OUT TO LUNCH

The woke bedwetters were out in force last week following the release of the ‘treasonous’ DA election ad featuring a burning paper SA flag which is restored to its former glory once the message gets through that if you don’t vote DA then all you’ll have before long is a pile of ashes. Bearing in mind what’s been happening over the past decade and a half I don’t think that’s too far-fetched.

After all, we had the July 2021 riots (in which the police and security forces were noticeably absent) which caused a few hundred deaths and ten of millions of rands worth of damage and we have yet to see the instigators brought to justice; despite the fact that the ANC claimed they knew exactly who was behind the insurrection.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

The ANC also managed to allow the parliament buildings to be badly damaged by fire in 2022 which was caused by one man wandering around with either a box of matches or a disposable cigarette lighter. Having previously commented about how difficult it is just to get a braai fire going on occasions one must gasp with wonderment at how a homeless man wandering around the unsecured parliamentary buildings unchecked managed to do so much damage without the help of a couple of cans of petrol or a box or two of Blitz firelighters. Or is there something the ruling party have forgotten to tell us?

There are countless other examples of members of the ANC setting fire to buildings if things don’t go their way so getting all frothed up about a computer generated image of a burning flag does look suspiciously like a toxic cocktail of hyperbole and hypocrisy.

I thought the DA burning flag ad was very powerful and the message was perfectly clear to anyone with half a brain. In fact it was spelt out very succinctly…”Unite to Rescue SA”. But the strength of the ad for me was not the image of a burning flag but the voice over. If the voice over had been a plummy, Anglo evil coloniser accent or a rich, rural Afrikaans land thief accent then one might have had a sliver of sympathy with some of the critics. But it was an obviously black accent and since that voice represents a considerably larger percentage of the electorate than the previously mentioned white voices I think the chance of the message hitting home are pretty high. I’m not meeting too many black South Africans at the moment who think the ANC have done much to improve their lives.

What I hadn’t realised before all the brouhaha is that flags are sacred symbols of national unity that need special protection. They have to be respected which is why the image of one being burnt sent people like News24’s Qaanitah Hunter rushing for the smelling salts before she summoned up enough energy to Tweet:

Not a single person said “uhm, maybe this is not a good idea”?

Clearly Qaanitah means that nobody in the Democratic Alliance said uhm it wasn’t a good idea and that’s probably because they thought it was a good idea. Personally I can’t get emotional about a piece of coloured cloth but in a society that still just about allows freedom of expression I have no problem with those who get tearful and emotional when they see the symbol of our national unity being burned. I just think they’re being a bit bonkers.

To imbue the flag with mystical powers and to suggest that any desecration of it is akin to wishing to overthrow the state is the sort of reaction you might expect from someone who has just eaten magic mushrooms but certainly not from any rational human being. Giving the South African flag the same elevated status as the Shroud of Turin suggests that we are long overdue for a reality check.

You may remember in the days of yore, when COVID-19 stalked the land, that it was compulsory to wear a face mask when in a public place to prevent the plague from wiping out half the population. Some of those face masks were in the colours and design of the SA flag. And yet nobody from the main-stream media got their knickers in a knot about a killer virus being splattered into the national flag.

Then there was Faf de Klerk’s famous SA flag speedo cradling the de Klerk family jewels. No outcry then either. There are any number of t-shirts you can buy online featuring the SA flag and I am pretty sure you could even get a South African flag table cloth if you asked around.

A government directive gives strict protocols as to how to treat what Pres Frogboiler pompously referred to as this “sacred article in the life of our country”.

The flag must never be allowed to:

Touch the ground or floor

Be used as a tablecloth or draped in front of a platform

Be manufactured or used as underclothes, bath and floor mats or any similar demeaning application.

Be displayed or flown upside down.

Be used for any commercial advertising in a manner that will distort or show disrespect to the flag.

Whoever would have guessed that a flag would be so sensitive? Next thing we know it will be demanding a ‘safe space’ and a kitten to stroke when it gets abused.

In time all this will be forgotten but in the few weeks still to go before the election it’s worth dwelling on the ‘T’ words being bandied about by the lefties. Treason, traitors, treachery. So which party do you think has best embodied those ideals over the past ten years? The Democratic Alliance or the African National Congress?

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A far more disturbing image than a burning paper flag appeared on social media last week. That was footage of ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula arriving in Inanda, north of Durban, in a R4 million Mercedes G-Wagen with the usual top of the range VIP protection thugs following closely in a cheapo (by comparison) BMW.

Inanda, the media report informed me, is one of the communities that battles with service delivery issues such as water scarcity, lack of rubbish collection and electricity. Not that this seems to bother the residents very much. They were all smiles and happy singing as the campaign bus moved through rubbish strewn areas between the most basic of shack dwellings while throwing yellow ANC t-shirts out to their grateful voting fodder. Some shirts land in the dirt by the side of the road and are hastily snatched up by people who know that their lives are unlikely to improve any more in the next five years than they have in the past thirty. But at least they have a t-shirt and that’s something.

In one shot a huge crowd at least ten deep were clamouring ecstatically for a tee-shirt, their hands outstretched in anticipation. Some were photographing the bus on this joyful day. No doubt, in years to come they will be able to show their grandchildren the photo of the day the caring ANC came to hand out free t-shirts.

There’s something wonderfully surreal about a party that claims to espouse “a better life for all” turning up to campaign in a filthy, poor settlement in one of the most expensive cars that it’s possible to buy. In my culture we would regard that as rubbing the noses of the poor in the dirt but clearly the good folk of Inanda don’t see it that way and will willingly vote for yet more surrealism on May 29th.