God is certainly having his day in court these days, but I doubt if he’d be anxious to endorse the way his name is being bandied about if he was around to hear it.
Down in Bloemfontein in the so-called Free State, former apartheid-era Judge Joos Hefer is trying valiantly to play God while a motley crowd of well-heeled natives and Indians scamper around pointing fingers at each other. Hefer must be secretly wishing that we still practised apartheid if this is the best performance the heirs of freedom are able to put on in the eyes of the world.
Everyone concerned, of course, would loudly proclaim that God was on their side, if they professed to have a god. In fact, Bulelani Ngcuka, the native who is alleged to have started all the trouble, gave an outburst in the City Press before the whole circus erupted in which he quoted directly from the Holy Scriptures.
Referring to his hornet’s nest of enemies, he ranted: ”For they shall be cut down like grass, and wither as the green herb.”
This quotation, we were courteously informed, was taken from Psalm 37. Ex-to-spook-or-not-to-spook Ngcuka showed a born-again Christian candour in feeling obliged to express himself this way.
It was a fascinating quotation for the majority of us non-believers to be treated to because it opened our eyes to a lot of unexpected issues.
First of all, why should the general public be expected to take sides on the basis of who among this dodgy crew would be the first to invoke the word of God in his or her own defence?
Let’s break down that quotation. Leaving aside the deep-seated suspicion that everyone concerned must have been partaking of a lot of the green herb referred to to get themselves into this ungodly mess, you have to ask yourself why it is necessary to talk about anybody, especially former struggle buddies, in terms of drought, fire and brimstone. How is it possible that the struggle could have come to this?
But what really made me prick up my ears was that reference to people being ”cut down like grass”. This rings a bell, I said to myself.
And, of course, the bell being rung was the name given to one of the many weapons of mass destruction deployed by the United States army and air force in their recent insurgency against the peace-loving people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
”Grasscutter” is the name given to a hideous little piece of weaponry that was supposed to take out Osama bin Laden and his faithful band of bitter-ender followers where they were presumably hiding in the man-made caves of Tora Bora (the men who made them being the very Americans who were now trying to blast the hell out of the Taliban and al-Qaeda monsters they themselves had created).
Embedded television journalism never actually allowed us to see what these ”grasscutters” were capable of. But the verbal and written descriptions told their own story.
The ”grasscutter”, we were told by various gleeful front-line hacks in their carefully tailored Fifth Avenue flack jackets, is a laser-guided missile that would be fired into the mouths of the caves where the cavemen were hiding, and then explode on impact into thousands of whizzing blades that would disperse in all directions, slicing whatever human or animal life was in there into smithereens — not enough flesh left to feed your cat was the idea.
Nasty sounding little gizmo, to be sure. What kind of a mind could even conceive of such a thing? What kind of a mind would ever consider using it? But they sure as hell did. And, the way they saw it, God was on their side.
It was Bulelani Ngcuka’s helpful outburst in the hapless City Press (erstwhile refuge of Ranjeni ”Bring-me-the-head-of-John-the-Baptist” Munusamy and Vusi ”What-the-heck-happened‒to-my-head?” Mona) that gave a new insight into what the thinking behind the deployment of this nasty little weapon was all about.
”Grasscutter”, it turned out, was a biblical reference. Only the Born-Again nutters who are piloting the Mothership to its inevitable destruction would have been aware of that. The rest of us heathens (men and women in turbans, yashmaks, long beards, bald heads, hot pants, Che Guevara T-shirts or whatever) would have to take our chances and be sliced up into sausage meat. God has spoken.
The trouble is God keeps changing his identity. One minute he looks like George W Bush, the next he’s a cunning double-clone job of Tony Blair and the Duchess of York. Who are we supposed to be listening to?
Worst of all, God generally seems to prefer to speak through intermediaries. Donald Rumsfeld, with his Brylcreemed hair, seems to be the chief among these. (I’ll have to remember to get out my mother’s old antimacassars in the unlikely event that he should ever come round to visit. But anything is possible these days. I hope he likes cat food sandwiches.)
The latest twist, though, is that Rumsfeld, for all the rumours of an early forced exit from the Pentagon, increasingly seems to be taking on the mantle of God himself.
I think that God should be ashamed of himself for allowing himself to have such lousy scriptwriters. But the worst is when God decides to let his hair down and speak off the cuff.
God outdid himself this week. Speaking at yet another embedded press shindig, Baas God Rumsfeld, trying patiently to explain why things were going so horribly wrong for the American army in liberated Iraq, had these profound words of wisdom to share with us: ”There are times when we know what we know; there are times when we know what we don’t know; and there are times when we don’t know what we don’t know.”
When it gets to this level, I have to say to myself that the only thing I know is I don’t want to hear anything more from God.