Peter Wilhelm: Staying positive despite eish-kom, ‘anti-vaxxers’ and the youth
Peter Wilhelm shares with the Biznews community another one of his laugh-out-loud, tongue-in-cheek satirical columns. Wilhelm deftly weaves through the musings in his mind as he expands on why we should all probably seek to be Bluebirds of Happiness despite the woes of the moment plaguing SA. The perfect dose of reflective comedy to get you through the rest of the week. – LF
By Peter Wilhelm*
Why don't these bloody people emigrate to the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic? Oh sorry – the Soviet Union collapsed about 40 years ago. It didn't work. It was broken. Why doesn't somebody tell Blade Nzimande?
It might assist him to grasp what constitutes the good life. For us, this paradise lies ahead – a world of good food, wine, shelter, electricity, Boeing 787s that flap their wings to soar, phones that work, and languishing forever in a warm bath of chocolate-flavoured goat's milk with Cleopatra (or Anthony).
Sorry again. That is heaven as foreseen by the dwindling corps of persons who believe that we will be forgiven in an afterlife for our sexual misdemeanours, inability not to grow old and useless, or even deploy the picayune snippets of information before the school burnt down.
So the irk I unveiled in my first sentence applies to those billions of trolls who infuse common knowledge with rubbish filched from the Internet or gossip overheard in the local café while waiting for their two slices of pink meat for the Sunday roast.
True, reading about the collapse of essential underpinnings of civilisation such as electricity supply, education, and health, a climate of terror prevails among the would-be émigrés.
Are we actually living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where emaciated, starving and tattooed formations wander in the desolation looking for fodder? We all think so, at times. Yet I'm not packing for Kirghiz.
"If there is hope, it lies in the Proles." So considers the miserable hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Proles are the proletariat, allowed their own folkways by the oligarchy since they are powerless. Only Blade cares.
My own outlook is far more cheery, as if the Bluebird of Happiness has laid a poached egg in my belly button. If there is hope, I say, it lies in the young!
In the past I have dissed this emergent group with caustic observations on their cut-off pyjamas and flagrant displays of flowing serotonin. And yet …
The young have begun to attain the next phase of human development: the hive mind. Through the incessant thumbing of their iPods & iPads they are in perpetual telepathic touch. On issues of major importance (such as whether to see Sex Tape or The Theory of Everything) agreement is reached on a cellular level without recourse to such archaic relics as words.
Cellphones need to be powered. So when Eskom sneezes electrons flow to and fro in cobwebs of wire, and enough is stolen to keep the hand-held devices buzzing. And they are first signs of infection by the coming technological singularity whereby computers will become artificially intelligent, like people.
While sipping coffee in a greasy spoon, this truth burrowed into my frontal lobes. The kidz were jabbering in their new-style lingo, gibbering about this 'n that of which only a few phrases were distinct: those relating to top cars.
Some names floated above my curdled warm milk: Alfa Romeo 4C, BMW i8, Ford Fusion, Infiniti Q50, Jaguar F-Type Coupé, Mercedes-Benz GLA. And those bullets driven by F1 masters on steroids.
Any mutt probably imagines these sub-learners are dreaming of their possessions once they've made their billions by setting up an online news service from Kakamas to Raqqa courtesy of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
But no! The conversation was infused with jealousy. The cars flaunted in the swollen air were the vehicles their dealers maintained on the profits of drugs and human trafficking.
How much more the young know than we! I was reminded of an episode of South Park, in which the savvy little 'uns discover that their deluded parents – in a chicken-pox epidemic – are deliberately exposing them to the virus! Whether by sleepovers, or getting them to play touchy-feely football, they encourage the viral spread, which leaps in cough spates to infect exponentially.
The South Park adults are a species of what has become known as the "anti-vaxxers". If their children sniffle, become poxy, tremble in their beds, and are revolted by chicken soup (made from hen claws and MSG) then later in life their immune systems will defeat those grown-up ailments that punish them for even thinking about sex.
So the boys and girls react in rage to being exposed to chicken-herpes – and wreak instantaneous vengeance. Toddling down to the South Park red light district they hire the most insalubrious hooker and get her to their homes – brushing her teeth with parents' toothbrushes, leaving the venom where Mommy and Daddy can catch it.
The moral? Never imagine you know more about science or the vectors of sexually transmitted diseases than round-faced kidlets. They know everything.
Sure they get an Everest of false information from their sources. But they still know a whole lot more than Auntie Mabel who knits booties for kittens.
* Peter Wilhelm is an awarded novelist, poet, and journalist. Author of 10 published books, he was born in Cape Town (1943), he completed his schooling in the Transvaal and taught English and Science. He joined the Financial Mail in 1974 and returned to the Cape to briefly edit Leadership. He writes film reviews and a weekly satirical column. The column has been fired by three editors: Ken Owen, Caroline Southey, and Gasant Abader. The late journalist Patrick Laurence said: "Peter satirises everything that moves." His column has evolved and moved from one publication to another. We welcome him for an extended stay on Biznews.com.