Happy birthday to a fine man*.

weblog Feb 2nd 2009
Jozi

So here we are. It is already the 31st day of the first month of 2009… a trite observation perhaps. It is, for the Blogospherian, the 31st anniversary of the birth of the grand fellow: our eldest child and son, Dayglo the magnificent, presently somewhere off the coast of Uruguay, we believe, on route south. Happy Birthday, Dayglo.

The day he was born 31 years ago the hospital in which he was born was devoid of paediatric staff. They had all been rushed to the site of a mission hospital out of town where a massacre had taken place. Insurgent liberation fighters had stormed the place and brutally slaughtered many of the staff and violated the bodies of infants in the paediatric [child care] section: a large section, we understood. A skeleton staff remained and hence I volunteered assistance and it was at a moment in history when the idea that a husband should facilitate in the birth was newly fashionable. Thus I assisted a competent midwife in the birth of our boy: about whom I wrote:

Covered in aspic
You emerge from the womb…
To stare with quiet incomprehension
At the sterile confines
Of your first awareness

Now 31 years later the man who’s gangster’s committed the atrocity out of town [during which, an Australian medical worker with whom we were acquainted, in the small expat community amongst whom we lived, was raped and murdered…RIP] has allowed himself to be snared into an alliance with a hated enemy One hopes the political opposition has not just committed suicide. There are few things more dangerous than a cunning cornered buffalo and if anyone is a buffalo it’s Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe.

The place where the incident happened was called Rhodesia, a country that is now a footnote in history. That place died in 1980 and our time living there ended. It was obvious that when you facilitate a transformation that puts baby murderers in power, things would be ugly and they were. We knew what was coming and left immediately.

The first act was the introduction of the Central Intelligence Organisation, associated with the murder of another acquaintance: a small hunchbacked man who always came to see our shows and then hung around in the bar feasting on crumbs of information and gradually becoming a friend to many. The CIO picked him up at Beit Bridge for no particular reason and decided to “straighten” his back: with a mallet.The rest of the butchery and the rest, thieving and buggary is now still unfolding history.

Yes; we assumed the reign of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe; a complex, manipulative example of the world’s most insidious disease: the warlord species would be nasty brutal and long [to restate Hobbes]. Now 31 years later he has agreed, reluctantly, to share power after having lost the last election and then cheating the presidential vote so blatantly that it has quite taken the breath [to trot out an old cliché] of a pretty aghast world, dealing with the greatest general economic meltdown in financial history and really rather distracted anyway: Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Congo, Tibet: no one is innocent so there shall be no accusation.

And now, abruptly, those complacent millions clambering their way out of the piss and grime that is, and has been human existence since forever, face the spectacle of a Sisyphean slide back into miserable oblivion. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] has just predicted the loss of as many as 51million jobs, this year… Now one’s thinking about next year everyone hopes the saviour Obama will pull us out of the shit.

The result of course will be a rising clarion call to the forces of so-called reason to end the Capitalist system that gave us a glimpse of what could be, and return us to the sterile confines of socialist awareness with it’s inevitable degeneration into the Mugabe world of putrefying decay and catastrophic descent into starvation and disease… the place we humans lived in from time immemorial [to use another cliché… sorry]. Even Mr Putin, the Stalinist KGB Russian Strongman and Mugabe wannabee has warned this week [ingenuously?] against this strident demand.

We have to resist this call. We must remember Socrates’ observation “people would put a man to death if they could and bring him back to life again with equal indifference to reason”

Mugabe is not unique: he is normal. It is our decision to live in harmony, those of us fortunate enough to live in reasonably operative democracies, and reject extremists from all sides of the political spectrum in favour of a stable interpretation of the market economic system, that is abnormal.

So 31 years ago when the grand lad whom we love adore and cherish with all the fervour of any proud parent I know arrived the world was in a state of “cold” war. The surrogates of extreme rage were in emerging meltdown…

I went from the birthing ward to make a speech at a respected institution. My audience those who favoured liberation... and what form of economic system would be the most desirable to pursue the dream offered by kliberation. I predicted the immanent collapse of the Soviet Union, condemned by endemic corruption and rampant looting by the horror thugs who ruled the region, to the collapse so long predicted by that frank assessment of Ayn Rand: represented in Atlas Shrugged; her terrifying masterpiece, which echoes hauntingly around our present halls of catastrophe.This was not popular notwithstanding that subsequent events proved me right.

I was chased from the lecture room, escorted from the buildings by armed guards. I spoke heresy. How dare I point to the emperor’s naked frame!

It was a truly momentous day that one the day our boy was born.

I put a note in the newspaper “welcome to the rat race.”
He noted my concern for his wellbeing and now sails around the world as a substitute for the clinical cubicle.

The world however iscurrwently discovering what happens to the machine when the 'grease' clogs up. Who needs Al Quaeda [sic] when you have the international banking community deciding to turn their lubricant into a product: and then developing sclerosis?

The beginning of the Kondratieff cycle that started with the abolition of the gold standard back in ’71 or so is now gathered apace and seems to have peaked in the early noughties. Mr Mugabe shows us the way. Can we all arrest our own slide, or can we grasp Mr Obama’s ring and launch ourselves into yet another Brave New World [clichés abounding hey].

For all our sakes I hope so.

As an aside; I hear that Toyota is recalling its Yaris brand of vehicle for a seat belt adjustment. Now: is that half a million Yarii or half a million Yaris’[s]?

· *This was written in the ear4ly hours of the 31st and then due to a quirk of Murphy that irascible wrecker of plans the Internet was inaccessible and the day’s momentum was lost. The impending Xstrata sponsored Platinum Mile race, a major inland water one mile swim event, followed on the first of Feb and was being organised and co-ordinated by Mrs Blog, assisted by moi [amongst a hundred others or so: excellent helpers all] on the day pitching the event from the Coca Cola sponsored “Gigrig” rapping with the gathered crowd, which was certainly large enough to stretch our accommodating skills to the edge of their elasticity. … The internet went back into it’s cyber box for the next 48 hours.
· The sun came out as requested after two weeks of persistent rain and it was a glorious day, as a considerable crowd of swimmers drank their way across the cleanest dam in Southern Afrika.. What a wonderful birthday weekend … Wherever on earth Dael is we wish you a wonderful 32nd year and good sailing.