For a moment it seemed that the United States had tired of quiet diplomacy. ‘The Bomb went off outside a Baghdad police station,” said the BBC correspondent. ‘We haven’t seen this kind of destruction for some time. It was definitely nuclear.”
Had the writing been burned on to the wall, along with the shadows of palm trees and char-grilled ex-camels? Had the US levelled the playing field, along with everything else? Had weapons of mass destruction finally been found in Iraq, floating in pretty parachuted clusters off the wing-roots of B-52s like autumnal cherry-blossoms?
No. The Bomb was just A Bomb, and the rest, reported in an Estuary accent — that nasal lament that has driven a whiny wedge between Great and Britain — was a product of my provincial ear: ‘It was definitely new, Clare.”
Paranoia, the saying goes, is being in possession of all the facts. Thanks to excellent websites run by fat teenagers in black clothing with ‘Kill Everybody” posters stuck up over their 21-inch computers screens, I like to think I am in possession of all the facts. But even the paranoia of these middle-class balls of self-loathing lard falls short of the media conspiracy that unfolded this week. Here are the facts, which we know to be true because they were printed in newspapers this week.
One. There are 500 new mega-millionaires in South Africa. This number includes three mining magnates, four Mail & Guardian columnists, and 493 of their acolytes.
Two. The Bitch of Baghdad, the Terminatrix of West Virginia (the wine for women who enjoy being men), Private Lynndie England, will be prosecuted for abusing Iraqi prisoners.
Three. South African men are the laziest in the world, outslothing Muscovite pimps and Zimbabwean election monitors. On a lighter note, our women work 22% harder than our men. Bless those gals and their pretty little calluses. Wake me when supper’s ready.
Four. The Sunday Times this week described South African Football Association (Safa) boss Danny Jordaan as ‘the hardest-working man in South African football”.
Five. Chumming is causing great white sharks to attack swimmers in Cape Town.
Six. Israel is the Third Reich and anyone who disagrees should be shot in the back of the head.
You don’t have to be John Pilger to join these dots. The encoded subtexts are as obvious as the anti-ubuntu forces of conservatism that have planted them in the global media. Simply put, these stories are attempts by the West and its lackeys in the Middle East to destroy South Africa’s Soccer World Cup bid.
By prosecuting one of its own, the US gains superficial goodwill from its allies but secretly fans militant solidarity between Arab states, thereby diverting Moroccan votes to the Egyptian or Libyan bid.
Is it a coincidence that the guilty party is called England, the imperialist rogue state that claims to have invented football, a laughable proposition given the game’s documented origins along the Nile and Euphrates?
As for the Zionist Reich, the only compassionate thing to do there would be to enslave the entire country and force Jews to build monuments to Egyptian nationalism. Perhaps big pyramidal things near Giza.
Moving on. There are said to be about 3,25-billion men in the world, about 26-million of them South African.
South African football is probably slightly less hard-working than, say, the Treatment Action Campaign, and slightly more hard-working than a meths drinker snoozing in a sack, so it’s not wildly unfair to put Safa’s male staff in the top 0,05% of the world’s laziest people.
However, if there are 500 new mega-millionaires in this country, a country in which nobody works, it must be extraordinarily easy to become said mega-millionaire. Since Jordaan isn’t a mega-millionaire, he must be slothful to the point of petrifaction. More lies.
And finally the sharks. Maybe materialistic Londoners and New Yorkers are terrorised by the insatiable hunger of great white sharks — Cosatu, I’m copyrighting this pun so watch it — but we in South Africa are still free. We’re nobody’s chum, do you hear? Do your worst, Fifa.
We beat the Bushmen, then the English, then the Cubans and Russians, then the Afrikaners, then Cliff Saunders, and then some pony herders in Lesotho. Bring it on, bitch! Bring it!
The truth is that we deserve to host the World Cup for the same reason that we deserve foreign aid, a statue in Trafalgar Square, and a seat on the UN Security Council: we just do.
And if we don’t win, there’s always a comforting snooze while the ladywife debugs the phones.