Lawrence Fishburne is considered one of the finest actors of his generation. His generation includes Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. Those who are doing the considering — usually chat-room visitors called ”Viking Wolf” or ”SoulThresher” (16-year-old mounds of asthmatic, nearsighted acne) — say that Larry is one of the last true Method actors. And they seem to have a point.
For his role as a dope-addled teen in Apocalypse Now, he became a dope-addled teen. For the deep-space chiller Event Horizon, he was spaced out and deeply chilled. In space no one can hear you yawn. However, his greatest triumph was as Morpheus in the Matrix series, a role that combined perfectly the barbiturate quality of his character’s name with the Goth-dork angst of the whole ghastly thing. His soliloquies, apparently written in fishfinger on an Etch-a-Sketch, galvanized the youth to go out and buy the tie-in merchandising and to feel superior and dangerous while doing so.
But Fishburne is not only a pretty face, and this week he was in South Africa, revolutionising our thinking. It turns out that child abuse is a bad thing. I found this jolly helpful, and wrote it down for future reference.
Larry is also very pleased the South African media are portraying the youth in such a good light. None of the local editors who, in later interviews, referred to him, mantra-like, as ”Lawrencefishburne”, were up to suggesting that if his own portrayals are any indication, adults are manically depressed intellectual poseurs who solve conflicts with long bursts of machine-gun fire and judo-chops to the throat.
What would he say next? Global warming is warming the globe? Breastfeeding mothers shouldn’t inhale nerve gas? But as quickly as he had arrived, he was gone.
It is just as well he didn’t stick around long enough to catch the latest instalment of the trial of Peter Marais and David Malatsi, accused of wanting their palms greased in return for green-lighting a golf estate in Plettenberg Bay.
If he had, he would no doubt have pointed out that golf estates are estates where golf is played. But you don’t need to be a finger-on-the-pulse crusader like Larry to know that golf is a major worry to those concerned with global security.
According to Scientific American‘s website, golf courses cover a chunk of our planet equal to the area of Hawaii, or a third of Belgium. Which begs the question: What has happened to all those Hawaiians and Belgians, torn away from their luaus and chocolate fondues, babies screaming, grass-skirts catching fire and 17th-century china crockery shattering under storm troopers’ boots, as they are herded into trucks and disposed of?
They are a forgotten people, these golf refugees, gaunt figures flitting through the dusk along the world’s fairways, furtively digging up sand-traps in search of ancestral cufflinks. But the human tragedy of golf is dwarfed by the environmental and military consequences of its quest for lebensraum.
An average golf course needs about 3 000m3 of water a day, which is as much rain as Botswana got in the 19th century, before the drought set in, and not all Middle-Eastern sheikdoms are demure enough to paint their dunes green.
Israel is already keeping a sharp eye on the condition of Egyptian and Syrian fairways. After all, one hot summer of typically profligate irrigation by its neighbours could escalate the security situation from the current Code Lush Green to Code Brittle Yellow or even Code Dusty Brown, which would see the Zionist Entity invaded from the north and south by brigades of water-tankers and swarms of holy warriors carrying buckets.
Realistically, though, a Golf War seems unlikely, given United States military golfing expansion. Despite plaintive cries by US taxpayers, the US Armed Forces maintain 246 golf courses around the world, three of them at Andrews Air Force Base.
Given the US military’s motto (”If it ain’t broke, break it and buy a new one”) one can only imagine the diesel-evaporating Humvee golf carts, the razor-wire and searchlights on every out-of-bounds area, the machine guns and concrete in the bunkers.
And if you think they are going to let some five-putting, sweet- spot-enlarging, shorts-wearing, par-three-playing, handicap-fudging Commie camel jockeys use US water — sweet, icy Montana stream water, bathed in by beavers and pretty Navaho girls with big brown eyes — to irrigate their degenerate undemocratic, nine-hole mashie courses, then you’re about to get your priorities rearranged, son.
Fishburne would want us to crack the carbon-fibre shank of neo-colonialism on the knee of free will, and to toss the ball of oppression into the water-hazard of enlightenment. Otherwise …
Today, Plettenberg Bay. Tomorrow, the world …