A Few Good Men

Either I just received a stern divine warning, or I just sampled a new flavour of irony.

Word about town had it that Richard Dawkins - famed author of The Selfish Gene, renowned biologist, and outspoken atheist - had written a new book: "The God Delusion". Brazen stuff. Never one to fear controversy, he's taking on belief in God, which just so happens to be the cornerstone of three world religions, and the central tenet upon which a couple of billion base their lives. So he's bound to offend, and it's bound to make great reading and divisive dinner-party conversation.

And so off I swung to the Waterfront. Items on shopping list:

1. Dress Shirt (current one has indelible lip-stick stain on collar)
2. The God Delusion

Items actually purchased:

1. Three pairs of black shoes
2. A pair of socks
3. A large milktart

How did this plan go so badly awry? Well, when I arrived at Exclusive Books and inspected the new non-fiction area, I discovered that instead of a provocative display of Dawkins' hardbacks, the place was covered with about twenty thousand copies of the new biography of perhaps Cape Town's greatest exponent, the former Anglican Archbishop, anti-Apartheid struggle luminary and Nobel Peace Laureate, Desmond Tutu.

Then it occurred to me that there were an awful lot of people shopping for books after eight on a Thursday evening. Investigating, I spotted a rather nondescript looking man signing copies of something for a line of about 100 star-struck looking people snaking off in a long line into the depths of the shop. Then, as I peered through the throng, I saw the Archbishop himself, merrily signing his biography.

Such is the magnetism of real heroes like this, that regular people like you and me go all reverent in their presence. I recall a similar feeling early one morning twelve years ago when I encountered the great Madiba himself on his pre-dusk walk through the university.

Desmond Tutu was and is one of the great leaders of our time. I may lack faith in religion, but I have unlimited faith in the character of men and women like him. They make all the difference in this world. To this day he champions all that is good in our country and ceaselessly attacks the rot. A hundred years from now, people strolling through Nobel Square will see his statue next to those of Nelson Mandela, F.W. De Klerk and Albert Luthuli, and wonder at the nature of their enigmatic smiles.

Axis Denied

Robert Mugabe (president-dictator of Zimbabwe) phoned me up the other day demanding admission to my new Axis, citing overwhelming evidence that he is the most mind-numbingly bone-headed, syphilitic, tin-pot autocrat in Africa, if not the world.

"Bob," said I with a sigh, "Although I agree that you are a first-class baboon, and should be consigned to a tree, I cannot let you in, as Axes in general are only allowed to have three members, and mine is full of thoroughly deservant individuals as it is. Plus, you're not denying anything in particular; you're just a complete penis."

And I sent him a nice bunch of bananas to cheer him up, which he wielded happily as he scampered off to brutally crush another peaceful demonstration.

Axis of Denial

I can accept that an inadequate education can result in one believing some pretty dumb things. Conspiracy theories (like that which claims the Apollo 11 Moon-landing was faked) abound, and have a natural allure for people insufficiently equipped to discern fact from fiction.

I can roll my eyes in good humour when someone extolls the merits of some crackpot but benign theory. Wear all the crytals you want, put magnets around your car's exhaust, give money to homeopaths - it's all pointless, but at least no-one's getting hurt.

However, when you feel like declaring something as patently ignorant and inflammatory as that you think the US government may have deliberately orchestrated the September 11 attacks, then you single yourself out for special membership of the Stupid Motherf*ckers Club. Congratulations Hugo Chavez (president of Venezuela), your massively idiotic and insensitive comments easily trumped even the Pope's recent improvident anti-Islam ones.

Now as a special prize you get a starring role in my brand new "Axis of Denial". Fellow blissfully myopic denialists South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (AIDS) and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Holocaust) will welcome the competition to see whose policies can do the most damage to their respective economies before they get removed from office.

What goes through these Arch-Denialists minds to make them so obstreperous? In Manto's case very little, but I suspect Hugo and Mahmoud suffer from delusions of grandeur. The former styles himself as a Che Guevara, riding about dispensing revolution and leftist fixalls, whilst Mahmoud fancies himself a latter day Cyrus the Great, re-uniting the Persian Empire and marching victoriously into Babylon. But now we're comparing icons with idiots, so I'll cut short the conceit.

Gentlemen, here's hoping that your heroes continue to eclipse you and that you will both fade into obscurity and trouble the real world no more.

Et in Akkad ego

Everyone knows where they were five years ago today. I was sitting at my machine, six months into my first job, when J-Man - surfing the net as usual instead of coding - said suddenly: "Holy Fuck! A plane's just flown into the World Trade Centre!" A sober day, and a more complicated, volatile, uncertain world ever since.

Last night I lay awake engrossed in a book about the language history of the ancient world. Writing having first developed in the Fertile Crescent, the text tracks the rise and fall of three great linguas franca in the three millennia BC: Sumerian, Akkadian & Aramaic. During their long reigns, they provided some cohesion and commonality to an otherwise intensely restive region. Empires rose and fell by the score. Even as culture bloomed, cities were razed and whole peoples destroyed or displaced through continual invasions and uprisings. Stewardship of any particular spot has changed hands so many times as to make mockery of claims to ancestral ownership. War is as deeply rooted and endemic in Mesopotamia and the Levant as civilisation itself. Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turks, etc., etc. are just recent protagonists in a cast featuring hundreds of long-lost tribes, cities and gods. Seen like this, the present crisis is merely the latest iteration of a neverending story that stretches back beyond the written record. Were we really so naive as to imagine that we could arrest more than 5000 years of momentum in a thousandth the time? It would be easier persuading the mountain to go to Mohammed.

'Cradle' of Civilisation? More like 'Crucible'.

Talk is Cheap

So I'm listening to this song on club977 with a chorus going: "Talk, talk, talk, talk," the whole time, and wondering what it's called and who it's by.

Turns out to be "Talk Talk" by "Talk Talk".

Should've seen that coming...