For my sermon today I would like to deal with three subjects, lust, lust and a little more lust.
Did you know that when next February you pitch up to watch a match in the World Cup cricket season, you will be carefully scrutinised for any overt sign that indicates you harbour an unhealthy preference for “alien” products or services?
Should you be sneaking in a couple of cans of Coca-Cola in your cooler bag, you’ll be asked not to display these while at the match. Pepsi is the
official cold-drink sponsor and competing brands will not be allowed so much as to blink an eye. Don’t try using a credit card with Absa on it. Standard governs the World Cup banking territory. The Toyota corporation will be mortally offended if you wear a cap saying “I Like Isuzu and Isuzu Likes Me”. Your cap could either be confiscated or you could be shown the exit turnstile by crazed Japanese marketing executives.
All this is corporate lust, a humanly corrosive form of commercial fascism that, in this case, has the solid backing of the Organising Committee of the World Cup, which body has recently announced a detailed description of the commercial garotte they are fitting to the event. The “sponsorship” rules, which by any objective standards border on the preposterous, have been drawn up with particular reference to recent legislation, the Merchandise Marks Act, and that criminalises what are referred to as “ambush marketing” techniques.
To use Marianne Merten’s succinct description in the Mail & Guardian of two weeks ago, “ambush marketing” is the use of ploys to include organising groups of spectators to wear T-shirts or wave banners with “offending” logos on them, hoisting “enemy” blimps near World Cup cricket grounds — any concentrated campaign designed to flout supplier rights of the official sponsors.
No surprise. Big-time sponsors have long since taken over popular sport. They have been encouraged to do so by the administrators of the sports, principally because the administrators long ago realised that their own feeble monetary pickings of the sports they so conscientiously administer could be far greater with some major corporation pouring zillions into the trough. There’s a lot of jostling at administrator feeding time.
So remember, when you go to a World Cup match don’t be heard whistling the tune from the wrong sort of jingle anywhere near one of hundreds of plainclothes sponsors’ monitors, or the numerous spy cameras mounted around the cricket grounds. Ali Bacher and his committee will come and nail you.
My second subject for lust relates to the hypocritical hype-fest following the recent kidnapping and multiple rape of a young British tourist. Kicked off by tourism commissar, Cheryl Carolus, followed up by much newspaper comment, there has been a small flood of outrage about this crime, all of which has focused on the damage that the crime might wreak on the South African tourist industry. Comrade Cheryl was particularly shrill, commenting on how the multiple rapes will “tarnish the image of South African tourism”.
But neither she nor anyone else I’ve seen or heard seems to have thought it necessary to express one iota of pity, compassion, sympathy for the victim of the crime. Her shocking calamity has been drowned in the bleating about a possible secondary casualty. The headline to a Cape Times editorial summed it up neatly: Killing Tourism.
True, the victim was given anti-retroviral treatment and some counselling and, with those bothersome details out of the way, Comrade Cheryl and company got down to wailing about a predicted loss of tourist revenue. Comrade Cheryl was careful to emphasise the terrible penalty to the Mpumalanga people — always clock up some political air-miles while you can. The thought of some sort of public apology or expression of regret for the victim’s circumstance seems to have slipped everyone’s mind.
The third lust is a more common one: the lust for making a public tosspot out of oneself whenever an opportunity occurs. Our so-called “celebrities” are very good at this, but none with the utter virtuosity of Mr Denis Beckett, currently standing in until the SABC can decide on a replacement for Tim Modise.
Denis’s fine gifts are on display every morning, Monday through Friday on SAfm — 104 to 107. Every now and then during his daily hosting of this radio phone-in, Denis takes little headlong dives into some picturesque form of second adolescence. He rambles on in his pleasantly aimless way and then, without any warning, suddenly drops his trousers, bends over and gives the nation a great big politically correct brown-eye. His voice shoots up into childish treble as he jitters on about the meaningful experience of riding upwards in a lift filled with people of different races: an inspirational metaphor for national optimism — that sort of thing. Then, just as suddenly, he lapses back into listening patiently to the grey drek-speak of the phone-inners.
I intend no disparagement of Denis by this, only a deep admiration for his abilities. His is a lust that shouldn’t be missed.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby