The White House found itself in a thorny situation recently when its chief florist, Laura Dowling, quit and was reportedly escorted from the residence on the eve of Valentine’s Day.
That’s according to a Monday night account by The Washington Post outlining the famed florist’s mysterious departure from the White House, CNN reported.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s office confirmed the florist’s departure, and, in contrast to the Post’s report, offered glowing praise of Dowling’s skills.
“As chief florist, Laura Dowling and her team treated guests of the White House to their beautiful floral arrangements. Ms. Dowling’s creations were always lively and colorful, reflecting not only the season but the unique and historic rooms which they graced. No two arrangements were ever the same and each one left guests with a lasting impression of the elegance and history of the People’s House,” the statement said.
“We are grateful for her contribution over the years and wish her well,” it said.
Dowling, a French-trained artisan who owns her own flower shop in Alexandria, Virginia, had been in the coveted position since 2009. She succeeded Nancy Clarke, who held the job for three decades. She didn’t respond to a CNN request for comment, but in a statement issued through law firm Sidley Austin to The Washington Post, Dowling said she resigned “to pursue exciting new opportunities and explore my passion for floral artistry and design.”
Dowling has not yet been replaced.
It appears that Michelle has “modern” tastes and found Dowling’s style too fussy.
Modern art is now front and center in an old White House room.
First Lady Michelle Obama has revealed her bold new look for the Old Family Dining Room in the White House, with abstract paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers and Alma Thomas, the first work by an African-American artist to be displayed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The black artist Thomas’s work, called “Resurrection” provides a bull’s-eye punch of color at the price of $290,000. “It’s kind of unbelievable that we haven’t done this before,” Obama said.
Renovating the Old Family Dining Room, which is located off the Executive Mansion’s State Dining Room, was the First Lady’s first major decorating project.
A piece of New York City history makes an appearance — a silver tea set from the 1939 World’s Fair is displayed on the sideboard.
KFC colours and a hideous rug
Here is the Old Family Dining Room as it was before the “diversity” onslaught.
Laura Bush posing in the Old Family Dining Room as it was before
Peddling black stereotypes and pandering to black voters go hand in hand when you’re a leftwinger.
Imagine a scenario where white public figures try that. There would be a frenzy on every news program in the world.
It’s the left’s double standard at work again.
First lady Michelle Obama did both on Monday in an interview with TVOne’s “NewsOne Now,” telling host Roland Martin that black people should vote Democrat no matter who is on the ticket.
TVOne targets black viewers, with a website that says it“represents a connection to the authentic, rich, and diverse experience of African American life, history, and culture.”
Essentially, the first lady told Martin that blacks should vote only on the basis of race and not ideas.
“That’s my message to voters. This isn’t about Barack, it’s not about the person on the ballot, it’s about you,” Obama said. “And for most of the people that we’re talking to, a Democratic ticket is the clear ticket that we should be voting on, regardless of who said what or did this. That shouldn’t even come into the equation.”
The scary part is that isn’t the worst of what she said. Her highness gave permission to “her people” to treat themselves after they follow her orders and mindlessly cast their vote.
Here is a transcript of her mindless black racism, the political staple of the left:
Martin: So can we, if we go out to the polls, can we say, we have ‘souls to the polls’ on Sunday, can we do ‘soul food after we vote’?
Obama: Absolutely, I give everyone full permission to eat some fried chicken after they vote only after—if you haven’t voted…(laughter.)
Martin: Just checking!
Obama: You make a good point because I am, I do talk about health. But I think that a good victory for Democrats on Tuesday, you know, should be rewarded with some fried chicken.
Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.
The polls and the pundits are cut up about a breach or two in the White House’s formidably protected perimeter. The People should not be. Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Thomas Jefferson, a real prince among men, traveled on horseback and wore plain clothes. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Washington was open to all-comers. Anyone who wrote to Jefferson received a reply in the great man’s hand. He paid for postage out of pocket. Never again will a Jefferson occupy the People’s House. But occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.
In any event, the latest security breach at the White House – there have been many under departing Secret Service Director Julia Pierson – saw 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez rush across the lawn and into the first family’s residence, where the trespasser was “confronted by a female Secret Service agent, whom he [naturally] overpowered.” No wonder Pierson and the press have circled the wagons. The same lady officer, or another with a similar skill set, had also failed to lock the front door. Disarmed, too, was an alarm meant to alert officers to intruders.
All in all, officers on-duty stood down, and an off-duty officer manned up. (The canine unit, sick of eating Michelle Obama’s carrots, was busy digging for bones.) Gonzales could have bounded up the stairs to the first family’s living quarters had the off-duty officer not tackled him. He must be male. Were he a woman, or something in-between, he’d be up for a medal of honor.
It’s always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action – in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops – hurt those who inflict it on non-believers.
As for Pierson, like other ciphers in skirts (or pantsuits) promoted by this administration, she is something else – but nothing like stumblebum Marie Harf, the sibilant spokeswoman at the State Department.
Watching Miley Cyrus’s hootchy hoopla is less offensive than enduring a press conference with Ms. Barf, where reasonably intelligent, veteran newsmen attempt to engage this schoolmarmish, tartish young woman in reasoned repartee. Marie Barf is intellectually inconsequential, to put it kindly. Only the other day did she claim, most memorably – and from the safety of her perch – that the outsourcing, in Benghazi, of the safety of American diplomats to the enemy, a local Muslim militia, is justified because it is part of the protocol. The militia hired to protect the compound was late to the scene, possibly complicit in the carnage.
Another exhibit is Lois Lerner. She “is toxic,” conceded Politico, before segueing into a puff piece about this corrupt kleptocrat. The central conceit of the Politico exposé, “Lerner Breaks Silence,” is that she’s a “complicated figure.” The characterization doesn’t jibe with the main character’s actions and demeanor. Lerner is, in fact, consistently one-dimensional. An example: The Treasury inspector general determined that Lerner’s IRS division used “inappropriate criteria … to identify tax-exempt applications for review,” and that certain organizations applying for tax-exempt status, singled out for their “policy positions,” were harassed for “significant amounts of information.” Translated from bureaucratese, Lerner used a vast, oppressive apparatus – the Internal Revenue Service – to hound right-leaning nonprofits, threaten their mission and menace their donors.
In particular, this bloodhound instructed her elite Unit (Determinations U) to BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for tea-party or 9/12 patriots. The IG made his recommendations. Lerner fobbed him off. The Office of Audit grumbled that it does not believe the “alternative corrective action” proposed by the Lerner division “fully addresses” the problems: “We do not consider the concerns in this report to be resolved.” Befitting the flat, uncomplicated, venal personality she is, Lerner showed no commitment to correct her agency’s ways. Post resignation, lippy Lerner remains unrepentant. “I am not sorry for anything I did,” she declared breezily to Politico.
Signally unsuccessful as head of the General Services Administration was Martha Johnson. (Like IRS top officials, she, too, was in-and-out of the White House.) On YouTube, taxpayers watched Johnson’s jolly bureaucrats having a whale of a time at their expense. Chins, butts and guts wiggling obscenely, the grotesque GSA training conferees stayed in lavish spa resort casinos, as detailed in a damning Office-of-Inspector-General report.
In selecting resorts in which to party, our corpulent public servants conducted “dry runs” and “scouting trips” to destinations like the Ritz-Carlton. Also underwritten by taxpayers were assorted team-building exercises, a bicycle-building project, for one. The OIG lists corrupt contracting practices, a miscellany of employee misconduct, including excessive and impermissible expenditure on luxury suites at Nevada’s M Resort, on 1,000 sushi rolls at $7 apiece and on “$6,325 on commemorative coins ‘rewarding’ all conference participants.”
These are but some of the president’s women – not even the heavy hitters. Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.
Sixty years after the Supreme Court outlawed “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, civil rights advocates say American schools are becoming increasingly segregated, while the first lady, Michelle Obama, lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.”
“Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech,” Mrs. Obama told 1,200 graduating high school seniors Friday here in the city that gave rise to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
In a speech that was part commencement address, part policy pronouncement and part journey into her own past, Mrs. Obama said that Brown’s advances were being reversed. “Many districts in this country have actually pulled back on efforts to integrate their schools, and many communities have become less diverse,” she said, leading to schools that are less diverse.
“And too often,” Mrs. Obama said, “those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color which too often lag behind.”
First Lady Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her children and her mother on her trip to China, which begins on Wednesday. But she won’t be accompanied by the press and she will take no questions from the media.
“Michelle Obama’s trip to China starting on Wednesday will be nonpolitical, the White House says, a ‘people-to-people exchange’ emphasizing the importance that both nations place on education. As if to underscore the point, no reporters are traveling with the first lady, and she does not plan to give interviews while there,” reports the New York Times.
The White House is defending the first lady bringing her family along for the ride by saying it’s what the Chinese would want. “Tina Tchen, Mrs. Obama’s chief of staff and a first-generation Chinese-American, said a multigenerational visit would be appreciated by the Chinese, who value tradition,” says the Times.
‘The most powerful message we can deliver [to the Chinese people] is one of the examples of not just the first lady’s life story but of America and our values,’ Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters during the Monday call.
‘That alone I think speaks to things like respect for human rights that are interwoven into the DNA of the United States of America.’
American and Chinese leaders have not had especially close personal relationships and there is hope among foreign relations experts that Obama and Peng will form a bond.
Obama’s trip comes as fears about China’s economy mount, the country flexes its muscles in disputed areas of the South China Sea and a missing Malaysian plane carrying Chinese nationals.
“In the US, women enjoy equal rights as men in politics,” said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “But in Chinese traditional culture, we have a saying: ‘a woman without talent is virtuous’.” While female Chinese business leaders are common, he said, women barely appear at the highest levels of the country’s political elite – only two rank among its 25 top officials.
US officials say they want to spread the “power of American values,” and the importance of education. On her second day in Beijing, Obama will give a speech about cultural exchange at the Stanford Center at Peking University, where she’ll meet with Chinese and American students.
About 200,000 Chinese students are studying in the US, more than from any other country. Only 20,000 American students study in China each year. The Obama administration wants to boost that number.
She won’t meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping, but will visit with his wife Peng Liyuan, visit schools and tourist highlights and eat lunch at a Tibetan restaurant.
Source: The Weekly Standard/Washington Post/The Guardian
Glenn Close’s remarks, In Memoriam, at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony, captured the delusions of grandeur held by the “tarts and tards of Hollywood,” and helped by their fans.
The actress (or is it “actor”?) did not thank the dearly departed for merely entertaining the masses, which is all actors and directors are capable of doing. Oh no. Her deities were, instead, acknowledged for “mentoring us, challenging us, elevating us”; “they made us want to be better, and gave us a greater understanding of the human condition and the human heart,” language that should be reserved for the likes of Ayn Rand and Aristotle.
Where a motion picture has indeed transported anyone—it is because it cleaved to a decent script, usually a good book. “Gone With the Wind,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Midnight Express,” and “Papillon,” are examples.
Still, Hollywood is quite capable of reducing great literature to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by shrill starlets. This was the fate of “Les Misérables,” last year. Lost in the din were a lot of lessons about “the human condition.” The Victor-Hugo masterpiece I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations—a lot like the powers that hounded Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit.com, to death, in 2013, and are intent on doing the same to the heroic Edward Snowden.
The dead were deified, but what of the walking dead?
To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of “grey hairs and no-hairs” to “black hairs”—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.
On the old, Hollywood performs professional geronticide.
Aging actors are put out to pasture, retired into buffoonish, badly scripted roles (“Nebraska”). The annual Oscar Awards will see at least one old actor trotted out (in 2011, the “distinction” went to Kirk Douglas) from retirement. From the sympathetic thunder clap received by Harrison Ford, 71, this year, I’d say he’s ready to be retired.
Yes, a silly society is a youth-obsessed society. Duly, a precocious kid actor will typically cameo. This year, viewers were spared the spectacle. Tykes did, however, twerk and twirl with the adults in a Pharrell Williams routine, conjuring the current crop of Walt Disney cartoon characters (“Rio 1”). Once-upon-a-time, our beloved cartoons were cute, innocent and mischievous. Think Disney’s Donald Duck, Warner Brothers’ Bugs-Bunny and Amblimation’s Fievel of “An American Tail” fame.
Alas, like The Kids, the animated characters that festoon film nowadays sound and act as if created by another Victor (Frankenstein), combining pixelated bits of the putrefying Bethenny Frankel, and some “Mob Wives,” “Real Housewives,” and “Dance Moms,” for good measure.
On the topic of body parts. Dance, in general, has also become more atavistic than artistic. Dance moves most energetically engage the rump and the reproductive region, as though choreographed to the rhythm of mating primates.
As for music, here too pimp culture has prevailed. Remember when the Obamas spiritual guide, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attempted to illustrate how “African” music differed from “European” music? His voice dripping with envy, Wright mocked the cantata in an address before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Black music,” hissed Obama’s holy man, may be different to “white music,” but in no way was it deficient.
Wright needn’t torture himself over the fact that B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach. Honky style harmonization—the controlled use of the human voice—that’s all dead, replaced with tribal primal screams, the kind emitted by one Idina Menzel, who ululated her way through a frightful number from “Frozen.”
Camelot culture has long since been usurped by pimp culture, because the latter is as easy as an American Girl Gone Wild on spring break. For her state dinners, Jackie Kennedy sought out the likes of the sublime mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry and cellist Pablo Casals; the current White House promotes Mary J. Blige and squat-and-thrust Beyoncé.
The annual Academy Awards will invariably showcase some unfunny standup—almost, but not quite, as bad as the tomfoolery of Jimmy Fallon. Forgive another bloated digression, but what does the popularity of this whiteface minstrel show, starring the almost desperate, dancing, prancing, androgynous Fallon, say about America?
I’d venture that Fallon has been groomed to provide bread and circuses for Booboisie. Replacing Jay Leno’s hardly demanding political satire with a vaudeville of giggles, goofiness, mind-numbing banter and God-awful “music” comes with the “responsibility” to propagandize the same population.
And so it was that during Michelle Obama’s appearance on the Tonight Show set, as if on cue, one minute and fifty nine seconds in, dumb dweeb Fallon segues into an Obamacare promotional segment. Fallon’s lead was a signal to Sister Act. FLOTUS launched her own agitprop for her husband’s healthcare juggernaut.
Other than “Prisoners” (thrillers are my thing), there is not one film gushed over at the 86th Academy Awards that I’d watch. I was unable to endure more than 15 minutes of the first, much-ballyhooed “Hunger Games.” Allegories—libertarian, left or right—are cumbersome, inorganic and artificial, all the more so when dreamt-up by Hollywood dumb-asses.
As a kid, I recall trying to divine (while reading subtitles) the agonized themes and symbolism in the work of the Nordic Chekhov, Ingmar Bergman. Like director Quentin Tarantino’s fetish with actress Uma Thurman, Bergman’s muse was the lovely Liv Ullmann. The duo tortured their viewers, but this director’s work was never labored; the plot was not beyond the ken of a curious kid. More in the league of Federico Fellini, Bergman was way too sophisticated to be compared to the creator of “Hunger Games,” whoever he is.
Prequels and sequels, Steve Sailer has settled the score on “Hunger Games”: “Like the Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’s ‘The Hunger Games’ young-adult novels are aimed at 12-year-old female readers. This puts the movies squarely in the intellectual wheelhouse of average Americans, a sizable fraction of whom don’t read much at all.”
Oddly enough, the most marked artistic deterioration in celluloid is due to computer-generated imagery, used in most all genres: action, adventure and event films. When compared to the on-set props of yesteryear’s films, computerized special effects appear cheap and fake.
The computer-generated presentation transports this viewer no further than her local video-game arcade.
The authentic experience afforded in these films was owed not to a computer program, but to real props built on set and to the stuntmen who manned them. (And who can forget the on-camera war-paint wizardry of Dick Smith, in “The Exorcist” and “Taxi Driver”?)
Finally, please stand up and be counted if you flocked to see Lupita Nyong perform reruns of “Roots.”
She was a sartorial dream-come-true, in pale blue, but I’m no more inclined to turn to Lupita, in “12 Years A Slave,” for entertainment, than I am to subject myself to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) “Butler.”
Today is 16 June, a public holiday (vacation to our American friends) commemorating the race riots of 1976 in Soweto. Every year I dread the arrival of 16 June, incongruously called “Youth Day”, because it represents the acme of the anti-white propaganda calendar in South Africa.
Even the country’s biggest beer company, SAB Miller, participates in the onslaught, with an “artistic” rendition of the dead Hector Pieterson’s famous photo which you can see lower down here. I will save you the real photo, either because you have seen it many times already, or because we are all aware of how images are debased through constant repetition. You needn’t have read any of the theories of Walter Benjamin or Jean Baudrillard about the loss of authenticity or receding reality to understand that.
US First Lady Michelle Obama visits Hector Pieterson Memorial, 22 June 2011
To South African leftists, black nationalists, radical theologians and persons of that ilk, Hector Pieterson or his image represents common currency. There is even now a Hector Pieterson Memorial which is touted to tourists. It has already been visited by Michelle Obama and will soon be inspected by her husband, Barack, whose first visit to South Africa is imminent. It seems that Chinese tourists go to the Voortrekker Monument while American tourists prefer the Hector Pieterson Memorial. Probably, it speaks to them of their own race riots, as well as the interminable arguments around them and how whites are always, in the final analysis, to blame for black violence and mayhem.
Now get this: Hector Pieterson was shot by a black policeman., not a white one. To the crazed, left-wing propagandists on their crusade against the last vestiges of white or Western civilization, the race of the policeman is immaterial. It suffices that the previous white South African government “made him pull the trigger”, like whites always “make blacks do things” or by some intricate racial dialectic cause them to commit crime, not to do well at school or undermine their value system so they end up taking bribes in positions of authority. According to eyewitness reports, Hector Pieterson, who was supposed to be at school that day but sauntered along to see some of the protest action, simply “wandered into the line of fire” between a large crowd of stone-throwing youths and a small group of policemen defending themselves after the mob had not responded to earlier warning shots fired over their heads.
South African Breweries (SAB Miller) has just published this version of the Hector Pieterson image, as a “positive” message to the multiracial youth of South Africa (Click to enlarge)
The photograph in question was taken by one Sam Nzima who worked for a black newspaper called The World at the time. It shows Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo after being hit by a stray bullet not intended for him. The shooter being black, you could call it “friendly fire” or black-on-black violence. Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside them and is obviously distressed. Here is the beer commercial version of the photograph which puts an entirely new “spin” on it, as being a message addressed to the multiracial youth of South Africa. Note also that Hector Pieterson has suddenly become white in SAB Miller’s “reworking” of Sam Nzima’s image.
SAB Miller became the second biggest beer company in the world as a result of two things:
The thirst of black South Africans for its products.
The fact that apartheid or white rule in the country placed enough buying power in the hands of blacks to afford so-called “clear beer”, as opposed to the African or “Bantu beer” traditionally consumed by blacks.
Not so long ago, I read someone’s Ph.D. thesis on the role of advertising in post-1994 South Africa and SAB, having the biggest “ad spend” in the country, also did the most “to shape our new identity”.
Until I saw SA Breweries’ appropriation of the Sam Nzima photograph, I had not been aware of how intimately the beer company had been involved in the whole Hector Pieterson cult! Apparently there exists a “shebeen route”, the Soweto equivalent of the Cape wine route, whereby one may visit “The world of beer”, showing a traditional (and in those days, illegal) black tavern or “shebeen”, and then move onto the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Winnie Mandela’s garage museum. After reading Rian Malan’s article in the latest Noseweek, one could safely say that Winnie Mandela has so many skeletons in her cupboard that she needs a garage to put them in. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, but perhaps someone needs to scan and OCR it to make a bootleg or “shebeen copy” available to enlighten the public on the real Winnie Mandela. Nelson Mandela’s wife (they have since been divorced) had 14-year old Stompie Moeketsi murdered but was protected by both the ANC and the dying National Party government from prosecution. Why? Because she was famous. And black, no doubt.
But let’s not digress and keep to our main topic, which is the 1976 race riot, flatteringly referred to by journalists and academics as an “uprising”. An article in the New Age newspaper, written by Zwelinzima L Sizani, an ANC official, is subtitled: “How we lost our fear of the regime in the days leading to June 16 1976 and the events that changed history.” Like SA Breweries, Sizani is also busy appropriating the riot for his party which played a very marginal, if any, role at the time.
Within the mythology of the New South Africa – why our country’s name has not been changed during all the other name changes I do not know – the Soweto riots were the “turning point”. On 16 June blacks “rose up against the white regime” which was “forcing Afrikaans down the throats of black schoolchildren”. In response – or so we are told – the rioters went on the rampage, killed a Jewish doctor caring for their sick, looted some beer halls and burned down government buildings, including some of their own schools.
‘The recent slogan of “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” represents a prolongation of the Jew-killing, school-burning mentality of 37 years ago.’
I know that in South Africa there exists a certain inversion of values, at least among our ubiquitous leftist commentators and historians. They consider terrorism, which is decried elsewhere in the world, as the apotheosis of virtue. Every time Afrikaans street names are changed, they ransack the lists of past terrorists and killers of civilians for “heroes” to name streets in Pretoria after, such as Solomon Mahlangu. Within this mindset it is perhaps understandable that killing a philanthropic Jew, Dr. Melville Edelstein, and burning schools are considered exemplary acts which we should celebrate every year on a national holiday. With SAB Miller and other big companies tossing in some ad spend to keep the propaganda going.
The recent slogan of “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” represents a prolongation of the Jew-killing, school-burning mentality of 37 years ago. If the Gauteng education department under Mrs. Barbara Creecy could burn down a few schools, especially Afrikaans schools, they would consider it a great contribution to this country’s intellectual development. No functional school must be left alone, is the revamped version of the slogan of yore: “Liberation before education.”
The Soweto riots of 1976 are used retroactively to justify the extremist racism and chauvinism meted out to Afrikaners today. In 1976, only a small minority of blacks and white English leftists were anti-Afrikaans. Thanks to the constant stream of ethnic hatred and propaganda, a real hatred against Afrikaans exists at present, fuelling farm murders and ethnic attacks.
The notion that anybody in the history of South Africa – or Azania as the Left calls it – has ever been forced to learn Afrikaans or learn in Afrikaans is so preposterous, it is almost laughable. Yet it suits a lot of people to repeat this fallacy mindlessly every year, including the adherents to the creed that Azania is really a British colony that should speak English only. The multiculturalist, anti-Western British Council probably loves it. For 200 years Afrikaans has survived against all odds, being suppressed under the British Empire and now under its successor, the Bantu Empire.
The denial of language rights to Afrikaners is even more pervasive in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth in the Cape Colony. English has always been “rammed down our throats”, together with the sickening propaganda that our children are forced to learn for exams at school. It includes history, which means ANC history and the biography of Nelson Mendala, and an idiotic subject called “Life Orientation”. Given the preponderance of English in business and in the media, Afrikaans has never been the dominant language in South Africa. Yet in the Life Orientation handbook at school it is stated: “Under apartheid Afrikaans was the dominant language in South Africa.” I suppose we wrote more books than anybody else in this country, which must have been a crime.
One of those prolific Afrikaans writers is Jaap Steyn, a retired professor of linguistics and one of the greatest minds to come out of South Africa. He wrote a 500–page tome on Afrikaans entitled Tuiste in eie taal (At home in one’s own language). The section on the Soweto riots contains some interesting facts:
In only one of the seven Soweto schools protesting against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in 1976 was the language used as such, and then only in one subject, History;
the English Academy of South Africa was waging a major campaign in black schools to get them to use English, whereas there was no such campaign by any Afrikaans organisation;
unlike a small coterie of white English leftists in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, blacks did not hate Afrikaans. During a competition for school choirs in Soweto, twelve of the sixteen choirs in the senior division sang in Afrikaans and only four in English.
According to Steyn, the economic damage of the riots included the following:
More than 100 buildings of the West Rand Bantu Administration Council were damaged or destroyed;
250 liquor stores and beer halls were looted or destroyed;
170 shops were looted or destroyed;
25 health clinics were burnt down;
8 banks were destroyed;
a number of libraries, post offices, hotels, churches, community halls, magistrate’s courts and gas stations were burnt down;
several 100 vehicles were burnt and up to a third of the 926 buses belonging to the Public Utility Transport Corporation (Putco) were attacked.
While liberals and leftists consider such acts of arson and wanton destruction as “heroic”, the question has to be asked: Why? After all, the ANC government announced only recently that from next year all children in the country will have to learn an African language at school, including white children. No predominantly white and Afrikaans school is preparing to riot and their teachers are not encouraging them to do so.
On 27 June 1976 the editor of the Zulu newspaper, Ilanga, Obed Kunene, wrote in the Sunday Tribune: “Blacks do not destroy facilities… They destroy symbols of the entire system devised by Whites for them… When riots come… all the institutions and services that bear the stamp of White authority become prime targets…”
By the same token, Afrikaners should now be burning every government building in sight, as the reverse holds true: Thanks to their demographic superiority, blacks enjoy political power over us at all levels and decide what is good for us, including what our children should learn at school and in what language they may study at university.
But seeing the Soweto riots as a merely black-white affair, as did the editor of Ilanga in 1976, is simplistic. For long periods white and black have been able to coexist more or less peacefully, but separately, in South Africa. Whenever there was outside interference or incitement of blacks, mayhem broke loose. A deeper analysis of the Soweto riots would reveal the role played by the British Churches such as the Anglican Church and by the so-called Christian Institute, funded by the German churches. They organised and encouraged the Soweto pupils, many of whom were in their twenties as blacks in those days started school at a higher age than whites, to protest and oppose even the study of Afrikaans literature.
‘Affirmative shopping’ as theft is euphemistically called in South Africa, takes place openly in a supermarket in Sasolburg
The problem with the riot-as-revolt theory is that since the advent of black rule in South Africa, we have had as many, if not more, riots than ever before! When someone had stolen cables along the railroad tracks, making trains late, the historic Pretoria statioin was set alight by blacks. Other trains were burnt out too. Not a day goes by when one does not read about “service delivery protests”. Tyres are burnt and vehicles stoned, similarly to the riots of 1976. Blacks seem to be revolting against their own government and municipalities, which they themselves had voted in. They also burn the same “symbols of oppression” as before: councillors’ homes, community centres, municipal offices, libraries, cars and still loot shops and liquor stores. In January this year, black South Africans exercised their right to loot in Sasolburg, south of Johannesburg and pictures again show burnt-out vechicles and a liquor store being ransacked.
In the United States too, race riots have been a feature of that country’s political life. When the four policemen who had assaulted Rodney King were acquitted in 1992, the Los Angeles riots ensued. During those riots, 53 people were killed and more than 2000 injured. In Britain, France, Sweden and elsewhere, burning and looting have become a way for their immigrant communities to express themselvesA recent modish term in South Africa has been the “grammar of blackness” on which I commented a few days ago in White guilt, Coloured faith. Perhaps riots are the grammar of blackness, as they often seem incomprehensible to the white mind. Winnie Mandela famously said: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”, the “necklace” being placing a petrol-filled tyre around the victim’s neck and igniting it.
The point to understand is that the burning has never stopped and “liberation” continues to this day.
In the Johannesburg Sunday Times I discovered the following amazing pronouncement this week, on the subject of a name change for Pretoria, our capital: “What we should accept is that victors always rewrite history and ensure their dominance is not only felt but seen.”
I may be alone in this, but I refuse to accept that because we have been conquered by propaganda, we should perpetuate the disinformation ourselves. None of the leftist fairy tale of South African history, including the Soweto riots, will stand up to closer scrutiny. There is no continuous “march to freedom” performed by South African blacks. Between the Rivonia trial where Mandela and his comrades were jailed and the Soweto riots, we discern a discontinuity or “epistemological break”. The Soweto riots must be seen as a more or less isolated event.
Neither is there continuity between the riots and the National Party’s ultimate capitulation and absorption by the ANC. FW de Klerk and Roelf Meyer betrayed their own electorate and supporters in all but surrendering to the ANC. Perhaps they were bribed or influenced by foreign powers, but they took that decision by themselves and for peculiarly idiosyncratic and personal reasons.
Like schoolchildren are fond of saying: “It’s random!” There is nothing in South Africa’s past that made the present nightmare a necessity. The Soweto riots could have been triggered by some other event that may have had nothing to do with Afrikaans at all. Like a Rodney King or soccer violence or the presence of foreign Africans in Soweto. Currently, we are seeing a lot of looting and killing around so-called xenophobia. The shops of Somali traders in black areas are regularly attacked, looted and their proprietors assaulted or murdered. So “liberation” continues.
Michelle Obama has already reaffirmed the myth of Soweto by visiting the Hector Pieterson memorial and no doubt her husband Barack will do the same during his coming visit to South Africa. He has already booked a visit to Mandela’s prison cell on Robben island, off Cape Town.
As in the dystopian novels of George Orwell, we are living through a powerful artificial consciousness, a pseudo-reality fabricated by the mass media, academia and the advertising industry. In this story the rioters are the heroes and Dr. Melville Edelstein or the Afrikaner education officials of Soweto are the villains
It constitutes rule by propaganda, domination by (dis)information. We have seen how Tony Blair lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Irak. The truth is what you can get away with. Or as it is bluntly put by the Sunday Times:
“What we should accept is that victors always rewrite history and ensure their dominance is not only felt but seen.”
I wonder what Orwell would have thought about that axiom.
A United States embassy official received a scroll on Friday giving the freedom of Cape Town to US president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, Mayor Patricia de Lille said.
She said the decision to award the freedom of the city to the Obamas was adopted by a majority vote in council last year.
“[It] is the highest honour that the city of Cape Town can confer on individuals who have made a significant contribution to Cape Town, South Africa, and the world in their respective fields.”
The scroll was accepted earlier on Friday by acting US ambassador Virginia Palmer.
De Lille said the Obamas had already accepted the honour and the only “outstanding issue” was to conduct the handover of the scroll.
The African National Congress in the province said at the time that the presidential couple should not accept the award.
“To us this is nothing other than a diversion and I think it would be a pity if Obama accepted the award from a city that doesn’t care about the poorest of the poor,” ANC secretary Songezo Mjongile told the Cape Times at the time.
The Democratic Alliance, which leads the city, hit back at the accusation.
“The facts show that the DA-led city of Cape Town delivers better quality services to more poor people than any other metro in South Africa,” DA spokesman Mmusi Maimane said.
“The city of Cape Town offers the most comprehensive and generous package of free basic services to indigent residents of any metro in the country. This is a fact.”
De Lille said on Friday that Michelle Obama travelled to Cape Town last year as part of a broader outreach to Africa and had brought with her the “uplifting example of achieving the extraordinary”.
She said they were both worthy recipients for the “inspiration” they had been to the world.
“It is my hope that their example will forever be a reminder that where there is hope and perseverance, and where we are fuelled by the courage of our convictions, even the unimaginable is doable.” – Sapa
The Washington Post today published an article by a reporter who is not a member of the editorial staff suggesting in no uncertain terms that those who criticize First Lady Michelle Obama for holding too much weight in her derriere are racist.
While opening her article by reporting an obviously insulting remark by a high school football coach, reporter Krissah Thompson goes on to write statements and include quotes indicating a general racist intent on the part of those who find Michelle to be overweight if they believe she has excess weight in her posterior.
From the article:
But what is it with Michelle Obama’s critics and the fixation with her derriere?
“We have a history in this country of white people not showing adequate respect for and devaluing the bodies of black women, and this most definitely falls in line with that,” says Ayana Byrd, the co-editor of the anthology “Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts . . . ”
The first lady’s critics “are reacting to the culture in which they’ve grown up or they are using it as a code to racialize Michelle Obama and remind people that she’s black,” says Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.
In her own analysis, Thompson, who covers race issues for the post, links comments about Michelle’s posterior to slavery.
The focus on this first lady’s posterior has historical antecedents. It reaches back to the imagery of Hottentot Venus, a woman from what is now South Africa whose naked body and pronounced posterior were paraded in shows throughout 19th-century Europe. On to the selling and trading of black women’s bodies through slavery.
Without question, some mentions of Michelle’s posterior are animated by racism and racial stereotyping. But the article suggests that any reference to the size of a portion of Mrs. Obama’s anatomy is racist.
The article includes no quotes or commentary that might provide balance by raising the topic of whether it is fair to discuss the first lady’s own weight as she leads a campaign to reduce the amount of fat kids are carrying around.
The piece also indicates a political bias in favor of the first lady and her agenda, calling a criticism of her Let’s Move program “the latest public rant” against low calorie lunches in schools that features “the usual protest against the federal government meddling in local business.” – whitehousedossier.com
Faux, the American way. Beyoncé and the First lady exchange air kisses
Hollywood has finally totally invaded American politics.
A forthcoming erotic novel being described as “fan fiction” will feature the first couple as protagonists-in-chief. According to Pop Culture Public Relations, the firm representing the book’s publisher, the novel, a version of a “personalizable” erotic tome, will be printed with the first couple’s names in it and available online at no cost on January 28. In an e-mail circulated yesterday, Pop Culture PR wrote, “Barack and Michelle Obama Star in This Erotic, Romantic Novel.”
Surely American literature will reach new heights with the publication of GuestHouse Games, in which the Obamas, “alone in their isolated beachfront guesthouse in the tropical paradise of Kailua, Hawaii,” are “drawn into the ancient Hawaiian spiritual world and into the exploration of their own deepest and most forbidden desires.”
It looks like you’ll have to read the whole thing to find out why they’re staying in the guest house as opposed to the main residence, among other mysteries.
uStarNovels, the publisher of this pioneering work, describes itself as a purveyor of “specially crafted original erotica and erotic romance” featuring “characters that are relatable for everyone” and “experiences that are credible.” Chris Matthews, brace yourself for more thrills up your leg.
President Obama’s inauguration ceremony meanwhile was full of fashion moments, which included his wife’s new wig. But Beyonce’s earrings made for one of the most sensational details.
The star sang the National Anthem out with a pair of dazzling emeralds at her ears, worth a cool $1.8million, according to designer Lorraine Schwartz.
The bright green hue was hardly noticed under her loose blonde waves.
A representative for the designer confirmed the price and said “These earrings were perfect for Beyonce because they are modern and classic just like she is!”
Fashion pundits gave Michelle’s new do a don’t, though.
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