Wasted

Dear Fellow South Africans

We are in sh..t.

Walking through our leafy, upmarket East Rand suburb recently, with its upmarket pubs and spaza casinos, watching the alternative chemists at their business, I was reminded of T S Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. Here is a Joburg spin on some of his verses:

Unreal city
This sewage crept by me upon the pavement
And along the road, up old Pretoria Street
Oh City, city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a gambling place in Rietfontein
The ceaseless whining from a TV tune
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where the desperate play at noon

Unreal city
Dodging the brown stuff on a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over Rietfontein, so many
I had not thought life had undone so many
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
(How else to navigate the filthy street?)

I thought then that this river of waste was an apt metaphor for our town. Actually, it's an apt metaphor for our country right now. I read that we have spent billions trying to eradicate the bucket system. We are still up to our necks in the stuff. Small wonder that it seems to permeate our lives. Mad Magazine once jested that South Africa has eleven official languages but can't speak sense in any of them. Well, we certainly can speak cr..p in all of them. Whence comes this epidemic of verbal diarrhoea? Lately we've had people, politicians not backward, calling other people dogs, baboons and other names. A politician was alleged to have encouraged people to commit murder. I hope that's fake news. What enema will rid us of this mine dump of turgid waste? What have we, the nation, been feeding on that we seem to belch forth the foulest waste at every opportunity? We can be so politically correct about pollution of the atmosphere, yet...

Again, Mr Eliot said it:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

But then again, I suppose one ought to lighten up. Politicians, like demolition experts, cannot really be relied upon to build anything lasting. We, who whine about the politicians, have been known to wreak as much havoc with a single poisonous tweet.

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh, said Eliot. Bring on the twenty year old scotch.

Yours in the struggle for a cure for national diarrhoea.

Richard