The Testimonies of an enumerator: episode 4

Weblog: 11/08/07 Welcome to the 4th episode of the “Testimonies of an enumerator”, a weekly serial in 19 parts that acts as a prelude to part 3 of my collection called the Azanian Quartet. The first two parts of the Azanian Quartet: The Buffalo Hunters and the Ashanti Raider are both available in ebook form at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari. @ USD$1.50 each

In a preemptive, some say petulant move, this week our beloved President, Thabo the Great fired his Deputy Health Minister over an alleged act of insubordination[I gather]. It was such an event that catapulted an energetic Corinth Starr into the independent political arena where she gained a remarkable victory for her Gender in the coming Gender conflict associated with the Starr Revolution. Read on….

4 The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy under Starr the elder.
Period 2009 – 2019


The De Soto conditions

Previously: In episode 3 you read that Corinth Starr (the elder), leader of the Gender* Party made a keynote, life defining declaratory speech at the famous Constitutional Hill Indaba in which she presented the now-famous argument for Basic Pay, a change we all now think of about as often as we do the air we breathe, and which began to turn the tide against the chronic poverty of the previous age.

[* gender: the term used to denote two alternate species of humanity, locked, at that time, into a mutually demanding, reproductive process that aroused considerable competitive conflict. It was also a source of recreation, with the demands of the recreational dimension generally overriding those of reproduction.It was noted that there were humans who rejected the reproduction demands inherent in their design and chose to penetrate their own gender, so therefore not all those who were penetrated were of the penetratee* gender, although the effect in terms of dominance power relationships was similar.][**Penetratee: regular readers will remember that for convenience we have chosen to define the two gender variants that made up humanity on Urdos as penetratee and penetrator, as the terminology used in the documents on which these testimonies are based did not seem too clear on the roles.]

Continuing: The great issue of that time, from Starr’s perspective, was not only gaining acceptance of the idea of Basic Pay but also developing an irrefutable [if perhaps apparently facile] argument to justify her proposed course of action to the hard core economists and bankers of the world. It was her intention to liberate the world ultimately: starting with Southern Azania as the model, from the economic malaise into which a huge marginalised proportion of the planet’s citizenry had slid, early in the new century, and from which it was proving increasingly difficult to emerge, notwithstanding the brief stumbling emergence of the south Asian* economies.[Editors note: we do not know much about these entities. It seems that they may have disappeared during the great climate meltdown of the early part of this post-apocalypse era.]

According to popular legend, Starr the elder spotted opportunity.

Starr had originally sensed the opportunity during a television business chat show on CNBC Africa that she was idly attending to during a late night work session. It had featured a well-known, populist economic analyst from a poverty drenched region in South America.. He had written a widely acclaimed book evaluating why some places in the world, (mainly those from which the Koloniste or kinfolk of the Koloniste came), were able to become prosperous and comfort seeking, while much of the world languished in poverty, adrift in an ocean of corruption, bedevilled with fraud and abusive, unfulfilled promises.

It had been received wisdom for centuries that the reason some were rich (as it was called, i.e. well endowed with valuable assets) and the many were poor [i.e. had no possessions of value or means of obtaining any] was due to the thieving behaviour of those who were rich, stealing wealth (as collective richness was called) from the weak and the timid and the generally self effacing ‘peeple’, to benefit only themselves.

This belief had been the cause of immense conflict between the rich and the poor throughout the century preceding the 21st [51st]. Those places where the poor had won out had steadily become poorer, due to indescribable levels of corruption and mismanagement that had accompanied their attempts to run an incentiveless environment. As frequently collapse was inevitable as those who triggered the Revolutions of the age became themselves the new elites with only token regard for the poor and the dispossessed but without the collective experience and skills from ages past.

Those fewer places where the rich, or as they put it, where opportunity had won out, steadily became richer. Many believed that this was mostly due to luck since there was still plenty of corruption and mismanagement in those places. Nonetheless both sides plunged into an era of reconsideration in the aftermath of the inevitable implosion of all those poor regions. This occurred over the decades known as the ‘Millennium Changeover’ between the so-called 20th and the 21st centuries [Also, for different, but equally obscure reasons, known as the 50th and the 51st centuries: contributor’s note.] The implosions gradually contributed to declining economic activity on the plane, which at times ground to a virtual halt, relatively speaking by the late end of the opening decade of the 21st/51st century.

At that time peeple in the southern part of what was later to be called the Azanian Konfederacy had not yet realised how much their world had changed completely, following a revolution that had taken place in Southern Azania at the end of the 20th/50th century. There were those citizens (as peeple were also often called) who lived in an Azanian world where the Koloniste way still ruled and there were those who lived in a world where the new revolutionary order ruled. Then there were those in between; and those on the outside; and others in the place called nowhere, who had no influence at all on the way their world was ruled. All this notwithstanding all the wonderful masques and fol-de-rol *organised by whatever ruling clique-of-the-moment chose to represent as that moment’s received reality.[* Fol-de-rol: We do not know what this means and assume it to be a form of metaphor associated with misdirected activity: contributor’s note.]

Back at the great Constitution Hill Indaba* Corinth Starr stepped forward and lowered her arms…calmed the crowd soothed them with the rhythm of her arms falling to a beat they could all feel though no one said it out loud: it was a simple chemical reaction.
[* Indaba a word that seems to denote some type of formal assembly: Contributor note..]

“There are peeple out there who say that I am irresponsible for promoting the principle of basic pay and I say it is our due!”

The crowd roared their approval…she was right, who were these hypocrites to tell the world that there was a problem with basic pay for all when they had salaries, they were paid for doing whatever they did, whether they did it well or not. Many of those in the crowd suspected that the country was packed wall to wall with people who had non-jobs for which they were paid and in which they did more or less nothing of any value; so why should they, the peeple not also be paid too.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with an extremist, and Corinth Starr was certainly an extremist. According to legend an extremist of the penetratee gender was more ferocious than any other creature; and this was a person aroused to rage with an antipathy that was overwhelming. So intense was her rage that it had, until that time, created more revulsion than devotion amongst the voting public. The world had been there so many times, it seemed. Then she produced Basic Pay and suddenly when they all looked up they were bestrode by a giant: everything democrats warn against.

At some stage during her time in the sidelines she had a makeover of some major effect. The strident “I wannitdonenowhatthefuckareyoustillstandingaroundfor” scowling, foot tapping demands of the past had been converted to a low key intensity, that sucked in the audience rather than subliminally operating in the shrillness zone of the angry demanding parent: scaring us into submission and repelling, simultaneously. Those that admired her most had previously had distance forced upon them: now she wooed them with an intensity few could match.

“The propensity of all human beings to prevaricate is a core mechanism in us that acts to prevent us from achieving our true potential” She saw a few furrowed brows and smiled, with a perfectly crafted radiance, “This idea that we have an obsession with avoiding the truth is almost trite.” She bit the word off. “In fact it is almost a cliché and like the air we breathe; it washes us, and we never think to alter it.” She seemed for a moment to bow her head and her body slumped, as though as an act of obeisance to her allotted destiny. They waited, not knowing what she was talking about but knowing it had something to do with getting free money; and most definitely feeling the intensity of her presentation.

“How to work within that awareness is a main purpose of the task that awaits us.”

“For years now peeple have promoted the idea that every citizen should be paid a wage by the governing authority…They have called it BIG because it would be a basic income grant,” she twisted the last word as she said it, and the audience could feel the vomit in her bile as she ground at that word…“grant”… “And we say! … Grant us no favours…we our doing our job…our job is too consume!”

What an idea…the crowd loved it. The conservatives of the ruling party and those beyond, in the extended audience shuddered at the thought. The chat show cynics and all the lackey spokespersons of the servile chattering classes tittered at the naivety of it all, and railed against “irresponsible promises”: as if there weren’t already enough, they said.

For it was the received wisdom that for a range of perfectly respectable economic reasons the idea was considered impractical. The core objection was that “the country couldn’t afford it” and on the surface this appeared an insurmountable objection. Starr’s genius was that she saw the opportunity [perceived from that random television programme] to reconstruct the base on which that viewpoint rested and that, added to the desperate times, made all the difference…as they all said at the time.

“And since it is our job to consume we demand our pay by right, for, not to pay us would make us slaves and our constitution does not permit …slavery!” She did something weird there with her voice, dropped the breathe to the lowest point it would go, down below the navel and lifted the word on syllables of fire catching the mood of the crowd and lifting it to enraged indignation…. “Yes, yes, yes!” They roared in adulation.

“How are you proposing to finance this generally inflationary exercise in giving away free money?” her advisers had demanded when she had first shared her vision with them some months earlier. She had introduced them to her chat show hero, a man from a foreign land, a place much poorer than Southern Azania, who had written a famous book, about the true secret of Capitalism’s success, in that part of the world called …Developed.

He had talked to them for a while about the role of property in the accumulation of wealth. He explained how the poor actually, collectively owned great wealth but were unable to access it for use in financing small enterprises because the system failed them. In all places where there was great poverty, there were unclear guidelines to the registration of property rights and therefore huge delays, in some cases insurmountable in the lifetimes of single persons.

This meant that the country was dispossessing its poor by default, and that the failure of the poor to escape poverty was something for which the system itself was therefore accountable; and which must be rectified. He finished by suggesting that the poor should sue.

Starr added. “It is the intention of this party to make that access happen on a massive scale with the biggest recording exercise ever undertaken, what has been done so far is inadequate.” Starr the elder had fixed her advisors with her steely stare, and transfixed them, “Then we shall mortgage the future to finance present expenditure through the widespread use of the basic pay. This new electronic digital era gives us opportunities for wealth disbursement that have never before existed. The Tax authorities will claw the pay back from those who earn above the minimum and our purpose must be to make the entire exercise operate on an entirely electronic basis, with the minimum of costly administrative leakage…” As she spoke those last words she made a wringing motion with both fists held together …like wringing out a towel; like wringing out a bureaucrat with a personal agenda.

She told the assembled crowd all this that day, finishing with:

“Therefore we must redefine the way in which we calculate our national income to include not only all production and service activity, not only in the formal but also in the informal. We must cost in the labour of millions of household activities, all of which have already been financed for millennia by the greater society…indeed…have facilitated that greater society’s very existence.”

The crowd loved Starr’s theme, that in the time of formal slavery the society managed to facilitate the most basic requirements of slaves and the rich still managed to accumulate wealth. So why was it that now, with the world awash with goodies no one wanted, with interest rates at historic lows indefinitely, with deflation eating away at gross domestic product that suddenly the financing of society’s needs had become so impossible.

“It has been said for millennia that the poor have always been with us …well that is true and how have the poor been financed all these years if not through the greater society that has thus over time permitted huge unaccounted capital accumulation.

“It is time for us to realise that investment, for us to make that realisation practical through Basic Pay.”

The crowd loved the feel of Basic Pay and began the great chant: Basic Pay, Basic Pay; feet pounding to the rhythm of their chanting cadence, forearms thrusting forefingers forward in the style of popular rap music… Bee Peee, Bee Pee…..”

She raised her arms and they quietened for a moment. Then she noted, caustically, that delaying the evaluation of wealth existing among the poor occurred because the process was controlled for the most part by the Penetrators, and because the penetrative gender was not the one doing the most suffering; and therefore had no sense of urgency. It is for those of us who feel the pain of nature with its constant hunger, to get things done. Whooping from the crowd revealed a barb well sent

It was a subtle shift, almost a rider to a theorem, and the message got where it was intended.

The cynics in the ruling party, when pressured, said that Corinth Starr (Starr the elder) had merely arranged for the poor to finance their own development and that it was such an unfair idea that no one would buy it. Once a marginal, always a marginal: no one promoting these crackpot ideas had ever scored more than a point or two in an election, and if she looking threatening enough, put her down or buy her out. They were so sleek and comfortable, feeling their omnipotence: their necks wonderfully fattened for the kill. They made a few token gestures; promises of the old kind, that all wrongs would be rectified along with a few token “vivas*”. [editor’s note: we have no record of what is meant connotatively by the use of this word which itself apparently means “long live”]

They put out some election posters suggesting that the idea [of Basic Pay] would cause greater poverty and in their speeches, clever speechwriters argued that such schemers as Starr the elder, like the eternal pyramid scammers, would soon divest the poor of their miserable holdings and then they would truly understand the meaning of poverty and all of society would collapse, just like in the old eastern empires of poor disorder.

They miscalculated: and, again, that made all the difference….

To be continued.

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

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