OUT TO LUNCH
There has been much lively debate of late at the Somerset West Croquet Club as to whether we should take the knee before our next match against the Helderberg Village retirement home team. Since most of our members haven’t a clue what ‘taking the knee’ signifies it has been left up to me as the club’s ‘wokest’ member to explain what it’s all about.
I have pointed out that this taking the knee business is all about showing how deeply caring and non racist you are. For example, to the casual observer you may appear to be a normal, hard working, law abiding, tax paying member of society who just happens to have an offensively white skin.
However, this sends a clear signal to those who have been highly trained to recognise such subliminal subtleties that you are probably a racist or, at the very least, that you harbour racist prejudices.
You can protest your innocence all you like but the only way to satisfy the howling Twitter mob and the many race-baiting grifters in the media is to publicly take the knee. This largely meaningless gesture doesn’t mean you’re not a racist but it does mean that you wouldn’t like to be thought of as one.
By not taking the knee you have virtually admitted in public that you don’t think black lives matter (Don’t worry…you’re in good company…the ANC also don’t think black lives matter judging by the way they run this shit-show called South Africa) and that, by extension, you’re a racist.
Should this whole matter not be left up to your own conscience though? Why should anybody be forced to take the knee just to satisfy the wishes of a bunch of virtue signalling, lefty lunatics? And more to the point, what does taking the knee actually achieve?
Does food magically appear on a poor black family’s table when a well meaning, deeply caring person takes the knee? Nope, it doesn’t. Is there any empirical evidence that wealthy, middle class folk risking a mud stain on their right knee makes the slightest difference to black poverty?
Well, if there is I haven’t seen it. So this knee taking business is all about showing you care without actually having to confront the problem personally. That’s up to people like Gift of the Givers. If you’ve taken the knee then you’ve done all you can possibly do to combat racism and should probably go home and sleep off all that generousity of spirit.
Poor Quinton de Kock managed to make global headlines last week by withdrawing from a match after the chaotically run Cricket South Africa sent out a mandate to all players to take the knee…or else. Quite rightly Quinton felt this was a matter of personal choice and was praised and criticised in unequal measure for his ‘brave’ decision. The criticism far outweighed the praise but that was probably because it was vastly amplified by the left-wing media and the Twitterati lynch mob.
But it wasn’t too long before Quinton came to realise the error of his ways and expressed his willingness to take the knee; to the great disappointment of his earlier supporters it must be said. Had Quinton (who was rather too keen to share his struggle credentials) suddenly discovered his inner lived experience?
"I was quiet on this very important issue until now. But I feel I have to explain myself a little bit.
For those who don't know, I come from a mixed race family. My half-sisters are Coloured and my step mom is Black. For me, Black lives have mattered since I was born. Not just because there was an international movement.”
More likely is that somebody whipped out a calculator, drew Quinton aside and showed him how much moolah he wouldn’t be earning next year if he didn’t take the knee. An annual pay packet of around R6mln guarantees a pretty comfortable lifestyle I would imagine and would be sorely missed if the Mumbai Indians thought they were employing a racist. Sometimes the decision whether or not to take the knee is made so much easier.
None of this is much help to the members of the Somerset West Croquet Club of course since croquet doesn’t pay nearly as well as cricket, despite being a much more interesting game.
A member vote has been taken though and we have decided not to take the knee for the simple reason that once down, most of us won’t be able to get back up again.
However, members have been encouraged to wave their clenched fists in the air and shout Amandla but none have done so at the time of writing.
******
The bed-wetters were out in full force last week. Not only did they have the Quinton de Kock ‘to kneel or not to kneel…that is the question’ matter to occupy their vacuous, outrage seeking minds but they also had Gareth Cliff’s interview with the prickly Mudzuli Rakhivhane to get their teeth into. For those who have been on holiday in the Sentinel Islands or boosted into space by Jeff Bezos and may have missed it, Gareth has a podcast called ‘The Burning Platform’ and in a very small part of the hour long podcast he was accused of talking over panellist Mudzuli Rakhivhane and saying that her claimed lived experience was ‘anecdotal and unimportant’ which, since the whole debate was supposed to be about the forthcoming municipal elections, was absolutely correct.
The other panellist on the show was the DA’s John Steenhuisen but since he didn’t say anything the best the lefties could come up with was that he was “smirking” while all this racial disharmony was going on.
Unlike many people, including the invertebrates at Nando’s I suspect, I watched the entire programme and thought that it came across very well. Mudzuli Rakhivhane was both engaging and eloquent (it’s very risky for an old white man to tell a 27 year old black woman that she speaks well but I love to live dangerously) and, apart from the brief ‘lived experience’ disagreement, there seemed to be no hard feelings on either side.
Unlike Piers Morgan, Mudzuli didn’t tear off her headset and storm out of the virtual studio. And the title of the podcast is ‘The Burning Platform’ for heaven’s sake and not ‘Stroke a Fluffy Kitten in your Safe Space’. Gareth Cliff ended the show by courteously thanking Mudzuli for appearing saying “I don’t think it will be the last time. You were on fire”. Time alone will tell.
I did contact Gareth Cliff to tell him how annoyed I was that he had been made Mampara of the Week in the Sunday Times whereas I hadn’t even made the list of finalists when I was outed as a ‘racist’ by that very newspaper back in 2008. But the real issue here is this wokist nonsense of lived experience and the enthusiasm so many people clearly possess to portray themselves as victims.
As a member of a persecuted minority ethnic group in this country surely my dehumanising, lived experience is far more relevant than that of someone from an ethnic group with over 80% demographic representation (particularly as members of that ethnic group are the ones who are currently running the country into the ground).
My daily lived experience is to be referred to as a land thief, as the descendant of a rapist slave trader and to be threatened with extermination by members of the EFF.
Even radicalised members of my own ethnic minority group within the media are happy to turn against me and label me all sorts of terribly hurtful things.
All the while I am forced to put up with this race baiting and humiliation and I am expected to cheerfully pay my taxes and my rates, pay my domestic a living wage and settle my bills on time. Does this bother me and would I ever be allowed to mention it on a Gareth Cliff podcast? Or is my lived experience also ‘anecdotal and unimportant’? I suspect it might be.
****
The fact that the municipal election was held on All Saints Day was surely somebody’s idea of a sick joke. As the day drew closer the desperation was clearly taking its toll on the ANC who have had to change strategy and switch from admitting their past sins and promising a better tomorrow to threatening a worse tomorrow if they don’t get voted back into office.
Addressing a mostly unmasked and definitely not socially distanced capacity crowd in Ekurhuleni last week President Frogboiler told his audience that if they didn’t vote ANC then they definitely wouldn’t be getting any electricity.
Apparently the community has been without power for four months, mainly thanks to ANC corruption and incompetence. Frogboiler sympathised and told the people “not to despair” because other parts of the country were experiencing stage 4 load shedding, albeit not for four months at a time. Yet.
