|
I am probably sitting in TranSky nursing the beer before too many the day the war comes down. I was sitting in the Bassline the day the first bombs came down. Which beer I was nursing is known only by Sartre, who can stand above the dark pit of live music and clock the bombs to the percussion of 340 ml - not the beat of my bottle bottom on the table.
My awareness was no more than that - a pretentious self-knowledge of my bohemian decadence, smoking a cigarette under the chair when the waitress wasn't looking. A friend was telling me how the staff of her newspaper were sitting around waiting for something to happen. They had already decided what the newspaper would look like.
"Did you see that bomb they dropped last night?" said someone the next morning. Smokers were supposed to be at work 15 minutes early to work in their four allocated smoke breaks. But no one else was there, so we just smoked and drank coffee. I was drinking extra strong. I was new. I listened to how the bomb had a homing device that could be set to the third hair of your second nostril from the right. I listened to how the bomb was so heavy it needed a carrier aircraft and spread its own wings once dropped from the vault.
This is what I knew about the war. Jhblive pointed out the similarity between the coverage of the cricket and the war: pullouts, info graphics, pin-up centrefolds and journalists who know nothing about the deep midfielder or GI field troops' view on world politics. I suppose. I don't know either. What is anyone's view on world politics?
It's not a rebellion that I don't read newspapers. It's a laziness. It's like trying to get back copies of The Bold and the Beautiful so that I can sit down and watch and understand why who is who fucking what. People say you catch on to soapies within a week without back copies. I don't know. I've never tried.
I tried with the war. After a week's worth of reading a month before it started, I still didn't understand. I don't think anyone did. My particularly ardent friends were violently frustrated with my inability to contribute to meaningless dinner table conversations. I wondered why they were still friends with me.
Conspiracy theories caught up with the explanations and soon I was batting off a Daily Sun journalist's Jack Daniels-intoxicated opinions at Tokyo Star. Michael Moore is a hero for just being "out there", pulling strings from within the capitalist construction, whether you agree with his hodgepodge journalism or not. He asks the questions and frames people within unreasonable doubt on the reasonable suspicion of evidence.
Conspiracy theories fuel reasonable doubt. If I accept the premise of the conspiracy theory realm, I have to call into question the very premise that offers my view of the factory of the world. Nothing is as it seems any longer and why, the whole political sphere is all bullshit, and all their mistakes too. The politicians themselves create the conspiracy theories so that they can wipe their bottoms while the world averts its eyes, focusing on their "real" motives.
In an indecipherable world, we make our own fairy tales - science fiction has been usurped by world politics. Canada complains that it has no movies that engage with its political sphere, or try to represent its political system or politicians. I don't know who the president of Canada is. But I can't think of any country except America that turns its politicians into celebrities, dramatising their enactment of Scott Fitzgerald's green light on a cardboard copy of the White House, set in Hollywood.
I read Sartre's The Reprieve during the first while of the media war - when the media still covered it, second to second like Big Brother, and before they got bored with the repetitious doldrums of trying to clean it up and the same incongruities, same lies, same slashed expectations, and, frankly, a war that has not ceased. I picked up The Reprieve a year after it arrived on my bookshelf. My bookshelf is like a doctor's waiting room, one in the backwaters of the Free State, where there's just a queue and the doctor comes only on Thursdays. The Reprieve is a landscape of existential crises and bad faith in the three days before World War II. It was a week before the war started. I carried on reading. Lost the book. Found it again. Dipped into it reluctantly when I didn't think about what's inside. It's despair.
Arundhati Roy came to the big Wits hall. There was a large representation from the Treatment Action Campaign as well as the Muslims Against War. And also a lot of people that just wanted to hear about her Booker Prize winning novel, God of Small Things. But she said that she isn't a novelist, but an activist. She spoke of alternative methods of social disobedience, and civil action. Ones that were more about action, and less about talk. More about effectiveness, and less about the protocols of communication and engagement. She had no idea what these might be.
We've been saying it since the 1960s: "We'd better start doing things differently, in a big way."
The internet is big in a way that we can't measure. On the internet you can participate in geographically-challenged communities of like-minded people. You can share off-beat music with other people who have never found their favourite CD in Musica, and you can surf the sites of people who are more - or less - articulate than you in communicating their world vision, sexual tastes, pet hates or family snapshots. You can participate in the making of superheroes from the comfort of your own keyboard, and share MP3s of rock stars who have never seen anything more than the inside of their computer hovel. Whether more or less articulate, you can at least find someone the same as you - even if maybe you have to cut and paste them into a collage of your ideal mirror-I.
The Wits Art History department did not encourage my Masters proposal on civil disobedience through internet art. Not only were they dubious on whether art can exist outside of a gallery - the internet not living up to formulations of the white cube - but they were dubious as to whether art could be art if it had an alternative function - civil disobedience. Even if the level or quality of the civil disobedience was minimal, even insignificant, which in our currently real-time written world seems the more plausible - can one even use such strong words as "civil disobedience" anymore? The thing brought into question was the autonomous nature of art. In the current "story" of modern art, each movement progresses from the previous in a seemingly natural regeneration or reformulation, with an overarching element of "growth". And art as autonomous was one of the founding premises of modernism - art for art's sake, art about art and art that seeks its function in art. Ultimately, the useless artefact of art with maybe minor cultural efficacy. The notion of perhaps returning to a pre-modernist conception of art is intolerable on today's formulation of what art is and how the school of art history will read it, explain it or assimilate it.
The day after I presented my proposal, an appeal went across the electronic ether, straight to my spam box, but I found it. Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble had been arrested and his art materials confiscated by the United States government. The appeal was for financial assistance towards the legal fees.
My great uncle recalls that in his second year BSc at Rhodes, 1945, the government told students they would get their year's credits if they fought in the war. They all went to Italy.
School children have also been arrested or investigated by the FBI on the basis of the art they created, the reports say.
Heck, he even got to drive some South African celebrities around when they went over to cheer up the troops. I probably would have plugged away at the books in a deserted Grahamstown, chastising myself that I was a rebel and a pacifist, and that the world would be greater for the example I set. But I don't really know which is the better or the worse. Or the cowardice. It's a shotgun situation; you have to run from something.
This is despair. My friend writes to me from Italy that they're fighting at the magazine he works for over who to put on the front cover of their "Evil" issue - Saddam in pyjamas, or Mugabe. He also once told me that he spits at images of Nkosazana Zuma.
And people are dying, I hear. I believe it; I don't need to see it. The war that never happened in 1992, Baudrillard, is not happening again, now in a hyper-reality that has extended beyond concrete media. In a world where I don't need to read the newspapers, in a world in which I can enclose myself in my internet community, in a world where our psyches are at war. We all know about the war.
In 1992 I had to be in bed by eight and watched cartoons in the morning before I went to school. I rode my bicycle to school in the ill-named Free State dorp, Vrede. There was no 5fm or internet - my family was the second to get internet in 1998. We taped songs from the TV with tape recorders sticky-taped to the speakers and eventually had a tape of Kylie Minogue circulating two years after her demise. (I see she's made a comeback now.) Sometimes my mother would let me stay up to watch Beverly Hills 90210 on Mondays. I read The Railway Children in bed until nine. They ate jam sandwiches without butter because they were poor. I hated butter and jam sandwiches and I was privileged.
I could be thirteen again. Some of my lovers say I look twelve. Only I check ctheory.net for Baudrillard's latest utterance and my friend gives me "bendie girls" pornography, for a laugh. I like Baudrillard's theories. Even though a woman in a wheelchair wrote to him that everything is real about the pain in her legs. I don't know her. I think that's what he means. I don't know anyone in Iraq. Did anything outside of our communities matter before we knew about it? I don't know Saddam. I wonder if he has friends. A local politician once told me that he has none - they work in four-year election period instalments. I don't know Bush. I wonder how I'm still receiving e-mail pictures of those first anti-war marches, people still finding that slogan, "The only bush I trust is my own", hilarious and previously unseen. I might know Bin, he might have been in the Bassline.
We've got Saddam now. We're still working on reeling in Bush. As I said, Bin might be at the Bassline, he might not.
But I want Baudrillard to say the war is real. I want him to say that we have all been conscripted. That the war isn't in Iraq or in America or America against the rest of the world. That the war is in all of us. It's symptomatic.
|
Nadine Botha, a not-so-simple Free State farm girl
comes to the big city atmosphere of small town Grahamstown,
obtained a degree (of viability) in Philosophy, English and
Theory of Art there. Now she is in Johannesburg. In some backwater
commune room, selling herself in light of respectable employment.
It's cyber, baby. Her pen itches to move. She has been published
in donga, New Coin, Writing From Here,
Aerial, Southern Rain, Botsotso
and some other pavement zines. In 2003 she was invited to
participate in the Crossing Border Word Festival
in The Hague and released a self-publication, Compared
to not eating tuna or chocolate. Ants moving the
house millimetres is to be released by Deep South at
the end of the year. That's it. She's lived, she's worked,
the rest is anecdote. 
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix!