With a mixture of amusement and amazement, the public might receive the latest exercise in social obligation: this in the form of a series of low-key advertisements recommending ‘Responsible Alcohol Use” and ‘Responsible Gambling”.
These advertisements are a touching gesture, coming as they do from vast business concerns making fortunes out of exploiting humankind’s frailties. Hypocrisy has an endless shelf life.
What infinite solace the adverts must provide to the wife, battered and bruised by a husband whose habitual drinking has liberated the sweeter side of his nature so that, when he’s had a few pots, he gives expression to the mounting catalogue of his career frustrations by means of his fists and his boots. You can hear the wife scream at him as he kicks her in the kidney. ‘Why can’t you be more responsible in your drinking?” she blurts, as the blood rushes up her throat. ‘If only you’d read those little advertisements and realise that when you drink yourself into a mindless stupor, come back here, crash the car into the side of the garage, lurch into the house smelling like a Cairo urinal, push over the furniture, throw a few vases at me, slap the baby around, scream at the neighbours, piss on the telephone and then vomit all over your belly just before you pass out in a welter of remorse and self-pity, it would be so much nicer if you were responsible when you did it.”
The other new advertisement selling ‘responsibility” is now aimed at those who gamble. Here responsibility is encouraged, presumably as some sort of humble public caveat from the community-sensitive businessmen who own and run casinos. How evident their distress at the penalties associated with their amiable commerce. How lurid the anguish of these compassionate men at the thought of all those impecunious people from the working classes who can’t pay for food, rent, household funds or even newer rags because it’s all been swallowed by your trustworthy slot machines. If only the ragged individuals who haunt your slot halls, their children left to play in the grime outside, could be more responsible.
What’s next on the responsibility binge? Can we look forward to a national campaign advocating responsible cocaine use? A newspaper ad stating: ‘Don’t buy your stash on any old Yeoville street corner. Use a reputable dealer who will guarantee you’re getting the pure product. Someone who hasn’t spiked it with some elephant tranquilliser. You could end up in the morgue instead of casualty outpatients. So be cautious! Sniff responsibly!”
Imagine the script for a new television commercial. Opening shot of an actor made up to look like a wise, grey-haired doctor, white lab coat, stethoscope around his neck. He turns to the camera, holds up a filthy, bent medical syringe with some warmish-looking yellow pus dripping out of the end of its needle. ‘Would you allow me, as a doctor, to stick this thing into you? Of course you wouldn’t. That’s because you know that the medical profession understands the dangers of cross infection of terrible diseases, sepsis and associated health risks of using unsterilised hypodermic needles.” He throws the dirty syringe into a metal bin marked ‘Medical Waste Material — Extremely Hazardous”. He folds his arms and the camera slowly zooms into close-up. ‘So what I am saying to all you mainline heroin slaves out there is quite simple. Be responsible. Use properly sterilised needles for your next desperate intravenous fix — which will probably be this afternoon. Don’t stick your used needle into your girlfriend. For that matter don’t stick anything else into her until you’ve properly sterilised it. Be responsible. Shoot clean.” The shot freezes and a written payoff is superimposed: ‘This Advertisement has been Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Responsible Drug Usage and its Lawyers.”
Recently I received in the post what looked like a standard 30-pack of cigarettes. No brand name, just a white flip-top box marked: OPEN NOW FOR ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT TOBACCO. Opened, up pops a little plastic message from the British American Tobacco company, reading: Information. Responsibility. Debate. History. Controversy. Visit our website … and so on. Presumably we should be encouraged to be responsible when acquiring lung cancer, circulatory disease and a kiss that tastes like an ashtray.
I’m closing off this week by explaining that I’m not returning to the Darrel Bristow-Bovey matter. In last week’s column I said I’d further discuss the letter I received in support of Bristow-Bovey, from his publisher, Steve Connolly, MD of Struik Publishers. I believe that Connolly’s robust defence of Bristow-Bovey deserves as full an exposure as possible, and I would like to publish both my letter to him and his unedited reply. However, Connolly’s reply to my questions does carry the standard rider about its contents not being disseminated without permission. I believe that, as his reply was in response to questions I put to him as a writer for the Mail & Guardian, the newspaper would have the right to publish his reply in whole or part.
As I want to publish both letters on my website, I believe it only courteous that I ask Connolly if he minds. This I will be doing, and hope to have the letters up by next week.