Peter Wilhelm: Smelly South Africans cloning the wrong countrymen
Biznews satirist Peter Wilhelm tore himself away from the Masters of Sex long enough to ponder why those mankind can least afford to be cloning are the ones doing it most. Matilda the Golden Orb for one. The Cloning Kings of Swaziland and Nkandla being among the others. His conclusion: South Africans lack a pleasurable aroma. And at this rate will continue to do so for some time to come. – Alec Hogg
By Peter Wilhelm
My pet Golden Orb spider Matilda has exploded. She worked her way up to it. I took her for daily walks on the Common, and she restricted herself on these essential outings to devouring joggers and squatters (fatty enough to qualify for heart-attacks post-Banting pig-outs). Then she insidiously crept around my garden and ate all the Easter eggs I'd hidden for the kidlets to find while I caught up with Masters of Sex.
Too late, I discovered that on reaching a certain Rubenesque pulchritude, the Orb had stored enough protein (including its simpering male partners) to enter the next phase of its reproductive cycle. When it pops, millions of itsy-bitsy spiderlings are set sail to infest your reforested garden and pantry.
The variety of means whereby animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and anything in between reproduce is staggering. The means chosen depends on whether you want all your offspring to exactly resemble you — clones having exactly the same genetic material as you so finely display. Or whether you want them to be different for reasons of evolution — which supposedly kicked in some 1.2-billion years ago.
But then why can't they get it right? Who has not had a teen slyly sidle up to them to ask, "Mom – is sex dirty?" To which the only realistic reply is: "Only if you're doing it right" (© Dirty Old Men, emulating Woody Allen).
However, if you're "doing it right", whatever your choice, a problem arises – innumerable children. They may well be exactly like you, with (in cloned males) knee-length eyebrow tufts, inflationary bellies, too wimpy to leave home (except for frail care), and refusal to concede that their capacity to drive cars is unaffected by the 27 or so double Klipdrifts on Friday night at his neighbour's panty party for which he wore a Kim Kardashian gown. Or no gown.
On the other, or even third, hand, your little sweetiepie has had direction signs tattooed all over her body, only listens to rap-polka gangsters fronted by her adored Kak Kombuis. Or uses her Inter-cobweb facility to try and discover how one fungus gets it on with another without even taking him (or her) on a date to KFC.
Usually, after a bucket of free-range chicken beaks, the ritualistic invitation follows: "Would you like to come up to my place on the bark of the weeping willow tree. We can try and make fungi."
Too many children (especially clingy fungi) are a lifelong household burden. The world record (so far) is a Mrs. Vassilyev (first name unknown) who had 69 between 1725-1762, including 16 sets of twins, seven batches of triplets, and four of quadruplets. This achievement came to mind when I read that a deceased local man's heirs are being besieged by 97 claimants to his fortune – possibly entire herds of cattle and permits for fracking and offshore phosphate nodule mining.
The family spokesman has struck back. His father only had three wives and the supplicants are nothing more than "street children" among whom the word had spread like a virus. Obviously, if the three wives overproduced like Mrs. Vassilyev (of which there is no proof) you could get to 97 kids in a trice.
And yet I wonder – as we move towards hereditary monarchy – how many inter-family crises we are facing once Robert Mugabe and Jake Zooma depart and leave their (cloned) seed clustered over the countryside?
Family feuds can get really, really nasty. They can result in civil war. The King of Swaziland is under siege for spending too much money on trinkets such as his six wives' Mercs. Jake needs more jets. Yet we need services that actually work and some means of lowering the collective temperature of the poo-EFF.
That bunch won't even clean up after itself, leaving it to the ageing oligarchs of the ANC or the surly proletariat.
How proud John Vorster and Kortbroek de Klerk must be that they chose the right people to surrender to when they gave up and retreated to Sun Valley, George, and the banks of the Vaal. A whole new generation of ANC labourers! If only some of them could connect wires!
A final thought. Far-off investors gaze upon us and ask what kind of country we are? Image is everything. Are we in fact a delectable repository for investment?
Informed that SA is engaged in an intellectual debate about how to complete its transition to economic freedom and democracy, they stare blankly.
All they really bear in mind (from watching the news) is a devastated terrain, comprising landfill mulch, in which the criminals have taken to robbing each other, and the tidal flow of discontented PhDs collect poo (their own?) and hurl it at images they would have revered if only alive at that time and place.
We smell.