Right now, nobody is throwing eggs at the glass doors of 120 Bree Street in Cape Town. On a similar stretch of pavement, this time outside Johannesburg’s Fourways office park, bundles of razor wire are not being unrolled.
In fact, nothing at all is happening, which seems to be the modus operandi of the global middle-class protest movement. This will come as a relief to the occupants of those two addresses — the employees of Halliburton, the American energy megacorporation condemned for groping with sweaty fingers at the bodice laces of Iraq’s oil industry. Or maybe it won’t: no one is throwing eggs any more since veganism went mainstream. And soy burgers aren’t quite so aerodynamic.
Halliburton, you will recall, was run by Dick Cheney before he became a Satanist and child pornographer, and is probably responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana. At least, that is The Guardian version.
Speaking of which, that’s a possible answer to the riddle of the missing protesters: they all read The Guardian article, reprinted in this newspaper (”How to boycott Bush”, July 16), and are passionately not buying expensive designer gear as the piece urged. Shop at Ackermans and defeat capitalism!
The forces of unbridled greed and mechanised exploitation are too busy counting money to read newspapers, but if they did, the article in question would have confirmed what they have long since learned through happy experience: that the Western middle class still has the resolve, the backbone and the common sense that ensured peace in our time in 1938. It is a licence to print money.
The last time it was this good to be filthy rich Queen Victoria was plump and married to Albert, rather than anorexic and married to Becks. But today’s captains of industry, those confidence tricksters who operate on continent-sized street corners, don’t have to send a gunboat or garrison to sort out the natives. We surrendered long ago.
After all, ours is a generation lobotomised by advertising and adolescent egotism, one that has had the ability to question bred out of it by constantly being told to question. ”You know better than to believe this commercial,” murmurs the commercial. Damn straight I do. And thanks for noticing my independence and clarity of thought. I think I love you. Do you take Visa?
Do today’s protesters, the howler-monkeys of the concrete jungle, fear genuine confrontation? You can’t blame them: all that shouting when mommy and daddy got divorced. Perhaps the randomness of their targets suggests genuine grass-roots rebellion, with corresponding genuine grass-roots ignorance. Perhaps they’re just thick.
November 26 has been declared Buy Nothing Day by anti-globalisation activists (unemployed Web designers who haven’t had sex in six months). The idea is that by going without our tea-time chockie, The Man will feel the might of the mobilised proletariat. Nothing like a Lilliputian upper-cut to the shin to keep him in line …
Buy Nothing Day is, of course, Do Nothing Day. It comes after Know Nothing Day and before Think Nothing Day. This is protest for the Attention Deficit Disorder generation, for whom causes are accessories. Save the whales? That’s so quaint. I bet you still have ”Stop Detention Without Trial” stickers on your Beetle. Dork.
But then, protest has always known how to sell itself. Michael Moore’s scruffy beard and baseball cap are as calculated as any corporate mission statement, protected by good old-fashioned threats of lawsuits. Ageing hippies can say what they want about the origin of the iconic peace symbol of the 1960s, but it is still a slightly altered Mercedes badge, a masterpiece of Nazi graphic design. The difference is that today’s protesters are being taken in by their own pitch, bewildered by the varieties of righteousness on sale.
How else to explain the haphazard choice of targets? Still flushed from smuggling clandestine photos of Nike sweatshops out of the Third World, they happily board a Boeing made by the same company that supplies the United States armed forces with F-15 fighter-bombers and Apache helicopter gunships. Convenience-store conscience.
Of course, the problem with advertising is that it persuades us to buy Abflexes rather than life insurance. The big, boring, complicated products are abandoned, left, we imagine, for big, boring complicated people to buy. The same has happened in the world of popular protest.
Brazilian ambassadors face no picket lines, no soy missiles. And yet their government is at best ignoring, at worst facilitating, the accelerating destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Yawn. Bloody Amazon, enough already.
Next to Iraqi civilian casualty figures, the statistic that 0,33% of the rainforest is burnt every year sounds like good news. Only 0,33%? Geez, I thought they burned, like, a quarter of it every six months!
How can 0,33% a year compete for outrage time? Would it make a difference to explain that if humanity was killed and burned at the same rate, the incinerators would be processing 20-million bodies a year? Probably not. After all, there are bigger fish to fry than some passé Brazilian shrubs and the creepy-crawlies that inhabit them. And far more satisfying statistics.
Like the way the US executes people, for starters. The American penchant for offing perps is held up as a prime example of their current disregard for human life. In Texas, we’re told, they only barbecue two things: steers and people.
In fact, in 1999 the US executed a whopping 98 people, an American record. An undoubtedly twitchy trigger finger is at work here, but it becomes somehow academic when one considers that 1 781 executions were carried out in China in 2001. In four months. According to Amnesty International, these Chinese were sentenced for crimes including pimping, petrol theft and fraud. They were paraded past large crowds, abused and degraded, before finally being killed in front of tens of thousands of people.
True, nothing on a similar scale had happened in China since, well, 1996. And to be fair, most criminals in China — those who publish dissertations on the excesses of the state, those who don’t kowtow low enough — are taught the error of their ways in humane ”re-education through labour” camps. So eager are the Chinese authorities to let the learning begin that they often skip the inconvenience of a trial.
This week Elton John said celebrities are ”scared” to speak out against the US president because of ”bullying tactics”. You know, like when the Dixie Chicks denounced George W Bush and were arrested in their beds, charged and convicted the same night, and beheaded in a stadium three days later. Oh, wait, I’m thinking of someone else.
So what exactly is being revealed by the white Western silence, the failure to denounce Chinese brutality, African corruption, Eastern European pollution, Japanese whale-slaughter? After all, the moral foundation of all anti-American protest is: decent people don’t behave like this. Are Western protesters, in their quest for political correctness, revealing curiously Victorian views of the world, of Orientals predisposed to demonic cruelty, of Africans irreparably corrupt and inept, of Slavs reconciled with squalor? Why do they expect more from their governments, but not from others?
Or do they simply see a higher likelihood of success in tackling Western ideas and policies than in going up against, for instance, a Chinese world owned and run by three or four men? If this is the case, surely the latter is a far more necessary target?
In the meantime, let’s go to 972 Pretorius Street in Pretoria and tell the Chinese ambassador to stop being naughty. You bring the soy burgers, I’ll bring the eggs.