Monday, December 29, 2008
Of blackbirds in pies and turkey voting patterns
It is such a burdensone cliché to mutter that something is so bizarrely contrary to personal welfare that it is like turkeys voting for Christmas. I thought that twenty four blackbirds voting for pies might be a fresher analogy. This is not just because of the nursery rhyme but because blackbirds’ songs are as pretty and complex as any, while the Russians have a penchant for the lachrymose. Russians? Well, they have just been asked to name their country’s heroes in a national poll. Joe Stalin was No. 3! Well, since it is Russia, maybe the analogy should be that it is like bears voting to be shackled to dance away their lives, encircled by grinning humans.
I called in to the tele room just now to catch up on the Presidential run-off here. It is very close with less than one per cent difference in total votes cast. While I was wondering about the consequences of either candidate getting in, along the bottom of the Sky screen was the breaking news concerning the Russian vote. Well, riddle me with bullets from a Kalashnikov! What does this say about memory, herd mentality, nationalism, love of one’s land or social drives? Tens of millions died under Stalin’s yoke. There were the pogroms against intellectual and religious dissidents and those peasants whose faces did not fit. And there were the vast military marches into death against Hitler, whose people and troops were themselves almost exactly mirroring the grotesque tragedy of their enemy. It is a paradox that, when the chips are down, the collective urge is more powerful than the individual. Even when choosing the former means almost certain death. Wars are fought between collectives and if enough fear is instilled in the individual, then s/he will generally throw her/his lot in with the herd led by its powerful oppressor. However, sometimes, particularly in democracies, under the icy illumination of historical rationale, heroes become villains, victories become Pyrrhic, dissidents turn into saviours and a sense of incredulity develops between the then and the now. We wonder what led us humans to do such appalling things. The holocaust. The many examples of genocide in countries who have dictatorships.
But the Russians have voted. There can scarcely be a family in the old USSR who did not suffer from the heel of Stalin’s boot and now they are saying that the death of a good proportion of the nation’s young is worth it, if the world is forced to sit up and accept that their country is a major player. I’ve really enjoyed working in Russia and, if I was not suffering from some poetic fog, I sensed, everywhere, a deep pain in people’s eyes. A sorrow. The Russian spirit is half-ploughed into a thousand battlefields and labour camps. Under the Tzars. Under the communists.
I worked in Uzbekistan and drank beer with a Genghis Khan label. He’d get a top vote among national heroes, there, despite his Mongol imperialism in defeating the country’s tribes. Perceptions change. History is about winners and no matter how they won, the vast multitudes, who can’t win at very much in their lives, want to identify with them, regardless of whether they were psychopathic beasts of evil. If the Germans had defeated all against them in Western Europe, when would we be voting Hitler into third place among our national heroes? How long would it take?
We should take a tune from the blackbirds’ song book and sing bitter-sweet, glorious, heroic verses about those who have made our lives freer, more harmonious and informed. They should be our heroes.
It is such a burdensone cliché to mutter that something is so bizarrely contrary to personal welfare that it is like turkeys voting for Christmas. I thought that twenty four blackbirds voting for pies might be a fresher analogy. This is not just because of the nursery rhyme but because blackbirds’ songs are as pretty and complex as any, while the Russians have a penchant for the lachrymose. Russians? Well, they have just been asked to name their country’s heroes in a national poll. Joe Stalin was No. 3! Well, since it is Russia, maybe the analogy should be that it is like bears voting to be shackled to dance away their lives, encircled by grinning humans.
I called in to the tele room just now to catch up on the Presidential run-off here. It is very close with less than one per cent difference in total votes cast. While I was wondering about the consequences of either candidate getting in, along the bottom of the Sky screen was the breaking news concerning the Russian vote. Well, riddle me with bullets from a Kalashnikov! What does this say about memory, herd mentality, nationalism, love of one’s land or social drives? Tens of millions died under Stalin’s yoke. There were the pogroms against intellectual and religious dissidents and those peasants whose faces did not fit. And there were the vast military marches into death against Hitler, whose people and troops were themselves almost exactly mirroring the grotesque tragedy of their enemy. It is a paradox that, when the chips are down, the collective urge is more powerful than the individual. Even when choosing the former means almost certain death. Wars are fought between collectives and if enough fear is instilled in the individual, then s/he will generally throw her/his lot in with the herd led by its powerful oppressor. However, sometimes, particularly in democracies, under the icy illumination of historical rationale, heroes become villains, victories become Pyrrhic, dissidents turn into saviours and a sense of incredulity develops between the then and the now. We wonder what led us humans to do such appalling things. The holocaust. The many examples of genocide in countries who have dictatorships.
But the Russians have voted. There can scarcely be a family in the old USSR who did not suffer from the heel of Stalin’s boot and now they are saying that the death of a good proportion of the nation’s young is worth it, if the world is forced to sit up and accept that their country is a major player. I’ve really enjoyed working in Russia and, if I was not suffering from some poetic fog, I sensed, everywhere, a deep pain in people’s eyes. A sorrow. The Russian spirit is half-ploughed into a thousand battlefields and labour camps. Under the Tzars. Under the communists.
I worked in Uzbekistan and drank beer with a Genghis Khan label. He’d get a top vote among national heroes, there, despite his Mongol imperialism in defeating the country’s tribes. Perceptions change. History is about winners and no matter how they won, the vast multitudes, who can’t win at very much in their lives, want to identify with them, regardless of whether they were psychopathic beasts of evil. If the Germans had defeated all against them in Western Europe, when would we be voting Hitler into third place among our national heroes? How long would it take?
We should take a tune from the blackbirds’ song book and sing bitter-sweet, glorious, heroic verses about those who have made our lives freer, more harmonious and informed. They should be our heroes.
Labels: Blackbirds. Memory., Stalin. Turkeys
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Cleanse my blood
I am wondering as I now observe the title for this piece unwrap itself from my thoughts and slide down my arms, pass through my fingers and appear upon my monitor, what each of you readers make of it? Those of you who harbour anxieties verging on hypochondria, may be looking eagerly for my report on yet another medical advance. Perhaps an anti-ageing procedure. Those of you who seek spiritual solutions in all things, may associate it with the altar and a purifying communion. There may be others among you who would prefer to dwell in a partial world of medieval fantasy (still being lived out among Sicilians, for whom this is a pointed reminder of the loop of Mafia history.) It could also resonate with those ageing Draculas among you who are desperately seeking renewal via a virgin’s blood.
Well, of course, it is none of these.
I am writing this on the balcony of a simple, palm-thatched cottage overlooking a perfect bay in Ghana. On an island. It is misty still but the sun is just visible as a white yolk. It feels like being trapped in a fable or fantasy that millions might nurse in their private thoughts. When I woke up an hour or so ago, all I could see from my bed, were the bleeding spots of red flowers in the fog.
I need to put on my trunks and swim to cleanse my blood of the wine I consumed yesterday evening. But this is not why I used the phrase in the heading for this piece.
On our way here we had to stop at a police checkpoint. A burly feller carrying a very mean instrument of death, knocked on the side window of our car.
“Cleanse my blood,” he directed.
“When we return later,” said our driver, stiffly, staring straight ahead.
The man gave a resigned grunt and waved us on with his gun, our purses intact, his palms free from grease. His blood uncleansed.
Labels: Ghana. Blood. Idyll.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Lest we forget...
The latest joke on ageing came my way when I was in England. It was about the newest chair lift. It is very fast. It is so fast that you can remember why you went upstairs! I think I have always found myself in dilemmas resulting from forgetting why I have arrived in some part of the house or other. It’s not a problem of ageing – or multi- tasking (which, despite myths to the contrary, men can do as well as women) but more the way my brain relegates the activity to some weedy area where the imperative to do this or that rolls into the long grass. I remember my mother shrieking in amusement as she found herself pouring sugar down the toilet instead of tea leaves. She was under fifty at the time and lived, sparkily, into her eighties. It also seems to be true that we live in an era where ageing is the enemy of youth, beauty and advertising executives; so much so that we are sensitised, like hypochondriacs, to the slightest sign that our faculties are on the decrease. This is how we prepare ourselves for that last great occasion in our lives – the moment of death. As our vehicle gradually slows, we seem conditioned to view the scenery through the windows as less colourful, less verdant, more deserted and monochrome, more night than day, when, in fact, it is not the case.
Here in Ghana, parties are for everyone, whatever age. Zimmered up, old men cavort and eye young flesh with mischievous grins and old women shake their bums, invitingly, like they always did. Holding on to vitality and a colourful environment seems a paramount drive.
Ageing can also lead to mellowing, whatever we remember or forget but the other end of the spectrum is not uplifting at all. I don’t mean the capacity for the elderly, especially in the west, to become slippered up for a dreary two or three decades of doing little except look out of the windows of their lives as described above, but the psychology of those who want to exercise power to tighten their dying grip on existence and their hatred for the young, who will continue to live on for some time, after they, themselves succumb.
Mugabe, for example.
He is an obscenity and, as in many a state in Africa, his single minded addiction to power, at the expense of his own country’s people, is a horrific reminder of how ageing can also lead to a complete indifference to the suffering of others. Whatever memory loss he suffers, it does not include how to torture, starve, murder and despoil. His contemptuous challenge to other African states, yesterday, that they hadn’t the bottle to try to topple him, is based on a terrible truth. Leaders around this continent will not condemn him because they know that what goes around comes around and they, themselves, are all too often busily storing up enough personal sins to bring War Tribunalists running to catalogue their acts of depravity.
It behoves us all to grin at the usual shortcomings of our memory systems when they involve involuntary lapses of the sugar-in-toilet kind but not to pretend forgetfulness at the terrible plight of those who must endure the tyranny of dictators, especially those who have made lifetime careers of it and will continue on their destructive paths to the very end..
The latest joke on ageing came my way when I was in England. It was about the newest chair lift. It is very fast. It is so fast that you can remember why you went upstairs! I think I have always found myself in dilemmas resulting from forgetting why I have arrived in some part of the house or other. It’s not a problem of ageing – or multi- tasking (which, despite myths to the contrary, men can do as well as women) but more the way my brain relegates the activity to some weedy area where the imperative to do this or that rolls into the long grass. I remember my mother shrieking in amusement as she found herself pouring sugar down the toilet instead of tea leaves. She was under fifty at the time and lived, sparkily, into her eighties. It also seems to be true that we live in an era where ageing is the enemy of youth, beauty and advertising executives; so much so that we are sensitised, like hypochondriacs, to the slightest sign that our faculties are on the decrease. This is how we prepare ourselves for that last great occasion in our lives – the moment of death. As our vehicle gradually slows, we seem conditioned to view the scenery through the windows as less colourful, less verdant, more deserted and monochrome, more night than day, when, in fact, it is not the case.
Here in Ghana, parties are for everyone, whatever age. Zimmered up, old men cavort and eye young flesh with mischievous grins and old women shake their bums, invitingly, like they always did. Holding on to vitality and a colourful environment seems a paramount drive.
Ageing can also lead to mellowing, whatever we remember or forget but the other end of the spectrum is not uplifting at all. I don’t mean the capacity for the elderly, especially in the west, to become slippered up for a dreary two or three decades of doing little except look out of the windows of their lives as described above, but the psychology of those who want to exercise power to tighten their dying grip on existence and their hatred for the young, who will continue to live on for some time, after they, themselves succumb.
Mugabe, for example.
He is an obscenity and, as in many a state in Africa, his single minded addiction to power, at the expense of his own country’s people, is a horrific reminder of how ageing can also lead to a complete indifference to the suffering of others. Whatever memory loss he suffers, it does not include how to torture, starve, murder and despoil. His contemptuous challenge to other African states, yesterday, that they hadn’t the bottle to try to topple him, is based on a terrible truth. Leaders around this continent will not condemn him because they know that what goes around comes around and they, themselves, are all too often busily storing up enough personal sins to bring War Tribunalists running to catalogue their acts of depravity.
It behoves us all to grin at the usual shortcomings of our memory systems when they involve involuntary lapses of the sugar-in-toilet kind but not to pretend forgetfulness at the terrible plight of those who must endure the tyranny of dictators, especially those who have made lifetime careers of it and will continue on their destructive paths to the very end..
Monday, December 15, 2008
He Madoff with the money
This blog is a day or two late because of the journey back to Ghana from the UK. Apart from the unhappy business of discovering that the pound is an albatross currency that only really works in the UK, I won’t gripe over this septic isle – this time! But what are my money concerns when compared with the horror story of one Bernard Madoff who ran the US banking sector’s equivalent of a pyramid selling scheme? This conniver gave profits to existing clients entirely from the investments of newcomers. Some 30 to 50 BILLION dollars disappeared in this way, including millions from British Banks. His scam had been inspected by US authorities very recently and found to be top hole. Now I know I am a sucker for the argument that Corporates are greedy and screw the public at large. Also, I am incensed that, as a customer of a bank, if things go a little pear-oriented, then you are treated like a malaria bearing mosquito, batted from pillar to post, losing whatever they can send in the baillifs for – including your house. But when THEY cock it up, we all suffer badly and nothing much happens to those responsible. No doubt Bernie the Brag will get his just deserts but US Inspection teams won’t, nor will the fund managers of the British Banks who swallowed his guff, hook line and sinker and threw our cash at him.
And so the domino falling goes on and on and houses lose their value and people lose both homes and their jobs and STILL the CBI and the banks pontificate about how the Government should run the economy, treating the public sector like it is a dim-witted cousin, who, in Spartan times, would have died at birth on a freezing night on a roof top.
So now there is another black hole in the money world, dragging constellations of financial houses beyond its event horizon, where, the laws of physics posit, they become incredibly debt-heavy with incredibly shrinking pay-outs. Meanwhile, note the elision, another black hole makes the news. This one is at the centre of our galaxy (indeed, another theory suggests that all galaxies are generated by black holes) and it is enormous, millions of times bigger than our sun. Will we end up being sucked into it on December 21st 2012, as discussed in an earlier blog or will we still remain on this peripheral end of a spiral arm, gloomily self-obsessed with ‘this seat of Mars’, indignantly voicing off about the holes in our pockets?
This blog is a day or two late because of the journey back to Ghana from the UK. Apart from the unhappy business of discovering that the pound is an albatross currency that only really works in the UK, I won’t gripe over this septic isle – this time! But what are my money concerns when compared with the horror story of one Bernard Madoff who ran the US banking sector’s equivalent of a pyramid selling scheme? This conniver gave profits to existing clients entirely from the investments of newcomers. Some 30 to 50 BILLION dollars disappeared in this way, including millions from British Banks. His scam had been inspected by US authorities very recently and found to be top hole. Now I know I am a sucker for the argument that Corporates are greedy and screw the public at large. Also, I am incensed that, as a customer of a bank, if things go a little pear-oriented, then you are treated like a malaria bearing mosquito, batted from pillar to post, losing whatever they can send in the baillifs for – including your house. But when THEY cock it up, we all suffer badly and nothing much happens to those responsible. No doubt Bernie the Brag will get his just deserts but US Inspection teams won’t, nor will the fund managers of the British Banks who swallowed his guff, hook line and sinker and threw our cash at him.
And so the domino falling goes on and on and houses lose their value and people lose both homes and their jobs and STILL the CBI and the banks pontificate about how the Government should run the economy, treating the public sector like it is a dim-witted cousin, who, in Spartan times, would have died at birth on a freezing night on a roof top.
So now there is another black hole in the money world, dragging constellations of financial houses beyond its event horizon, where, the laws of physics posit, they become incredibly debt-heavy with incredibly shrinking pay-outs. Meanwhile, note the elision, another black hole makes the news. This one is at the centre of our galaxy (indeed, another theory suggests that all galaxies are generated by black holes) and it is enormous, millions of times bigger than our sun. Will we end up being sucked into it on December 21st 2012, as discussed in an earlier blog or will we still remain on this peripheral end of a spiral arm, gloomily self-obsessed with ‘this seat of Mars’, indignantly voicing off about the holes in our pockets?
Labels: Madoff. Banks. Black Holes.
Monday, December 08, 2008
The War on Error
Clive James has a piece on the BBC website about how he can only think in chaos. It appears he has one of the rooms from hell (I assume that in hell, there are an infinite number of rooms); a vast jumble of related and unrelated sources of data in the form of books, newspapers, half-finished writing and unwashed cups. For myself, such a state of affairs would elicit in me the opposite of creativity, a sort of constipated, distressed inertia. Just as Canute tried to demonstrate that even a king cannot prevent the waves from washing his feet, I cannot prevent waves of nausea roll over me as the debris of past engagements with the word begin to mount on and around my desk. There is a Macbethian sticking point where I must take courage in both hands and bring order to bear. When everything is just so, even to the moment when the last pencil is safely entrapped in the container for writing implements, I can look again at the virgin page, pen poised. This kind of tidal activity goes on incessantly throughout life. Thus, I have, despite all the signs of being a dissolute desk user in my youth, become a tidier upper.
However, the thesis in this little essay is bigger than the battle for control over my desk. It concerns one of the laws of thermodynamics culled from the Hitchhikers Guide or some such; the law of entropy. Basically stated (at least to my subjective satisfaction) it is that all systems break down, from those relating to a human individual to those of a society, to those of the cosmos and, eventually, those of this and the many other posited universes. At the big end of this spectrum, everything in time and space will eventuate in a vast, dissipated deep freeze of practical nothingness and at the small, human end, the Forth Bridge, despite all those continuous coverings of resilient paint, will disassemble into random particles.
Being a management consultant, I am forcefully aware of entropy in human activity. It is a perennial salvage yard for broken down orderly systems, well-intended behaviours, protocols, lists, models and accurate projections. The intended effectiveness of organisations perish like rubber bands in sunlight, their elasticated vitality giving way to a sticky, brittle waste product. Like foraging ants, we consultants move through the administrative and interpersonal mess and drag away the detritus, leaving, momentarily, healthy order. But, despite our best efforts, with good behaviours embedded, creativity refurbished, communications effortless and effective and interpersonal dynamics restored, we know that in the months and years ahead, it will all end in tears. Again.
Mao had one good premise, in my experience. He called it ‘continuous cultural revolution’. In effect, life for each individual is a solitary battle for order in chaos. In the human groupings that make up a society, the problem is exponentially intensified. Look at the global breakdown of banking.
The only answer to the perpetual imperative of systemic order to crack up, to age, to fragment and return to the dust that first constituted it, is a daily war on error. That’s why it takes a life time of Canutish hard work even to write an article such as this.
Clive James has a piece on the BBC website about how he can only think in chaos. It appears he has one of the rooms from hell (I assume that in hell, there are an infinite number of rooms); a vast jumble of related and unrelated sources of data in the form of books, newspapers, half-finished writing and unwashed cups. For myself, such a state of affairs would elicit in me the opposite of creativity, a sort of constipated, distressed inertia. Just as Canute tried to demonstrate that even a king cannot prevent the waves from washing his feet, I cannot prevent waves of nausea roll over me as the debris of past engagements with the word begin to mount on and around my desk. There is a Macbethian sticking point where I must take courage in both hands and bring order to bear. When everything is just so, even to the moment when the last pencil is safely entrapped in the container for writing implements, I can look again at the virgin page, pen poised. This kind of tidal activity goes on incessantly throughout life. Thus, I have, despite all the signs of being a dissolute desk user in my youth, become a tidier upper.
However, the thesis in this little essay is bigger than the battle for control over my desk. It concerns one of the laws of thermodynamics culled from the Hitchhikers Guide or some such; the law of entropy. Basically stated (at least to my subjective satisfaction) it is that all systems break down, from those relating to a human individual to those of a society, to those of the cosmos and, eventually, those of this and the many other posited universes. At the big end of this spectrum, everything in time and space will eventuate in a vast, dissipated deep freeze of practical nothingness and at the small, human end, the Forth Bridge, despite all those continuous coverings of resilient paint, will disassemble into random particles.
Being a management consultant, I am forcefully aware of entropy in human activity. It is a perennial salvage yard for broken down orderly systems, well-intended behaviours, protocols, lists, models and accurate projections. The intended effectiveness of organisations perish like rubber bands in sunlight, their elasticated vitality giving way to a sticky, brittle waste product. Like foraging ants, we consultants move through the administrative and interpersonal mess and drag away the detritus, leaving, momentarily, healthy order. But, despite our best efforts, with good behaviours embedded, creativity refurbished, communications effortless and effective and interpersonal dynamics restored, we know that in the months and years ahead, it will all end in tears. Again.
Mao had one good premise, in my experience. He called it ‘continuous cultural revolution’. In effect, life for each individual is a solitary battle for order in chaos. In the human groupings that make up a society, the problem is exponentially intensified. Look at the global breakdown of banking.
The only answer to the perpetual imperative of systemic order to crack up, to age, to fragment and return to the dust that first constituted it, is a daily war on error. That’s why it takes a life time of Canutish hard work even to write an article such as this.
Labels: Entropy. Tidiness. Creatvity.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Of camels, climates and politics
Life, as they say, throws up its anomalies. I’m in the UK for a period of work which has taken me to the north. After an over night flight from a hot, humid Ghana, I am stuck in a hotel that will never be graced by adjectives of approbation. One minute I am moving slowly through an Accra heat, only ever picking up speed when I’m maintaining a semblance of fitness in a swimming pool, while half-listening to chanting evangelicals, their hymns punctuated by tropical birdsong (like tiny drops of ice being poured into an inkwell or a piercing three note warning call which also raises me from slumber at 5-45 every morning) and the next I am in a land that seemed almost to have faded from memory. Except the grey drizzle and the frozen wind come forcefully back in a déjà vu moment. The world of red-red stew and grasscutter soup is replaced by micro-wave heated processed fish and chips, mash potato and sausages and something called goo-johns which four people at the next table order. The wedding celebration has left the bar in some distress, with balloons half-deflated, ribbons trampled into the carpet and a few hangers-on talking loudly about what has just occurred or bitchily about the people who have attended. I particularly noted the Alan Bennett-like comment, “She doesn’t work in a shop, Jimmy, it’s a boutique!”
The taxi driver had spent most of the journey from the station to the hotel venting his equal hatred of Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher; bungs, lobbying and general corruption which was, at least, comparable to conversations I have had recently concerning Ghanaian politics where both major parties talk about ending patronage based on bribery and its grease-my-palm tribal feudalism. The national election takes place next week and ‘the youth’ (a Ghanaian phrase for unstable post-adolescent gangs) are paid one way or another by the self-same parties to turn up at the polling stations to intimidate, cajole or seduce the electorate. There is talk about the outbreak of ‘war’ again (similar to the disturbances in Nigeria). From my naïve perspective, it’s the usual rock and a hard place choice between the incumbent NPP conservatives who keep the peace but embrace the worst excesses of multi-national Corporates and Chinese and US imperialism and the socialist NDC opposition who shared wealth while imprisoning intellectuals and bumping off judges last time they had control.
The shift from the politics of oppression to something approaching civilised tolerance is often invisible in Africa. But then it is so in the West, too, only there social conventions give it a labyrinthine gloss under which the poor and ill-educated suffer without a voice or much hope. There are entrenched, vested interests in both worlds and they are intent in keeping things that way. Humans are capable of anything.
To finish this meander on a slightly lighter note, the treatment of children HAS moved from oppressive to humane as a result of world scrutiny in the rich Arab regions, where camel racing is the gamblers’ preferred arena. Recently, children rode these foul-spitting and halitosis-ridden humps round a track at ungainly speeds, now they are mounted by robots, chased by air-conditioned four wheel driven cars, whose owners press remote controls to operate the toddler-replicants’ whips and whisper imploring instructions into microphones that are broadcast via implanted micro-speakers in the camels’ ears.
"Go through the eye of that needle, camel!"
Life, as they say, throws up its anomalies. I’m in the UK for a period of work which has taken me to the north. After an over night flight from a hot, humid Ghana, I am stuck in a hotel that will never be graced by adjectives of approbation. One minute I am moving slowly through an Accra heat, only ever picking up speed when I’m maintaining a semblance of fitness in a swimming pool, while half-listening to chanting evangelicals, their hymns punctuated by tropical birdsong (like tiny drops of ice being poured into an inkwell or a piercing three note warning call which also raises me from slumber at 5-45 every morning) and the next I am in a land that seemed almost to have faded from memory. Except the grey drizzle and the frozen wind come forcefully back in a déjà vu moment. The world of red-red stew and grasscutter soup is replaced by micro-wave heated processed fish and chips, mash potato and sausages and something called goo-johns which four people at the next table order. The wedding celebration has left the bar in some distress, with balloons half-deflated, ribbons trampled into the carpet and a few hangers-on talking loudly about what has just occurred or bitchily about the people who have attended. I particularly noted the Alan Bennett-like comment, “She doesn’t work in a shop, Jimmy, it’s a boutique!”
The taxi driver had spent most of the journey from the station to the hotel venting his equal hatred of Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher; bungs, lobbying and general corruption which was, at least, comparable to conversations I have had recently concerning Ghanaian politics where both major parties talk about ending patronage based on bribery and its grease-my-palm tribal feudalism. The national election takes place next week and ‘the youth’ (a Ghanaian phrase for unstable post-adolescent gangs) are paid one way or another by the self-same parties to turn up at the polling stations to intimidate, cajole or seduce the electorate. There is talk about the outbreak of ‘war’ again (similar to the disturbances in Nigeria). From my naïve perspective, it’s the usual rock and a hard place choice between the incumbent NPP conservatives who keep the peace but embrace the worst excesses of multi-national Corporates and Chinese and US imperialism and the socialist NDC opposition who shared wealth while imprisoning intellectuals and bumping off judges last time they had control.
The shift from the politics of oppression to something approaching civilised tolerance is often invisible in Africa. But then it is so in the West, too, only there social conventions give it a labyrinthine gloss under which the poor and ill-educated suffer without a voice or much hope. There are entrenched, vested interests in both worlds and they are intent in keeping things that way. Humans are capable of anything.
To finish this meander on a slightly lighter note, the treatment of children HAS moved from oppressive to humane as a result of world scrutiny in the rich Arab regions, where camel racing is the gamblers’ preferred arena. Recently, children rode these foul-spitting and halitosis-ridden humps round a track at ungainly speeds, now they are mounted by robots, chased by air-conditioned four wheel driven cars, whose owners press remote controls to operate the toddler-replicants’ whips and whisper imploring instructions into microphones that are broadcast via implanted micro-speakers in the camels’ ears.
"Go through the eye of that needle, camel!"
Labels: Camels, Ghana, Politics and Robots.