It's Just a Stage

Dear Mr Hartley

Referring to your front page article Wanted: Facebook Racist of 28 August, I am deeply disturbed by what appears to be a wanton disregard for journalistic ethics and an irresponsibly cavalier approach to public rhetoric around race relations. Not only did placing this appalling image on your front page (instead of covering any one of a number of high profile and newsworthy events) smack of cheap shock tactics to sell copies, but it effectively stirred public outrage instead of contributing in any meaningful manner to debate around racial integration (or lack thereof) in this country.

But this is not my primary grounds for complaint. Subsequent investigation has suggested that this image has been run as a news story by Eyewitness News (amongst others) in 2008 and had already been investigated and proved to be a hoax at that time. Here is a link to a Mail & Guardian article discussing this post, as dated October 2008. The Washington Post and The Telegraph have already picked up on this story from the wires and are running it as fact.

There are, undoubtedly and regretfully, online hate groups based both in South Africa and the rest of the world. Running a story on them is, however, decidedly not front page news. Just as camera crews are instructed not to focus on rugby supporters brandishing the old South African flag in an attempt to deny them an entry into respectable media discourse, so The Sunday Times should, as a paper of supposed ethics, know not to lead with a story on a minority extremist group on, of all platforms, a facebook. Your actions have given these people the attention they crave and do not deserve.

You should be ashamed of the fact that you have stirred public response around the world, adding to the image of South Africa as a racist and hate-filled country in the name of a few thousand more sales. I know I, as a South African, am. Ard Matthews may have been publicly berated for disgracing his country by mispronouncing the national anthem, but you have misrepresented the country across the world.

Unless I am very misinformed of the facts, today marks the day when The Sunday Times became a cheap tabloid.

Yours sincerely,

Carla Lever

I left Cape Town on Friday in the very capable hands of some twenty-plus degree weather and an air of pre-summer optimism. Twenty-five hours later (thanks, Emirates routing), I pulled my swollen ankles and even more swollen suitcase onto the mean streets of Bournemouth and gazed expectantly at the sky.

Raining.

Previous to this, every Brit on the plane with me had queued up obediently in the same line at Passport control. I walked past the line straight to the open window of the neighbouring, queueless waiting official. “You British?” he asked. I handed over my passport. “It’s just that I’m going to ‘ave to check that; every bleedin’ day the sheep stick to the left and I ‘ave  to call ‘em  over. You can’t be that British.”

After satisfying himself that, for the purposes of entry, I was ‘British enough’, he asked me what I was coming over to do. I thought briefly about saying my chief purpose was finding his lost glottal stops, but wisely stuck to the generic ‘holiday’ and he waved me on.

You might think, from reading this, that I’m not having a good time.

You’d be wrong.

There are very few things I find as uplifting as being immersed in a good, comfortable chav culture. Give me self deprecating humour any day, pass a little moody with the mayonnaise.

If Americans are a nation of irrepressible Tiggers, Brits are all-Eeyore. We’re* a cynical nation of moaners, true, but take away our thistles for dinner and we wouldn’t be very pleased. There’s a special delight that’s reserved for the dry, a merriment in the maudlin. We do depression and we do it very, very well. Lost the Ashes again? Chin up, old chap. Rebekah Brooks paddling the NOTW up shit creek? All in a day’s work.

I cannot tell you, for example, how gleeful it makes me to spend a weekend in a town where the local shop’s cheery window displays picture an orthopaedic skeleton pushing a motorised shopping vehicle. It makes my day when I trot past the local chippy and Turkish takeaway and get to the classy strip, where – in a fit of culture clash meeting irony blindness – they’ve seen fit to name the most expensive restaurant ‘Alcatraz Brasserie’. I almost lose my nut when I flick through the telly guide and see the ‘must watch’ page leading with a show described as ‘an animated journey of the history of the cabbage’.

So let the yanks be endlessly and painfully chipper, let the French rolls their eyes together with their r’s. There’s something rather magnificent about the mundane. You only have to look at the chav skills of riding the seaside entertainment ponies with fizzy pink candyfloss stick in one hand and can of Guinness in the other, to realise that the nation is in safe hands. That’s skill, mate. Mad skill.

* I know I use ‘we’. Don’t be offended, I’m proudly SA too. But, as a SABrit. I reckon I can use ‘we’ indiscriminately until someone finally lets me vote.

Student A: Urgh, look at my skin! I keep forgetting to take my birth control pills and now I’m breaking out because of the hormone changes.

Student B: I think you’d better start taking those pills again, or you’ll have a bigger bump to worry about.

….

Wait! Could it be that my students are developing….witty repartee?

Ah look. January’s gone.

So, what life-changing, soul-affirming things did I do, in manner of last post’s gauntlet-throwing “watch this space” declaration?

Herewith the summary of my first 31 days of 2011.

WORK

• Found a flat for a relocating abortionist (ok, fine. Project managed a relocation for a Marie Stopes employee. But wasn’t it more fun the first time around?)
• Sat through a job interview where I was told that “We’ve only had a few race-motivated attacks and they rarely involve the lecturers.”
• Strongly considered taking the lecturing job out of sheer curiosity-cat syndrome.
• Instead taken a slew of other lecturing, editing and publicity jobs, committing me to five bosses, no benefits and an as-yet-unquantifiable amount of work.

PLAY

• Tried gamely to buy a sexy Mac at an I-Store, believing lectures will no doubt practically write themselves on machines that intelligent.
• Decided the name I-Store is only applicable if the I stands for imaginary, as they certainly don’t sell any actual products (even when you wave a credit card at them ever so nicely).
• Realised that I’d have a better chance at successfully owning a Mac if I won one in some lottery-odds competition.
• Entered a competition where you can win a Mac, by writing a cheery short story about a leukemia patient.
• Grew my own rocket, basil and mint, then invited friends over to quaff them in Light Summer Salads of Jamie Oliver-inspired insufferability.
• Irreparably burned new flat countertop at attempt to provide something more carb-tastic when Light Summer Salad clearly wasn’t cutting it.
• Began new regime of 7am mountainside runs, in manner of equally-insufferable Lifestyle Magazine Summer Physique article.
• Aggravated incipient arthritis in reconstructed hip and melanoma potential in delicate English skin. Turns out African terrain in the summer is bloody steep and bloody hot (probably at least one of those in the winter too).

PERSONAL

• Wished the man I used to date a happy engagement and the man I wished to date a happy birthing of his first child.
• Wished myself close to Siberian Salt Mines or similar.

All in all, most excellent work, then. Onwards to February, I say!

Ever had a morbid fascination with the car odometer?

[ok, it's that thing that counts the mileage]

Ever watched it at some precariously-balanced multiple 9 digit number, in rapt awe for the moment when it finally clocks over to the shiny new row of ’0′s’?

Of course you have. Why, it’s one of the finer examples of human nature, right up there with helping the aged cross the road and obsessively wondering why the chicken did.

Perhaps it harks back to something deep and primal in our nature that was vital to our cavebound forebearers’ survival, like herds of wildebeest tending to get rowdier once they hit critical mass of double figures. On the other hand, perhaps it could be a nice dose of nurture. I mean, school maths training with those little wooden abacus beads has a lot to flipping answer for, if you ask me – we’re Pavlov-trained with pink fizzers to want to make sets of ten.

Perhaps. I think it’s just general bloodyminded vapidity.

Don’t get me wrong, I love bloodyminded vapidity. It’s brought a lot of magnificent things to my life, like freecell marathons and The Onion. But it’s got its limits.

Entirely constructed phenomena that’d have Foucault popping a pulsing vein just seem to strike a chord with us. New Year’s Eve is one (hey, happy 2011 everyone!). Turning “the Big (insert digit here) – O” is another. I mean, the visual fascination of time ticking over to 0 draws the rubberneckers like nothing so much as a multi-car pileup.

…which leads us nicely back to our opening analogy of car odometers. There’s really no time quite like a big 0 number to start evaluating your car’s performance. Little things that might have escaped the attention for months suddenly become something to worry about; you start thinking of the engine, the smoothness of the ride, whether you even LIKE the car to begin with or if it’s time to trade it in for a newer model.

You see where this is going.

The trouble is, when we become distracted by technicalities, we lose focus on the things that really matter. And, somewhat like those drivers who find their gaze drawn irresistibly to that slowly-turning odometer, we just might find ourselves blindsided by a bit of life happening in the interim…like a bus.

Anyhoo, in completely unrelated news, I have nine months till I’m 30. You can do a lot in nine months, apparently.

So, um, watch this space.