Peter Wilhelm explores the more serious side of life, nature and especially satire as he ponders the fires that have devastated the Cape over the last week. Although his subject matter is more serious than it usually is, Peter regales us with artful prose, thought-provoking insights and just a hint of the razor wit that followers of his column have become accustomed to. – LF
By Peter Wilhelm
My late friend Robert Kirby taught me one lesson I take as indisputable: satire has its boundaries. Not because of external censorship, of which I have sufficient experience to find detestable. Yet there should be a horizon where one’s own rules (or ethical judgments) draw a distinct line. There is nothing amusing or trivial about pain, suffering, death, and the brutality of war.
As I write this the Great Fire still burns – sporadically I hope. A terrible grey pall lies above the city and upon our spirits. The unheard screams of the creatures who died in the conflagration – and so many human lives ruined – continue to burden us. It would be grotesque to pretend otherwise.
After the Charlie Hebdo atrocities in Paris I looked at some of the cartoons that roused such madness in a few fanatics. A few depict the prophet Muhammad in such a vile and disgusting manner that my response was akin to that of a sympathiser of the satirical magazine: “How is this funny?”
Those of us who trade in the windblown fluff of words should recall the hideous example of the columnist who thought it funny to write that black people did not mind if their children died because they would have such fun making more. This was disgraceful.
Enough. Let me return to Kirby.
Once, talking at Wits, Robert was asked why he could mock the captain of the Greek cruise liner Oceanos, which sank off our coast in 1991, but not the behaviour of the crew in one or another airline crash. His response was subtly eloquent. The air disaster (in which all died) was very different to that of the Oceanos (in which no-one died), which became subject to ridicule.
The sinking was marked by a unique combination of stupidity and cowardice. The ship was unseaworthy and sailed forth into the Eastern Cape seas where a terrible storm eventually capsized it. It now lies some 100-metres underwater and currents and sharks preclude doing much about it.
The salient issue is that the first to bolt was Captain Yiannis Avranas and his crew, leaving the passengers unaware of events while some continued dancing. Queried about his behaviour, Avranas responded: “When I order abandon the ship, it doesn’t matter what time I leave. Abandon is for everybody. If some people like to stay, they can stay.”
The passengers were all rescued and gave their own account.
What happened to the adage that “the captain always goes down with his ship”? Well, he doesn’t have to. The idiom is associated with the Titanic when the captain, Edward Smith, seeking to secure the rescue of the passengers in accord with the chivalrous injunction “women and children first” did indeed go down.
But it would be absurd if a skilled and cool-headed person waited until all his (or her) charge was safe, waved goodbye, and bubbled to the bottom. He could live on to guide other liners on or off the reefs and face the interrogation of a board of investigation. If necessary he must pay the penalty for being useless, as we see now with the skipper of the doomed Costa Concordia.
Note that in the above paragraph I used the meretricious pronoun his/her – a consequence of the partial triumph of feminism. Not, however, in tribute to the need for ethical gender balance, but out of terror of being ranked and treated with the same horrid sidelong repugnance as old Kingsley Amis, who took the view that all women are mad.
Some years ago a “second-wave” überfeminist called Shulamith Firestone (wonderful name!) argued in her book The Dialectic of Sex (1970) that the distinction between men and women HAD to go. Further, all differences between the sexes must be eliminated. There should be no incest taboo; no age barriers to sexual transgression (paedophilia); men should have babies; and so forth.
But how? Firestone summoned (out of the air, as it were) a genetic revolution that could alter male and female bodies so that reproductive organs became indistinguishable. This condition was to be enforced by a dictatorship of deeply progressive women.
The entire unwieldy apparatus of evolution by natural selection was to be overturned. Nature would be undone!
Amazed, I read her book and went on to lead my life. I now discover that Firestone was a true opstoker swirling in the myriad currents of the women’s movement. She reckoned that human nature, the family, was at fault. Women who were taken aback by this were dismissed as knitters and slackers.
Unfortunately, Firestone – who died recently alone and starving in a New York apartment – was mad, horribly, clinically so. Also not funny. Attempts are being made to restore her as an icon of feminism – but reason appears to be prevailing.
We tangle with Nature at our own risk.
