Has Oscar-mad SA taken leave of its senses?
I’VE considered this a great deal and I’m afraid that discipline is no longer practical as a means of evading the revelations emerging from the Oscar Pistorius trial.
This has been the most depressing feature of an unusually depressing quarter – discussion of which is inescapable – from wine bars to the Gautrain to (even) Classic FM to the cubicles of call centres to Kay Burley of Sky News. So I’m going to ask Eskom to initiate a manual shutdown – to institute the most severe power collapse it is capable of.
Simultaneously, I’m going to rent the DA and the EFF to threaten oil companies with indecision and expropriation without compensation respectively, until every battery bar on every mobile or iPad or laptop computer in Pretoria empties and the wheels of justice turn without commentary.
What have we learned from this trial? Equality? Decency? No. Instead we’ve subconsciously descended to the depths of this white middle-class parallel universe defined by laager living and racism masquerading as rational fear. We’ve witnessed the trappings of this existence in publicity obsession and paranoia, reality television parties at Kyalami, fast cars and faster women, tattoos, hip-hop, caps, bats, zombies and watermelons.
Amid a theme of retching and groaning, we find ourselves in the deceptive eye of a nuclear opiate designed for people to take leave of their senses, and our only hope is for Eskom to Pyongyang us into extended Earth Hour submission.
There are profound reasons why exposure to the unfolding events is fundamentally unhealthy. Scrutiny of the evident misogyny and subliminal racism is humiliating, reaffirming stereotypes to a world whose once-genuine interest has been replaced by sadistic voyeurism.
The level of distraction is unprecedented; two weeks away from an election, citizens already vulnerable to apathy have been seduced into a 30-second delayed technological stupor. Rarely has the interrogation of one tragedy revealed so many others.
In theory, there are devastating consequences to a manual blackout. But let’s dismiss irrelevant things like the economy – with friends like Joseph Mathunjwa, who needs economies? Besides, there will be unintended, pleasant consequences: for example, we won’t be exposed to our minister of higher learning stealing gasps of oxygen before uttering racist nonsense.
Sensible people are less likely to drive without petrol or traffic lights, leaving this to those pathologically impaired metered taxi drivers or tow truckers/ bouncers/ cage fighters who may well converge at a single point and generously excuse themselves from future census counts.
Playstations will gather dust. People will walk the streets and interact with neighbours and children. They might even start reading again.
If you thought things couldn’t appear any worse, then last week one of the most irritating commentators sought to challenge this. “We hope this trial reminds society how it should treat women.”
If society genuinely believes this, then Eskom needs to urgently oblige us . . . and we need to be thrust into the age of candles with a view to restarting evolution from there.
Reader is co-founder and chief investment officer of private equity firm RE:RE Capital, specialising in the development of renewable and conventional energy facilities. He writes a weekly column for BDlive.