This week’s essayist is Sir Francis Bacon, KC. An English statesman, philosopher and scientist. He died in 1626 in an experiment to discover if snow could be used to preserve meat.
Random side note: The KC in his title refers to King’s Council. It is the same as a QC, the expensive lawyers in the UK. If you’re looking to strike it rich at some point in your life consider the business card industry. When the Queen dies and Prince Charles hits the throne, every QC in the UK, Australia, NZ & Canada will be needing a new card.
This is his answer to that age old qestion: Is it better to be married or single?
Of Marriage and Single Life
By Sir Francis Bacon, KC (1621)
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public. Yet there is great reason that those that have children, should have greatest care of future times; unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges. There are some, who though they lead a single life, their thoughts do end with themselves, and account future times impertinences. Nay, there are some other, that account wife and children, but as bills of charges. Nay more, there are some foolish rich covetous men, that take a pride, in having no children, because they may be thought so much the richer. For perhaps they have heard some talk, Such a one is a great rich man, and another except to it, Yea, but he hath a great charge of children; as if it were an abatement to his riches. But the most ordinary cause of a single life, is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters, to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives, are of that condition. A single life doth well with churchmen; for charity will hardly water the ground, where it must first fill a pool. It is indifferent for judges and magistrates; for if they be facile and corrupt, you shall have a servant, five times worse than a wife. For soldiers, I find the generals commonly in their hortatives, put men in mind of their wives and children; and I think the despising of marriage amongst the Turks, maketh the vulgar soldier more base. Certainly wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men, though they maybe many times more charitable, because their means are less exhaust, yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hardhearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their tenderness is not so oft called upon. Grave natures, led by custom, and therefore constant, are commonly loving husbands, as was said of Ulysses, vetulam suam praetulit immortalitati. Chaste women are often proud and forward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity. It is one of the best bonds, both of chastity and obedience, in the wife, if she think her husband wise; which she will never do, if she find him jealous. Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men's nurses. So as a man may have a quarrel to marry, when he will. But yet he was reputed one of the wise men, that made answer to the question, when a man should marry, - A young man not yet, an elder man not at all. It is often seen that bad husbands, have very good wives; whether it be, that it raiseth the price of their husband's kindness, when it comes; or that the wives take a pride in their patience. But this never fails, if the bad husbands were of their own choosing, against their friends' consent; for then they will be sure to make good their own folly.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
[Essay Monday] J.G. Ballard
J.G.Ballard died on the weekend.
This is one of his weirder pieces.
It is a report on a series of "experiments" to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan.
It was his response to Reagan being made governor of California and the rise of what he called "media politicians". Politicians who realised the power of TV and the fact that audiences rarely listen to what you are saying but rather watch how you are saying it.
WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN
by JG Ballard [1967]
RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONCEPTUAL AUTO DISASTER. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subject showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender.
Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.
In 82% of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed fecal matter and rectal hemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers’ studies of the optimum auto disaster). It is hoped to construct a rectal modulous of Reagan and the auto disaster of maximized audience arousal.
Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tones and musculature associated with homoerotic behavior. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have a minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions...
INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.
Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of "Reagan" in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies...
SEXUAL FANTASIES IN CONNECTION WITH RONALD REAGAN. The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac, (c) the assembly kid prepuce of President Johnson...In 89% of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm. Tests indicate the masturbatory nature of the Presidential contender’s posture. Dolls consisting of plastic models of Reagan’s alternate genitalia were found to have a disturbing effect on deprived children.
REAGAN'S HAIRSTYLE. Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidential contender’s hairstyle. 65% of male subjects made positive connections between the hairstyle and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hairstyles were constructed.
THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF REAGAN. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counselor, etc.
The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance--the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.
This is one of his weirder pieces.
It is a report on a series of "experiments" to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan.
It was his response to Reagan being made governor of California and the rise of what he called "media politicians". Politicians who realised the power of TV and the fact that audiences rarely listen to what you are saying but rather watch how you are saying it.
WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN
by JG Ballard [1967]
RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONCEPTUAL AUTO DISASTER. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subject showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender.
Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.
In 82% of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed fecal matter and rectal hemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers’ studies of the optimum auto disaster). It is hoped to construct a rectal modulous of Reagan and the auto disaster of maximized audience arousal.
Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tones and musculature associated with homoerotic behavior. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have a minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions...
INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.
Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of "Reagan" in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies...
SEXUAL FANTASIES IN CONNECTION WITH RONALD REAGAN. The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac, (c) the assembly kid prepuce of President Johnson...In 89% of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm. Tests indicate the masturbatory nature of the Presidential contender’s posture. Dolls consisting of plastic models of Reagan’s alternate genitalia were found to have a disturbing effect on deprived children.
REAGAN'S HAIRSTYLE. Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidential contender’s hairstyle. 65% of male subjects made positive connections between the hairstyle and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hairstyles were constructed.
THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF REAGAN. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counselor, etc.
The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance--the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.
Friday, April 17, 2009
[Essay Friday] no.10
This week’s essayist is Mark Twain.
William Faulkner called him the father of American literature. And the New York Times called William Faulkner the greatest American writer of all time. So that makes him the father of the greatest American literature of all time. I.E. He’s worth reading.
We mainly know him for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he also had a more cutting side to his writing.
Like this.
An essay he wrote in response to war. In particular to the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902.
The War Prayer
by Mark Twain [1904]
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation
“God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!”
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.
"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the “whole” of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory-- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
William Faulkner called him the father of American literature. And the New York Times called William Faulkner the greatest American writer of all time. So that makes him the father of the greatest American literature of all time. I.E. He’s worth reading.
We mainly know him for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he also had a more cutting side to his writing.
Like this.
An essay he wrote in response to war. In particular to the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902.
The War Prayer
by Mark Twain [1904]
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation
“God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!”
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.
"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the “whole” of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory-- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
[Essay Friday] no.9
It's Easter. So I wanted to find something about death, redemption and resurrection. But it is also a four day weekend so I found an essay on laziness.
It is by Christopher Morley. 1920s author, essayist and journalist. He wrote Kitty Foyle and was the self-appointed chairman of the Three Hours for Lunch Club.
On laziness
Christopher Morley [1921]
To-day we rather intended to write an essay on Laziness, but were too indolent to do so.
The sort of thing we had in mind to write would have been exceedingly persuasive. We intended to discourse a little in favour of a greater appreciation of Indolence as a benign factor in human affairs.
It is our observation that every time we get into trouble it is due to not having been lazy enough. Unhappily, we were born with a certain fund of energy. We have been hustling about for a number of years now, and it doesn’t seem to get us anything but tribulation. Henceforward we are going to make a determined effort to be more languid and demure. It is the bustling man who always gets put on committees, who is asked to solve the problems of other people and neglect his own.
The man who is really, thoroughly, and philosophically slothful is the only thoroughly happy man. It is the happy man who benefits the world. The conclusion is inescapable.
We remember a saying about the meek inheriting the earth. The truly meek man is the lazy man. He is too modest to believe that any ferment and hubbub of his can ameliorate the earth or assuage the perplexities of humanity.
O. Henry said once that one should be careful to distinguish laziness from dignified repose. Alas, that was a mere quibble. Laziness is always dignified, it is always reposeful. Philosophical laziness, we mean. The kind of laziness that is based upon a carefully reasoned analysis of experience. Acquired laziness. We have no respect for those who were born lazy; it is like being born a millionaire: they cannot appreciate their bliss. It is the man who has hammered his laziness out of the stubborn material of life for whom we chant praise and allelulia.
The laziest man we know—we do not like to mention his name, as the brutal world does not yet recognize sloth at its community value—is one of the greatest poets in this country; one of the keenest satirists; one of the most rectilinear thinkers. He began life in the customary hustling way. He was always too busy to enjoy himself. He became surrounded by eager people who came to him to solve their problems. “It’s a queer thing,” he said sadly; “no one ever comes to me asking for help in solving my problems.” Finally the light broke upon him. He stopped answering letters, buying lunches for casual friends and visitors from out of town, he stopped lending money to old college pals and frittering his time away on all the useless minor matters that pester the good-natured. He sat down in a secluded café with his cheek against a seidel of dark beer and began to caress the universe with his intellect.
The most damning argument against the Germans is that they were not lazy enough. In the middle of Europe, a thoroughly disillusioned, indolent and delightful old continent, the Germans were a dangerous mass of energy and bumptious push. If the Germans had been as lazy, as indifferent, and as righteously laissez-fairish as their neighbours, the world would have been spared a great deal.
People respect laziness. If you once get a reputation for complete, immovable, and reckless indolence the world will leave you to your own thoughts, which are generally rather interesting.
Doctor Johnson, who was one of the world’s great philosophers, was lazy. Only yesterday our friend the Caliph showed us an extraordinarily interesting thing. It was a little leather-bound notebook in which Boswell jotted down memoranda of his talks with the old doctor. These notes he afterward worked up into the immortal Biography. And lo and behold, what was the very first entry in this treasured little relic?
Doctor Johnson told me in going to Ilam from Ashbourne, 22 September, 1777, that the way the plan of his Dictionary came to be addressed to Lord Chesterfield was this: He had neglected to write it by the time appointed. Dodsley suggested a desire to have it addressed to Lord C. Mr. J. laid hold of this as an excuse for delay, that it might be better done perhaps, and let Dodsley have his desire. Mr. Johnson said to his friend, Doctor Bathurst: “Now if any good comes of my addressing to Lord Chesterfield it will be ascribed to deep policy and address, when, in fact, it was only a casual excuse for laziness.”
Thus we see that it was sheer laziness that led to the greatest triumph of Doctor Johnson’s life, the noble and memorable letter to Chesterfield in 1775.
Mind your business is a good counsel; but mind your idleness also. It’s a tragic thing to make a business of your mind. Save your mind to amuse yourself with.
The lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way. The lazy man doesn’t (in the vulgar phrase) pass the buck. He lets the buck pass him. We have always secretly envied our lazy friends. Now we are going to join them. We have burned our boats or our bridges or whatever it is that one burns on the eve of a momentous decision.
Writing on this congenial topic has roused us up to quite a pitch of enthusiasm and energy.
It is by Christopher Morley. 1920s author, essayist and journalist. He wrote Kitty Foyle and was the self-appointed chairman of the Three Hours for Lunch Club.
On laziness
Christopher Morley [1921]
To-day we rather intended to write an essay on Laziness, but were too indolent to do so.
The sort of thing we had in mind to write would have been exceedingly persuasive. We intended to discourse a little in favour of a greater appreciation of Indolence as a benign factor in human affairs.
It is our observation that every time we get into trouble it is due to not having been lazy enough. Unhappily, we were born with a certain fund of energy. We have been hustling about for a number of years now, and it doesn’t seem to get us anything but tribulation. Henceforward we are going to make a determined effort to be more languid and demure. It is the bustling man who always gets put on committees, who is asked to solve the problems of other people and neglect his own.
The man who is really, thoroughly, and philosophically slothful is the only thoroughly happy man. It is the happy man who benefits the world. The conclusion is inescapable.
We remember a saying about the meek inheriting the earth. The truly meek man is the lazy man. He is too modest to believe that any ferment and hubbub of his can ameliorate the earth or assuage the perplexities of humanity.
O. Henry said once that one should be careful to distinguish laziness from dignified repose. Alas, that was a mere quibble. Laziness is always dignified, it is always reposeful. Philosophical laziness, we mean. The kind of laziness that is based upon a carefully reasoned analysis of experience. Acquired laziness. We have no respect for those who were born lazy; it is like being born a millionaire: they cannot appreciate their bliss. It is the man who has hammered his laziness out of the stubborn material of life for whom we chant praise and allelulia.
The laziest man we know—we do not like to mention his name, as the brutal world does not yet recognize sloth at its community value—is one of the greatest poets in this country; one of the keenest satirists; one of the most rectilinear thinkers. He began life in the customary hustling way. He was always too busy to enjoy himself. He became surrounded by eager people who came to him to solve their problems. “It’s a queer thing,” he said sadly; “no one ever comes to me asking for help in solving my problems.” Finally the light broke upon him. He stopped answering letters, buying lunches for casual friends and visitors from out of town, he stopped lending money to old college pals and frittering his time away on all the useless minor matters that pester the good-natured. He sat down in a secluded café with his cheek against a seidel of dark beer and began to caress the universe with his intellect.
The most damning argument against the Germans is that they were not lazy enough. In the middle of Europe, a thoroughly disillusioned, indolent and delightful old continent, the Germans were a dangerous mass of energy and bumptious push. If the Germans had been as lazy, as indifferent, and as righteously laissez-fairish as their neighbours, the world would have been spared a great deal.
People respect laziness. If you once get a reputation for complete, immovable, and reckless indolence the world will leave you to your own thoughts, which are generally rather interesting.
Doctor Johnson, who was one of the world’s great philosophers, was lazy. Only yesterday our friend the Caliph showed us an extraordinarily interesting thing. It was a little leather-bound notebook in which Boswell jotted down memoranda of his talks with the old doctor. These notes he afterward worked up into the immortal Biography. And lo and behold, what was the very first entry in this treasured little relic?
Doctor Johnson told me in going to Ilam from Ashbourne, 22 September, 1777, that the way the plan of his Dictionary came to be addressed to Lord Chesterfield was this: He had neglected to write it by the time appointed. Dodsley suggested a desire to have it addressed to Lord C. Mr. J. laid hold of this as an excuse for delay, that it might be better done perhaps, and let Dodsley have his desire. Mr. Johnson said to his friend, Doctor Bathurst: “Now if any good comes of my addressing to Lord Chesterfield it will be ascribed to deep policy and address, when, in fact, it was only a casual excuse for laziness.”
Thus we see that it was sheer laziness that led to the greatest triumph of Doctor Johnson’s life, the noble and memorable letter to Chesterfield in 1775.
Mind your business is a good counsel; but mind your idleness also. It’s a tragic thing to make a business of your mind. Save your mind to amuse yourself with.
The lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way. The lazy man doesn’t (in the vulgar phrase) pass the buck. He lets the buck pass him. We have always secretly envied our lazy friends. Now we are going to join them. We have burned our boats or our bridges or whatever it is that one burns on the eve of a momentous decision.
Writing on this congenial topic has roused us up to quite a pitch of enthusiasm and energy.
[Essay Friday] no.8
This week’s essay was found by Craig W. One of the art directors I work with.
A funny piece by the rightwing American writer Daniel Flynn. His books include Why the Left hate America and Intellectual Morons: How ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas.
He served with the US Marines. Claims to be banned for life from all Black Panther reunions. And in the tradition of conservative politics, he is a real patriot but hates 99% of the people who live in his country. This doesn’t preclude him from being funny. In fact it probably makes him even funnier.
This is his rant on Beer Nerds
The Labor Day Beer-Nerd Fatwa
Daniel. J. Flynn [2007]
Something wrong invaded my sight in the beer aisle, namely, an obnoxiously named product called Whale Tail Pale Ale. The name sounds like a second grader's poem. It grabbed my attention, and I guess that's the point. But it also raised my ire. This silly-sounding beer (Yeah, "ale." That's right. I'm calling you beer!) cost $10.59 for a four pack. Momentarily stunned that four packs existed, it nearly escaped my notice that, through some marketing Jedi Mind Trick, the beer company charges more for four beers than most other beer companies charge for twelve.
Beer is supposed to be sold in divisions of six, decree the beer gods. Who drinks four beers? Beer nerds who drink Whale Tail Pale Ale, that's who. Beer nerds? They are effeminate men who would rather be drinking wine but drink beer to convince themselves, their wives, and everyone around them of their manliness. They would chant an affirmation, but Whale Tail Pale Ale works just as well. The $10.59 price and deliberately quirky four-pack packaging says to the beer nerd: buy me. It says to the beer drinker: smash me.
So fascinated/disgusted by the $10.59 Whale Tail Pail Ale, I scanned the beer aisle last night for other offenders. I found something bedecked in fleur-di-lis called Don de Dieu, four of which cost $9.99. This was a deal compared to Scotland's Legends Skull Splitter--$18.59 for a four-pack! Brewed closer to home is the appropriately named Midas Touch; $12.59 will get you four of these "handcrafted ancient ale," made from "barley, honey, white muscat grapes & safron." They are not going for that freeze-wave Coors Light Silver Bullet Train demographic, are they?
There's something amiss at package stores, (that's what we call store-type establishments that sell alcohol in the northeast). I inveighed against excessive prices at bars in a post last year. Now it's the packies that have brought out the Bill Bixby in me. Beer nerds, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
The packaging and price of microbrews hypnotize beer nerds into believing that they're buying great beer. Someone is laughing hard counting his money. My strong suspicion is that there is no such thing as a microbrewery, just one enormous Anheuser-Busch style megacorporation that produces one beer with a wide variety of packaging. The formula goes something like this: 1. Devise a gonzo name, e.g., Salty Dog's Magiclicious Wheat Stout or Big Bob's Bongo Bock; 2. Splash lots of color on the packaging, as if one were buying not a man's beer but a child's juice box; 3. Say that your beer is brewed in Vermont; 4. Charge for a six-pack (or even a four pack) what domestic brands charge for a twelve-pack; 5. Make the beer heavy enough so that drinking twelve of them at a sitting will surely induce vomiting, or at least the feeling that one has eaten four loaves of bread.
The economics of beer works in strange ways. Instead of low prices attracting consumers, they scare them away. High prices convey the idea that this is a good beer. Low prices are the kiss of death. Budweiser, Busch, and even Schlitz are all good beers who hang out with a bad crowd. If you fraternize in the cooler with Meisterbrau and Naragansett enough, people are going to start thinking you are like them. But Schlitz, Busch, and company are different, even if their prices are the same. Don't tell that to beer snobs, who run from a $15 case as if it were botulism on sale.
Stella Artois is more their style. The advertisement slogans, "Reassuringly Expensive" and "Perfection Has Its Price," are a far cry from "Put a Little Weekend in Your Week." But they make the point: you are better than the people who drink Coors. It's as if one separates oneself from the riffraff by the beer one drinks. This is what Thorstein Veblen (a beer nerd's name if there ever was one) called "conspicuous consumption." But true beer drinkers know that it's your behavior, and not the beer you drink, that should be conspicuous.
It's labor day, and as a working man--okay, okay, I spend my days reading and writing, but I once hauled hot dogs up the grandstand at Fenway Park, cleaned latrines in the Marines, and bagged groceries for minimum wage--I protest white-collar, snob beers. I protest them by walking past the Whale's Tail Pale Ales and Scotland's Legendary Skull Splitters of the beer world, my nose high in the air, going straight to the bad-beer neighborhood end of the cooler, and grasping a case of Busch. This weekend, every flipped top, every first sip, every finished bottle slammed down on the table, will strike a blow against beer nerds.
A funny piece by the rightwing American writer Daniel Flynn. His books include Why the Left hate America and Intellectual Morons: How ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas.
He served with the US Marines. Claims to be banned for life from all Black Panther reunions. And in the tradition of conservative politics, he is a real patriot but hates 99% of the people who live in his country. This doesn’t preclude him from being funny. In fact it probably makes him even funnier.
This is his rant on Beer Nerds
The Labor Day Beer-Nerd Fatwa
Daniel. J. Flynn [2007]
Something wrong invaded my sight in the beer aisle, namely, an obnoxiously named product called Whale Tail Pale Ale. The name sounds like a second grader's poem. It grabbed my attention, and I guess that's the point. But it also raised my ire. This silly-sounding beer (Yeah, "ale." That's right. I'm calling you beer!) cost $10.59 for a four pack. Momentarily stunned that four packs existed, it nearly escaped my notice that, through some marketing Jedi Mind Trick, the beer company charges more for four beers than most other beer companies charge for twelve.
Beer is supposed to be sold in divisions of six, decree the beer gods. Who drinks four beers? Beer nerds who drink Whale Tail Pale Ale, that's who. Beer nerds? They are effeminate men who would rather be drinking wine but drink beer to convince themselves, their wives, and everyone around them of their manliness. They would chant an affirmation, but Whale Tail Pale Ale works just as well. The $10.59 price and deliberately quirky four-pack packaging says to the beer nerd: buy me. It says to the beer drinker: smash me.
So fascinated/disgusted by the $10.59 Whale Tail Pail Ale, I scanned the beer aisle last night for other offenders. I found something bedecked in fleur-di-lis called Don de Dieu, four of which cost $9.99. This was a deal compared to Scotland's Legends Skull Splitter--$18.59 for a four-pack! Brewed closer to home is the appropriately named Midas Touch; $12.59 will get you four of these "handcrafted ancient ale," made from "barley, honey, white muscat grapes & safron." They are not going for that freeze-wave Coors Light Silver Bullet Train demographic, are they?
There's something amiss at package stores, (that's what we call store-type establishments that sell alcohol in the northeast). I inveighed against excessive prices at bars in a post last year. Now it's the packies that have brought out the Bill Bixby in me. Beer nerds, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
The packaging and price of microbrews hypnotize beer nerds into believing that they're buying great beer. Someone is laughing hard counting his money. My strong suspicion is that there is no such thing as a microbrewery, just one enormous Anheuser-Busch style megacorporation that produces one beer with a wide variety of packaging. The formula goes something like this: 1. Devise a gonzo name, e.g., Salty Dog's Magiclicious Wheat Stout or Big Bob's Bongo Bock; 2. Splash lots of color on the packaging, as if one were buying not a man's beer but a child's juice box; 3. Say that your beer is brewed in Vermont; 4. Charge for a six-pack (or even a four pack) what domestic brands charge for a twelve-pack; 5. Make the beer heavy enough so that drinking twelve of them at a sitting will surely induce vomiting, or at least the feeling that one has eaten four loaves of bread.
The economics of beer works in strange ways. Instead of low prices attracting consumers, they scare them away. High prices convey the idea that this is a good beer. Low prices are the kiss of death. Budweiser, Busch, and even Schlitz are all good beers who hang out with a bad crowd. If you fraternize in the cooler with Meisterbrau and Naragansett enough, people are going to start thinking you are like them. But Schlitz, Busch, and company are different, even if their prices are the same. Don't tell that to beer snobs, who run from a $15 case as if it were botulism on sale.
Stella Artois is more their style. The advertisement slogans, "Reassuringly Expensive" and "Perfection Has Its Price," are a far cry from "Put a Little Weekend in Your Week." But they make the point: you are better than the people who drink Coors. It's as if one separates oneself from the riffraff by the beer one drinks. This is what Thorstein Veblen (a beer nerd's name if there ever was one) called "conspicuous consumption." But true beer drinkers know that it's your behavior, and not the beer you drink, that should be conspicuous.
It's labor day, and as a working man--okay, okay, I spend my days reading and writing, but I once hauled hot dogs up the grandstand at Fenway Park, cleaned latrines in the Marines, and bagged groceries for minimum wage--I protest white-collar, snob beers. I protest them by walking past the Whale's Tail Pale Ales and Scotland's Legendary Skull Splitters of the beer world, my nose high in the air, going straight to the bad-beer neighborhood end of the cooler, and grasping a case of Busch. This weekend, every flipped top, every first sip, every finished bottle slammed down on the table, will strike a blow against beer nerds.
[Essay Friday] no.7
Sport is a big thing in our agency. So this week a piece from a sports writer.
Oarabile Mosikare is from Francistown, Botswana. Where he writes for Mmegi – Botswana’s leading newspaper. He is not famous or anything but this is a great piece. It about his experiences as the owner of a football club. It is a little bit different to the Roman Abramovich story.
It has a few local words or people that you may not be familiar with. Jomo Sono and Patrice Motsepe are big South African football club owners. And dagga is the local word for marijuana.
King of 'Fong Kong' Football
Oarabile Mosikare (2009)
In my wildest dreams I never thought I would own a soccer team. But here I am at 29, possibly the world's youngest team owner. And the most stressed in Botswana, if not the world. It's no joke to run a team. Ask Jomo Sono, Patrice Motsepe and Roman Abramovich.
Of course I'm still waiting to become as rich and powerful as they are. My team is just a social soccer side playing in an informal league known round these parts as the "Sunday Times" because of when we play.
The Sunday Times "league" has taken Botswana by storm. Matches are organised mostly by word of mouth and the teams include a few old men, but the bulk are wild and badly behaved youngsters -- some as young as 15.
My team -- Industrial Super Stars, so named after the scrapyard area in Itekeng where the majority of our players live -- is made up of disgruntled and uncontrollable alcoholics without any soccer skills to boast about. My bunch was rejected by other Sunday Times soccer clubs.
In my quest to be Motsepe, I took the opportunity to name and organise the team. But finding them before a match is more complicated, especially at the end of the month. After payday, the team owner has to endure moving from one drinking hole to another in search of his players.
One of the unique things about the Sunday Times soccer league is that the usual football rules and regulations are relaxed. So relaxed, most of them don't apply. A player can be substituted and come back into play later, as many times as he likes. A referee might smoke a cigarette during the game. The referee can also be substituted if one team feels he is biased in favour of the opponents. When this happens, the ref is likely to express his disgust at the decision by donning the kit of the team that stood by him when he was subjected to insults.
Alcohol and dagga abound and the players use them with abandon. Because most players are unemployed -- especially in my team -- pints of Chibuku, a traditional brew, are a regular feature at the games.
These players don't care if team "owners" and officials such as me are present when they take their dagga. They are very uncouth. They spew venom. They don't want to be shouted at like professional coaches shout at their players. They threaten to decamp to another side and there are plenty to choose from at the bottom of the league barrel.
In the worst scenario they threaten to form their own team that will be run and controlled by them without being subjected to civil behaviour lectures. The most foul-mouthed will tell you to your face that you don't own them and that just because you occasionally buy them pints of Chibuku, this doesn't make you better than them.
I have been told to go and write shit in the papers whenever I called some of my players to order. "Just because you write for newspapers doesn't mean you can lecture to us about good behaviour," I have been told countless times. It is a bit unfair because other football team owners, such as Sono, Motsepe and Abramovich, are not subjected to this treatment. By the same token, just because my bank balance hovers close to zero most of the time, it doesn't mean I should be subjected to this sort of treatment, I mutter to myself.
Although I'm not given the respect that I deserve, the team is happy to use the water in my house to wash the kit. I'm also the custodian of the kit, which is a raw deal. Come half time nobody listens to the coach. They don't want team talk. They just want alcohol and that foul-smelling green stuff.
One of the Industrial Super Stars officials is my younger brother. One recent Sunday we Mosikares were accused of having hijacked the team. Drunken debates ensued. I came up with the idea of forming a rival team to the neighbouring Itekeng Soccer Club when I realised that the majority of my present players were not being given a chance to prove themselves. To explain the set-up for a South African audience, let's put it this way: if Industrial Super Stars were a political party it would be Cope; Itekeng Soccer Club would be the ANC.
My breakaway plan was hatched in the middle of the month when I did not have money to buy team kit. So one of my cousins -- among those now accusing me and my brother of hijacking control -- went and bought the kit at one of the Chinese shops in town. It is a "fong kong" kit costing less than P200 (about R250).
I wanted to refund him so that I could be left to run my Industrial Super Stars the way I liked, but he refused. My cousin can be difficult to deal with. On the field he will agree to be substituted only when he wants to smoke a cigarette.
In our way my team is like a close-knit family. And like all families, we bicker. It's just as well we hardly ever win any matches -- when we do, the boys drink until they drop.
Oarabile Mosikare is from Francistown, Botswana. Where he writes for Mmegi – Botswana’s leading newspaper. He is not famous or anything but this is a great piece. It about his experiences as the owner of a football club. It is a little bit different to the Roman Abramovich story.
It has a few local words or people that you may not be familiar with. Jomo Sono and Patrice Motsepe are big South African football club owners. And dagga is the local word for marijuana.
King of 'Fong Kong' Football
Oarabile Mosikare (2009)
In my wildest dreams I never thought I would own a soccer team. But here I am at 29, possibly the world's youngest team owner. And the most stressed in Botswana, if not the world. It's no joke to run a team. Ask Jomo Sono, Patrice Motsepe and Roman Abramovich.
Of course I'm still waiting to become as rich and powerful as they are. My team is just a social soccer side playing in an informal league known round these parts as the "Sunday Times" because of when we play.
The Sunday Times "league" has taken Botswana by storm. Matches are organised mostly by word of mouth and the teams include a few old men, but the bulk are wild and badly behaved youngsters -- some as young as 15.
My team -- Industrial Super Stars, so named after the scrapyard area in Itekeng where the majority of our players live -- is made up of disgruntled and uncontrollable alcoholics without any soccer skills to boast about. My bunch was rejected by other Sunday Times soccer clubs.
In my quest to be Motsepe, I took the opportunity to name and organise the team. But finding them before a match is more complicated, especially at the end of the month. After payday, the team owner has to endure moving from one drinking hole to another in search of his players.
One of the unique things about the Sunday Times soccer league is that the usual football rules and regulations are relaxed. So relaxed, most of them don't apply. A player can be substituted and come back into play later, as many times as he likes. A referee might smoke a cigarette during the game. The referee can also be substituted if one team feels he is biased in favour of the opponents. When this happens, the ref is likely to express his disgust at the decision by donning the kit of the team that stood by him when he was subjected to insults.
Alcohol and dagga abound and the players use them with abandon. Because most players are unemployed -- especially in my team -- pints of Chibuku, a traditional brew, are a regular feature at the games.
These players don't care if team "owners" and officials such as me are present when they take their dagga. They are very uncouth. They spew venom. They don't want to be shouted at like professional coaches shout at their players. They threaten to decamp to another side and there are plenty to choose from at the bottom of the league barrel.
In the worst scenario they threaten to form their own team that will be run and controlled by them without being subjected to civil behaviour lectures. The most foul-mouthed will tell you to your face that you don't own them and that just because you occasionally buy them pints of Chibuku, this doesn't make you better than them.
I have been told to go and write shit in the papers whenever I called some of my players to order. "Just because you write for newspapers doesn't mean you can lecture to us about good behaviour," I have been told countless times. It is a bit unfair because other football team owners, such as Sono, Motsepe and Abramovich, are not subjected to this treatment. By the same token, just because my bank balance hovers close to zero most of the time, it doesn't mean I should be subjected to this sort of treatment, I mutter to myself.
Although I'm not given the respect that I deserve, the team is happy to use the water in my house to wash the kit. I'm also the custodian of the kit, which is a raw deal. Come half time nobody listens to the coach. They don't want team talk. They just want alcohol and that foul-smelling green stuff.
One of the Industrial Super Stars officials is my younger brother. One recent Sunday we Mosikares were accused of having hijacked the team. Drunken debates ensued. I came up with the idea of forming a rival team to the neighbouring Itekeng Soccer Club when I realised that the majority of my present players were not being given a chance to prove themselves. To explain the set-up for a South African audience, let's put it this way: if Industrial Super Stars were a political party it would be Cope; Itekeng Soccer Club would be the ANC.
My breakaway plan was hatched in the middle of the month when I did not have money to buy team kit. So one of my cousins -- among those now accusing me and my brother of hijacking control -- went and bought the kit at one of the Chinese shops in town. It is a "fong kong" kit costing less than P200 (about R250).
I wanted to refund him so that I could be left to run my Industrial Super Stars the way I liked, but he refused. My cousin can be difficult to deal with. On the field he will agree to be substituted only when he wants to smoke a cigarette.
In our way my team is like a close-knit family. And like all families, we bicker. It's just as well we hardly ever win any matches -- when we do, the boys drink until they drop.
[Essay Friday] no.6
It’s a sunny day, so a sunny essay.
This week’s essayist is Alan Alexander Milne. In his day he was known as a fine chap who wrote for and edited Punch Magazine. Until a small bear came along and completely dwarfed all his previous works. This is one of the many essays he wrote for Punch. His musings on a cricket.
Bruce: A short study of a great life.
A.A. Milne (1907)
Bruce is a cricket. When I am lying awake o’ nights, thinking of all the wonderful things I am going to do on the morrow, Bruce is on his back, somewhere behind the boiler, singing to himself.
Looking back on the days when I first knew him, it seems strange to reflect that there was a time when I almost wanted to kill him. That was before I understood that he was really quite out of reach behind the boiler. The first night (how absurd it sounds now) I got out of bed with a slipper, tracked him three times round the room, and returned to bed very cold and mystified. The next day I spoke to the housekeeper about it, and learnt that I should never be able to get the slipper on to him properly.
On that night he sang more loudly than ever; the way he kept the note was wonderful. I decided to call him Bruce and, as he and the boiler were fixtures, to make the best of him. Even so I did not love him. The intrinsic merits of his song were few—the position from which he gave it argued a want of confidence in his powers.
And then I made a wonderful discovery. I was told by a man who knew a little more about crickets than I did that Bruce did not sing in the ordinary sense of the word, but that the chirping noise characteristic of him he made by rubbing his knees together. And the same with grasshoppers.
Now I invite you to consider what this really means. There is a heroism about this that is truly wonderful. Picture to yourself a hot August night on the one hand, myself in bed dropping comfortably off into a peaceful slumber—on the other hand, Bruce behind the boiler vigorously rubbing his knees together. The contract is a terrible one. I don’t know, but I should think that Bruce must be a Socialist by now.
Of course I want to know two things. First, how did Bruce get behind the boiler; secondly, why does he rub his knees together? There are seventy-two steps up to my rooms; if he came by the stairs it was a long and tiring journey for him, and there was always the chance of finding me out. Perhaps he came straight up the hot-water pipe—Excelsior!
I like the picture of him coming up the hot-water pipe. Probably he had others with him. They would take up position on the first three floors.
“Hallo, wherever are you off to?” they would say to Bruce, as they sat down and began to rosin their knees.
“How do you know there isn’t another floor?” Bruce would answer. “Anyhow I’m going to see.”
“Don’t be an ass. It’s warm enough here for anybody.”
“No, I think I’ll just go on a bit. There’s a chap up here who’s never heard Bluebell.’”
Perhaps, though, Bruce was born behind the broiler. I should be sorry to think that. I don’t like the idea of him taking advantage of the accidents of birth in this way. I prefer to regard him as a self-made cricket.
My knowledge of Bruce is contemptible. I don’t even know why he wants to rub his knees together so violently. Is it merely a nervous spasmodic twitching? Oh no, it cannot be that. It may be with the others, but not with Bruce. But if he does it deliberately, does he never get tired? Do his knees never wear out? When does he take nourishment?
That brings me to another point. What does Bruce eat? He might possibly tap the boiler for hot water now and then, but how does he manage for food? Is his diet animal, vegetable, or mineral? Mineral, it would appear …
It is twelve o’clock. I have a hard day’s work, and I am tired. There is no noise save from the direction of the boiler. As I lie awake, my thoughts are with Bruce. He has abandoned his whole soul to his song. For one moment, it is true, I am tempted to say, “Confound the beast, why won’t he let me go to sleep?” But then I think of his noble unselfish life. I think of his unceasing labor and of his love for music. And I recall, too, how in the face of disappointments which would have soured and embittered the life of another, he has remained cheerful. For while hustlers have sung hymns in praise of the bee, and have recommended the sluggard to the ant, no one has yet done justice to the tireless life of the cricket…
Bruce, I raise the water-bottle to you. More power to your knees!
This week’s essayist is Alan Alexander Milne. In his day he was known as a fine chap who wrote for and edited Punch Magazine. Until a small bear came along and completely dwarfed all his previous works. This is one of the many essays he wrote for Punch. His musings on a cricket.
Bruce: A short study of a great life.
A.A. Milne (1907)
Bruce is a cricket. When I am lying awake o’ nights, thinking of all the wonderful things I am going to do on the morrow, Bruce is on his back, somewhere behind the boiler, singing to himself.
Looking back on the days when I first knew him, it seems strange to reflect that there was a time when I almost wanted to kill him. That was before I understood that he was really quite out of reach behind the boiler. The first night (how absurd it sounds now) I got out of bed with a slipper, tracked him three times round the room, and returned to bed very cold and mystified. The next day I spoke to the housekeeper about it, and learnt that I should never be able to get the slipper on to him properly.
On that night he sang more loudly than ever; the way he kept the note was wonderful. I decided to call him Bruce and, as he and the boiler were fixtures, to make the best of him. Even so I did not love him. The intrinsic merits of his song were few—the position from which he gave it argued a want of confidence in his powers.
And then I made a wonderful discovery. I was told by a man who knew a little more about crickets than I did that Bruce did not sing in the ordinary sense of the word, but that the chirping noise characteristic of him he made by rubbing his knees together. And the same with grasshoppers.
Now I invite you to consider what this really means. There is a heroism about this that is truly wonderful. Picture to yourself a hot August night on the one hand, myself in bed dropping comfortably off into a peaceful slumber—on the other hand, Bruce behind the boiler vigorously rubbing his knees together. The contract is a terrible one. I don’t know, but I should think that Bruce must be a Socialist by now.
Of course I want to know two things. First, how did Bruce get behind the boiler; secondly, why does he rub his knees together? There are seventy-two steps up to my rooms; if he came by the stairs it was a long and tiring journey for him, and there was always the chance of finding me out. Perhaps he came straight up the hot-water pipe—Excelsior!
I like the picture of him coming up the hot-water pipe. Probably he had others with him. They would take up position on the first three floors.
“Hallo, wherever are you off to?” they would say to Bruce, as they sat down and began to rosin their knees.
“How do you know there isn’t another floor?” Bruce would answer. “Anyhow I’m going to see.”
“Don’t be an ass. It’s warm enough here for anybody.”
“No, I think I’ll just go on a bit. There’s a chap up here who’s never heard Bluebell.’”
Perhaps, though, Bruce was born behind the broiler. I should be sorry to think that. I don’t like the idea of him taking advantage of the accidents of birth in this way. I prefer to regard him as a self-made cricket.
My knowledge of Bruce is contemptible. I don’t even know why he wants to rub his knees together so violently. Is it merely a nervous spasmodic twitching? Oh no, it cannot be that. It may be with the others, but not with Bruce. But if he does it deliberately, does he never get tired? Do his knees never wear out? When does he take nourishment?
That brings me to another point. What does Bruce eat? He might possibly tap the boiler for hot water now and then, but how does he manage for food? Is his diet animal, vegetable, or mineral? Mineral, it would appear …
It is twelve o’clock. I have a hard day’s work, and I am tired. There is no noise save from the direction of the boiler. As I lie awake, my thoughts are with Bruce. He has abandoned his whole soul to his song. For one moment, it is true, I am tempted to say, “Confound the beast, why won’t he let me go to sleep?” But then I think of his noble unselfish life. I think of his unceasing labor and of his love for music. And I recall, too, how in the face of disappointments which would have soured and embittered the life of another, he has remained cheerful. For while hustlers have sung hymns in praise of the bee, and have recommended the sluggard to the ant, no one has yet done justice to the tireless life of the cricket…
Bruce, I raise the water-bottle to you. More power to your knees!
[Essay Friday] no.5
This week’s essay is by Charles Dickens. We all know him as a great writer. And as a great social campaigner. This essay shows another side to his writing. Another side to man himself. It is also a great window into the mindset of the Victorian era.
It is his take on the Noble Savage.
The noble savage was how Europeans saw the indigenous people they encountered in the America and Africa. People uncorrupted by civilization, living in a natural state. Made noble by the virtue of their ignorance. - “How can he do wrong, if he doesn’t know what he is doing?” - Basically an elitist view of people they considered to be not as intelligent as them.
Charles Dickens rejected this flawed concept but in doing so exposes his own underlying prejudices.
The Noble Savage
Charles Dickens (1853)
TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage - cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
Yet it is extraordinary to observe how some people will talk about him, as they talk about the good old times; how they will regret his disappearance, in the course of this world's development, from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity; how, even with the evidence of himself before them, they will either be determined to believe, or will suffer themselves to be persuaded into believing, that he is something which their five senses tell them he is not.
There was Mr. Catlin, some few years ago, with his Ojibbeway Indians. Mr. Catlin was an energetic, earnest man, who had lived among more tribes of Indians than I need reckon up here, and who had written a picturesque and glowing book about them. With his party of Indians squatting and spitting on the table before him, or dancing their miserable jigs after their own dreary manner, he called, in all good faith, upon his civilised audience to take notice of their symmetry and grace, their perfect limbs, and the exquisite expression of their pantomime; and his civilised audience, in all good faith, complied and admired. Whereas, as mere animals, they were wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed; and as men and women possessing any power of truthful dramatic expression by means of action, they were no better than the chorus at an Italian Opera in England - and would have been worse if such a thing were possible.
Mine are no new views of the noble savage. The greatest writers on natural history found him out long ago. BUFFON knew what he was, and showed why he is the sulky tyrant that he is to his women, and how it happens (Heaven be praised!) that his race is spare in numbers. For evidence of the quality of his moral nature, pass himself for a moment and refer to his 'faithful dog.' Has he ever improved a dog, or attached a dog, since his nobility first ran wild in woods, and was brought down (at a very long shot) by POPE? Or does the animal that is the friend of man, always degenerate in his low society?
It is not the miserable nature of the noble savage that is the new thing; it is the whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the affecting to regret him, and the drawing of any comparison of advantage between the blemishes of civilisation and the tenor of his swinish life. There may have been a change now and then in those diseased absurdities, but there is none in him.
Think of the Bushmen. Think of the two men and the two women who have been exhibited about England for some years. Are the majority of persons - who remember the horrid little leader of that party in his festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand, and his cry of 'Qu-u-u-u-aaa!' (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting I have no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment when he counterfeited the death of some creature he had shot, by laying his head on his hand and shaking his left leg - at which time I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him - I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.
There is at present a party of Zulu Kaffirs exhibiting at the St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, London. These noble savages are represented in a most agreeable manner; they are seen in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great beauty, and they are described in a very sensible and unpretending lecture, delivered with a modesty which is quite a pattern to all similar exponents. Though extremely ugly, they are much better shaped than such of their predecessors as I have referred to; and they are rather picturesque to the eye, though far from odoriferous to the nose. What a visitor left to his own interpretings and imaginings might suppose these noblemen to be about, when they give vent to that pantomimic expression which is quite settled to be the natural gift of the noble savage, I cannot possibly conceive; for it is so much too luminous for my personal civilisation that it conveys no idea to my mind beyond a general stamping, ramping, and raving, remarkable (as everything in savage life is) for its dire uniformity. But let us - with the interpreter's assistance, of which I for one stand so much in need - see what the noble savage does in Zulu Kaffirland.
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by his relations and friends, the moment a grey hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of extermination - which is the best thing I know of him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of any kind, sort, or description; and his 'mission' may be summed up as simply diabolical.
The ceremonies with which he faintly diversifies his life are, of course, of a kindred nature. If he wants a wife he appears before the kennel of the gentleman whom he has selected for his father-in- law, attended by a party of male friends of a very strong flavour, who screech and whistle and stamp an offer of so many cows for the young lady's hand. The chosen father-in-law - also supported by a high-flavoured party of male friends - screeches, whistles, and yells (being seated on the ground, he can't stamp) that there never was such a daughter in the market as his daughter, and that he must have six more cows. The son-in-law and his select circle of backers screech, whistle, stamp, and yell in reply, that they will give three more cows. The father-in-law (an old deluder, overpaid at the beginning) accepts four, and rises to bind the bargain. The whole party, the young lady included, then falling into epileptic convulsions, and screeching, whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, and his friends make demoniacal leaps at him by way of congratulation.
When the noble savage finds himself a little unwell, and mentions the circumstance to his friends, it is immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A learned personage, called an Imyanger or Witch Doctor, is immediately sent for to Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of the kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a grizzly bear, appears, and administers a dance of a most terrific nature, during the exhibition of which remedy he incessantly gnashes his teeth, and howls:- 'I am the original physician to Nooker the Umtargartie. Yow yow yow! No connexion with any other establishment. Till till till! All other Umtargarties are feigned Umtargarties, Boroo Boroo! but I perceive here a genuine and real Umtargartie, Hoosh Hoosh Hoosh! in whose blood I, the original Imyanger and Nookerer, Blizzerum Boo! will wash these bear's claws of mine. O yow yow yow!' All this time the learned physician is looking out among the attentive faces for some unfortunate man who owes him a cow, or who has given him any small offence, or against whom, without offence, he has conceived a spite. Him he never fails to Nooker as the Umtargartie, and he is instantly killed. In the absence of such an individual, the usual practice is to Nooker the quietest and most gentlemanly person in company. But the nookering is invariably followed on the spot by the butchering.
Some of the noble savages in whom Mr. Catlin was so strongly interested, and the diminution of whose numbers, by rum and smallpox, greatly affected him, had a custom not unlike this, though much more appalling and disgusting in its odious details.
The women being at work in the fields, hoeing the Indian corn, and the noble savage being asleep in the shade, the chief has sometimes the condescension to come forth, and lighten the labour by looking at it. On these occasions, he seats himself in his own savage chair, and is attended by his shield-bearer: who holds over his head a shield of cowhide - in shape like an immense mussel shell - fearfully and wonderfully, after the manner of a theatrical supernumerary. But lest the great man should forget his greatness in the contemplation of the humble works of agriculture, there suddenly rushes in a poet, retained for the purpose, called a Praiser. This literary gentleman wears a leopard's head over his own, and a dress of tigers' tails; he has the appearance of having come express on his hind legs from the Zoological Gardens; and he incontinently strikes up the chief's praises, plunging and tearing all the while. There is a frantic wickedness in this brute's manner of worrying the air, and gnashing out, 'O what a delightful chief he is! O what a delicious quantity of blood he sheds! O how majestically he laps it up! O how charmingly cruel he is! O how he tears the flesh of his enemies and crunches the bones! O how like the tiger and the leopard and the wolf and the bear he is! O, row row row row, how fond I am of him!' which might tempt the Society of Friends to charge at a hand-gallop into the Swartz-Kop location and exterminate the whole kraal.
When war is afoot among the noble savages - which is always - the chief holds a council to ascertain whether it is the opinion of his brothers and friends in general that the enemy shall be exterminated. On this occasion, after the performance of an Umsebeuza, or war song, - which is exactly like all the other songs, - the chief makes a speech to his brothers and friends, arranged in single file. No particular order is observed during the delivery of this address, but every gentleman who finds himself excited by the subject, instead of crying 'Hear, hear!' as is the custom with us, darts from the rank and tramples out the life, or crushes the skull, or mashes the face, or scoops out the eyes, or breaks the limbs, or performs a whirlwind of atrocities on the body, of an imaginary enemy. Several gentlemen becoming thus excited at once, and pounding away without the least regard to the orator, that illustrious person is rather in the position of an orator in an Irish House of Commons. But, several of these scenes of savage life bear a strong generic resemblance to an Irish election, and I think would be extremely well received and understood at Cork.
In all these ceremonies the noble savage holds forth to the utmost possible extent about himself; from which (to turn him to some civilised account) we may learn, I think, that as egotism is one of the most offensive and contemptible littlenesses a civilised man can exhibit, so it is really incompatible with the interchange of ideas; inasmuch as if we all talked about ourselves we should soon have no listeners, and must be all yelling and screeching at once on our own separate accounts: making society hideous. It is my opinion that if we retained in us anything of the noble savage, we could not get rid of it too soon. But the fact is clearly otherwise. Upon the wife and dowry question, substituting coin for cows, we have assuredly nothing of the Zulu Kaffir left. The endurance of despotism is one great distinguishing mark of a savage always. The improving world has quite got the better of that too. In like manner, Paris is a civilised city, and the Theatre Francais a highly civilised theatre; and we shall never hear, and never have heard in these later days (of course) of the Praiser THERE. No, no, civilised poets have better work to do. As to Nookering Umtargarties, there are no pretended Umtargarties in Europe, and no European powers to Nooker them; that would be mere spydom, subordination, small malice, superstition, and false pretence. And as to private Umtargarties, are we not in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-three, with spirits rapping at our doors?
To conclude as I began. My position is, that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility, nonsense.
We have no greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.
It is his take on the Noble Savage.
The noble savage was how Europeans saw the indigenous people they encountered in the America and Africa. People uncorrupted by civilization, living in a natural state. Made noble by the virtue of their ignorance. - “How can he do wrong, if he doesn’t know what he is doing?” - Basically an elitist view of people they considered to be not as intelligent as them.
Charles Dickens rejected this flawed concept but in doing so exposes his own underlying prejudices.
The Noble Savage
Charles Dickens (1853)
TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage - cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
Yet it is extraordinary to observe how some people will talk about him, as they talk about the good old times; how they will regret his disappearance, in the course of this world's development, from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity; how, even with the evidence of himself before them, they will either be determined to believe, or will suffer themselves to be persuaded into believing, that he is something which their five senses tell them he is not.
There was Mr. Catlin, some few years ago, with his Ojibbeway Indians. Mr. Catlin was an energetic, earnest man, who had lived among more tribes of Indians than I need reckon up here, and who had written a picturesque and glowing book about them. With his party of Indians squatting and spitting on the table before him, or dancing their miserable jigs after their own dreary manner, he called, in all good faith, upon his civilised audience to take notice of their symmetry and grace, their perfect limbs, and the exquisite expression of their pantomime; and his civilised audience, in all good faith, complied and admired. Whereas, as mere animals, they were wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed; and as men and women possessing any power of truthful dramatic expression by means of action, they were no better than the chorus at an Italian Opera in England - and would have been worse if such a thing were possible.
Mine are no new views of the noble savage. The greatest writers on natural history found him out long ago. BUFFON knew what he was, and showed why he is the sulky tyrant that he is to his women, and how it happens (Heaven be praised!) that his race is spare in numbers. For evidence of the quality of his moral nature, pass himself for a moment and refer to his 'faithful dog.' Has he ever improved a dog, or attached a dog, since his nobility first ran wild in woods, and was brought down (at a very long shot) by POPE? Or does the animal that is the friend of man, always degenerate in his low society?
It is not the miserable nature of the noble savage that is the new thing; it is the whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the affecting to regret him, and the drawing of any comparison of advantage between the blemishes of civilisation and the tenor of his swinish life. There may have been a change now and then in those diseased absurdities, but there is none in him.
Think of the Bushmen. Think of the two men and the two women who have been exhibited about England for some years. Are the majority of persons - who remember the horrid little leader of that party in his festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand, and his cry of 'Qu-u-u-u-aaa!' (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting I have no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment when he counterfeited the death of some creature he had shot, by laying his head on his hand and shaking his left leg - at which time I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him - I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.
There is at present a party of Zulu Kaffirs exhibiting at the St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, London. These noble savages are represented in a most agreeable manner; they are seen in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great beauty, and they are described in a very sensible and unpretending lecture, delivered with a modesty which is quite a pattern to all similar exponents. Though extremely ugly, they are much better shaped than such of their predecessors as I have referred to; and they are rather picturesque to the eye, though far from odoriferous to the nose. What a visitor left to his own interpretings and imaginings might suppose these noblemen to be about, when they give vent to that pantomimic expression which is quite settled to be the natural gift of the noble savage, I cannot possibly conceive; for it is so much too luminous for my personal civilisation that it conveys no idea to my mind beyond a general stamping, ramping, and raving, remarkable (as everything in savage life is) for its dire uniformity. But let us - with the interpreter's assistance, of which I for one stand so much in need - see what the noble savage does in Zulu Kaffirland.
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by his relations and friends, the moment a grey hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of extermination - which is the best thing I know of him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of any kind, sort, or description; and his 'mission' may be summed up as simply diabolical.
The ceremonies with which he faintly diversifies his life are, of course, of a kindred nature. If he wants a wife he appears before the kennel of the gentleman whom he has selected for his father-in- law, attended by a party of male friends of a very strong flavour, who screech and whistle and stamp an offer of so many cows for the young lady's hand. The chosen father-in-law - also supported by a high-flavoured party of male friends - screeches, whistles, and yells (being seated on the ground, he can't stamp) that there never was such a daughter in the market as his daughter, and that he must have six more cows. The son-in-law and his select circle of backers screech, whistle, stamp, and yell in reply, that they will give three more cows. The father-in-law (an old deluder, overpaid at the beginning) accepts four, and rises to bind the bargain. The whole party, the young lady included, then falling into epileptic convulsions, and screeching, whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, and his friends make demoniacal leaps at him by way of congratulation.
When the noble savage finds himself a little unwell, and mentions the circumstance to his friends, it is immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A learned personage, called an Imyanger or Witch Doctor, is immediately sent for to Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of the kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a grizzly bear, appears, and administers a dance of a most terrific nature, during the exhibition of which remedy he incessantly gnashes his teeth, and howls:- 'I am the original physician to Nooker the Umtargartie. Yow yow yow! No connexion with any other establishment. Till till till! All other Umtargarties are feigned Umtargarties, Boroo Boroo! but I perceive here a genuine and real Umtargartie, Hoosh Hoosh Hoosh! in whose blood I, the original Imyanger and Nookerer, Blizzerum Boo! will wash these bear's claws of mine. O yow yow yow!' All this time the learned physician is looking out among the attentive faces for some unfortunate man who owes him a cow, or who has given him any small offence, or against whom, without offence, he has conceived a spite. Him he never fails to Nooker as the Umtargartie, and he is instantly killed. In the absence of such an individual, the usual practice is to Nooker the quietest and most gentlemanly person in company. But the nookering is invariably followed on the spot by the butchering.
Some of the noble savages in whom Mr. Catlin was so strongly interested, and the diminution of whose numbers, by rum and smallpox, greatly affected him, had a custom not unlike this, though much more appalling and disgusting in its odious details.
The women being at work in the fields, hoeing the Indian corn, and the noble savage being asleep in the shade, the chief has sometimes the condescension to come forth, and lighten the labour by looking at it. On these occasions, he seats himself in his own savage chair, and is attended by his shield-bearer: who holds over his head a shield of cowhide - in shape like an immense mussel shell - fearfully and wonderfully, after the manner of a theatrical supernumerary. But lest the great man should forget his greatness in the contemplation of the humble works of agriculture, there suddenly rushes in a poet, retained for the purpose, called a Praiser. This literary gentleman wears a leopard's head over his own, and a dress of tigers' tails; he has the appearance of having come express on his hind legs from the Zoological Gardens; and he incontinently strikes up the chief's praises, plunging and tearing all the while. There is a frantic wickedness in this brute's manner of worrying the air, and gnashing out, 'O what a delightful chief he is! O what a delicious quantity of blood he sheds! O how majestically he laps it up! O how charmingly cruel he is! O how he tears the flesh of his enemies and crunches the bones! O how like the tiger and the leopard and the wolf and the bear he is! O, row row row row, how fond I am of him!' which might tempt the Society of Friends to charge at a hand-gallop into the Swartz-Kop location and exterminate the whole kraal.
When war is afoot among the noble savages - which is always - the chief holds a council to ascertain whether it is the opinion of his brothers and friends in general that the enemy shall be exterminated. On this occasion, after the performance of an Umsebeuza, or war song, - which is exactly like all the other songs, - the chief makes a speech to his brothers and friends, arranged in single file. No particular order is observed during the delivery of this address, but every gentleman who finds himself excited by the subject, instead of crying 'Hear, hear!' as is the custom with us, darts from the rank and tramples out the life, or crushes the skull, or mashes the face, or scoops out the eyes, or breaks the limbs, or performs a whirlwind of atrocities on the body, of an imaginary enemy. Several gentlemen becoming thus excited at once, and pounding away without the least regard to the orator, that illustrious person is rather in the position of an orator in an Irish House of Commons. But, several of these scenes of savage life bear a strong generic resemblance to an Irish election, and I think would be extremely well received and understood at Cork.
In all these ceremonies the noble savage holds forth to the utmost possible extent about himself; from which (to turn him to some civilised account) we may learn, I think, that as egotism is one of the most offensive and contemptible littlenesses a civilised man can exhibit, so it is really incompatible with the interchange of ideas; inasmuch as if we all talked about ourselves we should soon have no listeners, and must be all yelling and screeching at once on our own separate accounts: making society hideous. It is my opinion that if we retained in us anything of the noble savage, we could not get rid of it too soon. But the fact is clearly otherwise. Upon the wife and dowry question, substituting coin for cows, we have assuredly nothing of the Zulu Kaffir left. The endurance of despotism is one great distinguishing mark of a savage always. The improving world has quite got the better of that too. In like manner, Paris is a civilised city, and the Theatre Francais a highly civilised theatre; and we shall never hear, and never have heard in these later days (of course) of the Praiser THERE. No, no, civilised poets have better work to do. As to Nookering Umtargarties, there are no pretended Umtargarties in Europe, and no European powers to Nooker them; that would be mere spydom, subordination, small malice, superstition, and false pretence. And as to private Umtargarties, are we not in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-three, with spirits rapping at our doors?
To conclude as I began. My position is, that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility, nonsense.
We have no greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.
[Essay Friday] no.4
The New Statesman is a British political magazine founded by George Bernard Shaw.
Once a month they publish the New Statesman essay. It is usually written by some notable thinker or author. This is Naomi Klein and her take on how Nike, Gap, McDonald's and their like have turned the whole world into a marketing opportunity.
What she says is true, not because selling things is bad but because great selling has become more important than making great things.
The Tyranny of Brands
Naomi Klein [2001]
What are we to make of the extraordinary scenes in Seattle that brought the 20th century to a close? A New York Times reporter observed that this vibrant mass movement opposed to unregulated globalisation had materialised "seemingly overnight". On television, the reliable experts who explain everything couldn't sort out whether the protesters were right-wing nationalists or Marxist globalists. Even the American left seemed surprised to learn that, contrary to previous reports, it did, in fact, still exist.
Despite the seemingly unconnected causes that converged in Seattle that week, there was a common target: the multinational corporation in general and McDonald's, The Gap, Microsoft and Starbucks in particular. And what has given the movement against them a new energy and a new urgency is a profound shift in corporate priorities. That shift centres on the idea of corporate branding and the quest to build the most powerful brand image. It will, I believe, be one of the issues that shapes the first decade of the 21st century.
Branding seems like a fairly innocuous idea. It is slapping a logo on a product and saying it's the best. And when brands first emerged, that was all it was. At the start of the industrial revolution, the market was flooded with nearly identical mass-produced products. Along came Aunt Jemima and Quaker Oats with their happy comforting logos to say: our mass-produced product is of the highest quality.
But the role of branding has been changing, particularly in the past fifteen years: rather than serving as a guarantee of value on a product, the brand itself has increasingly become the product, a free-standing idea pasted on to innumerable surfaces. The actual product bearing the brand-name has become a medium, like radio or a billboard, to transmit the real message. The message is: It's Nike. It's Disney. It's Microsoft. It's Diesel. It's Caterpillar. The late graphic designer, Tibor Kalman, said that a brand used to be a mark of quality; now, it is "a stylistic badge of courage".
This shift in the role of the brand is related to a new corporate consensus, which emerged in the late 1980s. It held that corporations were too bloated: they were oversized, they owned too much, they employed too many people, they were weighed down with too many things. Where once the primary concern of every corporation was the production of goods, now production itself - running one's own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees - began to seem like a clunky liability.
The Nikes and Microsofts, and later the Tommy Hilfigers and Intels, made the bold claim that production was only an incidental part of their operations. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but ideas and images for their brands, and their real work lay not in manufacturing, but in building up their brands. Savvy ad agencies began to think of themselves as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the lifestyle, the attitude. Out of this heady time, we learnt that Nike was about "Sport", not shoes; Microsoft about "Communications", not software; Starbucks about "Community", not coffee; Virgin about a "Fun-loving Attitude", not an airline, a record label, a cola, a bridal gown line, a train - or any of the other brand extensions the company has launched. My favourite is Diesel, whose chief executive says he has "created a movement", not a line of clothes.
The formula for these brand-driven companies is pretty much the same: get rid of your unionised factories in the west and buy your products from Asian or Central American contractors and sub-contractors. Then, take the money you save and spend it on branding - on advertising, superstores, sponsorships. Based on the overwhelming success of this formula, virtue in the corporate world has become a sort of race towards weightlessness: the companies which own the least, keep the fewest employees on the payroll and produce the coolest ideas (as opposed to products) win the race.
I have come to think of such companies as transcendent brands because their goal is to escape almost all that is earthbound and to become pure idea, like a spirit ascending. This is a goal that is available not only to companies, but also to people. We have human brands as well as company brands and they, too, are cutting ties with what might be broadly described as "doing things". Bill Gates has quit as chief executive of Microsoft so that he can tend to his true mission: being Bill Gates. Michael Jordan has stopped playing basketball and has become a pure brand-identity machine. And not only does he now have his own "Jordan" superstores, he is the first celebrity endorser to get other celebrities endorsing his label. Michael Jordan is no longer an athlete, he is an attitude.
It wasn't until the Internet stock explosion that the extent of this shift became apparent. It marks the complete triumph of branding: the ascent of companies, most of which have yet to make a profit, that exist almost purely as ideas of themselves, leaving no real-world trace at all. What they are selling to Wall Street is unadulterated brand.
This shift to branding explains many of the most fundamental economic and cultural shifts of the past decade. Power, for a brand-driven company, is attained not by collecting assets per se, but by projecting one's brand idea on to as many surfaces of the culture as possible: the wall of a college, a billboard the size of a skyscraper, an ad campaign that waxes philosophic about the humane future of our global village. Where a previous generation of corporate giants used drills, hammers and cranes to build their empires, these companies need an endless parade of new ideas for brand extensions, continuously rejuvenated imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate their brand's idea of itself.
In this way, these corporate phantoms become real. If we think of a brand-driven company as an ever-expanding balloon, then public space, new political ideas and avant-garde imagery are the gases that inflate it: it needs to consume cultural space in order to stave off its own deflation. This is a major change. Marketing, in the classic sense, is about association: beautiful girl drinks soda, uses shampoo, drives car; soda/shampoo/car become associated with our aspiration to be beautiful like her.
Branding mania has changed all that: association is no longer good enough. The goal now is for the brands to animate their marketing identities, to become real-world, living manifestations of their myths. Brands are about "meaning", not product attributes. So companies provide their consumers with opportunities not merely to shop but to experience fully the meaning of their brand. The brand-name superstore, for instance, stands as a full expression of the brand's lifestyle in miniature. Many of these stores are so palatial, so interactive, so hi-tech that they lose money hand over fist. But that doesn't mean they aren't working. Their real goal, since they are never the company's only source of sales, is to act as a 3D manifestation of the brand, so grand that their rather mundane products will carry that grandeur with them like a homing device.
But this is only the beginning. Nike, which used just to sponsor athletes, has taken to buying sporting events outright. Disney, which through its movies and theme parks has sold a bygone version of small-town America, now owns and operates its very own small town, Celebration Florida.
In these branded creations, we see the building blocks of a fully privatised social and cultural infrastructure. These companies are stretching the fabric of their brands in so many directions that they are transformed into tent-like enclosures large enough to house any number of core activities, from shopping to entertainment to holidays. This is the true meaning of a lifestyle brand: living your life inside a brand. Brand-based companies are no longer satisfied with having a fling with their consumers, they want to move in together.
These companies are forever on the prowl for new and creative ways to build and strengthen their brand images. This thirsty quest for meaning and virgin space takes its toll on public institutions such as schools, where, in North America, corporate interests are transforming education, seeking not only to advertise in cafeterias and washrooms but to make brands the uncritical subjects of study. Maths textbooks urge students to calculate the circumference of an Oreo cookie, Channel One broadcasts Burger King ads into 12,000 US schools and a student from Georgia was suspended last year for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on his school's official "Coke Day".
Another effect is to restrict choice. Brands, at the core, are selfish creatures, driven by the need to eliminate competitors and create self-enclosed branded systems. So Reebok, once it lands a deal to sponsor campus athletics, wants to exclude not only competing brands but also, as was the case at the University of Wisconsin, all disparaging remarks made about Reebok by officials of the university. Such "non-disparagement" clauses are standard in campus sponsorship deals. Disney, after it bought ABC, decided that it would rather ABC News no longer covered Disney's scandals, and focused instead on promoting its movies in various feats of "synergy". We can look forward to more of the same, no doubt, from this month's merger of AOL and Time Warner.
There is another, more tangible, effect of the shift from products to brands: the devaluation of production itself. The belief that economic success lies in branding - production is a distant second - is changing the face of global employment. Building a superbrand is extraordinarily costly. A brand needs constant managing, tending, replenishing, stretching. The necessity for lavish spending on marketing creates intense resistance to investment in production facilities and labour. Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 per cent mark-up from the cost of factory production to the retail price have spent the decade scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the mark-up is closer to 400 per cent.
That's where the developing world's "free-trade zones" (free, that is, of taxes and wage or other labour regulations) come in. In Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere, the export-processing zones (as these areas are also called) are emerging as leading producers of garments, toys, shoes, electronics and cars. There are almost 1,000 zones around the world, spread through 70 countries and employing approximately 27 million workers.
Inside the gates of the zones, workers assemble the finished products of our branded world: Nike running shoes, Gap pyjamas, IBM computer screens, Old Navy jeans, or VW Bugs. Yet the zones appear to be the only places left on earth where the superbrands actually keep a low profile. Indeed, they are positively demure. Their names and logos aren't splashed on the facades of the factories. In fact, where a particular branded product is made is often kept secret. And unlike in the brand-segregated superstores, competing labels are often produced side by side in the same factories; glued by the same workers, stitched and soldered on the same machines.
Regardless of where the zones are located, the hours will be long - 14-hour days in Sri Lanka, 12 in Indonesia, 16 in southern China, 12 in the Philippines. The workers are mostly young women; the management, military-style; the wages, sub-subsistence; the work, low-skill and tedious. The factories are owned by contractors or subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong; the contractors meet orders for companies based in the US, Britain, Japan, Germany and Canada.
These pockets of pure industry are cloaked in a haze of transience: the contracts come and go with little notice (in Guatemala the factories are called "swallows" because they might take flight at any time); the workers are predominantly migrants, far from home with little connection to the place in which they find themselves; the work itself is short-term, often not renewed. Many factory workers in the Philippines are hired through an employment agency inside the zone walls which collects their cheques and takes a cut - a temp agency for factory workers, in other words.
We tend to think that globalisation moves jobs from one country to another. But in a brand-based economy, the value of the work itself moves to a drastically degraded rung of the corporate hierarchy. What is being abandoned in the relentless quest to reduce the costs of production is the Fordist principle: that labour not only creates products but, by paying workers a decent wage, creates the consumer market for that product and others like it. In Indonesia, the young women factory workers making Nike shoes and Gap jeans live a notch above famine victims and landless peasants. And though it may seem indecent to compare them with the relatively privileged retail workers in the western shopping malls, the same pattern is at work. In developed countries, too, jobs are increasingly temporary, part-time, contract-based. Just as factory jobs that once supported families in the west have been reconfigured in the developing world as jobs for teenagers, so have the brand-name clothing companies and restaurant chains - Wal-Mart, Starbucks, The Gap - pioneered the idea that fast-food and retail-sector jobs are disposable and unfit for adults.
And so we are left with an odd duality: brands have never been more omnipresent in our lives, nor have they ever generated as much wealth. All around us we see these new branded creations replacing our cultural institutions and our public spaces. And yet, at the same time, these same companies are oddly absent from our lives in the most immediate of ways: as steady employers. Multinationals that once identified strongly with their role as engines of job growth - and used it as leverage to extract all kinds of government support - now prefer to identify themselves as engines of "economic growth".
The extent of this shift cannot be overstated. Among the total number of working-age adults in the USA, Canada and the UK, those with full-time, permanent jobs working for someone other than themselves are in the minority. Temps, part-timers, the unemployed and those who have opted out of the labour force entirely - some because they don't want to work but many more because they have given up looking for jobs - now make up more than half of the working-age population.
We know that this formula reaps record profits in the short term. It may, however, prove to be a strategic miscalculation. When corporations are perceived as functioning vehicles of wealth distribution - trickling down jobs and tax revenue - they get deep civic loyalty in return. In exchange for steady pay cheques and stable communities, citizens attach themselves to the priorities and fortunes of the local corporate sector and don't ask too many questions about, say, water pollution. In other words, dependable job creation served as a kind of corporate suit of armour, shielding companies from the wrath that might otherwise have been directed their way. Only now, without realising it, brand-driven multinationals have gradually been shedding that armour: first came their inability to respect public space, next came their betrayal of the central promise of the information age - the promise of increased choice - and, finally, they severed the bond between employer and employee. They may be big, they may be rich, but suddenly there is nothing to protect them from public rage.
And that is the true significance of Seattle. All around us we are witnessing the early expressions of this anger, of the first, often crudely constructed lines of defence against the rule of the brands. We have, for example, the growth of "culture-jamming" which adapts a corporation's own advertising to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. So, for example, Apple Computers' "Think Different" campaign acquires a photograph of Stalin with the slogan "Think Really Different". The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that bought the billboard being altered, or figuratively, because whenever anyone messes with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful.
I've never been thoroughly convinced by the powers of culture-jamming: in a war fought strictly with images, surely the one with the most images will win? But the principles of culture-jamming - using the power of brand-names against themselves in a kind of brand boomerang - are being imported to much more direct and immediate political struggles. People are beginning to fight the big global economic battles by focusing on one or two brand-name corporations and turning them into large-scale political metaphors. They are having more luck with this strategy than they had with decades of fighting these battles on a policy level with governments.
Think of the campaigns that trace the journeys of brand-name goods back to their unbranded points of origin: Nike sneakers back to the sweatshops of Vietnam; Starbucks lattes back to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala and now East Timor; and virtually every ingredient of a McDonald's hamburger dissected into its bio-engineered beginnings.
There is a clear difference between these campaigns and the corporate boycotts of the past, whether against Nestle for its baby formula, or against Union Carbide for its infamous toxic accident in Bhopal, India. In those cases, activists had targeted a specific corporation engaged in an anomalously harmful practice. Today's anti-corporate campaigns simply piggyback on the high profile of their brand-name targets as a tactical means of highlighting difficult, even arcane issues. The companies being targeted - Disney, Mattel, The Gap and so on - may not always be the worst offenders, but they do tend to be the ones who flash their logos in bright lights on the global marquee. It may seem unfair to single such companies out for their "success", as some have argued, but it is precisely this success which is becoming an odd sort of liability.
Take McDonald's. In opening more than 23,000 outlets worldwide, the company has done more than spread the gospel of fast, uniform food. It has also, inadvertently, become equated in the public imagination with the "McJob", "McDonaldisation" and "McWorld". So when activists build a movement around McDonald's, as they did around the McLibel Trial, they are not really going after a fast-food chain, but harnessing the branding might behind the chain as a way to crack open a discussion on the otherwise impenetrable global economy: about labour, the environment and cultural imperialism.
Many superbrands are feeling the backlash. With typical understatement, Shell Oil's chief executive, Mark Moody, states: "Previously, if you went to your golf club or church and said, 'I work for Shell', you'd get a warm glow. In some parts of the world, that has changed a bit." That change flowed directly from the anti- corporate campaign launched against Shell after the hanging of the Nigerian author and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was fighting to get Shell to clean up the environmental devastation left behind when it pumped oil out of the Niger Delta. Had the campaigners focused on the dictatorship alone, the death of the activist could well have been yet another anonymous atrocity in Africa. But because they dared to name names - to name Shell as the economic interest behind the violence - it became an instantly globalised campaign, with protests at petrol stations around the world. The brand was the campaign's best asset. Something similar happened in the campaign against the brutal regime in Burma; almost all the major brand-name companies have now pulled out. The campaign against Monsanto - which has abandoned its plans for "terminator" seeds, genetically altered so as to yield only one crop - worked because the pressure was put on the heavily branded supermarkets and packaged food companies.
At the heart of this shift in focus is the recognition that corporations are much more than purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time, the driving forces behind bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. By now, we've all heard the statistics: how corporations such as Shell and Wal-Mart bask in budgets bigger than the gross domestic products of most nations; how, of the top 100 economies, 51 are multinationals and only 49 are countries. So, although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as "consumer boycotts", that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular education tools.
I doubt this current surge of anti-corporate activism would have been possible without the mania for branding. Branding, as we have seen, has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and - through the quest to turn brands into media providers, art producers, town squares and social philosophers - transformed it into something much more intimate. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become to the brand boomerang. If brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and identity, then, when they do wrong, their crimes are not easily dismissed as another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit these branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. And this connection is a volatile one, akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.
Branding, as I have stated, is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonishing rapidity but it is full of hot air. It shouldn't be surprising that this formula has bred armies of pin-wielding critics, anxious to pop the corporate balloon and watch it fall to the ground.
Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates's face, behind the shattering of a McDonald's window in Paris, behind the protests in Seattle, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track - a bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands' cultural looting of public and mental spaces.
All around the world, activists are making liberal use of the tool that has so thoroughly captured the imagination of the corporate world: branding. Brand image, the source of so much corporate wealth, is also, it turns out, the corporate Achilles' heel.
Once a month they publish the New Statesman essay. It is usually written by some notable thinker or author. This is Naomi Klein and her take on how Nike, Gap, McDonald's and their like have turned the whole world into a marketing opportunity.
What she says is true, not because selling things is bad but because great selling has become more important than making great things.
The Tyranny of Brands
Naomi Klein [2001]
What are we to make of the extraordinary scenes in Seattle that brought the 20th century to a close? A New York Times reporter observed that this vibrant mass movement opposed to unregulated globalisation had materialised "seemingly overnight". On television, the reliable experts who explain everything couldn't sort out whether the protesters were right-wing nationalists or Marxist globalists. Even the American left seemed surprised to learn that, contrary to previous reports, it did, in fact, still exist.
Despite the seemingly unconnected causes that converged in Seattle that week, there was a common target: the multinational corporation in general and McDonald's, The Gap, Microsoft and Starbucks in particular. And what has given the movement against them a new energy and a new urgency is a profound shift in corporate priorities. That shift centres on the idea of corporate branding and the quest to build the most powerful brand image. It will, I believe, be one of the issues that shapes the first decade of the 21st century.
Branding seems like a fairly innocuous idea. It is slapping a logo on a product and saying it's the best. And when brands first emerged, that was all it was. At the start of the industrial revolution, the market was flooded with nearly identical mass-produced products. Along came Aunt Jemima and Quaker Oats with their happy comforting logos to say: our mass-produced product is of the highest quality.
But the role of branding has been changing, particularly in the past fifteen years: rather than serving as a guarantee of value on a product, the brand itself has increasingly become the product, a free-standing idea pasted on to innumerable surfaces. The actual product bearing the brand-name has become a medium, like radio or a billboard, to transmit the real message. The message is: It's Nike. It's Disney. It's Microsoft. It's Diesel. It's Caterpillar. The late graphic designer, Tibor Kalman, said that a brand used to be a mark of quality; now, it is "a stylistic badge of courage".
This shift in the role of the brand is related to a new corporate consensus, which emerged in the late 1980s. It held that corporations were too bloated: they were oversized, they owned too much, they employed too many people, they were weighed down with too many things. Where once the primary concern of every corporation was the production of goods, now production itself - running one's own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees - began to seem like a clunky liability.
The Nikes and Microsofts, and later the Tommy Hilfigers and Intels, made the bold claim that production was only an incidental part of their operations. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but ideas and images for their brands, and their real work lay not in manufacturing, but in building up their brands. Savvy ad agencies began to think of themselves as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the lifestyle, the attitude. Out of this heady time, we learnt that Nike was about "Sport", not shoes; Microsoft about "Communications", not software; Starbucks about "Community", not coffee; Virgin about a "Fun-loving Attitude", not an airline, a record label, a cola, a bridal gown line, a train - or any of the other brand extensions the company has launched. My favourite is Diesel, whose chief executive says he has "created a movement", not a line of clothes.
The formula for these brand-driven companies is pretty much the same: get rid of your unionised factories in the west and buy your products from Asian or Central American contractors and sub-contractors. Then, take the money you save and spend it on branding - on advertising, superstores, sponsorships. Based on the overwhelming success of this formula, virtue in the corporate world has become a sort of race towards weightlessness: the companies which own the least, keep the fewest employees on the payroll and produce the coolest ideas (as opposed to products) win the race.
I have come to think of such companies as transcendent brands because their goal is to escape almost all that is earthbound and to become pure idea, like a spirit ascending. This is a goal that is available not only to companies, but also to people. We have human brands as well as company brands and they, too, are cutting ties with what might be broadly described as "doing things". Bill Gates has quit as chief executive of Microsoft so that he can tend to his true mission: being Bill Gates. Michael Jordan has stopped playing basketball and has become a pure brand-identity machine. And not only does he now have his own "Jordan" superstores, he is the first celebrity endorser to get other celebrities endorsing his label. Michael Jordan is no longer an athlete, he is an attitude.
It wasn't until the Internet stock explosion that the extent of this shift became apparent. It marks the complete triumph of branding: the ascent of companies, most of which have yet to make a profit, that exist almost purely as ideas of themselves, leaving no real-world trace at all. What they are selling to Wall Street is unadulterated brand.
This shift to branding explains many of the most fundamental economic and cultural shifts of the past decade. Power, for a brand-driven company, is attained not by collecting assets per se, but by projecting one's brand idea on to as many surfaces of the culture as possible: the wall of a college, a billboard the size of a skyscraper, an ad campaign that waxes philosophic about the humane future of our global village. Where a previous generation of corporate giants used drills, hammers and cranes to build their empires, these companies need an endless parade of new ideas for brand extensions, continuously rejuvenated imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate their brand's idea of itself.
In this way, these corporate phantoms become real. If we think of a brand-driven company as an ever-expanding balloon, then public space, new political ideas and avant-garde imagery are the gases that inflate it: it needs to consume cultural space in order to stave off its own deflation. This is a major change. Marketing, in the classic sense, is about association: beautiful girl drinks soda, uses shampoo, drives car; soda/shampoo/car become associated with our aspiration to be beautiful like her.
Branding mania has changed all that: association is no longer good enough. The goal now is for the brands to animate their marketing identities, to become real-world, living manifestations of their myths. Brands are about "meaning", not product attributes. So companies provide their consumers with opportunities not merely to shop but to experience fully the meaning of their brand. The brand-name superstore, for instance, stands as a full expression of the brand's lifestyle in miniature. Many of these stores are so palatial, so interactive, so hi-tech that they lose money hand over fist. But that doesn't mean they aren't working. Their real goal, since they are never the company's only source of sales, is to act as a 3D manifestation of the brand, so grand that their rather mundane products will carry that grandeur with them like a homing device.
But this is only the beginning. Nike, which used just to sponsor athletes, has taken to buying sporting events outright. Disney, which through its movies and theme parks has sold a bygone version of small-town America, now owns and operates its very own small town, Celebration Florida.
In these branded creations, we see the building blocks of a fully privatised social and cultural infrastructure. These companies are stretching the fabric of their brands in so many directions that they are transformed into tent-like enclosures large enough to house any number of core activities, from shopping to entertainment to holidays. This is the true meaning of a lifestyle brand: living your life inside a brand. Brand-based companies are no longer satisfied with having a fling with their consumers, they want to move in together.
These companies are forever on the prowl for new and creative ways to build and strengthen their brand images. This thirsty quest for meaning and virgin space takes its toll on public institutions such as schools, where, in North America, corporate interests are transforming education, seeking not only to advertise in cafeterias and washrooms but to make brands the uncritical subjects of study. Maths textbooks urge students to calculate the circumference of an Oreo cookie, Channel One broadcasts Burger King ads into 12,000 US schools and a student from Georgia was suspended last year for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on his school's official "Coke Day".
Another effect is to restrict choice. Brands, at the core, are selfish creatures, driven by the need to eliminate competitors and create self-enclosed branded systems. So Reebok, once it lands a deal to sponsor campus athletics, wants to exclude not only competing brands but also, as was the case at the University of Wisconsin, all disparaging remarks made about Reebok by officials of the university. Such "non-disparagement" clauses are standard in campus sponsorship deals. Disney, after it bought ABC, decided that it would rather ABC News no longer covered Disney's scandals, and focused instead on promoting its movies in various feats of "synergy". We can look forward to more of the same, no doubt, from this month's merger of AOL and Time Warner.
There is another, more tangible, effect of the shift from products to brands: the devaluation of production itself. The belief that economic success lies in branding - production is a distant second - is changing the face of global employment. Building a superbrand is extraordinarily costly. A brand needs constant managing, tending, replenishing, stretching. The necessity for lavish spending on marketing creates intense resistance to investment in production facilities and labour. Companies that were traditionally satisfied with a 100 per cent mark-up from the cost of factory production to the retail price have spent the decade scouring the globe for factories that can make their products so inexpensively that the mark-up is closer to 400 per cent.
That's where the developing world's "free-trade zones" (free, that is, of taxes and wage or other labour regulations) come in. In Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere, the export-processing zones (as these areas are also called) are emerging as leading producers of garments, toys, shoes, electronics and cars. There are almost 1,000 zones around the world, spread through 70 countries and employing approximately 27 million workers.
Inside the gates of the zones, workers assemble the finished products of our branded world: Nike running shoes, Gap pyjamas, IBM computer screens, Old Navy jeans, or VW Bugs. Yet the zones appear to be the only places left on earth where the superbrands actually keep a low profile. Indeed, they are positively demure. Their names and logos aren't splashed on the facades of the factories. In fact, where a particular branded product is made is often kept secret. And unlike in the brand-segregated superstores, competing labels are often produced side by side in the same factories; glued by the same workers, stitched and soldered on the same machines.
Regardless of where the zones are located, the hours will be long - 14-hour days in Sri Lanka, 12 in Indonesia, 16 in southern China, 12 in the Philippines. The workers are mostly young women; the management, military-style; the wages, sub-subsistence; the work, low-skill and tedious. The factories are owned by contractors or subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong; the contractors meet orders for companies based in the US, Britain, Japan, Germany and Canada.
These pockets of pure industry are cloaked in a haze of transience: the contracts come and go with little notice (in Guatemala the factories are called "swallows" because they might take flight at any time); the workers are predominantly migrants, far from home with little connection to the place in which they find themselves; the work itself is short-term, often not renewed. Many factory workers in the Philippines are hired through an employment agency inside the zone walls which collects their cheques and takes a cut - a temp agency for factory workers, in other words.
We tend to think that globalisation moves jobs from one country to another. But in a brand-based economy, the value of the work itself moves to a drastically degraded rung of the corporate hierarchy. What is being abandoned in the relentless quest to reduce the costs of production is the Fordist principle: that labour not only creates products but, by paying workers a decent wage, creates the consumer market for that product and others like it. In Indonesia, the young women factory workers making Nike shoes and Gap jeans live a notch above famine victims and landless peasants. And though it may seem indecent to compare them with the relatively privileged retail workers in the western shopping malls, the same pattern is at work. In developed countries, too, jobs are increasingly temporary, part-time, contract-based. Just as factory jobs that once supported families in the west have been reconfigured in the developing world as jobs for teenagers, so have the brand-name clothing companies and restaurant chains - Wal-Mart, Starbucks, The Gap - pioneered the idea that fast-food and retail-sector jobs are disposable and unfit for adults.
And so we are left with an odd duality: brands have never been more omnipresent in our lives, nor have they ever generated as much wealth. All around us we see these new branded creations replacing our cultural institutions and our public spaces. And yet, at the same time, these same companies are oddly absent from our lives in the most immediate of ways: as steady employers. Multinationals that once identified strongly with their role as engines of job growth - and used it as leverage to extract all kinds of government support - now prefer to identify themselves as engines of "economic growth".
The extent of this shift cannot be overstated. Among the total number of working-age adults in the USA, Canada and the UK, those with full-time, permanent jobs working for someone other than themselves are in the minority. Temps, part-timers, the unemployed and those who have opted out of the labour force entirely - some because they don't want to work but many more because they have given up looking for jobs - now make up more than half of the working-age population.
We know that this formula reaps record profits in the short term. It may, however, prove to be a strategic miscalculation. When corporations are perceived as functioning vehicles of wealth distribution - trickling down jobs and tax revenue - they get deep civic loyalty in return. In exchange for steady pay cheques and stable communities, citizens attach themselves to the priorities and fortunes of the local corporate sector and don't ask too many questions about, say, water pollution. In other words, dependable job creation served as a kind of corporate suit of armour, shielding companies from the wrath that might otherwise have been directed their way. Only now, without realising it, brand-driven multinationals have gradually been shedding that armour: first came their inability to respect public space, next came their betrayal of the central promise of the information age - the promise of increased choice - and, finally, they severed the bond between employer and employee. They may be big, they may be rich, but suddenly there is nothing to protect them from public rage.
And that is the true significance of Seattle. All around us we are witnessing the early expressions of this anger, of the first, often crudely constructed lines of defence against the rule of the brands. We have, for example, the growth of "culture-jamming" which adapts a corporation's own advertising to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. So, for example, Apple Computers' "Think Different" campaign acquires a photograph of Stalin with the slogan "Think Really Different". The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that bought the billboard being altered, or figuratively, because whenever anyone messes with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful.
I've never been thoroughly convinced by the powers of culture-jamming: in a war fought strictly with images, surely the one with the most images will win? But the principles of culture-jamming - using the power of brand-names against themselves in a kind of brand boomerang - are being imported to much more direct and immediate political struggles. People are beginning to fight the big global economic battles by focusing on one or two brand-name corporations and turning them into large-scale political metaphors. They are having more luck with this strategy than they had with decades of fighting these battles on a policy level with governments.
Think of the campaigns that trace the journeys of brand-name goods back to their unbranded points of origin: Nike sneakers back to the sweatshops of Vietnam; Starbucks lattes back to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala and now East Timor; and virtually every ingredient of a McDonald's hamburger dissected into its bio-engineered beginnings.
There is a clear difference between these campaigns and the corporate boycotts of the past, whether against Nestle for its baby formula, or against Union Carbide for its infamous toxic accident in Bhopal, India. In those cases, activists had targeted a specific corporation engaged in an anomalously harmful practice. Today's anti-corporate campaigns simply piggyback on the high profile of their brand-name targets as a tactical means of highlighting difficult, even arcane issues. The companies being targeted - Disney, Mattel, The Gap and so on - may not always be the worst offenders, but they do tend to be the ones who flash their logos in bright lights on the global marquee. It may seem unfair to single such companies out for their "success", as some have argued, but it is precisely this success which is becoming an odd sort of liability.
Take McDonald's. In opening more than 23,000 outlets worldwide, the company has done more than spread the gospel of fast, uniform food. It has also, inadvertently, become equated in the public imagination with the "McJob", "McDonaldisation" and "McWorld". So when activists build a movement around McDonald's, as they did around the McLibel Trial, they are not really going after a fast-food chain, but harnessing the branding might behind the chain as a way to crack open a discussion on the otherwise impenetrable global economy: about labour, the environment and cultural imperialism.
Many superbrands are feeling the backlash. With typical understatement, Shell Oil's chief executive, Mark Moody, states: "Previously, if you went to your golf club or church and said, 'I work for Shell', you'd get a warm glow. In some parts of the world, that has changed a bit." That change flowed directly from the anti- corporate campaign launched against Shell after the hanging of the Nigerian author and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was fighting to get Shell to clean up the environmental devastation left behind when it pumped oil out of the Niger Delta. Had the campaigners focused on the dictatorship alone, the death of the activist could well have been yet another anonymous atrocity in Africa. But because they dared to name names - to name Shell as the economic interest behind the violence - it became an instantly globalised campaign, with protests at petrol stations around the world. The brand was the campaign's best asset. Something similar happened in the campaign against the brutal regime in Burma; almost all the major brand-name companies have now pulled out. The campaign against Monsanto - which has abandoned its plans for "terminator" seeds, genetically altered so as to yield only one crop - worked because the pressure was put on the heavily branded supermarkets and packaged food companies.
At the heart of this shift in focus is the recognition that corporations are much more than purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time, the driving forces behind bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. By now, we've all heard the statistics: how corporations such as Shell and Wal-Mart bask in budgets bigger than the gross domestic products of most nations; how, of the top 100 economies, 51 are multinationals and only 49 are countries. So, although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as "consumer boycotts", that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular education tools.
I doubt this current surge of anti-corporate activism would have been possible without the mania for branding. Branding, as we have seen, has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and - through the quest to turn brands into media providers, art producers, town squares and social philosophers - transformed it into something much more intimate. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become to the brand boomerang. If brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and identity, then, when they do wrong, their crimes are not easily dismissed as another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit these branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. And this connection is a volatile one, akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.
Branding, as I have stated, is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonishing rapidity but it is full of hot air. It shouldn't be surprising that this formula has bred armies of pin-wielding critics, anxious to pop the corporate balloon and watch it fall to the ground.
Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates's face, behind the shattering of a McDonald's window in Paris, behind the protests in Seattle, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track - a bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands' cultural looting of public and mental spaces.
All around the world, activists are making liberal use of the tool that has so thoroughly captured the imagination of the corporate world: branding. Brand image, the source of so much corporate wealth, is also, it turns out, the corporate Achilles' heel.
[Essay Friday] no.3
Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer who did time for fighting against Apartheid. The subject of his awesome book, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.
He also has the honour of being the only nice South African in the song, I never met a nice South African.
In this essay he asks the question: Is Obama the new Mandela?
Obamandela
Breyten Breytenbach [2009]
First it was the voice. It seemed to proceed from a similar hollow in the chest as that of the old man. A voice with coffre. Sounding somewhat sepulchral. Certainly somber. A blue voice. Resonant.
I was listening to Barack Obama, and the tonality, the pitch, the cadences particularly, were reminiscent of the voice of Nelson Mandela. There was a likeness in the diction, too — a hint of cumbersomeness of the tongue. As if they speak neither easily nor for the mere pleasure of making sounds. More remarkably, they both express themselves in full sentences even off the cuff. Sentences you can transcribe and print as is, without having to snip the ums and the aws. As they begin to speak, they both seem to know where each following sentence, covering a thought, is going to end. A saying in Rwanda explains, “If you take your time, you can cook an elephant in the pot.”
Mandela’s voice tends to be higher, and his accent sometimes has an echo. This may be due to bad sound systems in the open air of South Africa.
They speak with emphasis, as if they know the weight of their own minds. The words are seldom original in reference, inventive in imagery, or, for that matter, provocative in thought. They are not riveting speakers, and they try out rhetorical flourishes only timidly, but both tower over their audiences as tribunes. They convey a solemnity of purpose and a kind of urgent, self-evident morality. In a refreshing break with other American public figures, Obama mostly appeared alone before the crowd—not flanked by the usual politburo of sententious sidekicks.
How strange, I thought, that these two men from different continents and more than forty years apart in age could sound so much alike. They move similarly as well. Watch how Mandela, even in old age, used to rock a few dance steps on stage and how Obama, during the endless and fatuous presidential campaign, would skip up to the podium. (For how long do American presidents actually govern? Two of every four years are taken up by stumping.)
They are conscious of their appearance. The shape is trim, the clothes sharp without being exhibitionist. Mandela has an edge with his patterned “Madiba shirts”; Obama favors the severe apparel of American male seriousness, the drab garb of the power bird with just the tie as a tail feather of color. One is tempted to note similarities with other elegant politicians of protest—Maurice Bishop, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Osama bin Laden, Subcomandante Marcos, Robert Sobukwe, Modibo Keita . . . Can there be a correlation between the silhouette and the sense of calling? Mandela and Obama are of the race of kings in the archaic sense, natural leaders who would stand head and shoulders above lackeys and adversaries, radiating resolve and composure. Not for them the vulgar dead-duck strut of a Shoe Bush, the pigeon-toed silkiness of a François Mitterrand, the stagger-and-stump of a drunken Yeltsin or the torturer-on-home-leave swagger of a Putin, nor the decadent and roly-poly joviality of a Sihanouk. “To enter the dance you have to know how to dance,” a Cameroonian saying has it. And (or but): “Eggs should not enter the dance of the stones,” say the West Indians.
They have the bearing of men convinced of higher responsibilities, and this puts them slightly apart from their entourage. They may appear distant but are not unapproachable. In repose they have a severe set to their lips, as of those who have known darkness. And yet one detects an impish sense of humor never far away. Suddenly the smile is there, unforced, as if from nowhere—generous and bright. They give the impression of using themselves to the best effect, of having mastered timing, of being inhabited by faith in a bigger cause but also superbly self-contained. (Obama’s campaign was a triumph of timing despite pressures from ally and foe.)
When necessary, outrage is effectively voiced. I still remember the dressing-down Mandela gave F. W. de Klerk—then the president of the white minority government in South Africa—when the latter questioned the African National Congress’s right to take part in the constitutional negotiations that would lead to the demise of apartheid and a passing of power. Suddenly Mandela spoke from the fist to berate the obtuse white leader. No more pretense at fastidious etiquette; the real issues of moral legitimacy were laid out for all to see. He must have been genuinely angry, but at no moment did one sense a loss of control or direction.
These are men who step delicately but with a clear sense of destination. It must come from knowing how powerfully entrenched the enemy forces are; also from a depth of self knowledge. Mandela always demanded respect from his jailers, yet he claimed that his first victory was over himself. He entered prison a firebrand and a radical black nationalist: as a young political leader he vehemently opposed collaboration with other political groups that shared his overall mission but were composed of other ethnicities. As a descendant of royalty, he was imbued with the historic task of leading his own people, the Xhosa, to freedom from colonial oppression. And then, during the endless years of incarceration on a barren prison island, with the sun like salt in his eyes, he must have explored the labyrinth of fear and doubt to challenge his own prejudice, however justified it seemed. It was there that the national leader, the nation-builder, was forged. “It is with the body’s water that one draws water from the well,” goes a Hausa saying.
Similarly Obama. According to his memoir Dreams from My Father, he constructed his identity through a willed identification with others, particularly the African-American community. In the process, he too had to channel his anger against a perceived impotence and to calibrate his need to belong. It could only have been a conscious and deliberate effort. He writes in that book that “to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. . . . Burdens we were to carry with style.”
Obama’s book is powerful and so well written that I’d suggest he’s wasting his talents as president of the USA. Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, was clearly ghosted (ironically, the French term for “ghost writer” is nègre), but we’re told that Obama wrote his own. The writerly flourishes are engrossing; at the same time I could not but notice the tricks—the unlikely reconstruction of childhood conversations, the choice in what was to be remembered, the didactic thrust of the text to make of it an exemplary pilgrim’s progress.
Who are these composite figures, really? They are seen as singular, and have been distrusted by the communities they emerged from, tainted by too close a frequentation with white. Yet by their very nonbelonging-belonging they have opened new tracks of reflection on racial identity and cultural conditionality. The odd thing is that both men can be considered outsiders despite their strong engagement in community affairs and their gregarious, easy, nonelitist ways; despite, also, the obvious adulation they enjoy. The king, in history, is a lonely posting endowed with supernatural attributes and saddled with more than human responsibilities. The king embodies the yearning of expectation. People have a need to identify with their idol, so that idealization promptly becomes appropriation—and just as ritually he may be sacrificed to placate the gods (presumably also the golden calf on Wall Street) so as to ensure rain and ample crops. Besides, a Bantu saying claims, “Authority, like the skin of the lion and the leopard, is full of holes.”
There are noticeable silences in both their lives, maybe in exact proportion to their very public and apparently transparent presence. The developing trajectory of Nelson Mandela’s life, when he would have been seen to grow to political and public maturity, is forever sealed in obscurity. No one knows what he might have done and become had he followed a “normal” career. By the time he came out into daylight, squinting and smiling, he was already an old man, and while still a forceful presence he was also a symbol of righteousness, set to collide with jaded careerists who had been talking about a revolution they probably never imagined they would actually accomplish.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, is only at the beginning of his full potential as political beast. He will almost certainly change and be changed by the exercise of power. Once you’ve sent your first batch of young men to be killed . . . His hands will be stained with blood. How can it be different? “The killing of man by man is one of the most ancient habits of our singular species, like procreation or dreams,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges.
And, of course, the ambitions and the sometimes conflicting interests of those who surround him will also labor (and undermine) his territory.
From a young age, Obama and Mandela seemed poised for a phased course of leadership. Maybe the combination of uncertainty and pride and anger and empathy and commitment gave them no choice. “He who suffers from diarrhea does not fear the night,” holds a Mossi wisdom. At a crucial moment in history they appear to incarnate a huge expectation and desire for change. The despair and disgust with the dispensation imposed by fascist rulers is so prevalent, the desire for change so deep and so urgent, that “victory” is inevitable. Men like Mandela and Obama do not engineer the change; they give a face to it, and this change wants to be radical and cathartic.
Are these leaders revolutionaries? Or even visionaries? Can they lead the break? Do they not expend the essence of their potential merely by taking office, by undertaking the historic effort of accompanying the paradigm-shattering changes?
The dog has caught the bus—and now what? The moment of taking power may also mark the onset of political impotence. Will Obama be obliged to govern from the center, as Mandela did? Was that not the condition for their ascendancy? Out of necessity they gather around them the executives who will “elevate” (confine) the charismatic leaders to the pedestal of symbols. This is not immediately apparent. Many lips are busy paying service. And they make cardinal mistakes, for whatever reason but mostly because they want to be seen to be as tough and pragmatic as an ideal father—the father neither of them really knew—would have been. When Mandela acceded to the post of president, he not only decided (was prevailed upon to decide) to preserve South Africa’s position as arms manufacturer for the continent, producing military hardware ideally suited for the bush wars African armies wage on their populations; he also condoned the obscene spree of sophisticated arms acquisition (fighter planes, corvettes, submarines—none of which could be of rational use, and after a while there was no longer the know-how to man the equipment) that would rip the moral guts out of the African National Congress in power.
For Obama these are early days. But already the tests are upon him. “I promise you: we as a people will get there,” he declared in his victory speech with a resolute jaw, and people wept. But what and where is the there referred to? Is he suggesting that America will regain its predominant position in the world? To do what? To impose military domination in order to protect economic control in order to advance the interests of Halliburton and Blackwater— because military power generates economic activity? Or is he thinking of “that shining city on the hill” that Governor Palin looked to? And what does that consist of other than President Reagan’s mausoleum?
Will he allow the crimes committed against humanity (including American humanity) by his predecessor’s administration to be brought to book? Will he draw commonsense conclusions from the fact that the financial system— for that matter, the entire globalization project—cannot be “fixed,” since it is now clear that unchecked greed and the frenzy of speculation and debt unrelated to real productivity will drag down the whole world? Andwhat will that system be replaced by? Will he—can he—inflect the peculiar American culture posited on the notion that it has the right to impose its violence on the world? Already he seems to have ducked the first foreign challenge of real ethical implications, offering no leadership while America’s client state, Israel, is ethnically cleansing Gaza viciously, bloodily, repulsively, and with the impunity of “heroes” shooting fish in a barrel.
Are Mandela and Obama tragic figures who can’t possibly live up to mankind’s exaggerated expectations? However different they may be from those around them because of their destinies, surely they are only human, and politicians at that, which means that they are expressing a constrained and specific evolution of humanity. “If the nose didn’t have nostrils, how would you blow it?” This is a Toucouleur saying.
With cosmic “luck” and application—for it is a discipline—Obama may get to the point where he realizes part of the secret of Mandela’s moral longevity: a shedding of self, i.e., that the only way to be replenished is to give. But does this make for feasible politics, that “art of the possible”?
As I approach the last paragraphs of this essay, I’m driving through the dark streets of Dakar after arriving at the chaotic airport on a flight from Paris. Ka’afir, the Senegalese colleague who comes to fetch me, and I do a quick roundup of world news since we last met. He brings me up to speed on the latest disappointments caused by the corrupt and inept Wade government: civil-servant salaries not paid in two months, power outages lasting days in the poorer neighborhoods, schools on strike, the impossible dearness of basic food, the Lions (Senegal’s national football team) not making the cut for the Africa Cup . . .
We pause to reflect on all of this. Then he suddenly says, “But the American people gave a lesson in democracy to the whole world.”
How so, I ask?
“Obama.”
He says nobody in Africa believed that the Americans could find in their hearts the maturity and the fairness to elect a black man to the highest office. I warn that the proof is still to come, that the man may fail because the challenges are too overwhelming, because the people around him have too powerfully entrenched views and strategies different from his (I mention the Israel conundrum). “Even so,” Ka’afir says, “even if he fails, which is likely, the historic fact still remains that the American people grew beyond their fears and prejudices. Their hearts expanded.”
He also has the honour of being the only nice South African in the song, I never met a nice South African.
In this essay he asks the question: Is Obama the new Mandela?
Obamandela
Breyten Breytenbach [2009]
First it was the voice. It seemed to proceed from a similar hollow in the chest as that of the old man. A voice with coffre. Sounding somewhat sepulchral. Certainly somber. A blue voice. Resonant.
I was listening to Barack Obama, and the tonality, the pitch, the cadences particularly, were reminiscent of the voice of Nelson Mandela. There was a likeness in the diction, too — a hint of cumbersomeness of the tongue. As if they speak neither easily nor for the mere pleasure of making sounds. More remarkably, they both express themselves in full sentences even off the cuff. Sentences you can transcribe and print as is, without having to snip the ums and the aws. As they begin to speak, they both seem to know where each following sentence, covering a thought, is going to end. A saying in Rwanda explains, “If you take your time, you can cook an elephant in the pot.”
Mandela’s voice tends to be higher, and his accent sometimes has an echo. This may be due to bad sound systems in the open air of South Africa.
They speak with emphasis, as if they know the weight of their own minds. The words are seldom original in reference, inventive in imagery, or, for that matter, provocative in thought. They are not riveting speakers, and they try out rhetorical flourishes only timidly, but both tower over their audiences as tribunes. They convey a solemnity of purpose and a kind of urgent, self-evident morality. In a refreshing break with other American public figures, Obama mostly appeared alone before the crowd—not flanked by the usual politburo of sententious sidekicks.
How strange, I thought, that these two men from different continents and more than forty years apart in age could sound so much alike. They move similarly as well. Watch how Mandela, even in old age, used to rock a few dance steps on stage and how Obama, during the endless and fatuous presidential campaign, would skip up to the podium. (For how long do American presidents actually govern? Two of every four years are taken up by stumping.)
They are conscious of their appearance. The shape is trim, the clothes sharp without being exhibitionist. Mandela has an edge with his patterned “Madiba shirts”; Obama favors the severe apparel of American male seriousness, the drab garb of the power bird with just the tie as a tail feather of color. One is tempted to note similarities with other elegant politicians of protest—Maurice Bishop, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Osama bin Laden, Subcomandante Marcos, Robert Sobukwe, Modibo Keita . . . Can there be a correlation between the silhouette and the sense of calling? Mandela and Obama are of the race of kings in the archaic sense, natural leaders who would stand head and shoulders above lackeys and adversaries, radiating resolve and composure. Not for them the vulgar dead-duck strut of a Shoe Bush, the pigeon-toed silkiness of a François Mitterrand, the stagger-and-stump of a drunken Yeltsin or the torturer-on-home-leave swagger of a Putin, nor the decadent and roly-poly joviality of a Sihanouk. “To enter the dance you have to know how to dance,” a Cameroonian saying has it. And (or but): “Eggs should not enter the dance of the stones,” say the West Indians.
They have the bearing of men convinced of higher responsibilities, and this puts them slightly apart from their entourage. They may appear distant but are not unapproachable. In repose they have a severe set to their lips, as of those who have known darkness. And yet one detects an impish sense of humor never far away. Suddenly the smile is there, unforced, as if from nowhere—generous and bright. They give the impression of using themselves to the best effect, of having mastered timing, of being inhabited by faith in a bigger cause but also superbly self-contained. (Obama’s campaign was a triumph of timing despite pressures from ally and foe.)
When necessary, outrage is effectively voiced. I still remember the dressing-down Mandela gave F. W. de Klerk—then the president of the white minority government in South Africa—when the latter questioned the African National Congress’s right to take part in the constitutional negotiations that would lead to the demise of apartheid and a passing of power. Suddenly Mandela spoke from the fist to berate the obtuse white leader. No more pretense at fastidious etiquette; the real issues of moral legitimacy were laid out for all to see. He must have been genuinely angry, but at no moment did one sense a loss of control or direction.
These are men who step delicately but with a clear sense of destination. It must come from knowing how powerfully entrenched the enemy forces are; also from a depth of self knowledge. Mandela always demanded respect from his jailers, yet he claimed that his first victory was over himself. He entered prison a firebrand and a radical black nationalist: as a young political leader he vehemently opposed collaboration with other political groups that shared his overall mission but were composed of other ethnicities. As a descendant of royalty, he was imbued with the historic task of leading his own people, the Xhosa, to freedom from colonial oppression. And then, during the endless years of incarceration on a barren prison island, with the sun like salt in his eyes, he must have explored the labyrinth of fear and doubt to challenge his own prejudice, however justified it seemed. It was there that the national leader, the nation-builder, was forged. “It is with the body’s water that one draws water from the well,” goes a Hausa saying.
Similarly Obama. According to his memoir Dreams from My Father, he constructed his identity through a willed identification with others, particularly the African-American community. In the process, he too had to channel his anger against a perceived impotence and to calibrate his need to belong. It could only have been a conscious and deliberate effort. He writes in that book that “to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. . . . Burdens we were to carry with style.”
Obama’s book is powerful and so well written that I’d suggest he’s wasting his talents as president of the USA. Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, was clearly ghosted (ironically, the French term for “ghost writer” is nègre), but we’re told that Obama wrote his own. The writerly flourishes are engrossing; at the same time I could not but notice the tricks—the unlikely reconstruction of childhood conversations, the choice in what was to be remembered, the didactic thrust of the text to make of it an exemplary pilgrim’s progress.
Who are these composite figures, really? They are seen as singular, and have been distrusted by the communities they emerged from, tainted by too close a frequentation with white. Yet by their very nonbelonging-belonging they have opened new tracks of reflection on racial identity and cultural conditionality. The odd thing is that both men can be considered outsiders despite their strong engagement in community affairs and their gregarious, easy, nonelitist ways; despite, also, the obvious adulation they enjoy. The king, in history, is a lonely posting endowed with supernatural attributes and saddled with more than human responsibilities. The king embodies the yearning of expectation. People have a need to identify with their idol, so that idealization promptly becomes appropriation—and just as ritually he may be sacrificed to placate the gods (presumably also the golden calf on Wall Street) so as to ensure rain and ample crops. Besides, a Bantu saying claims, “Authority, like the skin of the lion and the leopard, is full of holes.”
There are noticeable silences in both their lives, maybe in exact proportion to their very public and apparently transparent presence. The developing trajectory of Nelson Mandela’s life, when he would have been seen to grow to political and public maturity, is forever sealed in obscurity. No one knows what he might have done and become had he followed a “normal” career. By the time he came out into daylight, squinting and smiling, he was already an old man, and while still a forceful presence he was also a symbol of righteousness, set to collide with jaded careerists who had been talking about a revolution they probably never imagined they would actually accomplish.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, is only at the beginning of his full potential as political beast. He will almost certainly change and be changed by the exercise of power. Once you’ve sent your first batch of young men to be killed . . . His hands will be stained with blood. How can it be different? “The killing of man by man is one of the most ancient habits of our singular species, like procreation or dreams,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges.
And, of course, the ambitions and the sometimes conflicting interests of those who surround him will also labor (and undermine) his territory.
From a young age, Obama and Mandela seemed poised for a phased course of leadership. Maybe the combination of uncertainty and pride and anger and empathy and commitment gave them no choice. “He who suffers from diarrhea does not fear the night,” holds a Mossi wisdom. At a crucial moment in history they appear to incarnate a huge expectation and desire for change. The despair and disgust with the dispensation imposed by fascist rulers is so prevalent, the desire for change so deep and so urgent, that “victory” is inevitable. Men like Mandela and Obama do not engineer the change; they give a face to it, and this change wants to be radical and cathartic.
Are these leaders revolutionaries? Or even visionaries? Can they lead the break? Do they not expend the essence of their potential merely by taking office, by undertaking the historic effort of accompanying the paradigm-shattering changes?
The dog has caught the bus—and now what? The moment of taking power may also mark the onset of political impotence. Will Obama be obliged to govern from the center, as Mandela did? Was that not the condition for their ascendancy? Out of necessity they gather around them the executives who will “elevate” (confine) the charismatic leaders to the pedestal of symbols. This is not immediately apparent. Many lips are busy paying service. And they make cardinal mistakes, for whatever reason but mostly because they want to be seen to be as tough and pragmatic as an ideal father—the father neither of them really knew—would have been. When Mandela acceded to the post of president, he not only decided (was prevailed upon to decide) to preserve South Africa’s position as arms manufacturer for the continent, producing military hardware ideally suited for the bush wars African armies wage on their populations; he also condoned the obscene spree of sophisticated arms acquisition (fighter planes, corvettes, submarines—none of which could be of rational use, and after a while there was no longer the know-how to man the equipment) that would rip the moral guts out of the African National Congress in power.
For Obama these are early days. But already the tests are upon him. “I promise you: we as a people will get there,” he declared in his victory speech with a resolute jaw, and people wept. But what and where is the there referred to? Is he suggesting that America will regain its predominant position in the world? To do what? To impose military domination in order to protect economic control in order to advance the interests of Halliburton and Blackwater— because military power generates economic activity? Or is he thinking of “that shining city on the hill” that Governor Palin looked to? And what does that consist of other than President Reagan’s mausoleum?
Will he allow the crimes committed against humanity (including American humanity) by his predecessor’s administration to be brought to book? Will he draw commonsense conclusions from the fact that the financial system— for that matter, the entire globalization project—cannot be “fixed,” since it is now clear that unchecked greed and the frenzy of speculation and debt unrelated to real productivity will drag down the whole world? Andwhat will that system be replaced by? Will he—can he—inflect the peculiar American culture posited on the notion that it has the right to impose its violence on the world? Already he seems to have ducked the first foreign challenge of real ethical implications, offering no leadership while America’s client state, Israel, is ethnically cleansing Gaza viciously, bloodily, repulsively, and with the impunity of “heroes” shooting fish in a barrel.
Are Mandela and Obama tragic figures who can’t possibly live up to mankind’s exaggerated expectations? However different they may be from those around them because of their destinies, surely they are only human, and politicians at that, which means that they are expressing a constrained and specific evolution of humanity. “If the nose didn’t have nostrils, how would you blow it?” This is a Toucouleur saying.
With cosmic “luck” and application—for it is a discipline—Obama may get to the point where he realizes part of the secret of Mandela’s moral longevity: a shedding of self, i.e., that the only way to be replenished is to give. But does this make for feasible politics, that “art of the possible”?
As I approach the last paragraphs of this essay, I’m driving through the dark streets of Dakar after arriving at the chaotic airport on a flight from Paris. Ka’afir, the Senegalese colleague who comes to fetch me, and I do a quick roundup of world news since we last met. He brings me up to speed on the latest disappointments caused by the corrupt and inept Wade government: civil-servant salaries not paid in two months, power outages lasting days in the poorer neighborhoods, schools on strike, the impossible dearness of basic food, the Lions (Senegal’s national football team) not making the cut for the Africa Cup . . .
We pause to reflect on all of this. Then he suddenly says, “But the American people gave a lesson in democracy to the whole world.”
How so, I ask?
“Obama.”
He says nobody in Africa believed that the Americans could find in their hearts the maturity and the fairness to elect a black man to the highest office. I warn that the proof is still to come, that the man may fail because the challenges are too overwhelming, because the people around him have too powerfully entrenched views and strategies different from his (I mention the Israel conundrum). “Even so,” Ka’afir says, “even if he fails, which is likely, the historic fact still remains that the American people grew beyond their fears and prejudices. Their hearts expanded.”
[Essay Friday] no.2
This week's essay reads like a cheesy advertising manifesto. But it's author, Hunter S Thompson lived his life balls to the wall before shooting himself in the mouth, so he gets to say this stuff.
This is his take on security.
Security
Hunter s Thompson [1955]
Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?
Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?
Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.
As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
This is his take on security.
Security
Hunter s Thompson [1955]
Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?
Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?
Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.
As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
[Essay Friday] no.1.
You know George Orwell. But you may not know he served in the Indian Imperial Police.
This is his take on capital punishment.
A Hanging
George Orwell [1931]
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?”
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.”
“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.”
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!”
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number—fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”
Several people laughed—at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished—flick! like that. It iss not always so—oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. ‘My dear fellow,’ we said, ‘think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!’ But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
This is his take on capital punishment.
A Hanging
George Orwell [1931]
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?”
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.”
“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.”
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!”
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number—fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”
Several people laughed—at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished—flick! like that. It iss not always so—oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. ‘My dear fellow,’ we said, ‘think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!’ But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
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