"But I Digress ..." by Darrel Bristow-Bovey Read Free Book Online Page B

depravity.
    Two days later I stood in a narrow Chinatown alley, carefully watching as my cobra was sliced open. The blood was decanted into a small plastic packet, such as you would use to wrap your child’s sandwiches for school. I looked around eagerly, savouring the exoticness of the moment, but the vendors weren’t watching me. They were peering through a half-open door at a flickering TV screen. I looked over their shoulders. A Barbara Cartland movie was showing.
    Hugh Grant stood proud in Regency wig and ruffles. He appeared to be defending, or perhaps defiling, the honour of a simple country lass in blonde curls. He said something in Thai, and the snake vendors hissed approvingly. I sighed and sipped my blood. Everyone wants to be a critic.

White male TV columnists overthrow the world
    SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 FEBRUARY 2000
    T HERE ARE MANY ways of insulting someone. One way that is surprisingly common is to give them a bunch of carnations on Valentine’s Day. (Don’t ask why, buddy, just don’t do it.)
    Another popular means of insult is to call someone nasty names. “Shane” is a nasty name, and so is “Gary”, and I’m not crazy about “Dwayne” either.
    The important thing about insulting someone, if you want the insult to sting, is to ensure that it is accurate and to the point. “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” has pleasing iambic pentameter, but it is not going to cause a roomful of Simunye presenters to burst into tears.
    Similarly, when Steven Kenton the class bully took to calling Lance Denman “Four-Eyes” when we were all cruel youths, it caused more puzzlement than pain, since Lance Denman never wore glasses. Steven Kenton tried to explain that he was referring to Lance Denman’s stammer, but once you have to explain an insult, you are lost.
    â€œI-I-I-I don’t know what you mean,” Lance Denman would simply say smugly, and Steven Kenton would be nonplussed, if nonplussed is the word I’m looking for.
    An ill-directed insult causes more mirth than soul-searching. Just the other day, for instance, someone hissed, not without venom, that I belong to something called “the white male media conspiracy”.
    Unless you’re white, male and working in the media, it is hard to understand just how funny this is. Take a good look at the next white male media worker you bump into while returning your empties down at the bottle store – he can scarcely co-ordinate his own clothing, far less a sinister counter-revolutionary movement. We can’t even put together a Sunday league cricket team, let alone conspire to overthrow the world with our white, male TV columns.
    On the whole, conspiracies require a great deal more application, intelligence and energy than most human beings (white, male or otherwise) can bring to the job. If we have learnt anything from the past century, it should be that history unfolds not through planning and co-ordination, but through the unravelling of chance and circumstance, and the relentless dialectic of opportunity and opportunism.
    The Nazis: A Warning from History (SABC3, Sunday, 9pm) should be compulsory viewing for everyone who complains there is nothing decent on television, and everyone who likes to abnegate his own responsibilities by pointing an indignant finger outwards. The idea of ordinary people being helpless before the hidden face of implacable power is perversely comforting, but it is a myth.
    The West has long been made uncomfortable by the very fact of Hitler and his Nazis. How could such a man, and such a machine, exist in a civilised world? The easiest answer is to accept, at least partially, Hitler’s own publicity: the Nazis must have been supermen, or supermonsters, cold-blooded and calculating, working tirelessly to achieve their diabolical masterplan.
    The truth, as A Warning from History so strikingly demonstrates, is less dramatic and far