In Mordor — don’t go down without a just fight
Cop27 is on. Get ready for a blowout of political methane.
Now methane is mos methane, whether it’s from cows or political BS, it’s 85 times more destructive to our oxygen film around the Earth, which keeps us alive, than CO².
On the motorcycle for 12 days you get time to have thoughts in your helmet. Some profound, some profane.
You come off your line and now the big bike is running itself and you are hanging on to the bars wondering why your brain drifted off and your happy existence has turned to terror.
I remember as a kid living in a white East London bubble how everything would go along all hunky dory, just fun and so exciting, filled with trips to the sea, social visits for big braais where there was lots of sexy banter — this was the 60s né, all bikinis, hot pants, miniskirts and knee-high white boots.
Men grew sideburns and their hair began to curl at the back.
But not for me. My dad had an oddly 40s and 50s approach to men’s and boys’ hair styles.
I would be ordered off to the barber in “Queen’s Street”, our mini-Mecca in staid suburban Cambridge.
Damn, we lived in King Edward Road — who was the UK traditional chief-loving street-namer in the municipality back in the day?
Anyway, little naughty sh*t me, the only one with an elastic band clamped around his upper arm in the black and white family portrait, would be sent, aged eight or nine years old, on the long trek to the place with the big red and white barber’s pole.
Short back and sides, my dad Scotty would order.
That place was pungent with unguents Brylcreem and Trugel.
My dad insisted on the Arctic white Brylcreem but I loved the pulsing radium-blue of Trugel.
But he was in charge, and all was peaceful until I crossed his line, and then it was a PK. An outburst of violence.
That’s how it was in those days kids. Our parents, themselves products of the World War 2 generation where the violence unleashed by autocrats, fascists and Nazis, sent 60-million people to a premature end, believed in a good klap now and then.
I suspect my mom was practising her odd underhand tennis backhand on me.
I watched in fascination how my friend, that private schoolteacher, never, ever used his hand on his children, and I was quick to abandon the “one, two, three” system of a paddywhack on the butt when it literally made me cry.
I also realised that violence, no matter how constrained or light, had absolutely no effect on the children.
If I have one regret, it was that. My girls don’t agree.
In mitigation, I guess we were one of the last generation of apartheid whites, and surprise, surprise, we too were raised in a system of violent punishment, and where has that taken us?
Wokus pokus types who love to whine on about white privilege in a sea of black minority privilege, are missing the point: it is the continuation of the violence which corrodes our now corrupted and unfree society.
That violence seems to know no class, race or culture, and while, as you know my reader, I am prepared to fight to defend press freedom and assaults on journalists with justified violence.
I remember how press photographer Paul Weinberg used a martial art to counter the sjambok of a charging riot cop in the 80s with a counter step.
If the cause is just, well then?
It’s such a tricky issue, and one which sees our courts settling it if you get it wrong.
The issue of violence should require maximum revs for our magnificent brains to sort out before we rush back into the primordial instinct of moer.
That is how far the scar reaches, it burns us right back to the primeval start somewhere in the ether of our time.
And it obviously moves forward in us our current survivalist fight which reaches up through nation states into the oligarchical corporate dominance.
And that is what Cop27 is all about: the rich not prepared to change a good thing, even if it puts the rest of society at risk of ecocide.
I get it. As a kid, I was so addicted to petrol I accidentally set my leg on fire in the backyard, and now, according to UJ sociology prof Patrick Bond, fossil-fuel addicted politicians are wanting to move on to “meth” addiction.
Methane gas. Darkly funny.
If Cop27 is worth anything, it is the fun of unpicking the lies and puffery; the greenwash, the brownwash.
If I was smart I would turn it into game of dice; take a Cop statement, roll the numbers, have a quirky set of answers like a six would be worth a spot in a guarded final enclave while the rest of Earth burns.
A kind of climate Monopoly, with my favourite move: Politicians and executive climate criminals go straight to jail for crimes against life.
I was at Cop17 in Durban.
The UN sets up base and comes close to body searching everyone, and when it got testy in there, those big world cops in blue feel nothing about telling journalists to stop recording.
Yes, Cop is a cop-out with fossil fuel companies sending the biggest delegation to try and break up, dissipate, muddy, waterdown, obfuscate, cavil, weasel — anything, whatever it takes to get them to those gas and oil deposits under the Wild Coast ocean which drives Shell — and Gweezy — mad with desire.
My enduring memory of that jamboree was what happened outside of the wheeling and dealing in the ring, in the spectator seats was row upon row of organisations who filled the tents, open areas and lecture halls of Durban.
Here the people who give a damn came to pick apart the vested drivel manufactured by leading world polluters, creating this public ring around the climate emission hustlers in suits and shiny shoes.
I was particularly moved by young global activists who spoke eloquently and fluently about the climate crisis and wished that our SA youth could reach this level of sophistication and commitment, to finally fly above the ideological bog of parochial, party-infected diatribe.
I want them to look down and see Earth for what it is in the era of the sixth extinction; chopped, invaded, polluted, burned, flooded.
Roiling with destruction and corruption. As actor-activist Leo DiCaprio said from the oil company’s chopper flying over tar sands: “It looks like Mordor.”
Back in the day, a trip to that barber’s red and white pole (the US added blue) in Cambridge, East London, included bloodletting, teeth pulling and setting broken bones administered by monks.
I can relate, since there was some bloodcurdling reactions from my dear mother when I returned shorn with a lakka stiff little kaif, or correctly stated m’lud, a mooi coiffeur.
You wonder why, after being properly barbered as a roofie (new) troep (conscripted soldier) in the SADF in 1978, and further attrocities of war, I refused to cut my hair in my first year of journalism at Rhodes.
It got so wild I had to take a pair of scissors to hack out a knot.
Thesadays, I am back to wearing it short because, well, that is all I have left.
I wish I could blame it on climate change, but time is the culprit.
I remember our favourite complaint in the 60s was that family was “ganging up” on perceived victims, and I guess we are all to some extent, simply gangstas.
Nonetheless, I pray for young people of Mordor. Don’t go down without a just fight.