A Famous Grouse: May 7

Latest Weekend Argus column. As submitted for publication. -- AD

THE dramatic events in Pakistan this week had not gone unnoticed by the little ones. There they were, one moment awash in the warm glow of the cartoons and next thing, the grownups had taken over the TV remote and were hopping from one news channel to the next. It was perhaps inevitable there would be questions.

We had to tell them the shocking truth -- American soldiers had shot dead Jafar.

And why not? Any parent who has had to sit through Disney’s Aladdin movies will tell you there’s more than a passing resemblance between the two.

In the first and best of the films, weirdie beardie Jafar, the grand vizier to the sultan of Agrabah, is on a quest to locate the genie’s magic lamp which he will use to take over the sultanate before making himself the most powerful wizard in the world.

He fails, of course, and -- spoiler alert! -- at the end of the movie he is trapped in the lamp, now a genie himself but, alas, with no free will of his own.

In the second movie, it gets much worse. In a shocking display of violence, Jafar is once again trapped in the lamp which is now kicked through a fissure in the earth’s surface by a grumpy parrot called Iago and it lands in a sea of lava. The lamp melts and, alas again, Jafar is crisped and reduced to dust.

And so it was with Osama bin Laden, who -- as the chatter went at the Mahogany Ridge on Monday -- was finding paradise a bit of a downer, what with the 72 vegans who now won’t leave him alone.

The novelist Salman Rushdie had the perfect take on the al Qaeda leader, pointing out that he died on Walpurgisnacht, a spring festival celebrated in parts of Europe and usually associated with bonfires, dancing and what was known in medieval times as witches’ sabbaths but more lately as Workers’ Day.

“Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight,” Rushdie wrote in the Daily Beast. “One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was ‘Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,’ and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting ‘U-S-A!’ last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere.”

Of course, we’ve since learnt that that firefight, fierce as it no doubt may have been, was a distinctly one-sided affair, and yes, the yahoo tone and jingoist triumphalism of those American celebrations was indeed grating.

But these and the other issues that have emerged in the days since the raid on the compound in Abbottabad had done little to alter my initial reaction to the news of bin Laden’s death.

I believe the world is a better place now that he is gone. The fact that this deluded murderer was unarmed when he was shot in the face and could see it coming really doesn’t change my opinion all that much. Perhaps it would have been ideal if he had been brought to trial for that procedural veneer, but in the end he would have wound up just as dead. That’s what the Americans wanted all along -- a dead terrorist, and that’s what they got.

Of course, one man’s dead terrorist is, in the nature of these things, another man’s religious hero and martyr.

But even that, too, is changing. The Arab spring, or the so-called jasmine revolution, has been secular in nature. In short, it’s about democracy and universal human rights -- and certainly not about following nutty mullahs and jihadi into the sort of theocracies deemed backward even by the standards of seventh century caliphates.

While al Qaeda’s influence may be on the wane, the same cannot be said for opprobrium for the White House, and in this regard, local reaction to the US raid has been predictably imbecilic, especially the outburst from Young Communist League secretary Buti Manamela: “They claim to be the champion of peace and democracy but they are nothing but invaders and their anti-terrorism campaign is the greatest cover-up of their own terrorism. Through their president [Barack] Obama, they are the worst animal fighting in human skin.”

On Tuesday, the Times of London printed all the known names of those who died in attacks planned by bin Laden. They included the 261 people who died in the blasts in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in August, 1998.

The targets may have been the embassies of the “US imperialists” but the vast majority of the dead were African.

A Famous Grouse: October 16, 2010

Another (unedited) Weekend Argus column. -- AD

THE City of Cape Town, I learnt this week, apparently has in its employ those who are familiar with the practices and customs of the dark arts and will not hesitate to make use of that expertise as it goes about stamping out merriment and fun within the boundaries of the metropole.
This is welcome news, especially for those living in Plumstead. Residents there can sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that officials take a dim view of tourist operators larking about in the local cemetery at night.
As councillor Carol Bew has noted, some of them have loved ones buried there; they object to these tours as they feel that, far from being just a place where the dead have been buried, the graveyard is a sacred and holy place. “It is not a place for entertainment and not a place for events,” she told one newspaper. “There are historical graves, but they can be visited during the day.”
True, and Bew was probably as correct when she suggested that Mark Rose-Christie -- who is now considering that cancelling his five-hour “mystery ghost bus tour” as a result of the city’s rectitude and punctiliousness -- must follow certain processes. “There are certain fees that have to be paid depending on the event,” she said. “To do that he has to go through city structures, follow the policy, and that is that. There is no skirting around it.”
But it was Bew who, in her correspondence with Rose-Christie, raised this nonsense about satanism, suggesting that Rose-Christie’s operators “dress in black robes, come in the dead of night, make a small fire at certain graves, make soft music to create an atmosphere” and “even drive a coach into an open grave and make it disappear” and so on. She had been informed of this, she added, by City Parks, who appear to know what’s going on when it comes to such matters.
Perhaps Bew is a superstitious person, and really does believe in such rubbish. Which would be a pity, because why then should we take her seriously? For all we know, she may well believe that rubbing oneself with a toad on nights when the moon is full will get rid of warts, and that is hardly the sort of thing one expects from our elected representatives.
Perhaps she feels she must believe in such things because it serves the interests of the vaunted multiculturalism, because, hey, that’s what tolerance is all about. You know the trope: we are a diverse community, with many, many different and conflicting beliefs, and many, many of them irrational and illogical, but an offence to one faith is an offence to all, not so? If the traditions of the clergy are irrational, based in darkness and morbidity, then who are we to criticise and attack such traditions?
There is one further aspect of the city’s behaviour in its dealings with Rose-Christie that is especially troubling. He has pointed out that there are many cities around the world, with histories and folklore as rich as Cape Town’s, where such tours of graveyards and cemeteries are on offer. But, Rose-Christie has claimed, nowhere else are tour operators charged a fee for taking visitors to these places, and he was told: “We are not like other cities, or the rest of the world, we are Cape Town.”
Unique, then, in our capacity to be smug, petty and especially little, for this is truly the Cape colonic: so far up our own fundamental that we’re practically inside out. Perhaps, one day, we may just get over ourselves for long enough to realise that what really is unique here is that we continue to live, shamefully, in perhaps the most racially divided city in the country, but that is another issue altogether.
Rose-Christie has said that he will not pay what he feels is an exorbitant fee of R3 000 per group to visit Plumstead Cemetery. Fair enough. I wouldn’t be seen dead there myself. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that.) But I’d urge him to reconsider scrapping his mystery tour altogether.
 If he really wanted to offer his clients a baffling experience, he should drop by Cape Town Stadium. Picture the scene: a dark night, with huddled tourists on the pitch, staring up at the empty terraces, the silence thick with the ghosts of Fifa’s empty promises and dead vuvuzelas. Very spooky.