Facilities: The bars only served bad beer, sweet white wine (ie. also bad) and bad red wine. The latter was also in short supply, and the two bars we queued at ran out just as we reached the head of the queue. Alternately, we were the victim of some prejudice or other, given this suspicious timing. Seeing as there were plenty of empty seats in the arena, this does not bode well for how they would cope with a sold-out event. (Perhaps some of you who went to the Kylie Minogue show can comment?).

Opening act: Yoav, Israeli born but bred in Cape Town. This man and his guitar combine to create some lovely sounds – he does electronica-style beats with his hands on the guitar, which combine with a strong and evocative voice to create some quite compelling tunes. Check his interesting biography here, and if you get a chance to hear him live, it should be worth your while.

Tori: She is utterly nuts – she’s got the Earth Mother thing going, combined with a manic intensity that sometimes led you to think she was about to swallow a microphone or pound a keyboard to bits. But also bloody good at what she does. In terms of performers looking and acting like they give a damn about putting on a good show, she’s up there with the best I’ve seen. Because this was an unplugged-style concert (just her and two pianos), many of the tracks had different arrangements to the ones you’d have heard on the albums, and I’d say that all of them worked very well (with the possible exception of “Concertina”, which I thought lacked the driving rhythm of the recorded version). The best of the night for me was either “Hey Jupiter” or her cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” (a quite regular cover, along with The Cure’s Lovesong, which we unfortunately didn’t get to hear this time). “Me and a Gun” worked well live, thanks to both the intensity of the lyrics and that voice of hers – the arena was utterly silent for this, and I’d imagine it would have been the highlight of the evening for some.

The only general regret I have – and it’s not a complaint, as the show was memorable and very worthwhile – was that for an artist who has such a large catalogue, it’s unfortunate that 7 of the 17 tracks were off “Little Earthquakes”. In the 20 years since that (debut) album was released, there have been 11 others, so we only got to hear a small selection of her music. This might of course have been to the taste of many present, who at least knew the words and could therefore sing along. And this was a problem. As I said above, many of the songs had new arrangements, so the enthusiastic backup singers in the crowd around us had little choice but to fumble along as best they could, matching the tempo of what they were hearing to what they remembered in real-time. And this no doubt sounded better in their heads than it did in ours. Or at least, I’d think so – because if it did sound as bad to them as to us, I imagine that they would have stopped trying.

The sound was great, unlike at the U2 concert. My only technical complaint is regarding the lighting. We were in the 5th row, below the stage, and would quite regularly be temporarily blinded by one or more lights pointed straight at us at eye-level. But this is a minor quibble, and one could always watch one of the two big screens instead of the stage when this happened.

And finally, a special mention to the Queen of the Nile, who gave me a 900% return on investment after I apparently pushed her buttons in the right sequence. Thanks and praise be to the law of averages, along with confirmation bias.

The recently revised South African Press Code confirms that the role of the press remains – at least from the point of view of the Code – pretty much what we’ve always understood it to be. To summarise, the press serves society by allowing us to make informed judgements regarding events of the day. In doing so, they should refrain from violating the dignity or privacy of others unless justified in doing so by a legitimate public interest.

Whether one has sufficient justification is a matter of judgement. This is especially the case with regard to deeply emotive issues such as paedophilia. On Friday, October 14, the Cape Argus carried a front-page exposé of convicted paedophile William Creasey, which was later defended in a follow-up op-ed as serving the public interest.

In the op-ed, High Court Reporter Fatima Schroeder argued that the exposé “drew attention to the need for formal monitoring mechanisms being incorporated into the sentencing of sex offenders”, and that the Argus was “convinced of our duty to contribute to limiting the exposure of children to risk”. Editor of the Cape Argus, Gasant Abarder, concurred with this view in an exchange I had with him on Twitter.

But if this is a justification, it is interesting to note that in the initial article only around 10% of it dealt with the general issue of how best to treat and monitor sex offenders, while the rest dealt fairly explicitly with Creasey himself. While there is no question that Creasey has committed wrongs in the past, one can wonder whether the general issues involved could be debated without so much attention to his particular case – especially because he is – to the best of our knowledge – innocent of any current crimes.

My concern is that a focus on the particulars of this one man blurs the boundary between the press operating as a purveyor of news and as a moral watchdog. That this line is being blurred is exemplified in the prominent role of the Independent Newspaper group in the LeadSA campaign, where certain forms of behaviour are endorsed and others censured, as in the Bill of Responsibilities.

When the legitimate interests of others are at threat, we all – including the press – have a moral duty to not be silent. This is particularly true of the especially vulnerable, such as children. But alongside our interests in protecting children from predators, we also have an interest in protecting the role of the media as a trustworthy and principled source of information.

In this case, it is important to note that Creasey himself has neither denied nor confirmed his intentions to offer art classes to children, insisting that he would be seeking legal counsel. We should remember that just as some might consider the publication of the exposé as an act of vigilantism, it remains possible that the advertisements offering art classes to children were published by a person who knew Creasey’s history and wanted to expose him.

Normally we would wait for the facts to be established in a court of law before releasing them to the public. This case is treated differently, and the reasons are clear: It is widely believed that paedophiles cannot be rehabilitated, and therefore remain a threat in perpetuity. But as is so often the case, what is widely believed is not necessarily the truth.

The truth is that we don’t know. Those afflicted with these compulsions are heterogeneous, and existing research is compromised by the fact that we can only study the paedophiles that commit crimes and are caught doing so. It should therefore not surprise us that the results of such research present a pessimistic picture. What is more difficult to study are those who have deviant sexual fantasies, yet never act on them.

A further obstacle here is a psychological one: The topic of paedophilia invokes such disgust that we are inclined to fear the worst, and to engage in pre-emptive strikes such as this lead story in the Cape Argus. The fact that parents – and especially parents whose children might be exposed to Creasey – would welcome this does not justify the conclusion that it was the best way of responding to the situation.

Paedophiles can and should be held criminally responsible for their actions. Creasey was convicted, and later released on parole. This might not have been the appropriate response. It’s perhaps desirable to institute chemical castration as in countries such as Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and the United States, where remarkable declines in recidivism have resulted. It’s also desirable to have a better populated registry of sex offenders, so that parents and schools can establish whether a prospective teacher has committed such crimes in the past.

If different responses are merited, such as chemical castration or enforcing no contact with children whatsoever, then those debates should be taken up on a legislative level. Creasey cannot be expected to bear a disproportionate share of the public’s outrage, as if he were an elected representative of paedophiles everywhere. If it’s not appropriate for him to walk the streets, or to teach children, it should be illegal for him to do so. Until it is, the (potentially very real) fears that parents and children have don’t allow for singling one man out for this sort of attention.

So it does not seem obviously true that the fear of potential recidivism necessarily justified the public exposure of one named individual – especially if alternatives were available. One such alternative was attempted, in that the police were approached. Their response was to say that there was “nothing they could do until they had proof that Creasey had committed an offence against a child”. As the article itself points out, Creasey’s parole had come to an end and he was now a “free man” – although according to the Argus, not as free as the rest of us.

Instead of exposing him, perhaps Creasey could have been encouraged to seek professional help in light of the signs that he might be engaging in “grooming” (attempts by a sex offender to target and prepare children for sexual abuse). The newspaper could even have warned him that they would be publishing such an exposé in the near future, unless they received independent confirmation that he was in treatment, and avoiding unmonitored contact with children.

But instead, The Cape Argus leapt immediately to red alert. And while I have absolutely no interest in defending paedophiles, we all have an interest in a balanced and responsible media, which does all it can to serve the public interest – including our interests in fairness, dignity and privacy. But in this case, moral panic, sensationalism and prurient interests seem to have won the day.

A few hours after hearing of Steve Jobs’ death, it started to seem as if Princess Diana would have reason to be jealous (if she could still be anything at all), such was the outpouring of praise directed at the CEO of Apple. “Praise” is of course the understated version of some of what we read, or witnessed at iStores across the world, where the behaviour often seemed more worshipful than what you’d imagine merited by the death of a man with no (ostensible) religious following.

But as Umberto Eco observed in 1994, the ongoing debates between supporters of the Mac and the PC has long been something like a holy war. PC users disparage the Mac faithful for embracing the paternalism of a world with prescribed choices, and Mac users sneer at the irrationality of us PC folk in making our digital lives so much more complicated than they could be. Eco said:

I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

As is the case with all cults, adherents tend to lose touch with reality. Something of a personality cult developed around Steve Jobs – partly because of the undeniable sexiness of the products he introduced each year, and more recently perhaps partly due to his well-publicised battle against pancreatic cancer.

Now we see Jobs lauded as the sort of innovator and business leader the world needs more of, despite the evidence suggesting that he was a somewhat abusive autocrat rather than the sort of consultative, politically-correct kind of leader that regularly gets held up as an example to follow in business as well as politics. There’s evidence of a double-standard here, and there is also a remarkable lack of balance in the range of responses to his death and his legacy.

Just as much of the reaction to the failure of South Africa to grant the Dalai Lama a visa prompted either overly flattering portraits of the man himself or character assassinations, Steve Jobs is now either deified or demeaned, depending on who you read. The truth is as always not that simple, and we do ourselves no favours by embracing these false dichotomies.

Of course Jobs changed the world, but he’s no Norman Borlaug, Rosa Parks, Thomas Edison or even Craig Venter. He refined and popularised various tools for making our digital lives more efficient, and more pleasurable. Apple, with Jobs at the helm, had mastered the art of making us believe that renaming and refining was the equal of invention – but it isn’t.

The iCloud is simply the cloud, as most of us knew before Jobs tried to get us there with fewer clicks of a button, and FaceTime is simply video-conferencing with a silly name. A mouse with one button, like Apple’s used to be, is simply a crippled input device. The most recent innovation, introduced at the launch of the iPhone 4S, is Siri – a voice-activated tool for performing various functions on your mobile phone. Siri no doubt has a lovely voice, but she’s doing the same job I’ve been able to do on my Android phones for the last three years.

An example of something actually invented by Jobs or Apple is difficult to find (just as it is for Microsoft). What they mostly do is package and resell the innovations of the real mavericks – those who truly “think different” (while perhaps respect [sic] grammar). What Jobs and Gates have historically done is encourage you to think the same – at least in terms of believing that their products, and their products alone, are the route to your digital salvation.

This is not necessarily or always a bad thing. Informed buyers can be aware of the costs and benefits of aligning themselves to one faction or the other, or mixing and matching if appropriate. I use iPods, but manage them with PC software because iTunes is horribly bloated and slow, at least on a PC. And I use PCs and Android devices because I want to tinker and customise, and I certainly don’t want to be told that Apple considers a phone app to violate standards of decency they have decided I should hold.

If you want things to just work, and don’t want to invest time and energy into learning how they work, there’s no question in my mind that Apple products can be superior. But as Andrew Orlowski points out, the problem is that claiming that they – or Steve Jobs – changed the world raises the question of how small that world – your world – started out being. A new way to do something we’ve always been able to do can be innovative, but it isn’t so by definition.

The endless queues around iStores on the release of a new Apple product, and the religious fervour accompanying the annual Apple product announcements, give the impression of a world of devotees that were letting Jobs do their thinking for them, rather than using the tools he introduced in order to do their own creating and innovating. This thinking is different, yes, but it’s perhaps not the kind of thinking that even Jobs would endorse, as much as he would have appreciated the resulting profits.

In an interview for Wired magazine in 1994, Jobs said that there is a “solution to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education. … What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”

One thing that certainly helps in fixing education is to encourage critical thought, and to discourage the binary worldview which says that Steve Jobs is either a techno-Messiah or some sort of sweatshop-running magpie of digital innovation, taking and then rebranding other people’s ideas in furtherance of the cult of Apple.

But treating one person as so important and so meaningful to the world, when he was only doing the same thing as his competitors – sometimes years after them – seems rather hyperbolic. It’s true that he made computing easier for many, and has done the same thing for our smaller computers that also make phone calls. Whether this is a good thing or not is an open debate, because easier can often mean that there’s less for you to do, and less for you to think about.

Curiosities/Observations

• The mad rush for duty-free as the sardines exited customs at the airport was a certain clue that you don’t want to buy booze or cigarettes in the city, unless you can help it. The queue there involved a far longer wait than customs itself, and the rationality of spending time in this queue was confirmed while browsing a wine shop. Not just a wine shop, mind you, but a “Wine Monopoly”. That is in fact its name. All wine and spirits are sold exclusively by the state, with prices partly determined by alcohol content, in a clear attempt to legislate morality. Which is of course fine if you’re a rich banker or lawyer, but not so good for the average geezer sunning himself in the park at 8pm. (These long summer nights are rather pleasant.)
• Chatting to a local on the night I arrived, I was told something odd about schooling here. Basically, children are not evaluated in any substantive way before the age of 14 (or maybe 16 – he was plying me with drink). This is of course in service of their manic egalitarianism, which dictates that kids shouldn’t be made to feel special, or inferior, before adults believe they can deal with it. So instead of exams, tests and report cards, teachers can only offer nebulous advice such as “maybe you should take a look at that maths textbook sometime? I hear it has lots of cool pictures.” Or something – I haven’t spoken to a teacher to see how this plays out.
• You need to be an active member of a church to become a gravedigger.
• The most commonly-found food is the polser, which is a hot dog, and raisin buns (whose Scandiwegian name I cannot recall). The polser will set you back around R35, as will the buns, with 3 of them in a portion. But if it’s polser you’re after, rather go to Denmark, where they serve them with crispy fried onions and rémoulade. These Norwegian ones (at least the ones I’ve found), have neither, and are thus crap. Denmark wins, and I have no biases to disclose.

• They are into peace, especially in the vicinity of the Nobel Center. I’m here for a humanist conference, and – recent events in Norway notwithstanding – it’s quite striking how the content and tone of dialogue with locals converges on trying to reconcile misunderstandings and resolve tensions. There is far less ego, or at least a different sort of ego. This congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union is being hosted at a reception by the Crown Prince tomorrow night, and the Mayor is also making an appearance at the conference dinner on Saturday. There are flags advertising our conference in the streets. Basically, they take this stuff seriously.

And then, outside of observations on Norway, there’s an embarrassing and (hopefully) humorous anecdote, which involved the Irish. But before I get to that: South African readers, if you think you have a drinking problem, you probably don’t. Because you’re not Irish. The one Irish delegate (implicated in the story I’m getting to) told me about how she and her friends drank vodka all day at school at the age of 16, from their ‘water’ bottles. And this was a head girl, from a middle-upper class background.

Anyway, I was chatting to Annie and her partner Aaron about God, Roy Keane (is that tautologous?) and assorted matters. Aaron wandered off to scrounge for coins to buy another beer. And then, while talking to Annie, I’m pretty darn sure I saw her raise her hand to the side of her face, wiggle her fingers and say “I’m up here”. That sequence of gestures is difficult to interpret as something else, one would think, and also difficult to misinterpret – it usually means “stop objectifying me by staring at my cleavage, you sexist boor”. Except I wasn’t, and hadn’t been.

This freaked me out. If you’ve watched Curb your Enthusiasm (the new series is great, by the way), you might have a sense of how utterly strange, and socially awkward, the next half-hour or so was. Because Aaron had returned, and it was another half-hour before he left, and I finally had the opportunity to resolve whether I was going to live with this misunderstanding, or “put it out there”.

I chose the latter path, and asked her whether she had wiggled her fingers, saying “I’m up here”. She looked at me as if I was alien, insane or both. I repeated the question, mimicking the gesture. Now she seemed convinced I was insane, which I might have exacerbated by saying “look, I realise I probably sound creepy now, but this is quite awkward and needs clarifying”. But she had no idea what I was talking about. And now there was this enormous elephant in the room, and I felt compelled to explain, again, what I thought I had seen – and of course what I perceived it to mean (the thing I may or may not have seen).

But bless the Irish – her quite straightforward response was “Ah, no. If you’d been doing that, I would just have slapped you or stormed off.” So then we got on with talking about Roy Keane, potatoes and so forth, with the discomfort slowly dissipating.

And now it’s Thursday, and the first phase of the visit (leadership training for secular humanist groups, at the IHEU) is over, with the conference proper starting tomorrow. I’ll be sending occasional updates on proceedings through the FSI Twitter account, and the usual motley collection of links and provocations via my account. Be careful out there.

But being away from the Internet – and perhaps especially from Twitter – can be a good thing. Now that I’m catching up on a few day’s worth of timeline in a few hours, I can see that I might have become involved in various wars, in ways that might later be regretted. The forced remove conduces to slower consideration.

It also starkly reveals how little there is worth paying attention to – among the gems of insightful links and stimulating conversations, there is still so much wasted time, and so many pointless moments of narcissism on a platform like Twitter. And of course, we can all be guilty of those, and I know I sometimes am – but we should try to make those funny, at least, so that some value can be extracted from them.

The one thing I regret having missed is the conversation around Business Day’s publishing the 2008 Sunday Times report, which occupied many SA Twitter timelines on June 15. If you know nothing about this story, read this (see links to earlier articles at the bottom), this and this (especially this last one, where the editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce, summarises why BD published the report, and his views on the controversy that resulted from doing so).

Sure, I can read all the virtual column-inches now, but the conversation has now slowed – the real-time exchanging of views between interested parties has concluded, and opinions are most likely entrenched. You get a chance to influence what people think, and have them influence what you think, on a platform such as Twitter, and this often happens before the columns, op-eds and articles are written. And we don’t often go back to revise our views, especially once we have committed them to ‘paper’. So these conversations are a pity to miss, and one clear advantage that the social web has over books and paper.

But despite having missed a few such conversations, it has been wonderful to get a chance to do some serious reading. If you’re interested in the conversation around what effects social media and the Internet are having on us, read Jaron Lanier’s wonderfully contrarian You are not a gadget. If you are interested in debates around personhood – what makes you you, and are you the same you as you were 20 years ago – Julian Baggini’s The Ego Trick is very good.

Both sorts of interacting (ie. the immediate and the traditional) with words, and with ideas, are valuable. We shouldn’t neglect or demonize either of them – but rather make sure we take full advantage of both. But having said that, until our small boating crew gets back to terra firma next weekend, I quite look forward to reading a few more books.

In case you haven’t see The Wire, I’ll say no more. Except that you should see watch the series, which I came to very late for some reason. But now that I have watched it, there’s no question that it fits into the category of the best television shows ever, at least in my estimation (even though I might not be able to help this – it’s listed on Stuff White People Like, after all). To further expose myself to potential ridicule or potential accusations of a deficit in aesthetic judgement, here’s my list, rank-ordered for bestest-ever TV:

1. The Wire
2. Deadwood
3. The West Wing
4. Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 version)

While I was intending to tell you why, there are lectures to be written, and a Sunday to enjoy. But if there are any of these four that you haven’t watched, they are all worth checking out. And seeing as it’s soon to be Winter, you surely need to think about what to do on those days and nights where leaving the house is unthinkable. Unlike today.

It was not only in his dedication to his students’ writing that his commitment proved invaluable, but also in the texts, and the ideas, that he exposed all of us to. He introduced me to Czeslaw Milosz, and to Bertold Brecht, and countless other writers who helped inform what I was trying to think, and say. Our shared appreciation of Leonard Cohen, and his attempts to find the numinous in the mundane, led to many a conversation which left a lasting impression on how I went about trying to find the lines I needed, or wanted, at the time.

He has left us with many books of poetry and essays, all of which have something to offer to most – and usually, quite a lot to offer to all willing to spend some time reading and thinking about the intersections between time, place and the person struggling to locate herself within the noise. For stripping down, and getting through, the noise was one of his most obvious talents – and one we could all benefit from spending some time trying to emulate.

One book that hasn’t been mentioned in the tributes I’ve seen to date is his 1997 book, a writer’s diary. Opening it now, I see that my bookmark is probably still where I left it 10 or so years ago, when I last re-read it, on a paragraph that sticks in the memory. Part of his entry for 16 March, 1996 reads:

The writer belongs to the world; but only by belonging to himself first of all. (In some cases, doubtless, last of all as well.) And this is, in good part, his ethical problem as a human being, as well as a writer.

Judging by the few times I’ve been in his company along with Tanya and the children, I don’t doubt that he resolved this ethical problem, as he seemed to belong to them, and them to him, in a way which made it clear that he’d found a place of peace, but also of inspiration, and of happiness. All sympathies to them, for what they have lost, and to all others who will miss him.

While I haven’t written any poetry for as long as I can remember, looking over those files now, I can remember how valuable his input was – and wish that I could show you a before-and-after version of the same poem in order to demonstrate my debt. While I can’t do that, there is one that I know was strongly influenced by his patient guidance, and it’s pasted below. Thank you, Stephen.

Nailed to our dreaming

Again we watch the sun climb
the tree to your window, and then again
we sleep, nailed to our dreaming
of something other than neglect,
the comfort of paralysis.

Again we shed our city skin,
and travel these parched roads
in search of a fragment of promise,
the quieting of fear. We know
that there is always more to say –

Other ways to define our solitude,
diverse shapes for our desires.
But the words are unkind, are lost
in your gaze, in my imagining
of a love that is liberty.

And though this may be filled
with the end of summer’s song,
over here is a smile.
Over there is my hate and moonlight,
my rainbow with sleep;
wishes from days slipped quietly past,

when I felt my lives begin to unravel,
but then gentled them all back;
for too many years have been lost
on these narrow streets,
edged by dirty snowbanks twice-melted,
of our wishing a poorer future than our past.

They say that all we can rely on
are those things we despise,
and that may be why
I have been frozen here so long,
a mute witness to my body.
Yet we somehow speak, finding new tongues,

until you wake me at dawn,
talk of the roads we must navigate
to find our way home. Still mute,
I wonder if you recognise me only now,
or if you even knew whose hand
you held in your sleep.

First, as I’ve said before in related contexts, it makes the mistake of presenting religion and religious leaders as the moral authorities in society. They can certainly have their say, but to prevent legitimate suspicions of a failure to think things through, representation from civil society more broadly – especially the non-religious – would be necessary.

Second, the Bill is not simply a list of the responsibilities that correlate with our Bill of Rights. That would be a relatively simple list – for example, the right to life would correlate with the responsibility to not kill people. But that sort of list would not be inspirational, and we know that LeadSA likes inspirational. Their call to light a candle for Mandela is a good example of this, where a completely meaningless activity is suggested (and again, associated with prayer), instead of perhaps exhorting South Africans to do something useful, like donate time or money to an NGO like Equal Education. I think we can quite safely predict which of these two options Mandela would prefer you to choose.

No, instead this list goes far beyond our Bill of Rights, and creates a whole new set of obligations, some of which are utterly misguided. While they claim that the “12 responsibilities flow from each of the 12 rights enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa”, this is false. The responsibility to greet people warmly, “and speak to them courteously”, does not flow from the Constitution. The Constitution secured important liberties which most in our country lacked, and one of those liberties is to be as rude as you please, to whomever you please.

There are plenty of these sorts of aspirational sentiments, aimed at a grassroots social engineering. And that’s fine, but not if it comes from government, via the Department of Education. Because the sentiments in this Bill endorse the idea of a nanny state, which is not consistent with the essential commitment to personal liberty in the Constitution. Especially in the instance of one clause in the Bill, which explicitly undermines our liberty. On freedom of belief and religion, the Bill says we are obliged to:

respect the beliefs and opinions of others, and their right to express these, even when we may strongly disagree with these beliefs and opinions. That is what it means to be a free democracy

That’s not what it means at all. Part of it is true, namely the right that people have to express beliefs we disagree with strongly. But we certainly have no obligation to respect beliefs and opinions. People we can respect, sure, but we do so by holding them to account for their opinions. By telling them when they are wrong, and explaining why, so that they can be better informed. We count on other people to do the same for us, so that we don’t fall prey to dogmatism and the sleep of reason ourselves.

This is not leading SA. This is dumbing things down into slogans and cliche, and LeadSA can sod off.

More will be said on this next week, so apologies for the hasty and scantily justified rant above.

Postscript: See here for my alternative Bill of Responsibilities.

So, as to how people can take themselves far too seriously: Yesterday, after having pledged to make dinner for myself and The Doctor, a trip to Gardens Centre was required in order to procure ingredients. Walking past the MTN store, I remembered that I had had difficulty with roaming while in London, and I therefore walked in to make enquiries. While chatting to the clerk, a woman came in, and started addressing the customer in line behind me (the only one). She asked him how long he’d been waiting, emphasising that she was short on time.

Not long, he said, but this was insufficiently reassuring. “I don’t have time to twiddle my thumbs”, she said. She then asserted that she would get on with other business, and that this customer should ensure that her place in the queue was preserved. In a somewhat bemused fashion, he offered an ambiguous mumble, and she departed. Upon returning, and finding herself next in line, she forcefully dropped her phone on the counter, and started loudly complaining that it was misbehaving.

The staff tinkered, at one point plugging it in to check that it was charged. Big mistake. “I charged it this morning! Do you think I’m stupid?”, she yelled. But the problem had something to do with turning off/on, and they were unable to diagnose the fault right there. So they offered to take it in for repairs. No – “it’s not worth repairing. It only cost me R100″, she said. “Well, is it under guarantee? We can take it in for repairs, and offer you a loan phone in the meanwhile”, the staff offered.

“No! You must replace it”. She pointed to the MTN branding on the phone, and said, waving her arms around to gesture at the store walls, “all of this here made this phone, and is responsible for it!”. They then dared to ask if she had bought it there. But she had not – she had bought it at the Waterfront CNA. Well then, ma’am, we can’t help you – you must take it there, and I imagine if you have your receipt, they will be able to help. “Who keeps receipts!”, she yelled. “And do you mean I have to traipse all the way to the Waterfront? I don’t have time for that!”. “We can’t help you, ma’am – you didn’t buy it here, and even if you did, we’d need your receipt to be able to help”.

So she storms out. About ten minutes later (I was having a long geeky conversation with a clerk), she appeared in the doorway and announced: “I have bought a phone from Vodacom!”. Then, she steps in, throws the phone on the floor, and starts stomping on it and crushing it with her heel, shrieking things like “this is what I think of MTN!”. She kicks pieces of phone in the direction of the helpdesk, and storms out again. But – she had forgotten something. Seconds later, she re-appears, throws the charger into the store, and yells “and you can hang yourselves on THIS!”.

We all had a good laugh, and one store clerk had some good fortune, as it appears the phone, once reassembled, was now in better working order.

The other frivolity involved my friend, the occasional celebrity “After-dinner mint” (at least according to a P4 radio billboard that once bore his mugshot), calling me last Sunday to suggest the audacious plan of flying to London to watch football. So we did, because the game was at Old Trafford, home of the best football team (and the ugliest footballer). And seeing as he is an Arsenal fan, and they were “our” opposition, I could look forward to plenty of gloating at his expense once we secured our inevitable victory (2-0 to Manchester United was the eventual score. As the crowd kept reminding the MintMan, his team “is just a shit Barcelona”).

And London was fun. We went to pubs, ate at fat-lip Jamie’s Italian (and, with another friend, at Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head, where I enjoyed a 52-hour cooked pork belly). We hung with Simon Pegg at a bar in Covent Garden (no, not really, but he was there), and took lots of Tube rides and a train to Manchester. We learnt that orang-utans use tree bark for sexual pleasure (so the poster said – not empirically verified by us), and that strange fox-like creatures in London steal stuff from your car, if you’re not sufficiently watchful. We saw a famous (I imagine) mouldy wall outside our hotel room. It became known to us that the disabled have access to an “ability suite” at Old Trafford. And also, I discovered that Eton has a “Porny School”, which might be useful information to some of you.

Following the Cape Town performance by U2 last weekend, I blogged a brief response (some content is duplicated here) in an attempt to articulate why the show was so disappointing. To be honest, I’d always been somewhat ambivalent about attending, and when tickets were made available, it was partly the review on these pages that persuaded me to brave the masses and the madness. Styli Charalambous reported that, at the Johannesburg leg a week before, U2 laid claim to being the “best band in the world”, and while that claim always appeared to be implausible, it nevertheless seemed likely that they would put on a good – or even great – evening’s entertainment.

So, this cynic and some like-minded friends braved the 70 000 (ish) strong crowd, fully expecting the spectacle to be impressive enough in execution to outweigh Bono’s predictable sermonising and his love of cliché (“Africa is the wealthiest country – your people have gold in them” being a recent example). And at times it was – the engineering feat that is “The Claw” was pretty impressive, as was the lighting and video.

Undoubtedly impressive were the logistic details of the evening in general, although aspects of the public transport system were apparently dysfunctional. Security, crowd control, bar facilities and the like were smooth and efficient, reinforcing the precedent set during the World Cup. Well done Cape Town, whoever you may be. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said in respect of U2, who were distinctly underwhelming.

They were disappointing mostly because the sound was terrible – muddy, and with a fair amount of distortion. Vocals were often inaudible, and when combined with the wall of sound approach they seem to have gone for, the tone was generally one of aural assault. Unless one was a die-hard fan, who knew all the songs in the repertoire, there were plenty of opportunities for boredom – one frenetic and noisy track with bombastic (and unintelligible) lyrics sounds pretty much like the next, and the previous one. Fortunately, we timed things perfectly for missing the Springbok Nude Girls performance, which was most likely the same sort of thing, turned up to 11.

And then, of course, there was the cheese factor, and the sermonising. There were the predictable pictures of Mandela on the big screen, and the predictable cheers when Bono encouraged the audience to swallow the implausible assertions that they were in some mythical heart of Africa. Hello Rainbow Nation, yelled Saint Bono, where curiously, it seems that 99% of the audience is white.

“You have the big 5?, he told us, before going on to introduce his “slightly smaller 4?, namely the members of the band, now all given animal names (Bono was a wildebees, at least according to The Edge). But we don’t have the big 5 in South AfricaCape Town, really, except where they might be trucked into some luxury game reserve. Not to mention that the concert in question is taking place in a city that is oft-criticised for being as un-African as a city on this continent can be. [edit: I made the embarrassingly false claim that we don't have a big 5 in SA].

I’ve expressed scepticism about the Africa-thing before, so these appeals to nationalistic sentiment were never likely to have much traction in my case. However, it’s clear enough that Bono thinks “Africa” means something special – or at least, that he wants us to think he does. But his Africa-shtick is dependent on mythology, rather than on time on place, so I doubt that he’s given it much thought that Cape Town might be in a different universe to Accra, and various other spots that he name-checked during one of his attempts to pump up this section of the “Rainbow Nation”.

Besides complaints about the sound (and unconfirmed gossip has it that this problem was noted, and part of the reason for the very long delay before U2 took to the stage), the show itself was dull, and lacking in energy. The rote nature of the performance was clear, and as a friend observed, the band didn’t look that interested in what they were doing. But that’s fine – you pay your money and you take your chances. All performers have good and bad nights, and audiences (or rather, audience-members) can be fickle beasts. U2 owed us nothing beyond showing up, and being vaguely professional.

But when I say, above, that “the same cannot be said in respect of U2”, I mean not only that the concert didn’t deserve fulsome praise, but also that – at least according to some – negative sentiments regarding the concert should not be contemplated, never mind expressed. Feedback to the blog post in question came quickly, and angrily, via Twitter, comments and email, with the majority sentiment being something to the order of “how dare you not appreciate the blessings that were bestowed on you?”

And this is more disappointing than the concert was, in that what it points to is a deep-seated insecurity. It reveals a mindset whereby we should be grateful for whatever crumbs the gods may scatter at our feet, and where one is not allowed to voice criticism, lest these bounties be denied us in future. Bono has graced us with his wildebeesty presence, and may decline such favours in the future (hip replacements permitting that choice, of course) if we don’t make our gratitude clear.

This is a provincialism that is unwarranted and unseemly. While I don’t think we’re entitled to expect Iggy Pop levels of commitment from touring bands, we are entitled to disappointment when a performance doesn’t meet our expectations, and we are also entitled to express these disappointments, just as audiences in other parts of the world are. And if a concert is promoted as a 360-degree experience, where it matters less where you sit in relation to the band, the last thing one expects is for (at least according to Internet forum discussions) the sound quality to be better in the cheaper seats, rather than those close to the stage.

Remember, we’re talking about a show that is said (by Wikipedia, admittedly) to cost over R 5 000 000 per day, excluding the stage construction. With that sort of spend, you’d think they would remember to devote significant resources to getting the sound engineering right.

The broad concern I’m addressing here is simply our reluctance to be critical, except where that criticism comes in the form of the shrill and antagonistic baiting that is commonplace in comments to online articles. Alternately, what we often see is a relativistic reluctance to be critical at all, where we weasel our way through life saying things like “everyone is entitled to their opinion” – without remembering that opinions help shape actions, and that we should therefore care deeply about our opinions, and those of others.

Of course, we can disagree with each others’ opinions, and we should do so. But being able to do so starts with allowing yourself to hold opinions, even (and especially, in some cases) where they run against the grain of popular sentiment. And I get that most of the audience enjoyed the show, and don’t begrudge them that pleasure. But if you are one of those who didn’t (and there are quite a few, judging by search results), your criticisms don’t, and shouldn’t, have any bearing on the experiences of those that did enjoy the concert.

Our opinions should however be honest ones, and should not be premised in a notion that we’re second-class, and deserve whatever we get. While the days of perma-tours by washed-up bands like Crowded House seem to fortunately be a thing of the past, there’s no sense in our sending a clear signal to Big Concerts and other promoters that we’re so desperate for visitations from our gods that the details no longer matter.

After all, consider the potential outcomes of such an uncritical disposition. Who knows what’s next – Roxette, perhaps?