Author, writer and journalist Peter Wilhelm has built an army of fans over decades with his eccentric satirical column. It’s strictly for discerning readers, those who delight in wordplay and high class wit. I remember chuckling (often more than that) at his contributions to the Financial Mail in its heyday, one of a handful of publications where he strayed over his editor’s line. Wilhelm is an acquired taste. Once you get it, this is one to savour. I’m delighted Peter has agreed to occasionally brighten our mornings on Biznews. Here’s his first contribution. Appropriate as ever. And thought provoking. A weekly guarantee from the discerning reader’s ultimate satirist. Â – AHÂ
By Peter Wilhelm
Satire is a deadly infraction now. Still … here goes.
Interrogating my own bleak educational past, I am not shocked at the mass failure of last year’s matrics. Crumbling the official lies like stale bread reveals that a mere 40% or so of the million-plus bright-eyed innocents who leapt into the learning slough decades ago actually passed.
Clearly, standards need to be further lowered if we are to become a nation of soccer-playing PhDs.
Blaming corruption, drunken teachers, ministerial appointees with fake credentials, tik, zero pass rates, collective ennui – reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover – is both arid and pointless.
Let me illustrate this with a brief lesson in my own grasp of Science – essential to launching our Soviet spy satellites.
First, exactly what is meant by “Science”?
You begin with a claim. Thus, a species of frog has been discovered that gives birth to live tadpoles. Obviously this will shock those who have hitherto believed that this 265-million-year-old creature laid eggs rather than selecting genetic partners at singles bars. But is it true? Any new “discovery” must be verified, falsified, and enter the common hive-mind before validation.
Doubt always shadows claims such as: “The Higgs Boson has been found! Prof. Higgs mislaid it in his sock drawer!” And if daily scrutiny of commodities prices and flimsy GDP figures can be reckoned as science (and not astrology), the principle applies to innumerable pastures of the human quest.
What can we absolutely believe to the extent that it guides our choices, economic strategies, and national planning?
I once wisely put my science teacher’s diploma to the test of earning a living. What a disaster! Stifling and bored I would inform my students that Boyle’s Law states that of you insert a straw into a puffer fish and blow, the blob will eventually pop. Mrs Boyle’s Law, I added, was an instruction: “If you come back from the bar reeling again, I want a bladdy divorce!” They faithfully wrote it all down.
So never take any kind of lesson from me.
In abject self-loathing, I left teaching (despite classroom riots at my exit) and looked elsewhere. Yet in the “real” world I found the same North Korean-style infusion of fabrication and delusion. In journalism, editors actually wanted me to “check” allegations! That absurd prohibition has only now fallen into disuse.
In our country – and not solely because of the Internet, the tremulous survival of ANC tabloids, and political cowardice – everything has become susceptible to distortion, gossip, and (as the bubbling hatreds that mesh with the scum in social media such as Facebook) racist conspiracy theories.
Add to this the failure of education to instil a sense of proportion and reality. In old-style newspapers, gremlin-like copy sifters called sub-editors could be partially relied on to pass as fit for printing copy that had been fact-checked. Now (as noted) no facts are reliable.
A Washington friend contacted me to query, in no tender manner, whether it was true that “with 250 000 murders a year, SA stood on the abyss of civil war”. How this mad figure reached his befogged mind I cannot say. Only one-fifth of our youthful population risk being murdered – otherwise, we would stumble into ferocious internecine warfare (fought with AK47s and rocket launchers) and never reach the corner café to buy candles.
Still, the gaseous conjecture that SA is an incipient failed state discourages foreign investors even though, on the bright side, there is no civil war or hereditary dictatorship. Add to that a swift scan of our tabloids, suggesting a society so bloated with idiocy it’s about to prolapse under the pressure of headlines such as: TOKOLOSHE BLESSED MY PUNANI and SUICIDES SENTENCED TO DEATH.
The nation is condemned to live with such evil perceptions and smears, like some heroic symbol of statehood accused of sexually molesting puppies.
What, you ask, am I getting at? Is this an opinion piece or a rant? It is of course a rant, and one I increasingly hear from those who in former lives stood firmly against apartheid, and for universal liberation. In short, the democratic credentials of my demographic – some of whom were banned, others jailed, others forgotten by the fake historians of our age – show disillusionment creep. Why do they stay? Was this what they thought they fought for?
Of course not. While there are indeed gangland events every day, most of us – and I do mean most – are not victims or witnesses of daily Clint Eastwood-style shootouts. A lack of electricity and work (for the swelling millions of matriculated PhDs) tends to keep the streets relatively quiet barring the odd mass murder. For this we have the terrifying police to thank, and perhaps a climate that sends us from 0° to 40° each day.
That said, please don’t shoot me.
* 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.
