Vu Si weh denials

Oh Vu si weh denial
Oh we’ll play a happy little game of denial oh ye
We deny we were bad; claim we were always good except for them who weren’t, and they claim the same only in reverse:
And now we have a pretty pickle.
[well maybe… who else is in sight?] Il violencia continua… continua.

Bob the Roz never had this problem … well in the beginning anyway.
He issued orders … the violence stopped,
Only to flare in a different order.
State violence in place of the free market form.

Our violence is the product of freedom and the need
To assert primacy over the new domain.
Crime is the only legitimate free market activity allowed in the country… all other
Economic games are monopolised, cartelised, controlled, regulated and now on top of it all officiated or is that now
mediated
through BEE to be…ee
Too hard to please,too.

It is our own ‘sweet anarchy’ and there is some desperation as the realisation dawns that there will be no free handouts to those who did not walk in freedom’s shoes but hovered on the sidelines waiting for the crumbs.

And the handouts and the takeouts and the stakeouts are paralysing our development
For as the winners take all those who can make it work are no where to be seen.
Money spent on arms it is said could have funded a national
education
bond
system so that the kids who go into tertiary ed
to learn how to run the prize captured by daddy and his buddys
could bond themselves
to a lifetime’s payback
Learn now pay over the life of your career.

But we didn’t do that: we bought the guns, planes, boats and bombs to shrivel Indonesia [well who else is in the firing line?] and giveaway
to our enemies in the form
Of fruitless expeditions
to foreign places which exclude Darfur and Myan Mar where
the people cry for liberation from alien enemies that we ignore and pretend not to see
for those aliens are our friends and we cannot see motes in the eyes of friens list the log rammed up- our bums becomes eternal..

Ho say
The legs are coming off the pot
And the pot
Will fall down into the fire.

The children from Khutsong, shipped sheepishly out to no place, went to drink
Vast swathes of local booze:
And shag the local ladies.
Response: a clichéd outburst from outraged
Displaced
Local lads
Who attacked and ravaged the traumatised Khutsongese
In their shivering beds.
There was no relativity here, no sense of carefully stage manged evasions.

Meanwhile our saga over Vusi persists… Why should simple things like firing someone you don’t like be so easy
For the President and so
Difficult for me?

Certainly apparent choices of who should be fired and who not, do seem to affirm the need to have rules making firing of anyone almost impossible
Even for Presidents

But the court agreed he could and we couldn’t.

Every wannabee instant megastar of the new ruling order will be watching with baited breath to see how wonderfully rich a few can become at the expense of the many when the dastardly owners of foreign held companies
Are deprived of their
Rights to the fruits of their
Labour by a thief in the night in the disintegrating failed State of Rumbabwe.

It is often said that to repeat the same action over and over in the forlorn expectation of a different outcome is an indicator of insanity
I prefer to think… oh unfashionable thought… oh naughty thought…. That such behaviour implied… shall we say… a dulled intellect: not to be confused with stupidity to which it is cousin… and which could never be said to apply to our people.
Albeit cupidity on the [part
Of those disingenuous con-persons
Who will benefit from the theft at the expense of those too dull-witted/indolent
satisfied/uninformed oh fuck it all just plain too damm old fashioned stupid
to
Realise
that there is no such thing as a free
lunch as
The cliché goes… someone somewhere always pays
Usually by leaving the table
While you are feasting… so your children stay
behind
to wash the dishes.

Is it denial to tacitly accept that the violence with which we live….
Comes in part from the national idea that having power means being able to do what you like because you can
And want to: and being left out of the party means
starting your own.
And because we are unfashionably unenlightened we cannot
understand that the
rhetoric with which
We handled the struggle for
Freedom
Was only
rhetoric?

Rubbish… Tell that bullshit theory to the Amagents who
Have become rich on the proceeds
Of daring deeds and derring do

And we shall break the mirror
To steal the image.

NiK

Free Burma.

See also http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

Misdirecting Vusi

Sing a little jig about
Vusi
Shroud the reasons why you
Pushed him out
The door
With the strangest little song about a man who would go down
to the floor
If not rescued.

Quick shift with left to right to left again then hold on tight
For shadow sideshows that give us fright
And less than consciousness:
As first Shabby… so oh
conveniently
provides for
Righteous indignation
Affecting whoooh?
No redress save a lien
On his cash which with some dash may be
Dispensed…
to his bold markers.

A bigger hand
A bigger hand: they cry, with joy. Start the Toi… for the sneakiest
hand
Called blind man’s muff and we huff and huff about those who
stuff their pockets full of mis-
begotten rough bold cash: snatched from the dash
to ye olde [soccer] world cup

Fifty million in comm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How dare these men bomb!!!!!!!!!!! on the people this way????????????
Says the finister of migrants a fine old figature of probity and
Caution who speaks with straight comfortable morality,
inveighs against plurality
And neatly steals the show
away from Vusi
ands those woosy
men
And women in his prosecuting ministry

Now what was that story about a warrant… of arrest?… For who?
Nooo… 0
Never such a laughable
suggestion
surely
no one would think to…
Mention it was he
surely there would be
No such thing

And lest you forget again about the things that are real
That woman down there who killed a husband somewhere
Has been released to bury daddy struck down by wrath almighty so you see
if Vusi had something he had say then he may
have had such a hand wouldn’t he?

Wouldn’t he?
NiK[07]

A tribute for Nelson Mandela

Seventeen years ago i wrote the following piece on the occasion when Mr Mandela was released from prison. Later when he retired as our first democratic President i sent him a copy which was graciously received. As our beloved Madiba now enters his 90th year I’m reprinting the piece again for my blogreaders, who naturally did not exist in 1990 before we all knew about the Internet.

February 1990:

A report on breaking through the ceiling:
A praise prose poem for Nelson Mandela.

The world came
to watch a
spectacle;
a man who had
been locked away
for twenty-seven years
was to be released.
And the spokespeople
for the media
and the great,
came from afar to hear
the wisdom
which it was
believed
this old man
had gained
during his incarceration.

After waiting
uncertainly
for hours
in the hot February
glare;
He finally emerged
blinking
into the sunlight.
Was led to a podium
around which
a Hundred Thousand people
had gathered and
onwhichtheeyesofFiveHundredMillion
faces
werefocussedviatelevisionsetsina
hundred and eighty
countriesbeamedbyinstantsatellite.

With a great sense of Majesty
All awaited
his unique insights, which,
his publicists claimed,
andwhichallwhocamewould
have
themselves
believe he had gained
through years of
incarcerated
introspection

The great buzz
was that this man
had
through his
suffering
acquired unsullied
wisdom and would
unitethecountryandleadhisto
rmentorsandhispeople
toapromisedland:
freed
of all the pain borne
by the suffering
for millennia.

Slowly
he ascended the steps
and trod
with unaccustomed grace
toward
the podium.

A hush
fell
uponhalfaBillionhouseholds.
Fathers
shushed their children
andbeatthosewhospokewhilethegreat
Man
began to speak.

And the sound of wonder
amongst
the gathered dignitaries
and the watching multitudes
turned
to
consternation.

For he spoke yet
anancientanditwasbelievedarecently
discreditedlanguage
and none had thought
to expect
it.

And so they sat
in bewildered
and bemused
consideration
ofwhattheywerehearing
while
a
howlingmobofjubilantsupporters
soon turned their joy
to rapturous
violence
smashingallthewindowsonthesquare.

.NiK(1990)
Publ. 1995. Bedford Yearbook
Publ. Collection: Random Notes… by NiK[00] http://editred.com/nicholasjakari

Bill Flynn. RIP

I woke up this morning grateful for another day of living in this mad, perplexing and fast evolving reality we call the modern age.

Bill Flynn didn’t wake up today.

He died in his sleep… the best way to go for those who are the best.

After hearing the news of Bill Flynn’s passing on into another part of Quantum space at the ripe old age of 58 in this one, the solemn tones of the reporter changed into an angry snarl as he broadcast that Robert Mc Bride [a local chief of police] had allegedly stated that he would enter the homes of his enemies, rape and then kill their wives, burn their homes, kill their dogs and … I don’t remember what was supposed to happen to the children. I thought how Bill would have loved to play Robert Mc Bride making those alleged statements. How hysterically we would have laughed.

The announcer stated that Bill’s son had found his dad dead in bed; and it reminded me that it was 29 years ago this week, that I saw my own father died in his box. Someone had shaved off his moustache and revealed a man I didn’t know. I wondered since what dreams he had, what aspirations, what disappointments… Had he died fulfilled?

Bill Flynn devoted his life to supplying the diversionary arts that we use to hide from ourselves. He was a comedian who made people laugh. He was other things too: father, husband, friend of Slab’,a rock singer who enjoyed an aria: but mostly he was a comedian, and he made us laugh without the pain that comes from introspection.

One hopes he died fulfilled; for it is a truism that one can never know the fact of one’s own passage from this dimension. For us his performance would separate us for a time from our own anxieties and disillusionment
by revealing ourselves to us and permitting
us to laugh at our own vanity
and foolishness
and to escape ourselves for an instant
before returning to our own,
discordant universe.

Some years ago a more personal friend, than this distant image on a passing screen,
died in his sleep. When found by a cleaning lady the next day the television was on, the beer next to the bed was half drunk and the cork tipped cigarette he liked to smoke had burned down to the flesh. He was the headmaster of a local high school and his funeral was a moving affair.

I wrote this piece that follows now as a tribute to Derek Tarpey, in many ways the same kind of life fulfilling person as Bill. Today I re-publish it in tribute to the passage of a man who made us laugh.

For Derek then. For Bill Flynn now.
“Heaven’s mourning breaks” said the Preacherman
“We were touched:
Our lives, by his life,
Our lives by his death”

The preacher went on: “Live in the moment;
Do what must be done
Now,”
And he did that, this man who left so soon.

And then the Preacher spoke words
Of comfort for the living,
Who remain
Unaware of the truth;
Of the mystery within which we live,
Shaken now by this
Event: Are we
Supposed to think? Better sure
The polished gloss of words to stretch and gently massage
All our pain away.
He spoke of the Irish road;
Light words that skimmed across
The warm wet surface of
Our tears. And he continued,
His well rehearsed words of comfort
Tossing words upon further words
Which we all barely heard
So lost were we
In contemplation of the
Place where he was not.

The flag hung limp
Obscuring for me that
Professed man of god
Who spoke of journeys without end…
And so the tributes likewise
Who spoke of what he’d done. Short, sharp,
Pithy tight to bind the tears, which hung
In sorrow on each added word.

“What you saw
Was what you got”
And we all got an awful lot
For the changing of the world

Then, when the choir sang… “Tula
Mama….” Their intoned cadence
Reaching out:
Soothing us, while
The praise singer sang out
Evocations
Which thundered ‘round the crowded
Quad. Then,
The wind blew strong and the half-hung flags
Flew briskly in the late noon sun.

We felt our catharsis
Start then,
As the boys expressed their
Grief.
They sent away their leader
With a cry that shook
The leaf, still huddled deep inside
The barest winter trees…
Their war cry from the deepest past.

“A rum tum tum
A rum tum tum.”

Then, to rage at darest death and
Shake its claw away…
“A rum tum tum…
A rum tum tum…”

We shuddered, we who stayed behind.
Took heart again from
What he’d done, and we knew then
As the ancients did
The hollowness of death
That takes from us at random: reminding
Us of certainty and but for what
Go i.

Then, having heard from Whitman
We preferred to hear the boys, gathered
From a dozen
Distinct originations
Linked arms
Into a shield against the universe and
All
Its blasted tricks;

“A rum tum tum….
A rum tum tum…”

The birds upon the parapet
Launched themselves in fright.
The half-mast flag that had hung limp now
Stretched out for the light.

“A rum tum tum…
A rum tum tum…”

We stood awhile
`Till all the rest was silent.

.NiK(2002)

In memoriam Diana Spencer [Lady]

I enjoyed Gareth Cliff on Monday last [28 May]and was going to post this blog [then] when I would have been saying that I enjoyed him today… only as we all know our blogspot vanished and has now been replaced with something
less vulnerable to the new publications act, presumably …

In fact I enjoy Gareth Cliff every day and wish there were more of him, sharp, witty and irreverent. He reminded me then that it was ten years ago that we heard the terrible news of the death of a dilettante supreme… the awful end of the lovely Lady Diana Spencer, who, like Marilyn, had the good sense to die young and and while still loved by her admirers.

He asked us [the listeners] to phone in with our thoughts on the event and it’s ever undiminished mystery… I couldn’t do that because I was driving across town and for a change was not stuck in a single traffic jam. But I remembered that day and for those who loved her this piece of poetry below is what I wrote then.

[If you didn’t think much of her and considered her a silly dabbler then read no more. I always considered her a spunky ‘wench’ and had great regard for her courage in the face of some pretty brutal treatment.].

Blogmark was down en route to Amagama.com so this couldn’t be said at that moment and had to wait for now.

It was not entirely mine, this “conversation with Diana” that you are about to read in poetic form. The class of young eighth grade ladies who wrote with me that morning would all now be circa twenty-four year old women, many married and with children of their own… So this is in memory of her and of them.

Conversation with Diana. From a classroom exercise in deconstructive poetry with forty-seven grade eight girls on the morning that we all heard the news of the tragic death of ‘Lady Di’.

1
Were you making love
then
happy again;
indiscreet in the arms of a man you would meet in the fast flowing flood of eternity’s beat.Were you rocking to the rhythm
of Freddie’s
“Friends will be friends”,
or was it Frankie’s “Stranger’s in the night”?
2
Your people now say
you were maligned; that
they didn’t treat you right.
They say
they’ll make amends,
call you: “… a
beacon of light”.
3
Better to be
alive in the sea,
said the Indian guide
to the ingenue,
than a bloated dead dolphin
adrift
on the shore.
4
“We were always strangers
playing at the table;
then i was sent away
vaporised upon a cradle:
given far too many kisses
and no hugs
anymore.
5
Don’t ask me what the ‘sounds’ were
when i went to stay.
It could never have been Queen,
i did it, my way”.

.NiK(1997)
From the collection: “Random Notes” by .NiK [2000]

27 is a powerful number

27 is the number of years President Mandela was in gaol before he became president.


27 is the number of years since I wrote the piece of poetry below in march 1980 regarding the immanent accession to power of Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe who has imprisoned his entire people in a web of horror for 27 years next month.
Curiously enough, my name NiK means 27 in a memory enhancing structure known as ‘The Major System’; whereby the number 2 is represented by the letter N and the number 7 is represented by the letter K [see how many sevens you can find in K] [consonants by the way, are silent]. 27 is also the designated name of one of the country’s longest established prison gangs. The number 27 pops up fairly often in the lotto and is also my birth date. It also [my specific birth date 27] has apparently some significance amongst those who are into the occult-. Currently however its interest lies in the Mugabe factor.

I am not going to say much about the Roz. I’ve said plenty over the years and so have many others. I believe he is doing exactly what he said he would do 27 years ago in the same way that Adolf Hitler explained in Mein Kampf [my edition published in 1927] that he was going to implement a final solution for the Jews. The fact that no one chose to believe either of them is not their fault.

27 years ago I heard the announcement on the radio that Mugabe’s Zanu party had won the election in Zimbabwe and the meeting I was attending at the time ended abruptly. Later that morning I walked across town back to my office. – Salisbury, soon to be Harare, was as silent as the grave. There were no jubilant supporters on the streets, nor on the road home that day; although later the thug gangs appeared and made it obvious that a new era had dawned. The movie Mad Max could have been shot on that day- that is how deserted the city was. We all knew that the future would be awful and not being financially well positioned for the cataclysm to come I went home packed my family into an oversized sardine can and left the country almost immediately. We had to wait somewhere near the border for a few weeks while the dog’s anti rabies shots matured to fruition. Many warehouses storing the goods of evacuating families were firebombed. They were anxious weeks.

The year before the election I had directed a piece of live theatre in a city centre open-air venue. It was a two weeklong performance of Wole Soyinka’s disturbing play about a Mugabe type dictator’s brutal rule in a mythical African country. The play is called Kongi’s Harvest. The night before the show opened I caused consternation amongst my cast when I announced, as part of what I intended to be a stirring motivational speech, that they were taking part in a unique opportunity. Such a play with such a disturbing message about the corruption of power would certainly never have been allowed by the proto fascist Smith regime. Everybody agreed.

Many of our earlier shows: Sartre’s No Exit, Ionescu’s The lesson, Journey’s end, Boesman and Lena and the Blood Knot for instance had to pass a special pre-performance trial. We performed solely for the benefit of a censorship committee sent by the government to decide if we were presenting potentially subversive material. By Kongi time the censorship committee was history.

They would never have approved Kongi’s Harvest [which I produced in spite of the authors objections and refusal to grant rights-I was that convinced of the importance of the message of the play for the future of Zimbabwe that I defied the ban imposed by a man I revere as the Shakespeare of Afrika; and paid the royalties due, to the national theatre association for distribution to the great man when things eventually became sensible again. I did hear years later that he came to Harare and met with members of the cast].

I then suggested to my cast that it was probable that Kongi’s Harvest would be banned by any incoming nationalist administration. My all-black cast of about forty players revolted. They raged, ranted and walked off the set, accusing me of the all to familiar cry of racism, as our President has done again this week in the curious belief that only white people worry about criminals.

The cast demanded that I apologise for suggesting that a future black administration would ever abuse the rights of the citizenry as the Smith regime had done. I said that I regretted that I had to tell them the truth; that the probability they were doomed to suffer indefinitely was more than 90%. I eventually got them back on stage and the show enjoyed a patchy response from a less than enthusiastic populace. The theme was too real.

After I left Zimbabwe for good, I did return twice for exploratory visits and on each occasion was appalled at the disintegration of a once ordered society. Surely it wasn’t that hard to keep the thing running? Two years after independence my lead actor Christopher Chisvu produced a knocked off version of Kongi’s Harvest. It was banned on the opening night and Christopher became one of the first who had to go into exile to escape the repressive Mugabe.I was later accosted by a man at the Norwood pick n Pay who told me that he had a message from Chisvu and the remnants of my cast…I was forgiven: they now understood… It was, as a reader recently observed, a Pyrric victory.

By 1982 the stench of fear was tangible in the Harare atmosphere. A delightful but anonymous former fan of my theatre company, a man who suffered a deformity in the form of a hunchback was murdered that year by CIO [Central Intelligence Organisation] agents in Beit Bridge when they set out to ‘straighten his hump’.

During the intervening period North Korean trained troops massacred close to half a million citizens of an unfashionable part of the country, either through direct action or through subsequent famine. The evil perpetrated by this powerblighted regime over the past 27 years is longstanding and legion. The eventual list of victims, of what has been a Zimbabwean holocaust, will grossly outnumber the great wall of the heroes that we are busy constructing here in Tshwane.

The great problem with modern democracy seems to be the equal access to thieving by all and sundry. Under the previous system [ in repressive Smith’s Rhodesia] looting of the State chest was relatively limited to a handful of rumoured ‘landlords’. Nonetheless in spite of his fascist behaviour, only a decade back the crafty Roz had fooled everyone outside the country into a belief that Zim’ was an emerging player on the world stage. Like so many of today’s capitalist businesses who are in bed today with the anti democratic government of the People’s Republic of China there were plenty of profit makers who enjoyed a short term boost from Mugabe’s lack of public accountability.

And then whammo- he implemented the policy he’d outlined before 1980, to which I referred in the poem below. The poem was banned by a British government administration hell bent on handing power to the nastiest man around and getting the hell out of the action. Only sceptics like myself had ever believed Mugabe would engage in the scorched earth policies that followed his election reverses in 2000: scorched earth for him, and, one suspects, relief from our own government. [One has to assume our government’s tacit support for a policy of national suicide involves some twisted revolutionary logic].

Frankly I think Mugabe decided like the spoilt child he is that if the people were not going to play with him then he was going home and talking has toys with him. ‘I’ll break the country and then you’ll be sorry’. Of course our government’s response may well be Machiavellian. Given our national propensity for monopolies a vigorous and thriving Zimbabwe was an impediment to our adventures north of the Zambezi. The Roz’s fit of temper suits us perfectly [in a non-humanitarian sense].

The probability that Zimbabwe can be restored to full service effectiveness again during this century is close to improbable. A century of capital acquisition has been destroyed. It is ‘Close to impossible’ because the most practical solution would be improbable: the complete deregulation and privatisation of the entire State with concomitant open borders. Even then it would be debateable. The era when ordinary decent criminals were sent out to colonise the ‘new world’ are long gone. Many of the country’s trained and skilled people have been snatched up by a world that is experiencing its own critical skills shortages.

Today’s most probable ‘knowledge’ imports will be Chinese and possible south Asian groups. If I were a fiction writer, which I am, then I would have some 50,000 Chinese ‘workers’ operating in Zimbabwe by 2011. China has a surplus of some forty million men due to the unintended consequence of their one child policy, and it would be a fun move to stick 50,000 soldiers disguised as traders and more traders, who could at the right moment appropriate the State by proxy- it may already have happened. There will be no mass return to the homeland by Zim exiles as many, such as those promoting the local ‘homecoming revolution’, fondly envisage.

Does this mean that I think Mr Mugabe is in danger of immanent expulsion from the Presidency?

No I don’t, I give the probability of his overthrow no more than 2 on a scale where 0 equals dull improbability and 100 equals comprehensive certainty.

What I have always found interesting though is the way that, right from the outset Zanu PF has mirrored all the evil ways of the old Apartheid regime in their Zimbabwe reign. The pace of horror was accelerated though, for the evil apartheid regime needed three decades via Sharpeville and other bad things to mature to the full horror represented by the Biko murder in 1976. ZanuPF emerged from the election fully matured as an evildoer. Today the Roz called on the world to ‘Go Hang’. When told of Biko’s death our own faceless flunky government gangster representative famously told the world that the death ‘left him cold’.

Nonetheless the beginnings are there- The people must suffer enough to rebel and ordinary common people in our continent have acquired an almost infinite capacity for suffering. That was the point reached by places like Rumania and Ukraine and even pre-2006 Lebanon, which may yet fail to survive the Hezbollah inspired hurricane destruction of Israel’s bullying credibility as a regional superpower last year.

Ultimately the world has cared less about much more important places than Zimbabwe, and it is almost inevitable that the opposition has to start funding their own ‘resistance’ campaign- They do not really seem to have the stomach for it which is good for us to their south. A civil war to our north would impact badly on our emerging regional dominance, by virtue of creating a pretty solid barrier.

It is most unlikely that Mr Mugabe will live forever; he will almost certainly live another 3 years because we are sure he is anxious to make thirty. Thirty is a much luckier number for Bob the Roz than 27. 30 is tomorrow and we all know tomorrow’s never come. In the meantime he has to figure out a plan to eradicate his opposition before they can regroup and he should achieve that- Playing by the rules always serves those best who bend the rules to their purpose, whilst denying their opposition the latitude to do the same. Still: here’s hoping 27 proves seminal for the Roz notwithstanding my scepticism.


Election Manifesto.

It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.

No it’s
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They’ve all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre…………….

.NiK(1980)

Published …Sting Magazine, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now
Zimbabwe) Banned by the British Interim
Administration…1980:
A faceless British foreign office type at government house,
Part of the interim administration that stepped in when
the Smith regime collapsed in 1980 and submitted to a
national referendum, told me my poem was in ‘bad form’.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ‘ Lobster Quadrille.’

Keep on bloggin’

The petition to save the animals

On one of the days when i was running around the city i went to a place where i encountered a gang of about twelve whittery twittery ten[ish] year old girls who had gathered with great excitement around a counter where there was a petition that they were all signing.

“What are you doing?” i asked one of them. A chorus came back “We are signing a petition to save the Animals.” they said, with that wonderful ferocious certainty that is the sole province of ten years olds. Their voices rang with strident clarity as i walked on down the empty hallway and as their phrases bounced against the bare winter walls without warning the words came straight at me and i managed to catch most of them before they flew off.

The Petition to save the Animals

Love the animals
love them all
love the ones that slither and crawl.

Love the cats
that snarl and claw
love the dog
behind the door

Love the elephants
with their trunks
love the smelly
naughty skunks.

Has the bell rung?
Has the fat duck sung?
Is time running out
for everyone

No we say we love them all
and those who ask this
must be in thrall
to the emptiness behind
the wall.

The bell has rung
the deed is done
we covered the world with everyone

If they can’t pay rent
they were not meant
to stay on here for the main event…
They have to go!

No No No
We want to hear you cry
that all the animals must not die
so bring them back into
our towns
those Lions and Tigers bearing frowns

Love the animals
love them all
especially those that
slither and crawl.

.NiK[06]

The stuttering game

July 8, ’06
The stuttering game.

One of those intimate peculiarities that reveal one’s proclivities most enthusiastically
Is the contrived stutter.

We’ve all heard them on the radio
On television
‘Our guys’ the endless stream of
‘in’ people who proliferate in our media and talk -You know: the so-called,
Chattering class’. Those who are consulted and asked to state the obvious done
With style and authoritative panache.
I say Scroon these interest rates- What do say hey do you think we’re at the end of it
Oh gosh no- at least another 200 basis points lie ahead. This due to the impact of the screed upon the exchange scrabbler
The tosspot deficit
And the ballooning cost of scromps
Yes dammed peculiar stuff these scromps.

In amongst these is the regular one who uses the stutter as a strategy to control the debate/discussion/interview/interaction. They all have similar names and
As Pete put it- ‘They all sound just the same.’

The contrived stutter is a strategy
It is used to draw on a presumed
Latent implicit sympathy/guilt at no sympathy
Feelings in a listener, which makes them fearful to
Interrupt -you know how fragile people are in the company of the damaged,
And simultaneously helps to keep the airwaves full thereby preventing others, perhaps
Less sensitive, from jumping into the silence
That would ordinarily be represented by the length of time the ‘stutterer’ would have Stuttered-and
Stealing the moment..

One would imagine that in the combative turf represented by political interactivity Keeping the floor is as essential to Party
Political success as keeping the ball is to a sports team’s success. If you are unwilling For whatever reason to practice thinking
Faster than a cutthroat razor can slice the wind
Then better a strategy that maintains a slow pace
Controlled
To mask the synergies of both
simultaneously

My favourite this year was the trades union chappie who claimed
His members didn’t care for the ten commandments
Of the Christian bible because
His members weren’t
Christians.

He encountered some flak if you remember
And appeared on the worthy Mr Perlman’s programme
And was interviewed and under attack he dominated the airwaves
with his gloriously structured and wonderfully prepared stut, stut, stutter.
It was magnificent -the man went da da da da da da da teraraera d through question after question obfuscating
His responses
With elaborate Party stammer-laced construction
That stood in stark contrast to the glorious
Fiery outpouring of rhetoric we all heard from him earlier in the broadcast and the previous day when he’d first been reported.
Then there was no tongue tied twisting around through a curiously convoluting range of
his meanings and his feelings and his intentions.
Complete clarity. Absolute certainty. Then-
Perhaps the He who spoke to Perlman was not the same He
Recorded at the meeting?

I think that people who genuinely stutter and for whom
Stuttering is a terrible affliction
Must feel immensely abused by this widespread
opportunistic yet now most fashionable
Misuse of a
Developed physical handicap to lure their listeners and
Numb them with a stream of stuttering seal talk. The ultimate
Effect is one of
Disconnected information or in
Politically incorrect layman’s language -frequently-
Bullshit.

The Party stutter was the one thing missing from the performance of the supporting hero in 16 Blocks- the movie; featuring a booze laced, dronk verdriet, slouch about bum played by the inimitable Bruce ‘love s ya baby’ Willis.

The subject of the movie, which involves the removal of the
Supporting hero: a vital witness in a corruption enquiry, to a courthouse somewhere Downtown
by a certain time, is a tedious fellow: after-a-while-you-wanna-slash-his-chords
And-render-him-permanently-paraphasic.
In short a yabbling
Kid with a need
To become a modest baker of
Birthday cakes and
In amongst a completely incoherent adenoidal stream of vacuous babble
He manages to present a completely
Convinced
Belief that people can change -and that you can
Take control of your life and
Turn it to where you want it to be. The one thing he never
Does
In his satiric mind numbing stream of babble is stutter.

But then perhaps the stutter would have been
Counter
To the theme of the movie, which was,
Intrinsically,
About honesty.

.NiK[o6]

London calling…again

London Calling

I’m watching a replay of the London bombings one year on.
The grinding details regarding the pain
Felt
By
Those
Who remain behind
Brought out for a re-union with we
Who are numbed by earthquakes and bombs
And tsunami’s and bombs
And Aids and bombs and big bright Mercedes motor cars
And the forgettery that wipes everything clean as soon as we know it wasn’t us that
Got bombed.
Alt control delete
Alt control delete
Alt
Control delete
Altdelete control delete alt.
Delete delete.

Getting our attention is more and more difficult and calls
For ever more
Intrusive
Modes of intrusion.

Take notice of me. Now.
Last night ‘they’-the Beeb played scenes from a tape
Released by who knows who
And
Allegedly featuring one
Of the
Suicide liberation fundamentalist
Irrationalist perp’s in the whole bombing
Bit

And for a moment I thought of V
And who’s playing

Whom
In this asymmetrical game we are having with
Ourselves.

.NiK[06]

Nik

The rambling nature of conspiracy/conshmiracy

Gravity

If an Avalanche is
Crashing
Down a mountainside
Shall we believe
That the atomised snowflakes are engaged in
A tacit
Conspiracy to crash
Through
Their destination
Or would
It be rational to conclude
The destination to be
Inevitable: a result of
Critical mass.

.NiK(00)
from the collection: Random Notes…

I decided some years ago to rename Gauteng, the so-called “Golden Province” in which i live, as Zone One. I intended it as a literary device wherein my Zone One could be many things that I choose it to be, without it necessarily being what it was when I was not choosing.

Some of the rationale for this had to do with the difficulty offshore citizens had with pronouncing the name [where is this place called Gouting? For instance] and I am sure that if people can’t remember or pronounce your name they will tend to avoid using it. So I unashamedly appropriated the name from another part of the continent. Like other places this one defines its regions by Zones rather than by pretty names. In my view the name ‘Zone’ reflects a continental reality emphasized by our beloved leader’s supreme masterstroke of turning our Zone One into the ‘Washington’s of Africa/Azania’. There are Zones where people can make loads of money and live well and there are Zones where they can only eke out a decidedly miserable existence. I am pleased that I live in one of those where people can live well without having to be politically connected.

Now I see that a new so called ‘factional’ novel is about to be launched onto the market and the setting for this book-Zone One. Is the name use spreading or is the new factoid novel one written by Moi? Is this the stuff of conspiracy?

Why would a place in Africa simply reduce regional segmentation to the abstraction of Zones 1- Whatever-. Does the numbering itself reflect the State’s priorities? Or perhaps –

No one thought about it at all. There was no careful conspiracy. Or perhaps someone somewhere among the initiators thought it out: some genius of pre-modern communication theory. Don’t you find that to be the most fun about conspiracy theories. In our general day to day lives we encounter nothing but broad ranging incompetence, foul-ups, plans shot down due to misinformation, disinformation or just plain thoughtlessness-and yet in conspiracies all is perfection-I’m always most curious about the seemingly supernatural powers of the unsung participants in the conspiracies that are the basis of conspiracy theories, aren’t you?

The Zones are places that have been geographically segmented. All over the continent there are zones where no nothing lives, something lives, some people live and many people live. The places where many people live are always the most free: citizens are free to merge their shadow with darkness and slip unknown through their scurrying lives.

Zone one is the primary liberated Zone. It is vast, one of the world’s mega states in a globalising world. It could be argued that Zone one is vulnerable to implosion. It could equally be argued that the issues arising that indicate potential implosion are soluble with money, effort and enthusiasm. Broadly speaking Zone one is the fastest growing region amongst a toddling but nonetheless growing region.

A while back people who obsessed about conspiracies placed the big corporate monster identified in the book S A [Inc] published some dozen or so years ago as the prime mover and shaker in the transition. They were allegedly the architects of change. The Liberal SA writer Jill Wentzel added to that fire of speculation with her evaluations of policy adaptations of SA [Inc} over the decades of the dispossession era in a groundbreaking book on the Liberal perspective around the time the country was liberated.I don’t have it to hand and the local library has misplaced their copy-possibly someone wanted it and took it before someone else did?

According to the venerable Robin Mc Gregor, SA[Inc} owned some 90 odd percent of the SA stock market listings in the late 80’s. Now they don’t I’m sure, and the press is increasingly muttering on about the stark reality that SA Inc has ducked out of the country altogether and is divesting itself of its SA holding with almost unseemly haste. Now that would have been a strange outcome for a conspiracy wouldn’t it-unless there wasn’t a conspiracy and all the various players were doing was ‘adapting their skills to the situation’ as the lead character in the above mentioned soon to be published factional novel set in Zone One, is frequently apt to point out.

Notwithstanding this, the rump of the old SA [Inc] that remains will no doubt continue to exercise formidable resources with the possibly over cautious dexterity that we never saw, experienced or cared about with the late large murdered mining man [about whom I alluded in my blog story called ‘the Apprentice Hit Man’ in an earlier blog. This overweight life connoisseur undeniably, to my mind, holds sway as the most flamboyant, over-the-top criminal we have ever experienced, and being a country rich in diverse resources we have experienced many. There was theft on the grandest scale ever conceived and it just went on and on-Significant commentators have pointed out huge discrepancies in the man’s dealings for over a decade -and the party as we all know went on-My personal favourite in all of that scam was the fake Arts awards thing where the artists got zip and the marketers won the prizes.

When you can have crime on that scale, taking place with impunity, then who needs more secret conspiracies if indeed there are such things. And was it a conspiracy or was the BIG BAD MINING MAN simply someone seeking attention on a vast scale.

I have mentioned before I’m sure my favourite conspiracy. Growing up in a small now forgotten mining town on the eastern edges of the eastern quarter of Zone One, east of Jozi-my journey to school was one undertaken daily through hostile territory. There were warring factions and tribes that hated each other and one tribe in particular; a newly ascendant one was violent in the extreme. I grew up believing that the members of that ascendant tribe were the most hateful of people and was later most surprised to discover that to be reasonably untrue.

Decades later, in my mid-forties I befriended an old Septegenarian who told me- in confidence over a few too many dops of Klippies and iced water – that the fathers of his generation would pay their sons two and six [refers to currency prevailing in 1950’s -had a purchasing power parity index value of about R150.00 in 2006 currency-using the ‘how-many-times-could-you-go-to-the-movies’ index -five times for two and six.]. If that is not a pretty solid incentive to beat the shit out of your neighbour than what else would be.

I suggested this to him. ‘Did the orders go out?’ I asked. He shook his head for awhile, thinking back over a confused life of ups and downs. No-he said eventually. ‘It wasn’t as though he had ever been told he should do it;’ he said. It was just that he didn’t want people to think he was a ‘joiner’, as he called it.

So a wave of terror-certainly on me-was unleashed for two and six. A tacit conspiracy whereby we all agree without formalising our position.

I would suggest that the recent decision of a labour court to rule in favour of a Black man of the now ascendant ruling class dominant ethnic source, over a Black man of mixed blood/original colour origins reflects a tacit conspiracy in favour of the wrong recipient.[see Escom appointment saga recent press reports]

There is wide agreement that the dominant black part of the population are themselves usurpers. The so called ‘coloured’ man derives [frequently] from the ancient remnants of the Koi and San tribes who were engulfed by the southward migration of pioneering agricultural settlers and were effectively dispossessed centuries before the pioneering [so-called black] settlers were themselves displaced and dispossessed by an even later invasion of differently hued [so-called white] settlers.

In this new more materialistic post revolutionary age who was the more sinned against is slowly becoming a divisive issue as I predicted in a piece published in the Mail in Guardian back in ’99.


Conschmiracy

I couldn’t find the things I wanted today, they’re in
The computer somewhere,
Probably neatly filed in place
Under a name I’ve given it
And a category I deemed appropriate at the time.

When I read of hackers entering the domain
And looting the contents
Of one’s hard drive and thus
Becoming privy to these thoughts
I wonder if they find the things I can’t.

Were I a conspiracy theorist I should believe that ‘they’
Had taken
My thoughts away
And that is why I can’t find them.

Then perhaps there is a more prosaic side to
This belief that groups meet in huddled rooms
And plan the enslavement of the world [and perhaps they do?]
Do herrings shoal from tacit conspiracy?
Or is it simply
Sensible
To pursue the pulse.

.NiK[2002]
from the collection: Rehearsing Nietzsche.