A mindless destroyer
I used to jokingly refer to the United States as the “Evil Empire”, but I’m afraid history will show this to be an accurate description of a society that mindlessly destroyed Earth’s precious reserves.
About 25% of Earth’s population uses 75% of its resources, and causes a similar proportion of Earth’s pollution. If that doesn’t strike you as grossly unfair, there’s something wrong with you. The way these resources are used, too, is cause for dismay.
Every day, huge numbers die of starvation, while many Americans are obese and spend billions on slimming drugs.
The starving are in countries that cannot access global markets because of trade barriers. Africans could grow the agricultural products of Europe at one-sixteenth of the cost, but are excluded from markets while European consumers pay massive taxes so that their governments can subsidise farmers.
We hear wonderful things about globalisation, but it only operates to the benefit of developed countries. Where the global market should allow Africa to compete, because it has an advantage in resources and labour, it cannot because artificial forces manipulate the market.
The rich countries shine glory on themselves for their aid handouts, while their other hand is slowly throttling our continent.
The entire planet agrees on the Kyoto protocol, while the US pulls out, saying there is no proof that greenhouse gases cause global warming. They say this while ice caps melt.
I hope they enjoyed their tornadoes, made worse by rising sea temperatures. Gaia strikes back — Nature is a dynamic system that adjusts to restore equilibrium.
Let’s look at energy. Fossil fuels are limited; they should be handled as precious items. But George W Bush believes the extravagance of the Ameri-can people is part of their lifestyle, and they have a right to defend it.
A logical person would say: fuel is short, we use a lot of it, so let’s change the way we operate. The US says: let’s live in suburbs, the least energy-efficient form of “civilisation” in history. Let’s drive SUVs that use double the fuel of normal cars. Let’s identify countries with oil, attack them and take their oil. Let’s put American companies in charge of that oil.
Americans don’t care about the rest of the world. Bush doesn’t even know the names of the leaders he visits. Half of the members of Congress don’t have passports. Many Americans don’t know where Canada is.
Not all Americans are bad, but there is something sick and dangerous about that blinkered society. Its driving force is wasteful consumerism; they are a lesson in materialism gone wrong. They remind me of an aggressive drunk: you just can’t reason with that kind of animal.
I hope that there is some kind of turnaround, and that the next few decades see a new level of cooperation among human beings. The alternative is growing inequality, oppression and waste, until we are in a very sorry state indeed. — Johan
Nzimande silent on reasons
It is refreshing to read Blade Nzimande saying the second decade of democracy must be “one for the poor”, those who (implicitly) paid heavily for the first decade being a glorious one for the rich and the newly enriched (December 2).
His view has undoubted popular resonance. Diverse groupings backed Cosatu’s call for a united front against unemployment and poverty, and there have been many protests against the failure to meet people’s basic needs.
The numbers of those who back Nzimande’s call are considerably larger than the SACP’s support base. This ought to give him encouragement.
It is his silences that prompt the fear that his wishes will be orphaned. Nzimande tells us the government’s 1996 Gear policy “was adopted without the remotest consultation with alliance partners”. He adds that the SACP went into the 1999 election “on a platform of accelerating change, but the main thing that happened was an attempt to launch full-scale privatisation”.
He doesn’t interrogate how these developments could have occurred. How did two members of a tripartite alliance allow a whole decade to be so antithetical to the needs of their constituencies? Leading SACP members and former Cosatu leaders sit in the Cabinet. How did they allow such things?
If these questions aren’t addressed, there is no reason to hope that the second decade will be any different from the first. Mistakes were made. We must learn from them.
This does not mean abandoning the alliance. It suggests the alliance must be used more effectively. It means standing up to protect the interests of workers and the poor.
Nzimande is not alone in his silence. In his recent public paper on the Freedom Charter, Jeremy Cronin provided an incisive analysis of the current situation but was silent on how we got here. Cosatu’s strategy paper of 2003 offers a robust assessment of a disturbing present, without explaining how two members of a tripartite alliance allowed such a disjuncture between expectations and reality.
We are not yet in a position to debate answers. The SACP and Cosatu have not been able to acknowledge the questions. — Jeff Rudin, South African Municipal Workers Union
Mandela’s cell
(Lest we forget)
I stood among a crowd
of tourists from abroad
and stared into his past.
A cage of bricks and bars
as gloomy and as cramped
as racial bias in the mind.
And in that ancient tomb
a bench, a gleam of bowl,
a stone-cold strip of floor.
I could not hear the clang
shook from a gate of steel
that bigotry kept locked,
nor see a gaunt-faced man
fold up each dawn for years
a mat where he had dreamed.
Instead, far off, I heard
the cheering of the world
when he the era’s Lazarus
walked out into the sun
leaving his heirs to tend
his legacy’s stark shrine.
Around that unlocked gate,
that emptied prison cell,
cameras flashed applause.
— Chris Zithulele Mann, Grahamstown
Liberal hypocrisy
While Shaun de Waal rightly points out the importance of giving more art coverage in the current Mail & Guardian, I want to highlight the treatment I received from the paper as a young artist.
I had my first one-man show in South Africa at the Karen McKerron Gallery in Jo’burg in 1987.
Ivor Powell said he liked it but could not write about it “for personal reasons”.
A friend who worked at M&G later told me it was editorial policy not to cover my work because I was Jim Bailey’s son!
Jim had gone virtually bankrupt in 1984. When Weekly Mail editor Anton Harber approached him for funding and came away empty-handed, it was clearly war.
That I, a struggling young artist, had fuck all to do with this mess perfectly illustrates the hypocrisy of the armchair-liberal mind.
De Waal continues ignoring my art, and this is not sour grapes, as it enjoys massive media coverage. — Beezy Bailey, Cape Town
Harry Potter of commentary
Perhaps it is fitting that Stellenbosch University — centred in a town stuck largely (politically) in the 1940s and aspiring to all things French — is the only place I know that gives serious audience to one Dan Roodt (“Rainbow? What rainbow?”, December 2).
Stuck largely in the middle of 1940s South Africa, Roodt’s memory is conveniently amnesic, his logic simply and laughably flawed and his comparisons to things French so absurd a first-year political science student pissed on Tassies could dismiss it in a haze of dry summer overindulgence.
Living a privileged life on the back of a reborn country that they call home, the Roodts of the world never cease to amaze me, cowardly critical yet prospering on what is supposedly anathema to them.
These über-hypocrites give flesh to Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that “we are what we pretend to be”.
Roodt belongs in the entertainment section of the Mail & Guardian; he is the Harry Potter of contemporary political commentary: prepubescent, harmless, occasionally a little dark and scary but, in the end, pure fantasy and fiction. Light, digestible and, most important, easily passed. Pass the toilet paper please. — Brent Johnson, Stellenbosch
Ending a week without my fix of Robert Kirby and John Matshikiza left me very depressed. But what really tempted me to jump off the bridge was finding the “honorary fly in an ointment”, Dan Roodt, as a replacement. Hayikhona, Ms Editor, hayikhona! — George Makola, Tembisa
Our democracy has come of age
Let us put our hands together for ourselves, for South Africa — our democracy has come of age. This is the implication of the recent flurry of debates involving various leaders of the tripartite alliance. The democratic ideal can only benefit.
Because of its apartheid past, South Africa has been an abnormal society in which people have been judged by the colour of their skins. In reaction to abnormal challenges of racial classification and brutal suppression of democratic discourse, abnormal alliances have been struck. Hence the national democratic struggle, waged by a coalition of otherwise divergent forces intent on challenging a common enemy.
The debates taking place now are nothing but a crystallisation of a new struggle for South Africa through normal social discourse, a struggle consolidating people more on the basis of their material conditions.
This is not only a normal phenomenon, but an international one of which South Africa has been deprived. It is a phenomenon that underlies the development of any society as the two major social classes, labour and capital, contest social change and transformation. The contest is over the means of production in South African society.
The Jacob Zuma saga has crystallised this contest, which has until now been smothered by the understandable need to defend our fledgling democracy. We are now in “free waters”. Beware, we are in for major surprises. — Lebeko “Cassey” Madikgetla, Vereeniging
Disappointed
I am deeply disappointed with the Constitutional Court’s ruling on gay marriage.
I applaud the recognition that to deny homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals is discriminatory and wrong. But to throw the issue back to Parliament rather than amending the law is dangerous.
Parliament has a year to come up with legislation, no doubt similar to England’s civil partnerships. But there are fundamental differences in the rights associated with civil partnerships and marriage.
While homosexual relationships will receive some recognition, they will be legally separate. The risk is that discrimination will be written into law. And that will take forever to change. — David Beukes