![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x marks the spit
Wednesday, 1 March 2006 06:13 pmMiffed, I am. Nobody told me that local government election day was a public holiday, and now all my carefully-planned seminar schedules are a day out. *spits*. However, I have appropriately celebrated the unexpected holiday by doing no work and reading the whole box of books which have just arrived for the Evil Landlord, mostly Patrica McKillip fantasies. (I recommend Something Rich And Strange, which is a weird and slightly psychotic ecological fable, with beautiful sea-green language). We then hied us forth to vote, a process which has as its only redeeming feature the fact that it was quick and efficient (fifteen minutes, including driving). There's a purple splotch on my left thumb. I feel all civic.
I don't know if it's just the South African political landscape, but any kind of voting strikes me as being a dear little exercise in futility, one which basically fills me with lowering gloom. The more usual liberal/conservative axis does an interesting sort of twisty thing in the SA context, and shoots off in four directions instead of two. Claim we never so hard to be a reconciled Rainbow Nation, politics are divided into Black Liberal (ANC, acceptable rhetoric but massive corruption), Black Conservative (one settler, one bullet), White Liberal (guilt and whinging) and White Conservative (old Boer die-hards). This leaves me in a voting booth rolling random role-playing dice to decide between the Green Party and Patrica de Lille, for neither of which I end up voting on the grounds that it makes me feel as though I'm supporting something approximately aligned to me ideologically, but which makes its mark on the body politic by vociferous growling and worrying somewhere around ankle height, with itsy-bitsy teeth. I like a bit more pit-bull in my politics, thank you very much. Every year the temptation is to submit a voting paper with "BOLLOCKS!" written across it in large capitals. So far I've resisted. I'm just too law-abiding.
Cape Town is experiencing gale-force winds, which must be among my top three favourite sorts of weather. But when the hell did it get to be March? Surely there's a law against that? It's March already and I haven't haxx0red Roland Barthes! *runs screaming into the night*
I don't know if it's just the South African political landscape, but any kind of voting strikes me as being a dear little exercise in futility, one which basically fills me with lowering gloom. The more usual liberal/conservative axis does an interesting sort of twisty thing in the SA context, and shoots off in four directions instead of two. Claim we never so hard to be a reconciled Rainbow Nation, politics are divided into Black Liberal (ANC, acceptable rhetoric but massive corruption), Black Conservative (one settler, one bullet), White Liberal (guilt and whinging) and White Conservative (old Boer die-hards). This leaves me in a voting booth rolling random role-playing dice to decide between the Green Party and Patrica de Lille, for neither of which I end up voting on the grounds that it makes me feel as though I'm supporting something approximately aligned to me ideologically, but which makes its mark on the body politic by vociferous growling and worrying somewhere around ankle height, with itsy-bitsy teeth. I like a bit more pit-bull in my politics, thank you very much. Every year the temptation is to submit a voting paper with "BOLLOCKS!" written across it in large capitals. So far I've resisted. I'm just too law-abiding.
Cape Town is experiencing gale-force winds, which must be among my top three favourite sorts of weather. But when the hell did it get to be March? Surely there's a law against that? It's March already and I haven't haxx0red Roland Barthes! *runs screaming into the night*
