BEANCOUNTERS AND ARTISTS

There's an irritating ad on TV - I think it's Nedbank - that suggests that your investment is better off with them because they keep emotion and reason as far apart from each other as possible.

What unmitigated twaddle!  I'd trust this bunch less than I'd trust a donkey, and I'll tell you why:

The greatest scientists, philosophers, and dare I say, investment brokers, will tell you that their work is not a science.  It's a combination of having access to as many relevant facts as possible and acting logically in applying those facts, yes.

But it's ALSO, and often where the most noteworthy achievements happen, when you act on your gut.  Einstein had a dream.  Churchill got drunk.  And Coleridge - well yes he was a poet, I grant you, but we would never have had "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree..." if he hadn't been a regular imbiber of some pretty hallucinatory substances.

Not that I'm advocating that accountants, portfolio managers and financial advisers go out and toke on some weed (although their spouses might find them suddenly a lot more interesting), and not that I advocate getting high at all.  I don't do the stuff.

What I am trying to say is that life is not as black and white as the advert would have us think.  It's grey.  It's messy.  Intuition is an emotion.  And it functions in ways shrinks, brain surgeons and neurologists have been trying to understand for centuries - they still don't - and it still saves our butts in times of crisis in ways we will never consciously understand.  The last-minute cold-feet that saved you from marrying what would have been a wife from hell.  The hairs on the back of your neck that stopped you going in to business with someone who later turns out to be an unethical, dishonest cad.  The feeling (yes, I used the word) that stopped you from buying some shares the day before they tanked.

Read a book called "Steering by Starlight" by Martha Beck, and see how dreams affect reality.  All the time.  There are island communities that "dream" the fish to them.  And it works.

Wearing the blinkers of a logic-only world view will make you like a bipolar friend of a friend: he's impossibly rich, lonely, isolated, emotionless and unable to relate meaningfully to his spouse or children.  One part of his life is working.  The other parts that give meaning to that one part, are dysfunctional.

When we start to put our trust in purveyors of the "science" of life instead of in whole people who can flow between the science and the art of life, it's like asking Mr Bipolar to tell you how to repair your relationship with your family.  Ain't gonna happen.

The title of this blog comes from Hamlet (Act I Sc v), where the ghost of his father appears and asks Hamlet to avenge his death.  This is all too much for poor old Horatio.  Er ist total ausgeflippt, as they say in Munich.  He's been exposed to something outside his worldview and he's freaking out:

Horatio: "O day and night, this is wondrous strange!"

Hamlet?  He's chilled.  A ghost?  Cool.  Let's hear what it has to say:

Hamlet: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..."

Hamlet is saying to Horatio that what you think you know is not what there is to know.  If something comes out of left field, don't freak out.  Suss it out.  Understand it, even though you may not agree with it.

Actuaries are really bright kids who hit varsities with a string of distinctions and then become responsible for making decisions that will impact billions of dollars, euros, etc.  So why are they so consistently wrong?  What's with the geniuses that they could not predict 2008?  That with the experience of 2008 they could not predict what's happening now, in 2011 - a recession, I believe, that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park and will probably be a lot closer to the 1931 Depression.  Hey, I'm not the expert - but then the experts seem to be missing it by a mile quite consistently nowdays.  I'm just acting on my gut.

God used a donkey (Numbers 22:28) when all else failed.  He did so because there was a deadline.  His message needed to be heard NOW, but everyone was too busy.  So He used a donkey.

I fear that in the case of bean-counters, financial advisers and their ilk, they may prove more of a challenge to Him than an ass.

SNOW and STUFF

Wow.  Now Juju wants to effect regime-change in Botswana.  Only months ago he was saying we cannot influence the affairs of another sovereign nation (Zimbabwe & Libya).  I guess that's only when you agree with them.  Hypocrisy?  Naah!

The real issue is Khama is offering the US a military base in sub-Saharan Africa.  Given what Juju has seen the US and Nato allies do to Brother Leader in Libya, the LAST thing Juju wants on our borders is a squadron of F22 Raptors and Cruise missiles.

Why?  Because, if he comes to power, he's going to do to SA exactly what Gadaffi did to Libya and Mugabe did to Zim.  (Which makes the prospect of a US base at Gaborone not such a bad idea.)

That's why Juju's elders need to tell him to shut up and sit down.  But they won't.  Sigh.  We need a new President.  Urgently.  Get thee to the polling booths, come 2012...

On to other matters.  Note to self: when filming in Lesotho in sub-zero temperatures, make sure you leave enough time for the camera to acclimatize when taking said camera out of blizzard and filming in warm interior.

Spent fifteen minutes frantically roasting camera in front of roaring log fire so lens wouldn't fog up ("Has your video thingy caught a cold, love?", said the plump mom from Manchester, sipping her gluhwein.).  Not great for the camera I know, but when you need to get the shot, you do tend to act a bit weird.

Opposite applies as well: the next day we moved from interior back to blizzard and I needed to use the long lens.  Fogged up the minute I took it out of its case.  Buried it in the snow for half an hour and it still didn't unfog in time.

So what did I do?  Intrepid camerman that I am, I slung the rig under one arm, caught the ski-lift up the slope with the other, and inserted myself between the uprights of one of the Giant Slalom gates, about half-way down the slope, just under a massive incline.  Skiers swore at me as they ripped past at about 100km/h, narrowly missing me and the gate.

Didn't make me the most popular person among the athletes, but the footage was terrific...

They don't know this, but seeing them do that at such close quarters gave me enormous respect for them.

You try coming down a slope at bone-breaking speeds, and clipping your turns to the minimum so your shins and arms hit those plastic gate-poles like a rifle-shot.  Yes, they have shin- and elbow-guards, but it's a bit like having a face-guard and being hit by Mike Tyson.  You're still going to feel it.

And yet you continue to hurl yourself at those gates all the way down...  That's a madness you have to admire.  Sheer aggro bullheadedness in the face of what to me seemed certain death.

And yet at the bottom, they're all humble and smiley and "yeah man I'm stoked - good run, I reckon."  Hats off to you, dudes.  Understated macho.  Bloomin' marvelous.

Promo for TV broadcast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-69F1g9oj4

Broadcast times:

Premier Broadcast:         Mon 15 Aug        21h30, Supersport Channel 7

Repeat Broadcasts:     Tue 16 Aug          15h00, Supersport Channel 7

                                       Wed 17 Aug        11h00, Supersport Channel 5

                                       Thu 18 Aug          22h30, Supersport Channel 6

                                        Fri 19 Aug           06h20, Supersport Channel 7

                                        Tue 23 Aug          08h30, Supersport Channel 6

                                        Thu 25 Aug          15h00, Supersport Channel 7

                                        Fri 26 Aug            20h30, Supersport Channel 6

MALEMA MORONISMS

This Malema idiot is getting away with way too much. On being questioned on where he is getting the money for his R16m bunker/mansion on a salary of R25,000 a month, the Mugabe-in-waiting's response is "I am not a pubically elected ofishool. I don't have to tell you where I get the money from."

O yeah? Let's apply something to which Malema is totally unaccustomed: logic.

Let's assume he has a number of patrons who are bankrolling his mansion - among other expenses. The logical question to ask is 'why would they do this?' In the cut and thrust of politics, no-one does anything for nothing. The patrons obviously believe Malema will one day become a publicly elected official. They are investing in that belief and expect to be recompensed by his largesse once that becomes a reality.

Another glaring piece of logic everyone is ignoring is that although he is not a public servant, he IS an elected official. As such, his electorate, the ANCYL, has every right to demand full disclosure of his income. The fact that they haven't shows just how easily they are beguiled by Melema's bullshit. Idiots.

But getting back to Malema's patrons. How do they stand to benefit? Tenders, of course. This country has a long history of 'tenderpreneurs' - Roux Shabangu and others - who ride the gravy train to Lamborghini bling-paradise through winning contracts via irregular and illegal means.

So, Malema is basically promising to assist his patrons by using his influence unconstituionally, and therefore illegally, IF he becomes a political kingpin. Note I said IF, not when. I live in hope.

As Roux Shabangu has recently found out, the patron's scenario doesn't always work out. Public Protector Thuli Madonsela is making Shabangu's life a living hell, and even Shabangu's mate, General Bheki Cele can't dig him out. Cele should be unceremoniously fired for awarding the contract to Shabangu in the first place, but this is Zuma's ANC, so instead, Cele will be 'redeployed' to inflict untold damage on the hapless Japanese as SA Ambassador/Bull-in-a-china-shop.

How stupid are these patrons? Throw money at a fascist megalomaniac who counts Bob Mugabe and Brother Leader Gadaffi among his heroes, in the hope that he will become, erm, another Mugabe/Gadaffi. If, God forbid, that nightmare does come true, the country will be so fucked that the patrons will be the last things on Malema's mind as he goes into perpetual denial that the country is becoming ungovernable, while simultaneously siphoning billions off to his Swiss bank account. Talk about backing a lemon.

But this is Africa, and stranger things have happened.

WHEN GOD GETS YOU BACK

The day before my son went back to Cape Town, we went on a hike in the Magaliesberg. Well, it started out that way. It ended up by God getting me back for all the horrible things I've done to Him.

My nephew, who's done this before, warned us: "Don't go in the fast group. They're insane. Go in the middle group." So when the guide said "Leisure over there, Medium minus over there, medium plus over here," we went with medium plus. I thought there would be a fast group that followed. Big mistake. Medium plus is hike-speak for fast. These long, sinewy silent types that look sardonic even when they'e pissing into the wind. The tall woman's badges on her backpack said: "Santiago de Compostela Pilgrimage Walk - 880km", and "Drakensberg Grand Traverse - 220km". These weren't poser-badges. She'd actually done them.

By the time my son and I realised that our group's cracking pace was not just a warm-up burst, it was too late. "Our friends seem to have lagged behind," I said to our guide during the twenty second drinks break. "We'll wait here for their group to catch up". "Oh no," he says, "They turned right about four kilometres back. They're slow." The last phrase was said dismissively, as one might disregard a lower species.

This posed a problem. "What time will we get back? We're all in the one car," I said. "The same time," he said, cheerily. "But this group is hiking 22km," I pointed out. "The middle group is only doing twelve."

"Exactly," he said, and walked/ran off to lead our group of sardonic former Reconnaisance Commandos. Then the penny dropped, and with it, my stomach. We would be hiking 22km in the same time my nephew and his friend - oh you lucky buggers - would be hiking twelve.

I don't know if you've ever hiked cross country before, but it's an entirely different experience from walking on even ground. There are no footpaths, roads or anything vaguely flat. There are thick, snagging tufts of grass which hide rocks just loose enough to deprive you of a firm foothold. For the inexperienced hiker trying to keep up with those who can read this terrain like a book, you don't walk so much as lurch. It's a fast-forward stumble, and it was due to continue for the balance of our 22kms.

It was about this time that I realised I was wearing the wrong shoes. Somewhere among our many moves my hiking boots had been nationalised by the cleaning staff, and I was wearing some very upmarket black suede ankle length boots. Not appropriate I grant you, but in my outdoor-challenged wardrobe, they were the best of a bad lot. Just how bad, my feet were now beginning to tell me. And the right boot was beginning to complain audibly. Step groan. Step groan. Please God, stay in one piece, I prayed. We were too far gone to be bootless. In this terrain, to be bootless was as good as being quadriplegic.

In addition to all the above, another reason hiking is one of the most character-building activities I've done, is that the hills in the Magaliesberg are cruelly dome-shaped. They're not honest. In the Drakensberg, the terrain is lest duplicitous. You can see the top of whatever mountain you're hiking toward. Not the Magaliesburg. What looked like the top of the hill turns out to be a nipple on a convex slope that teases you with one mock-summit after the next, all the while leading you inexorably upward. If the Magaliesburg was female she would be the ultimate tease.

Fortunately, unlike the female variety, the Magaliesburg is a tease that delivers. After about eleven kilometres of lurching up one side of innumerable domes and staggering down the other, we slotted into a ravine drenched with greenery and the clearest, coolest water I've ever seen.

The ravine sloped gently upward, and after a few easy rock-climbs we found ourselves at a place my sardonic colleagues called 'Dome Pools'. Six metre deep granite pools so clear you could make out the grains of sand at the bottom. Waterfalls and rapids so crisp and cool you could fill your water bottles from them. Evian and Perrier tasted like drain water by comparison. There was no road, footpath, contour path, cattle path - nothing to give away their existence.

They were literally in the middle of nowhere. We stretched out and unpacked our lunches from our backpacks. The silence was so complete that for awhile, talking felt like sacrilege. Just a forty minute drive from Joburg, and we were in a cathedral so gentle, calm and sacred just thinking about leaving filled you with regret.

Realizing we had to, and that we had eleven more kilometers to cover at the same pace we'd hiked the first eleven, filled me with undiluted terror.

But that was in fifteen minutes. Right now, my son and I looked at our reflections in the water, ate our sandwiches, and chatted about small, insignificant things. It was the best time I'd spent with him in months.

The journey back would be hellish (for me, not for him), and it was. The next day would be even worse. (It was. Getting out of bed felt like being tortured by a hundred gargoyles while walking on red-hot coals.)

But for those moments at Dome Pools, it was as if all our arguments turned into water and dissipated into the cold Magaliesburg granite, and all that was left was each other, stripped down to the silent basic essences of who we were.

And in that essential solitude, we saw and valued what was in the other. Like the hike home, there was a journey to come. It would not be easy. But now we knew each other. We were a team. And that made all the difference.

Yes, God got me back. He got me back like He always does - by giving me unexpected gifts I don't deserve.

PROF GUY BUTLER

I'd forgotten just what an exceptional man Guy Butler was.

Go to:
http://www.ru.ac.za/6246

Or if that's too much effort, just read this, one of his poems:

The Divine Underground

Souls in flagrante delicto or in extremis
stretched on the rack or Cleopatra’s bed,
you have no news for me,
me, not fit to tread
where hawk-sure men of the media
zoom lenses down on your limbs in spasm
or claw at your grunts or ululations
with glittering microphones.

No, I go hungrily slumming for those who wear
a habit of discipline on every gesture, armed
in still affection, steel-bright after years.

I find them poorly disguised as morons,
under distorting stars,
lost in their lands of birth, quite ousted by
smooth bastards or daughters in gorgeous gowns:
in the cold, in the shade,
like lepers, like untouchables, in whose eyes
our storms of guilt dissolve in their light of forgiveness:
they know what they have lost,
they guess at what they have gained;
divining an innocent justice, they endure
our grand and murderous razzmatazz
as if they were God’s spies.

The effect of Keats, Donne and Eliot on lady students

The Grahamstown Festival of the Arts is almost upon us again. Which always makes me think of Rhodes University back in the seventies, and of poetry and young ladies.

The thing is, I was a late starter. When my high school classmates at St Benedict's were boasting of their conquests with the opposite sex, I was so terrified of women I REALLY didn't even know how to talk to them. I probably put them up on a pedestal. Bit of a romantic twat.

It took a year of national service in the Navy to beat that out of me. In the seventies, national service - especially in the Army - did a lot of things to a lot of young men, so I am eternally grateful that all it really did to me was make me "cowboy up, cupcake", as they say in Arizona.

It happened on Navy shore-leave, with a very forward girl who started the evening as a friend's date and ended up as mine. Parked outside her parent's Kempton Park home, it happened in my mom's hand-me-down old Opel Kadett with the gear lever that came out of its socket every time you engaged third - a pretty apt description of the evening, come to think of it.

Things did improve after I left the Navy and became a student. Rhodes in the late seventies was a universe populated with the likes of Andrew and Janet Buckland, Ian Roberts, Jeremy Mansefield, Shaun Johnson, and many others who went on to achieve great heights.

I, like many of them, found myself studying English, Speech and Drama, Psychology and Journalism. Unlike them, instead of paying attention when demigods of literature like Andre P Brink and Guy Butler had the lectern, I was falling for a series of remarkable young women I really didn't deserve.

It never occurred to me until many years later that this was more due to simple availability than ability. I spent the vast majority of my time in the Drama faculty, where women heavily outnumbered men, and where straight men were few and far between. So the reality was simply a matter of statistics.

I remember I never went home in the July holidays. It was the Festival of the Arts, and I tended to be cast in the festival productions. Drama students from UCT, Wits, Natal, Stellenbosch, Tuks and other faculties descended on Grahamstown to perform their Festival productions.

There was a bakery opposite the main pub where one could buy raw dough (cheaper than bread, which meant more money to make gluhwein - it's really cold in Grahamstown in July).

In between productions, the drama students would meet at various digs, and the dough would be baked in strips on a fireplace (many student digs were in old Settler houses with massive hearths and yellowwood floors), and we would discuss Pirandello, Lorca, Ibsen, Brecht, Chekov, Sartre and God knows what else over copious amounts of gluhwein and hot bread.

Among other poems, I could recite 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' by Keats, particularly when drunk, and it had a remarkable effect on young ladies.

I really did love Keats. And John Donne. And a good few Shakespearean sonnets. And if I was really far gone, then out would come a few quatrains of The Waste Land. The drunker I got, the more readily their poems tumbled from my lips. I couldn't help myself. An unanticipated side effect was it got me a fair bit of action.

Except T S Eliot.

Eliot's poems really turned girls off. Especially The Waste Land. With me, it was always a toss up between Eliot and Donne as my favourite poet of all time. It took a couple of disappointments that should have taught me to avoid Eliot, especially when la belle dame sans merci was a really interesting, bright, witty, gorgeous actress, touched by the muse with truly ridiculous amounts of onstage presence, and I ruined the moment by slurring out 'April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...'. Idiot.

Start the evening with Donne, build up through a few of the Bard's sonnets and end with Keats. Avoid Eliot. Not difficult to remember. Except when you've had an entire bucket of gluhwein chased with couple of glasses of Tassies. Then out came Eliot, and good-bye la belle dame.

Is this what the Jews felt like before WWII?

In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, I've been resolutely optimistic about this beautiful country of my birth. I claim as much right to be an African as anyone else born on this continent and reject the label of settler with contempt. I have put down roots, worked hard, got married, had kids, bought property. This is my home. I cannot conceive of life without vermilion-sky sunsets, umbrella trees, cicadas, boerewors, the penny-whistle, the Hector Petersen Memorial, Table Mountain, Highveld electric storms, fresh mango, the Springboks and Kaizer Chiefs.

But as I was editing a debate by high school kids today, their incisive minds gave me pause. You would not expect to learn pessimism from the youth, but they made me think seriously about their and my future in this country.

The topic of the debate was, "This house would recommend the lifting of sanctions in Zimbabwe if that country gave unconditional access to the international press to monitor the next elections."

As the sides argued their points they reminded me that Zanu PF had actually lost the 2008 elections. They reminded me that in 2008 SADC and South Africa in particular had been tasked with the job of monitoring and enforcing the Global Political Agreement (GPA) between ZANU-PF and the two factions of the MDC.

And that got me thinking. Not only has our government been woefully remiss in its job of umpiring the GPA, allowing Mugabe and his military cabal to get away with one crime after another, but they also turned a blind eye to Juju's rock-star visit to Zim in April 2010 when Malema endorsed Mugabe's economic policies and talked of importing them to South Africa to nationalise white-owned farms and mines. Since then, he has been on trial for refusing to back down on a song that a judge admitted has racist consequences, he's called white opposition politicians cockroaches and madams, and their black colleagues tea girls. He's called white land-owners criminals.

The former mayor of Port Elizabeth, Nceba Faku, in the wake of the recent Municipal Elections urges ANC supporters to chase those who voted for the opposition into the sea - and goes un-reproached by the President.

Roux Shabangu is exposed by Thuli Madonsela, the Public Prosecutor, who also fingers shenanigans in the CCMA and others, for renting a building to the SAPS at inordinately inflated rates (a R500 million deal), and her findings are ignored, swept under the carpet or become the subject of protracted civil cases.

In the wake of mounting media criticism about its fielding of candidates for the Municipal Elections, reports on corruption, accusations of racism and criticism of its economic policies, the ANC threatens to steam-roll the Protection of Information Bill through parliament, which will substantially limit press freedom.

The ANC, in these and many other actions over the past few months, is becoming increasingly similar in style, policy and thinking to Mugabe's ZANU PF.

What, one wanders, would the ANC do if it ever got to the point where it may be in danger of losing an election? Based on what has transpired in the last year or so, I have no doubt they would resort to the same dictatorial tactics Mugabe has employed over the last decade in Zimbabwe.

My wife's family has roots back to Germany before and during the war. Her grandfather was killed by the Nazis. Her grandmother was Jewish. Her mother and aunts have talked of the decision to finally leave Europe. I am relating more and more to those conversations. I have two sons. What future will they have here?

I am starting to think about that parable of the frog who never knew he was being cooked because the water he was swimming in was heated up so slowly. By the time he realised things were too hot, it was too late.

A part of me would be eternally rootless for leaving this place. Am I being selfish, leaving others to a destiny they do not have the resources to escape from? I know there are thousands of township families with the same misgivings, who have fewer options than I.

But perhaps its time to cut those ties. I and the skilled South Africans of all races who can sell their labour overseas are looking at our options a little more closely. Putting out feelers. Looking into possibilities we would never have considered two years ago.

All this because our leaders show no signs of change. On the contrary, their rabid nationalist Africanism appears to be hardening and entrenching itself further. Which reminds me of another parable where the electorate can be compared to a tortoise and the ruling party to a scorpion.

There was once a land where greed, corruption and lies turned to water, and caused a flood, the like of which had never been seen before. Everything sweet and fertile was washed away by the relentless waters. The lone survivors were a scorpion, on the highest stone, and a tortoise, who could swim in the water. As the waters continued to rise, the scorpion knew that even his high stone would soon be covered. 'Carry me over the water so I don't drown', says the scorpion to the tortoise. The tortoise refuses, knowing that the scorpion has stung many of its fellows to death. But the scorpion insists, 'If I sting you when we are in the water, we will both die', so the tortoise relents and gives the scorpion a ride. Half way across the water, the scorpion scuttles up to the tortoises' neck and stings it to death. As it is dying, the tortoise says to the scorpion, 'Why did you do that? Now we will both die.' The scorpion replies, 'I couldn't help myself. It's in my nature.'