Perspective is a bitch. I’ve just read a Sapa report on the fact that David Bullard has just lost his unfair dismissal case against Avusa Media. For many years, I thought Bullard’s actual name was “Controversial Columnist David Bullard”. Why would his parents call him that, I wondered? Is he perhaps the product of a home where the mother is a hip-hop star, the father a journalist, and they believed that names determine your destiny? Or perhaps Controversial Columnist is his Indian name, given to him by grateful natives when he first brought the beauteous glow of bile to this dark continent.
Imagine my surprise when I met him for the first time, and he punched me. “Hi, pleased to meet you, may I call you Con? Ouch!” (OK, I made that story up.) I’ve actually forgotten some of the details about why Bullard was fired. According to Biz Community, part of the arbitrator’s ruling stated “I am also aware that the applicant’s face was used to celebrate Sunday Times‘ birthday, but this per se does not grant him the status of an employee, if in fact he was not an employee.” So it must have been fascinatingly intricate.
But after all these years of endless carping about it, it’s a bit like that story that your crazy Aunt Matilda tells about some ancient insult committed by some neighbour who’s been dead for decades. You know it must have hurt once, and that someone was the villain, someone the victim, but really. It’s over. Of course that’s easy to say if you aren’t actually Aunt Matilda, nursing a grudge and feeling hard done by. But don’t complain if you get fewer invites to family gatherings as time goes by.
The only appreciable result of Bullard’s constant gibing at the Sunday Times, and his feverish attempt to paint the management as drunks, is that I now think that the then-editor’s full name is Bibulous Mondli Makhanya. Imagine my surprise when I met him for the first time, and — no, wait, that joke wasn’t funny the first time.
Many people will welcome the ruling, believing that Bullard will now move on to writing the funny, albeit conservative, columns of which his fans believe him capable. Fat chance. He’s apparently taking it to a higher court. It’s worth remembering what Bullard actually wrote in 2008. The bit that really upset me was a variation on that vile, racist Western saw that “life is cheap in Africa”. “Every so often a child goes missing from the village, eaten either by a hungry lion or a crocodile. The family mourn for a week or so, and then have another child.”
At the time, I penned a column saying that Bullard shouldn’t have been fired, saying, “I absolutely disagree with public pressure being used to decide your editorial policy, not to mention your HR policy, and I think that firing David Bullard for writing unspeakable crap is a cowardly thing to do, although not as stupid as hiring him in the first place. And I wouldn’t want to see Jon Qwelane fired either.”
But as those of you who can still remember as far back as my opening paragraph will recall, perspective is a bitch. When you think about the racist gibes of the electioneering idiots of the past few weeks, you start to think, maybe we should just fire people who say things that are contrary to the Constitutional precepts of our country. Our self-righteous little wanker of an Ambassador to Uganda, Jon “Manlove is for pigs” Qwelane should be first to go, and the host of little Afro-Goebbelses who came out of the woodwork (ha, get it?) for the elections should also be kicked out of office. Well … I don’t really believe that. With freedom of expression great frustration comes, as President Yoda would say. But it would be nice.