I don’t know about you, but I cannot ever manage to relax in my home town over the year-end holidays – it feels too much like work, or even like a long-term relationship where you have to keep telling yourself: “just let her rant, let her get it all out of her system; she’s not even talking about me; she’s just expressing herself”; until the name “Barry” starts getting repeated more than any other words and the bile starts frothing up in the corners of her mouth. But you love her, and you just let her be. And then you know it’s time to pack up the Mini with booze and books and provisions and head up the west coast to a small seaside town and stay in a fisherman’s cottage right on the beach, where you can leave her screaming at the television for hours at a time, playing with her WhatsApp and incessantly editing her candid-camera type home-movies, while you get onto the more serious business of pouring 11:30am G&T’s, or disappearing for hours at a time on scenic coastal hikes.
I took off 30 days this year-end holiday season. The only real break I had was for 10 days up the west coast. Yet ten is greater than zero, even in the former maths classes of apartheid Bantu education, so “it’s all good” as the expression goes.
Please understand this is going to be a gentle piece; no huge laughs, no huge themes; nothing hard-hitting. Just a lazy day Saturday afternoon spent watching Al-Jazeera’s alleged maligned and cynical footage of the alleged chosen people’s God’s army, demolish residential building after residential building in Gaza with USA paid for and supplied bombs.
We are not going to talk about anything serious here, neither about the ANC, nor the DA, which is really just the old Nationalist Party in disguise that spends all Cape Town citizens’ rates cash on legal fees – defending the indefensible – and on partial window-dressing upkeep of the Atlantic seaboard to secure the votes of the larney whities; while the Cape Flats goes for a ball of shit in a heap of drug-trafficking, guns, death and violence.
We’ll not mention the ANC and Squirrel’s endless appropriation of genuine South African recent achievements, like SA’s International Court of Justice lawsuit against Israel for alleged genocidal intent against the citizens of Gaza. How at every opportunity, Squirrel attempts to rub the misty, filthy, cruddy glass of organised government crime and wholesale corruption clean with his big benevolent paws. You know, when I listen to Squirrel, I suffer from what is called “cognitive dissonance”. This is an expression I learned on the so-called “alternative media” – the one filled with anti-semites, crackpots and conspiracy theorists, who say covid vaccines are deadly and an attempt by the alleged “international cabal” to wipe out humanity. Some of it is hilarious and some not so. It was not so hilarious when my mom landed up in ICU with a mini-stroke after her second covid injection.
Where was I? Oh yes, cognitive dissonance. This is when you hold two contradictory beliefs – like I believe in freedom of thought and deed, but then I want a government who tells me what to do and what to think; or I am a rampant sex addict – screwing anything that has basic motor function over the age of 21 and never using a condom, but then I believe safe sex is the only way to go in this world of HIV and Rift-Valley airborne haemorrhagic fever.
So, when I listen to Squirrel, I believe I suffer from cognitive dissonance. Because I believe in the picture of SA bliss he is painting – of full employment of the urban poor; of massively reduced crime; of zero grift and government sleaze; of no loadshedding and the global south and BRICS beating the G7 nations with a new currency made out of unicorns, rainbows, hope and ubuntu.
I believe Oscar Pistorius is reformed and he will now sweep up the local church floors and park cars for the humble congregants; I believe Big Satan (USA) will release Harvey Weinstein imminently and rescind his 39-year jail term and tell him:
“Hahahaha Harvey, that was funny hey, wasn’t it? You can have all your money back Harvey, you loveable big perv, you can have your film company back, here you go; and you can have all the women you want and need to rub what you have down below, which apparently isn’t a normal man’s schlong, but something more of a va-guy-na”.
Contributed by:
Barry Varkel, an attorney of the High Court of South Africa and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.
Author of Nigiri Law, Goy Vey and Big Jon Harry’s Revenge
Quite an interesting piece after your 10 day break!
I quite enjoyed reading this piece while you remind me us in a gentle way the shit that is going in the world and locally amid the elections in 2024 in SA.
Well good writing skills Barry, a few English words learnt while I read your piece. I will be having my own competing beliefs when I vote this year. Voting with my head or stomach or should I say my heart!!!