For eight or nine years Jeremy Gordin assisted The Sunday Independent's Karen Bliksem to write her weekly columns, so much so that some people actually thought that he was she and she was he. Now, the veteran unemployed journalist, or unemployed veteran journalist, or just plain unemployed journalist, has decided to try writing his own ...

Son-of-Bliksem? Son-of-a-bitch? Or just a sobber? You decide.

S.O.B. - AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN

About the troubles of Dinner Jacket and other Semites, non-Semites and anti-Semites

I have woken, these chilly winter mornings, thinking of my grandfather of beloved memory, Fischel "Fishcake" Rumbovksi.

Let me explain. An immigration official changed the surname, our original one, to Ribald when grandpa arrived at the Cape Town docks in circa 1898. Later, grandpa, who did not like the humorous undertone of his new surname because he was then a rabbi, changed it to Gordin so as to emulate the Yiddish playwright who was making a packet in New York City in those days.

Unfortunately neither grandpa - who gave up holy things to sell eggs - nor any of his progeny has ever made any boodle. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. Or a thorn is a thorn, whatever you call it.

Now, Grandpa Fishcake's mental rule of thumb for every issue - he was not an original thinker - was to ask the following question: "Is it good for the Jews?"

So, for example, when some time in the last century a certain Major Hunt (referred to by Fishcake, whose mother tongue was Yiddish, as "Meir Hunt" - Meir the dog) stood for the United Party in Jeppestown, where Fishcake lived, grandpa asked: "Is it good for the Jews?"

"Well," he replied to himself, his wife Sarah, and to any one else who cared to listen, "he won't be worse for us than the fellow standing for the other party. So I must say that this is indeed good for the Jews. And what is good for the Jews must be good for everyone."

What Fishcake was saying in his own way - it was before the era of NGO-speak - was that because Jews were a vulnerable minority in nearly every community in which they found themselves, they were excellent indicators (bellwethers, if you like) of trends, of what was good (or bad) for the rest.

Nelson Mandela, if I remember correctly my visits to the precincts of the constitutional court, where Mandela's words are captured on a plaque, said something similar. He allegedly said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. And I'm sure someone once said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its senior citizens (which, in my case, I'm sorry to say, is not so well, but this is a matter for another day).

Of course Grandpa Fishcake, being an immigrant, and an irritable, self-involved one at that, did not spare much thought for the vulnerable majority of his day - i.e., most of his fellow citizens - and of course our immediate world has moved on.

We now have a wonderful constitution and all the vulnerable minorities are well protected. Women, youth, children and people with disabilities have had a new ministry, devoted entirely to their needs, set up by the new administration of Jacob "Zoom-zoom" Zuma (and they said women would not be respected during his reign).

Actually, if I were a woman, I would bitterly resent being lumped together with the Youth, who seem to be an unruly and unpleasant bunch.

I mean, I ask you with tears in my peepers: what kind of commonality is there between, say, Ferial Haffajee, the former editor of the Mail & Guardian, the country's premier investigative newspaper (well, that's what it says on the Internet) and the new editor of City Press, presumably the country's other premier newspaper, or Colleen Lowe Morna, a feminist and expert on elephants, on the one hand (if you could hold the two of them in one hand), and Julius "Little Julie" Malema, president of the ANC youth brigades, on the other?

Be that as it may, I still think that Fishcake's approach has value.

Consider, for example, the, er, investment scheme headed by a young fellow called Barry Tannenbaum, which is all over the news at present. Is it good for the Jews?

I don't think it is - because many of the investors seem to have been members of the faith and you know how nasty people can turn when the subject is Jews and money. Old prejudices die hard; some traditions carry on; etcetera.

But it appears, from a rather remarkable report in Wednesday's Business Report, penned by the inimitable Roy Cokayne, that it might be "good" for certain prisoners - the burly ones who take advantage of other prisoners.

The report reads - and I quote: "Harcourt-Cooke [of Computer Forensic Services] said the concern for investors was that Tannenbaum was not going to be extradited from Australia ... as he would get protection from courts due to his chance of contracting HIV/Aids in a South African jail".

What? Is it now part of Australian legal precedent that no one can be extradited to SA because he or she might contract HIV/Aids in a Seffrican jail? What about Aussie jails? Who said Tannenbaum would go to jail anyway? Maybe he has a convincing explanation for everything. Didn't I read somewhere about people being innocent until proven guilty?

And who said Tannenbaum would be placed among the general prison population? More likely, isn't it, that, if he does spend any time in chookie, he would be placed with those nice awaiting-trial people? And who said that Tannenbaum would be raped? Or does Harcourt-Cooke know something about Tannenbaum's sexual proclivities that we don't? And, if he does, should he be talking about them?

Besides, doesn't Harcourt-Cooke know that we have a new minister of correctional services, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula (with whom Cookie shares a double-barreled surname)?

Now, while I admit that her tenure at home affairs did not engender much confidence, she surely can't be worse than her predecessor, Ngconde Mathemba Bryce "mouth before wicket" Balfour, can she? Or can she?

Surely Mapisa-Nqakula's going to go into those prisons, guns blazing, or whatever, and put paid to all that rape and other stuff?

By the way, that Zoom-zoom is a crafty bugger, isn't he? I mean, I think I'd rather be an awaiting trial prisoner than the minister of correctional services or home affairs, and look to whom he gives those two ministries: sulky Mapisa-Nqakula and his ex-wife. Talk about a poisoned chalice.

But what I really wanted to talk about today is Mahmoud "Dinner Jacket" Ahmadinejad.

The poor fellow is in all kinds of trouble - he has the world all a-twitter and there has been blood on the Iranian streets - following allegations that he has been involved in election fraud.

The question is: is this good for the Jews?

Most Jews and Israelis would say that it is.

I say that they should think again. Did you know, by the way, that there is a rumour in Israel that Dinner Jacket actually works for Mossad? And most rumours in Israel turn out to be more or less accurate.

Think about it. Dinner Jacket actually makes the Israelis look good. As long as he carries on the way he does, the Israelis get off the hook. They can even launch a blitzkrieg on Gaza - during which the troops are told to shoot anything that moves and to take no casualties - and they still get off the hook because Dinner Jacket suddenly pops up and starts ranting and raving like a latter-day Joseph Goebbels.

In other words, as grandpa Fishcake would have noted, if Ahmadinejad had not existed, the Israelis would have had to invent him. Maybe, as they say on the street in Israel, they did.

So don't be into much of a hurry to think his troubles are good for the Jews. Au contraire, mon petit pois, au contraire.

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