This week the American media reported, in somewhat offended tones, that people were dying in the heatwave currently incinerating the south-western states. Real people, mind you, not just immigrants and Democrats. Indeed, 20 people have died in Phoenix alone, a cruel irony not dwelt on out of sensitivity to the bereaved; and besides, one couldn’t be sure that Arizonians were up on their mythological creatures.
Indeed, in the small hours of last Tuesday, as the night-time temperature dropped to a mercifully low 38, the layman must have lain naked on his kitchen tiles musing grimly on the nature of living in the globe’s leading polluter, and finally understanding that what goes around comes around, apparently accompanied by fine skies, a gentle breeze and the faint smell of roasting pork dressed in melting polyester.
Not so the scientist, living next door. Secure in the knowledge that global warming is a model still open to development, he would have pooh-poohed the complaints of his insomniac menopausal wife where she lay shrieking in the chest freezer, wondering if she’d have time to kill him with the eggbeater before she burst into flames. Yes, dear, I know it’s hot, but you can’t just draw simplistic parallels between unprecedented heat and unprecedented industrial emissions. That’s called sloppy science. And it’s goddamn unpatriotic, honey.
Somehow she, like the rest of us, has never insisted on reciprocal rigour, and when he and his colleagues go home and arrive in our world, they are allowed to indulge in sloppy language, ethics, theology, accounting, parenting and foreplay. And so the simplistic parallels remain undrawn.
Such as those between racism and stupidity, for example.
As Vegas smouldered, a Kenyan MP named Ramadhan Kajembe lit another fire by declaring that condoms were the inventions of mzungus (whites) and should, by implication, be rejected. Furthermore, he said, they were painful to put on.
No doubt scientists of the social variety would rush to his defence, citing fear of change, cultural and gender-based traditions, and the pressures of globalisation on modern Africa. But this layman can’t help thinking that the Kenyan’s statements have nothing to do with trying to deal with the scars of 65-million years of oppression and exploitation, and everything to do with being the Global Village idiot. And given Minister Ragamuffin’s apparent intellect, one has to wonder whether he’s experiencing pain when putting on condoms not so much because his love chipolata is oversensitive, but because he’s trying to roll them down over his head.
If only we could accept that racism is a symptom of having apple sauce and pork-rinds between one’s ears, the current furore over Cape Town mayoral adviser Blackman Ngoro’s remarks on the ghastliness of coloureds might have been averted. We would see that he is not a nasty man because he is a racist. He is simply a moron.
Indeed, to read his diatribe is to enter a mind entirely unstained by learning: Ngoro’s spelling and grammar speak of a childhood spent gamboling about outside the warren, rolling in the dew and sniffing the gunk between his toes. He is that most rare kind of dolt — an entirely naïve one.
It goes without saying that the mayor’s office is racist. Naturals like Ngoro don’t reserve their prejudice for online editorials, and the inevitable water-cooler diatribes wouldn’t have been tolerated if his colleagues didn’t share his views. This is not worrying: anyone who thinks they aren’t racist is either younger than seven or Australian, which is really the same thing.
What is worrying, though, is how he got the job. One assumes it was a fairly conventional Cape Town council interview, with the candidate first asked to fit a whole orange into his mouth before being led by the hand through a row of cones, rounding off with a short multiple choice questionnaire (‘What does your Mommy call you?” ‘How many fingers and toes do you have?” and so on).
But surely, in the gruelling callback interviews, some doubts emerged? For instance, in the five-minute beanbag-balancing task, didn’t they see his penchant for throwing his beanbag at the nearest coloured person? Didn’t handwriting analysts see in his signature — a spidery, jam-stained X — some latent rage?
Ngoro was on leave this week, which is usually a euphemism for getting fired. But in this case one suspects it was simply to give him a chance to creosote the chip on his shoulder. After all, you can’t draw simplistic parallels between employability and idiocy.