WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-04-27 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
The subject of my sermon today, my fellow sinners and brethren, is shame. Not as in the oft-ironic “Ag shame” peppering any idle Seffrican conversation.
Were that so, I could just repeat “Hey”, “Is it?”, and “Shame” in no particular order until the end of my text, leaving suitable intervals for you, dear readers, to intersperse your own thoughts.
No, shame in the sense of acknowledging that one has bitched up badly and intends putting whatever it is right. These days, though, our country appears to lie under some sort of hole in the ozone layer that’s near-totally nuked with guilt, shame and ensuing apology.
Not wholly, however.
Shortly after his brisk, cellphone-enabled eviction from the columnar world, not-my-favourite writer David Bullard made an unexpectedly comprehensive apology for his ill-considered words. As well he might.
On the principle of not kicking a man when he’s down, it calmed the chorus of yaps. With exceptions. In Business Day, Xolela “I’m an intellectual” Mangcu twice drew general lessons about “white recidivism”. Spreading blame, as it were, across a whole race group.
Then Max “Let freedom reign” du Preez explained in a sister publication how free speech applied to everyone except those he didn’t like, such as the Bullsh boykie.
Meanwhile, the laughably entitled minister of arts and culture, Pallo “Don’t cross the river” Jordan, weighed in to warn that, as we have enough of our own, indigenous racists, “we can’t afford to import racists from other parts of the world”. That is, England whence Bullard.
Right. My sources tell me the department of trade and industry is to impose a ginormous import tariff on foreign racists. A special Seta will train our very own racists. A Racism Control Board will check quality standards set by the CSIR.
In case we didn’t get the point, the arty and cultured one added that importing foreign racists was equivalent to “coming to someone’s living room and defecating on their carpet”.
A splendidly Eurocentric simile! It reminded me – and I know I’m showing my age – of cher gallant Mon General Charles de Gaulle, fulminating in 1968 that he would not permit his country’s students and workers to chie-en-lit.
This scatological vernacular was delicately explained to me as “dumping on the bedsheets” and I’m being my most euphemistic here.
In the past, before that ozone problem, shame occasionally impacted.
There was the Black Sash movement – middle-class, generally middle-aged, honky housewives with plenty of servants – who abandoned domesticity to stand as a glowering, shame-inducing reminder whenever particularly egregious Nat politicians appeared.
The less I say about the shamelessness of certain members of our judiciary the better. Noisome details of bonking exploits; of dubious secondary sources of income; of unwillingness to support by-blows; and of a propensity to indulge in “tea”-fuelled, sexist rants after crashing their luxury sedans are beginning to clutter up newspaper pages rightfully reserved for our more deserving traditional criminal classes. But nary a m’lud departs.
Now for more heavyweight shamelessness. The fluttering of chickens – vultures? – coming home to roost was heard last week as trustees of the estate of late, benevolent and utterly shameless mining magnate Brett “Klepto” Kebble got to work. Proffering “please returns”, no less.
Brother Guy “No Neck” Kebble was but a minor recipient of the largesse with just R1,04-million listed for repayment. Dr Denis “His Ex” Worrall garnered R1,2-million for his Omega Investment Research. Learning from its elders, not betters, the ANC Youth League sucked up R1 365000.
David “Imbongi” Gleason and his Gleason Publications were said to have received R3 419000. Lunga “Gimme more” Ncwana, the Youth League leader and businessman, allegedly absorbed R4 549527. (I’m glad somebody was counting, rand by rand.) Lastly, the ANC as a whole hoovered home R4 554970.
I’m waiting for just one of them to say: “I shouldn’t’ve. I knew it was shareholders’ money, not Kebble’s.”
But I won’t hold my breath waiting for regret or shame.
Finally, our defence department displayed utter shamelessness by insisting that it had absolutely no idea where the good ship An Yue Jiang had got to.
Remember those far-off days when a previous Pretoria regime used to insist on the huge importance of the Cape sea route, claiming that not a squid could squirt in “our” waters without the admirals at Silvermine being apprised?
We were vital to the defence of the West, so vital that said regime should be left alone to oppress whomever it liked, as much as it liked. Now, it seems, our gallant sea dogs have gone into Brer Rabbit mode and don’t know nuffin’.
All this while, the weapons-laden ship of shame departed Durbs-by-the-sea, turned left for Maputo, then reversed to sail south and around the Cape, and on up towards the Namibian and Angolan coasts, before once again reversing and heading back to the Cape. Eventually it turned north to limp into Luanda for refuelling but not, however, to unload arms.
For shame had – if only temporarily – appeared in a most unusual quarter. The Confucian virtue of chi (a concept rather wider than what we normally understand by “shame” alone) momentarily re-emerged in Beijing, where the foreign ministry announced that the ship’s owners had decided to recall her “because Zimbabwe could not take delivery of the cargo”.
Ag, shame!