Craig Seligman’s Bloomberg column—it’s not worth reading—is about South African “Nobelist Nadine Gordimer,” known for her impenetrable prose, having “channeled her rage” over the reality of the “Rambo Nation” in yet more obscurantist prose.
(“Rambo Nation” is the title of the Introduction to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”)
Permissible rage over the new South African mobocracy has to be a mixed-race affair. After all, you can’t tell the story of the dispossessed white minority (Afrikaner farmers), currently “being culled like springbok in a hunting safari.”
To kick off the fun, I watched a rather well-produced, utterly one-sided, propagandist “documentary” yesterday. “Have You Heard From Johannesburg” is about the so-called Struggle. The behind-the-scenes reality popped into my head when watching the famously “exiled South Africans,” (like Oliver Tambo) suited up, and giving ponderous interviews:
“… There was certainly precious little that would have dampened Joseph Lelyveld’s enthusiasm for ‘The Struggle.’ But when the former (aforementioned) New York Times editor went looking for his exiled ANC heroes all over Africa, he found nothing but monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men whom he desperately tried to rouse with revolutionary rhetoric.” (Page 143, Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)
Myth-making aside, the ANC’s manufactured heroes have nothing on the ascetic, self-sacrificing Salafis who man al-Qaeda (and who do not rely on European groupies for sustenance).
UPDATED I: “AFRICAN NATIONAL CORRUPTION.” A LOT TO CELEBRATE. DURBAN. I WOULD NOT recognize it today. Durban Bay is dying, environmentally.
UPDATE II: “Be a man who is not afraid to know his HIV status” broadcasts a billboard in the CBD of the once-magnificent city of Johannesburg. The image attached to the ad? A white man. HIV is almost non-existent, statistically, among whites. Such equal opportunity idiocy reminds me of that useless idiot, actress Charlize Theron, who, during a recent interviewwith another member of the idiocracy, Piers Morgan, hinted that South Africans should be disarmed. Her campaign against rape in SA was as vague, if not as dangerous. In addition to being a pretentious, rather poor actress, Theron is a major hypocrite: I believe her mother shot her father, all in a “good” cause, of course.
The image of your prototypical HIV carriers is at the 3:27 minute mark:
In my book I flesh out the facts about the Central Business District; what it looks like today—the JHB Stock Exchange has been forced to migrate to the suburbs, and businesses are shuttered—as compared to the time when I used to walk to work (it was in the Southern Life Building) from the bus station. I lived up the road in the once vibrant, humming, safe Hillbrow, where I used to stroll at night. A clip of Hillbrow today is below.
Have you ever heard of the hijacking of a … building? It’s a new concept. Of course, the woman in the clip is mouthing the allowable left-liberal platitudes, with her reference to the divinity “Madiba” (Mandela’s African honorific, and an adopted affectation among liberals). “Madiba” would not wish fear to replace his magnificent legacy. The old idiot interviewed seems to think that fear anchored in a fearful reality is a really bad thing. I’ve heard this pearl of wisdom repeated among many American liberals. Living life stupidly and fearlessly seems to be a great virtue.
Sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for market Studies, the “Property and Freedom” lecture below was given by Prof. Richard Pipes, author of the book Property and Freedom. Here’s a shocker: historians of the West have paid scant attention to the role of private property in the annals of America and Europe. “If you look for the word ‘property’ in the index of American books dealing with evolution of American [and European] attitudes you tend to find nothing there,” says Pipes.
You already know what this writer thinks. It should be, life, property, liberty. In that order. Property trumps liberty, for liberty can be variously defined. Our government insists we are free so long as we can vote. We know this to be untrue. Property, moreover, is harder to redefine by the state. If our rights to property were fully upheld—the same state that tells us to consider ourselves free (and be grateful) would be unable to control huge areas of our lives—bedroom, boardroom, deathbed, you name them.
Gov. Chris Christie’s address on Tuesday, at the Reagan Library, was more rambling than Reaganesque. It was also a little baffling. In the second paragraph, Christie says,
“Ronald Reagan believed in this country. He embodied the strength, perseverance and faith that has propelled immigrants for centuries to embark on dangerous journeys to come here, to give up all that was familiar for all that was possible.”
What’s up with this? Was Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, an immigrant? And why mention immigrants at the onset of your coming-out-as-presidential-candidate address? By so doing, Ann Coulter’s crush is probably attempting to convey that to speak of America is to speak of immigrants.
America=immigration.
John Jay had a different take. He conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what his descendants are taught.
