What price a ticket to watch the British and Irish Lions?

The tour by the Lions class of 2009 is in danger of sinking without a trace. There are no supreme stars besides Brian O’Driscoll and whilst the team do the scrums and lineouts very efficiently and their ball retention is at times phenomenal, one gets the feeling that the Boks might have too many gears and too much gas in the tank.

Then there is the other little factor of the financial outlay necessary to get a seat at the stadium. Approximately triple the price for seat to watch the All Blacks is just a bridge too far in these times of recession and real rugby value for money.

The buildup to the tests has been lukewarm at best as all the best SA players are being rested, leaving those past sell by and those yet to reach Bok contention to try and stem the red flow.

What this has done is build a false sense of security for the Lions, a misplaced belief in their own myth and the wake up call when it sounds in Durban on the 20th might be devastating for some people.

Lastly, the sports enthusiast has been spoilt for choice and I know pubs where cricket takes precedence over the rugby where in days of yore there was never so much as even a hint of a debate.

What exactly this might mean is that the Lions might be seen in retrospect as being simply a warm up for the Tri-Nations and not the 1 in 12 that they are alleged to be.

This does of course presuppose that the Lions don’t have another gear and players to step up to the plate when Juan Smith, Pierre Spies, Victor Matfield and Jean De Villiers start asking questions.

Answer the question as to whether these Lions have what it takes to stretch the Boks and then find a place to bet the ranch. Somebody is going to win big and others might end up staying after school with lines, not powder but ink.

The Lions are in Cape Town to take on Western Province this afternoon and some people are talking up a storm. Can Province ignite the stuttering tour or will they also struggle to even score one try? Too many questions and not enough answers. The bell is tolling and it’s not picky and choosy, live up to the hype or die all hyped out.

There is a book out concurrently about the Lions and their history. ‘Once were Lions’ might be a better bet than watching the games live at the stadium. Return on investment is at least assured.

The media have done as good a job as they could have under trying circumstances and yet the knives could be out after the first showdown in Durban. Either a giant killing act or a walk in park. It’s as simple as that.

Dan Retief on the Lions

The Road is a haunting, haggard tale that can leave a reader feeling hunted for days after the journey.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a journey through a ravaged land where the reader is in no danger of becoming entangled in a dense, word-filled bush and verbose, overgrown crops that need a bushknife to hack through.

Minimalism and an economy of words drag the reader kicking and screaming through this ultimate apocalyptic survivors tale. Ultimate because it could so easily come true. No real imagination necessary to download this nightmare in the early hours of a sleepless morning.

The blurb is curiously uninformative, “A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.”

McCarthy does not build plots, he weaves tales endlessly using only words. I was warned about this book by an English Literature grad student from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She simply said that I wouldn’t be able to put it down and when I stumbled upon it on the backpackers communal shelf I snapped it up forthwith.

She was right about not being able to toss it aside, even when I had to squint through matchsticks. This book stands as a challenge to anybody who does not enjoy reading. Defy this book and you might as well defy life, the universe and everything. It doesn’t get more real, visceral and tactile than this.

A sample follows that I throw out as bait, knowing I won’t lack for plenty of catches.

“In the morning they came out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried away by wolves.”

The idle and inane, kindergarten sqabble that goes on around the planet about global warming is brought into bold, believable relief against a background of stark, lifeless skylines that do nothing but highlight what used to be there.

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Picador
2006

‘A country at war with itself’. South Africa’s crisis of crime.

Anthony Altbeker wrote a book published in 2007  entitled, ‘A country at war with itself’, where he looked at the problem of crime in South Africa, the crime wave explosion after 1994 and the deeper, far more scary problem of the levels of violence used with seeming impunity in SA crime.

Altbeker examines some interesting angles on crime South African style including the idea that crime has become almost faddish as enough people in certain communities have adopted a criminal lifestyle for others to feel less inhibited about diving in too.The analogy he draws is that of a party where once a critical mass of dancers are up on the dancefloor than most of the rest will join in as there is less chance of being noticed.

If some of the most uninhibited dancers were kidnapped would the rest of the group not then be a little bit more hesitant to get up and strut their stuff out on the dancefloor. If the most uninhibited criminals were removed off the streets and successfully prosecuted and sentenced would other citizens then not be more prone to making different choices and decisions about how to live out their lives.

He goes on to focus on where he thinks government has gone wrong in focusing the police on crime prevention with more police visible and more community involvement by the police with joint ventures and campaigns. This he says has led to a downgrading of the process involved in prosecuting and gaining actual convictions of criminals with the result that not enough hardened criminals are convicted and seen to be punished.

The large quantities of awaiting trial prisoners in SA prisons are testament to this focus on preventing and not solving crimes already committed.

As a result of this emphasis detectives were seen as of secondary importance to uniformed officers on the beat and were put in charge of community policing forums and/or required to don uniforms and take part in roadblocks or cordon and search operations.

“The upshot is that we have too few detectives with too little experience and motivation. This helps to explain why the conviction rate for murder hovers around 20% despite a large proportion of these crimes having been committed by people known to the victim – crimes which should be relatively easy to solve.”

“The most important issue of all, however, is strategic, and it revolves around reframing the purpose of the criminal justice system from ‘fighting crime’ to ‘fighting criminals’.”

The incapacity of our prisons to adequately hold the prison population and awaiting trial prisoners celled with violent repeat offenders is also a factor in the ongoing national crisis.

“Finally our overcrowded prisons will rehabilitate no-one. They are also a potential time bomb that needs to be defused.” This time bomb hinges around prisoners awaiting trial for petty crime housed with rapists, murderers and armed robbers, effectively doing a cram course in advanced, vioilent crime. 

The difficulty in comparing stats with other developing and third world countries that don’t keep or else doctor stats makes it impossible to say, for certain, that we are the crime capital of the world but we do have more violent crime than most.

“Violence has become a cultural phenomenon. It is a form of behaviour driven by its own logic and attractive in its own right, one that is, for a significant minority, an expression of their selfhood, something towards which young men are drawn by the ‘enticement, or incitement,of peer-group prestige’.”

“Suggesting that violence in South Africa is a cultural phenomenon, like any culture-based argument, is controversial, even provocative. And yet it seems a much more fruitful explanation than some of the ‘root cause’ (poverty, unemployment etc)  thinking we’ve been offered.

“It implies, however, that simply implementing existing policies is unlikely to work by itself. Raising people out of poverty is a good and noble thing, and it needs to make no impact on crime to be justified. But the impact of this on crime will be less an effect of reducing material need than of the manner in which increased income changes the self-concepts of the people whose lives improve.

“Economic reality must be remade, but so too must be the climate in which social conditions are translated by people into forms of human behaviour.”

The South African tribe as a whole needs all kinds of preconceptions and prejudices turned around, both criminals and non-criminals, for any lasting change to take place in the dominant position that violence and crime hold in conversation, debate, argument and reactions to differences of opinion and confrontation as well as the national psyche of the nation.

A country at war with itself. Anthony Altbeker

Jonathan Ball Publishers

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