ah that too is unproven and therefore like the personal affairs of all persons a private matter [again as it should be] is out of bounds for discussion.
The great thing about winning this marathon struggle is the ten-year After-party that is our forcoming attraction. Have a great life Msholozi [sic] with your wondrous Machini wami [sic] Those guys in the G20 are all lining up to have a foto-op with you at the next big summit. They would have all buckled under the strain, well maybe not Mr Putin or that tough little Frenchman, but you are undoubtedly "The man": chutzpah deluxe..
Better to be a man about whom questions are asked than one about whom the answers are known.
Final question. Could this oddball ending be improved with a close out shot of Mr Z taking a shower?
Blogroid
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Prevaricating over the Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama
Weblog 25th March 2009-03-25
Dateline Jozi
It is hard to imagine a governing party in a working democracy taking the kind of liberties with public credibility in the run up to a national election that the ruling party is taking in South Africa’s immanent election, and getting away with it. Perhaps though South Africa is no longer a working democracy?
Some would say in retrospect that 2009 was when politics really got dirty, with fingers in the eyes to opponents, following a spray of dust to block the nostrils. Others argue that a country is only truly a democracy once the voter has changed the ruling party on a few occasions. Until then it is simply an emerging democracy.
This campaign of the ruling party is a defensive fighter’s response to some very real problems that no main persons want to deal with, yet. This is throwing dust in the face of your enemy as it advances. Distraction and misdirection: Keep all opposition in reaction mode so you never have to defend your record and no one else gets around to presenting their plan. In the meantime advance your troops.
It is a mean dust trail and one that rightly cannot be ignored. The ruling party must be most certain that they will walk this election again and again time without plunder to show such disregard for the State constructed out of the Struggle.
For us oldies the past month or so reeks of the old days when the Apartheid Regime would make some outrageous contribution to our daily fair … and then bluster their way through a series of denials backed up with fists and whatever for those too persistent in pursuit of transparent clarity.
The Minister of Foreign affairs [Mrs Dlamini-Zuma] this morning made a defence of the idea that sport and politics don’t mix that would have done her predecessor [Mr Botha] proud, and would undoubtedly confuse the hell out of Mr Peter Hain who organised umpteen campaigns against Apartheid sport, presumably with Mrs Zuma’s blessing, back in the bad old days. I imagine that Ms Zola Budd, wherever she is, feels a sense of chagrin that the people who destroyed her more than promising career would now be protecting her participation.
Or was there a difference between the apartheid regime’s violation of human rights in South Africa and the Chinese Government’s violation of the rights of Tibetans following their occupation of the Tibetan State for the past half century. The head of the SA Communist Party believes so.
Presumably the taxi drivers who this week vowed on the national news to disrupt the world cup because [apparently] their rights to terrorise motorists are being violated by the bus rapid transport system coming into being are ok, because they are not mixing politics with sport: their grievances are purely commercial.
The ruling party’s silence on the threats of taxi drivers contrasts curiously with their rudeness to one of the planet’s most revered figures. Nonetheless this strange disinterest in the affairs of the world pales compared to the way the Party has behaved recently over a range of issues that should affect voter responses but quite obviously are not going to, perhaps because the voter base of the party approves of their positions.
To mention a few: The shock release on medical parole, from a fifteen-year prison sentence of the Presidential candidate’s benefactor, Mr Shabir Shaik. The circumstances become murkier under cross-examination and the apparent fairness gap between his treatment and the plight of thousands of other alleged terminally ill prisoners is largely ignored, both by the government and its supporters..
Then there is a red herring, soften- them- up- for- bad –news report that the national prosecuting authority intends to drop its always-pending-[alleged corruption and racketeering ] case against Mr Zuma the prime Presidential candidate in the election…
Then there was is the brief ‘uproar’ over the listing of struggle icon, and convicted fraudster, Mrs Madikazela –Mandela for the national assembly. At number 5 there is no question that this formidable woman will take her rightful place in the national assembly, and the volume of antipathy over this is at a lower level of confusion. As was the bizarre endgame played out by another [lesser] struggle icon Karl Niehouse the ruling party’s answer to Karl Rove the Bush fixit man, who confessed tearfully to a stunned nation that he was a lying crook who deceived people over money. The list of circumstances in which the ruling party demonstrates it disinterest in the things that bother ordinary people is almost endless, and so ingrained has dismissive behaviour become that few people even bother to take note of it anymore aside from uptight opponents and reject larneys.
Nonetheless all this was light dust indeed in retrospect, when played out against their latest attempt to test how far they can fool all of the people and still win an absolute majority from the suckers.
To enlarge on my opening observation: This week the government of South Africa defended its commercial interests in the 2010 World Cup by playing the most bizarre card played by this capricious government in its fifteen year history in office. They banned the Dalai Lama from attending a world Peace conference organised to promote the World Cup competition.
Their reasoning: The Dalai Lama’s attendance was not in the country’s national interest. This phrase that has popped up a few times lately is again reminiscent of the Auld days and usually meant not in the ruling party’s interests.
It is hard to imagine how the Dalai Lama, more than likely the world’s most elegiac figure now that Mother Theresa has died could cause a rift in South Africa’s national interests.
I also have no recollection of a time when the public response to a ruling party decision was so overwhelmingly negative.
Fortunately for the ruling party the psychographics of soccer supporters is so diametrically different to the psychographics of Dalai Lama supporters with only marginal areas of overlap that most of those who intend to party at the world cup have only one world piece in mind, and it’s not the Dalai Lama, bless his withered buttocks.
What remains to be tested is whether the ruling party supporters numbered in any quantity amongst the unaccustomed outpouring of unhappiness at the bizarre behaviour of the government of the huge response to Tim Modisa’s after eight debate yesterday..
Top honours for the day go to the fellow [who may have been called] Thabo, who had the unenviable task of multi-tasking his defence for the Government while seemingly taking his daughters to school: to judge by the happy squealing backgrounds [one was reminded of Perlman’s great interview with a cabinet minister in some remote part of the continent discoursing on his country’s chances while feeding the chickens.].
The Party Spokesperson, remained firmly stoic in the face of a tirade of rage and confusion that had even the redoubtable Mr Tim Modisa amazed. If ever one had evidence that the national broadcaster’s prime radio station has some credibility it was the after eight debate on the Dalai Lama’s rejection. Even a cabinet minister was appalled [Mrs Hogan Min of Health]
… Will she be fired is the next question. She should be is my answer.
Thabo handled her betrayal with stunning fortitude. Even the loquacious Mr Leon, a well known, fellow guest with Thabo X , was silenced by the fellow’s dogged fortitude.
Of course the Party spokesperson was never able to give a direct NO to the repeated question. Did the Chinese government exert pressure on the Government to silence the meddlesome monk? Did the master prevaricator of the week draw the line at outright lying?
Perhaps he worked on a need to know basis and he didn’t need to know that. Perhaps these are the troops?
A day later the head of the Communist Party came on line to defend the decision, and the public was subjected to a delightful exercise in prevarication whereby the forcible takeover [in 1950]of the independent [Theistic] Kingdom of Tibet by China was represented as reclaiming an intransigent part of “one China”, and the efforts of the Tibetans to reclaim their independence was in effect likened to the behaviour of the late Ian Smith in unilaterally declaring Rhodesian independence.
The takeover of Tibet by China was a colonial act equivalent to South Africa deciding to annex Lesotho on the ground that it is surrounded by that country and subject to a “One South Africa” policy, and far from the Dalai Lama being a dissident priest he, like Nelson Mandela with whom he was to share the podium at the aborted Peace Conference, is a liberation leader. Obviously the communist party of South Africa can’t get it head around the fact that people want to be rid of communist rule where it still applies.
Anyway none of this had any effect on the voters who, in a series of extreme low poll by-elections on the 25th March sent the ruling party back into office by huge margins… If anything the ruling party seems more popular than ever, and so I stick by my prediction that the ruling party will win the by a landslide in a low poll election with the possible loss of the Western Cape.
Weblog 25th March 2009-03-25
Dateline Jozi
It is hard to imagine a governing party in a working democracy taking the kind of liberties with public credibility in the run up to a national election that the ruling party is taking in South Africa’s immanent election, and getting away with it. Perhaps though South Africa is no longer a working democracy?
Some would say in retrospect that 2009 was when politics really got dirty, with fingers in the eyes to opponents, following a spray of dust to block the nostrils. Others argue that a country is only truly a democracy once the voter has changed the ruling party on a few occasions. Until then it is simply an emerging democracy.
This campaign of the ruling party is a defensive fighter’s response to some very real problems that no main persons want to deal with, yet. This is throwing dust in the face of your enemy as it advances. Distraction and misdirection: Keep all opposition in reaction mode so you never have to defend your record and no one else gets around to presenting their plan. In the meantime advance your troops.
It is a mean dust trail and one that rightly cannot be ignored. The ruling party must be most certain that they will walk this election again and again time without plunder to show such disregard for the State constructed out of the Struggle.
For us oldies the past month or so reeks of the old days when the Apartheid Regime would make some outrageous contribution to our daily fair … and then bluster their way through a series of denials backed up with fists and whatever for those too persistent in pursuit of transparent clarity.
The Minister of Foreign affairs [Mrs Dlamini-Zuma] this morning made a defence of the idea that sport and politics don’t mix that would have done her predecessor [Mr Botha] proud, and would undoubtedly confuse the hell out of Mr Peter Hain who organised umpteen campaigns against Apartheid sport, presumably with Mrs Zuma’s blessing, back in the bad old days. I imagine that Ms Zola Budd, wherever she is, feels a sense of chagrin that the people who destroyed her more than promising career would now be protecting her participation.
Or was there a difference between the apartheid regime’s violation of human rights in South Africa and the Chinese Government’s violation of the rights of Tibetans following their occupation of the Tibetan State for the past half century. The head of the SA Communist Party believes so.
Presumably the taxi drivers who this week vowed on the national news to disrupt the world cup because [apparently] their rights to terrorise motorists are being violated by the bus rapid transport system coming into being are ok, because they are not mixing politics with sport: their grievances are purely commercial.
The ruling party’s silence on the threats of taxi drivers contrasts curiously with their rudeness to one of the planet’s most revered figures. Nonetheless this strange disinterest in the affairs of the world pales compared to the way the Party has behaved recently over a range of issues that should affect voter responses but quite obviously are not going to, perhaps because the voter base of the party approves of their positions.
To mention a few: The shock release on medical parole, from a fifteen-year prison sentence of the Presidential candidate’s benefactor, Mr Shabir Shaik. The circumstances become murkier under cross-examination and the apparent fairness gap between his treatment and the plight of thousands of other alleged terminally ill prisoners is largely ignored, both by the government and its supporters..
Then there is a red herring, soften- them- up- for- bad –news report that the national prosecuting authority intends to drop its always-pending-[alleged corruption and racketeering ] case against Mr Zuma the prime Presidential candidate in the election…
Then there was is the brief ‘uproar’ over the listing of struggle icon, and convicted fraudster, Mrs Madikazela –Mandela for the national assembly. At number 5 there is no question that this formidable woman will take her rightful place in the national assembly, and the volume of antipathy over this is at a lower level of confusion. As was the bizarre endgame played out by another [lesser] struggle icon Karl Niehouse the ruling party’s answer to Karl Rove the Bush fixit man, who confessed tearfully to a stunned nation that he was a lying crook who deceived people over money. The list of circumstances in which the ruling party demonstrates it disinterest in the things that bother ordinary people is almost endless, and so ingrained has dismissive behaviour become that few people even bother to take note of it anymore aside from uptight opponents and reject larneys.
Nonetheless all this was light dust indeed in retrospect, when played out against their latest attempt to test how far they can fool all of the people and still win an absolute majority from the suckers.
To enlarge on my opening observation: This week the government of South Africa defended its commercial interests in the 2010 World Cup by playing the most bizarre card played by this capricious government in its fifteen year history in office. They banned the Dalai Lama from attending a world Peace conference organised to promote the World Cup competition.
Their reasoning: The Dalai Lama’s attendance was not in the country’s national interest. This phrase that has popped up a few times lately is again reminiscent of the Auld days and usually meant not in the ruling party’s interests.
It is hard to imagine how the Dalai Lama, more than likely the world’s most elegiac figure now that Mother Theresa has died could cause a rift in South Africa’s national interests.
I also have no recollection of a time when the public response to a ruling party decision was so overwhelmingly negative.
Fortunately for the ruling party the psychographics of soccer supporters is so diametrically different to the psychographics of Dalai Lama supporters with only marginal areas of overlap that most of those who intend to party at the world cup have only one world piece in mind, and it’s not the Dalai Lama, bless his withered buttocks.
What remains to be tested is whether the ruling party supporters numbered in any quantity amongst the unaccustomed outpouring of unhappiness at the bizarre behaviour of the government of the huge response to Tim Modisa’s after eight debate yesterday..
Top honours for the day go to the fellow [who may have been called] Thabo, who had the unenviable task of multi-tasking his defence for the Government while seemingly taking his daughters to school: to judge by the happy squealing backgrounds [one was reminded of Perlman’s great interview with a cabinet minister in some remote part of the continent discoursing on his country’s chances while feeding the chickens.].
The Party Spokesperson, remained firmly stoic in the face of a tirade of rage and confusion that had even the redoubtable Mr Tim Modisa amazed. If ever one had evidence that the national broadcaster’s prime radio station has some credibility it was the after eight debate on the Dalai Lama’s rejection. Even a cabinet minister was appalled [Mrs Hogan Min of Health]
… Will she be fired is the next question. She should be is my answer.
Thabo handled her betrayal with stunning fortitude. Even the loquacious Mr Leon, a well known, fellow guest with Thabo X , was silenced by the fellow’s dogged fortitude.
Of course the Party spokesperson was never able to give a direct NO to the repeated question. Did the Chinese government exert pressure on the Government to silence the meddlesome monk? Did the master prevaricator of the week draw the line at outright lying?
Perhaps he worked on a need to know basis and he didn’t need to know that. Perhaps these are the troops?
A day later the head of the Communist Party came on line to defend the decision, and the public was subjected to a delightful exercise in prevarication whereby the forcible takeover [in 1950]of the independent [Theistic] Kingdom of Tibet by China was represented as reclaiming an intransigent part of “one China”, and the efforts of the Tibetans to reclaim their independence was in effect likened to the behaviour of the late Ian Smith in unilaterally declaring Rhodesian independence.
The takeover of Tibet by China was a colonial act equivalent to South Africa deciding to annex Lesotho on the ground that it is surrounded by that country and subject to a “One South Africa” policy, and far from the Dalai Lama being a dissident priest he, like Nelson Mandela with whom he was to share the podium at the aborted Peace Conference, is a liberation leader. Obviously the communist party of South Africa can’t get it head around the fact that people want to be rid of communist rule where it still applies.
Anyway none of this had any effect on the voters who, in a series of extreme low poll by-elections on the 25th March sent the ruling party back into office by huge margins… If anything the ruling party seems more popular than ever, and so I stick by my prediction that the ruling party will win the by a landslide in a low poll election with the possible loss of the Western Cape.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Is COPE a Trojan Horse
The beloved country is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries. I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades.
We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”? Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair [former Pom PM aka Phoney Haire]admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”….
I refer here to those proponents of the completely utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism; the perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America, and providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by the socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing of beneficiaries of AA, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and far more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful... Being incompetent in Governmnent has trained them to be incompetent as campaigners for a new party.
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing form their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence. One reads about “purging” and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… and may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.]COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
% Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They [the authors]present an intriguing essay [they [the a of IT Party]do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much will the general public swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.
On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.
Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..
So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.
And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.
Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades.
We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.
How have they not “learned their lesson”? Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.
Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.
There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.
I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.
NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair [former Pom PM aka Phoney Haire]admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..
Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.
It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”….
I refer here to those proponents of the completely utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism; the perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America, and providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by the socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people that lacked the means to service them.
We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.
Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.
Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.
Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.
Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.
As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.
This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.
Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.
So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing of beneficiaries of AA, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and far more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.
These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful... Being incompetent in Governmnent has trained them to be incompetent as campaigners for a new party.
They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing form their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.
Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.
Oh yes I forgot… the ANC is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence. One reads about “purging” and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… and may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.
So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.]COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
% Poll 61%
This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.
In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They [the authors]present an intriguing essay [they [the a of IT Party]do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.
Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much will the general public swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.
This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.
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