Freckles & Doubt

By way of rewarding self for the horrors of this year's remote reg and orientation experiences, I ordered myself Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have been playing it in the evenings as far as possible given the various outcomes of the daily war between myself and Pandora for occupancy of my gaming chair. Apparently I can only occasionally seduce her away by deploying the heated blanket on the sofa. We have arrived at a semi-compromise, below:



I am enjoying ACNH, although not deliriously or obsessively, and have, shall we say, Notes.

Pottering happily about a landscape harvesting, planting, building or collecting things and meeting small, domestic goals is very much my jam when I'm tired and stressed, see obsessive re-play of Stardew Valley, incursions into things like Littlewood and My Time At Portia, and my fondness for the buildy bits of Skyrim, Fallout IV or Yonder. ACNH is more of same, although through the console lens rather than the PC, and is thus Different - less textured, less character-driven, and its cutesy aesthetic is occasionally grating. (Yonder and even Portia did it much better, IMNSHO, in the sense of being more Zelda-like, less childish).

I am enjoying, in a qualified sort of fashion, the pottering about, although its grindiness becomes repetitive a little too quickly. The writing, while in the facile sort of class appropriate to the genre, is occasionally amusing and wry. I do become a bit weirded out by the visuals, the fixed perspective is frequently frustrating and the horizon effects are frankly trippy, in the sense that ACNH denizens apparently live on a cylindrical world with a radius approximately the width of a football field. The way things move over the horizon is odd. But overall it's rather pretty and occasionally, when the art team have been let loose on a night sky or sunrise, beautiful. (Also: desperately enamoured of the museum.)

I also think I am losing potential texture and depth because I don't do co-operative play with Real People, that's not what I game for, so huge tracts of the game which are designed for island visits and social interaction with other players, are simply closed to me. (And the inbuilt assumptions around interaction infuse the gameplay rather unacceptably. Cannot, because of lack of above, complete fruit and flower collections! Maddened!) And the characterisation of the NPCs is superficial enough that it doesn't in any way substitute for the Real People interactions, and really makes me miss Stardew Valley.

Which all sounds unduly negative, but I have been playing several hours a day for the last couple of weeks, and am deriving quiet enjoyment from it, so there is clearly a lot here to enjoy despite the minor deficiencies. (I am also developing a marked habit of playing for an hour in bed in the mornings when I wake up, with tea and cats, because Switch, and it's definitely not a bad way to start the day).

What I am not enjoying at all, because I don't think they're satirising them strongly enough, is the unabashed capitalist underpinning of it all. I live in a late-capitalist hellscape, I do not need such to be faithfully and only semi-critically replicated in my gaming, thank you. ACNH is very much about Things, it's a densely populated landscape full of highly specific bits of furniture and clothing and decorations and appliances and useless modern tchotchkes, which you collect in large amounts. Even worse, its achievement and quest mechanisms are expressed in a miles/rewards/tokens system which forcibly reminds me of the one I rejected, with extreme prejudice, from my medical aid - little mini-quests all carefully calibrated to force you to grind, and sell, and buy, and grease the wheels of the whole system.

And Animal Crossing works on a system which makes you borrow money to build things; hell, you arrive on your idyllic island and the managing company immediately turns around and stiffs you with a large bill you spend the first part of the game paying off. It turns out that owing money, which gives me hives in the real world, also gives me virtual hives in gaming. I hate owing money, and you can't do anything - build, move things around - without paying large sums for it. (I am simultaneously replaying Littlewood because ACNH has given me an overwhelming desire for a fully, freely landscapable map at whim, as often as I like, without penalty).

Although it's inevitable for the glossy large-scale popular product of a massive and powerful corporation whose design techniques are clearly aimed more at marketing than at narrative fulfilment, I really, really hate that this game quite unabashedly normalises capitalist assumptions and structures and, ultimately, entrapments. The cute island getaway setting is not an escape from capitalism, it's merely another set of images in which to replicate capitalist pressures and trappings, buy and sell and borrow and consume. (And don't get me started on turnips. I think the empty notional money manipulation of the real-world stock market is vicious and immoral and disgusting, and it's not suddenly cute and acceptable because your abstract coup markers are now knobbly vegetables).

Part of the whole setup is clearly semi-satirical, in that the company characters who run the islands are caricatures - raccoons with their little grasping hands, and Isabelle as a sort of overly and superficially smiley corporate doll. But it's a nod and wink sort of jokiness which renders these corporate figures both innocuous and intrinsic - that's just, the game says, how things are. They're a bit dodge, but you can't resist them or overturn them or choose not to interact with them. They underpin everything. Capitalism, the game says, is the only game in town. And it's cute! don't worry about it! just play it! we all do! it's all there is!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is both training wheels and pabulum for the capitalist serf, and while it's a reasonably entertaining sort of gameplay amble, about the best thing I can say about it, re-reading the above, is that it's apparently energised me into rampantly politicised Marxism in two weeks, which is not bad going, given my levels of exhaustion and usual state of jaded political lassitude. Huh.

(My subject line is Preachers, "Motorcycle Emptiness", because apparently the only possible response to corporate capitalist cute is Welsh anti-capitalist semi-punk).

Gawsh. *blows dust off blog*. Apparently I am not in a blogging space, much, right now, which I attribute to the inevitable fog of exhaustion with which the hell-time of my year enfolds my luckless person. In this particular iteration my post-registration punch-drunkness is manifesting partially as extreme glandularity and frequent nausea, but mainly as my weird insomnia problem, wherein I wake up for no adequately defined reason at anything between 3.30 and 5am, and can't get back to sleep. This is leading to a fair amount of early-hours lying in bed while tea-drinking, fanfic-reading, playing Stardew Valley on the Ipad (not uniformly a seamless port, I have to say, bits of it are wonderful and large tracts of it are annoying me) and haplessly providing a human mattress to my felines, who appear generally to approve of my new hours. It also means I spend a fair amount of time wandering around vaguely and bumping into things, because sleep deprivation.

Last night there actually was a proximate cause, in the form of a pestilential mosquito who managed to get into the net, probably through one of the holes the cats have made in it while climbing unco-ordinatedly up the bed, and who dive-bombed me relentlessly until I woke up, activated light and vision, and stalked and crushed him horribly. The horrible sticky heat of the last few weeks may also, I think, have implicated in the sleep-failure; I hope the current trend of misty, moisty mornings and random gentle precipitation will gradually soothe me into somnia. (I also have to randomly shout-out to whoever it is who writes the weather descriptions on AccuWeather, they clearly become easily bored with "sunny" and "pleasant" and escalate into "agreeable, "delightful" and, by way of gnomic I-Ching style epigram, "after a cloudy start, sun returns".)

Jo pointed out the other day how bad a litany of despair my last few blog post subject lines have been, and registration hell-season notwithstanding, it's a fair cop; today's, of course, replicates the ostensible final words of the Opportunity rover, who ground to halt in a sandstorm a few weeks back after exceeding all lifespan expectations by just under fifteen years. I have empathised to a large extent with the internet's outpouring of anthropomorphising woe over a collection of metal and circuits to whom we attributed not just agency, but character, specifically dedication and gallantry; I particularly like XKCD's take on it. The human tendency to ascribe personhood to the non-human and then pack-bond relentlessly with it, is probably one of the redeeming features of our species. If we could work out how to force certain privileged subsets of us to apply that impulse to certain less privileged subsets of actual humans, we'd be golden.

Life feels a bit apocalyptic at the moment, I will probably be having more of those dreams. While it's pleasantly damp and cool in Cape Town and water restrictions have been relaxed a bit, the equal and opposite reaction has been Eskom running out of power - again - and implementing load shedding - again - without warning - again. I mean, they publish it on their website, which no-one ever reads until the lights go out, or at least once the lights have come on again after going out. And they randomly switch between Level 1 and Level 2 - also without warning - which is particularly rife with complication given that the WhatsApp group for my street is prone to excitably and incoherently giving each other conflicting information about which zone we're actually in, which when read off against shifting load shedding statuses can completely obscure all logic and sense for days at a time. Honestly, my immediate environment could probably be serviceably choreographed as French farce right now. I try to plot when the lights are going to die, which they reliably don't when I expect it and do when I'm not expecting it, at which point I sigh, grab a torch and/or the gas stove for tea-making purposes, and hope to hell that the fanfic up on my Ipad at this precise moment is at least one of those 80-000 word epics which will keep me going for a bit.

Load shedding also, of course, happened on campus bang in the middle of our exam committee frantic period, giving us two and a half key hours in which administrators couldn't upload progression codes. Fortunately the essentially reactionary and analogue checking process involves giant printed board schedules and a pencil and the building has large windows, so some aspects of the whole edifice remained functional. But it's an index to the essential insanity of the season that I am, for once, grateful that my annual rant about how this whole process should be done more accurately and less exhaustingly by computers, has never borne fruit. We'd be completely screwed if it had. As it is, I am at the stage of slurring and noun loss which has forced me to reassure three separate colleagues this week that I'm not actually drunk, promise, just extremely fatigued, but the whole thing has been organised with ruthless efficiency and we are on track for final committees tomorrow.

In the middle of the post-apocalyptic whole, it's been particularly surreal to watch the abstract collapse of Tumblr, which has been my fandom and media home, if only in a strictly onlooker capacity, for six or seven years now. The venal and ham-fisted incompetents who contrive to run the site in the teeth of their own unfitness have banned NSFW images, with NSFW being defined in essential heterosexualist, gendered, puritanico-capitalist terms and implemented by an automated algorithm apparently conceived of and executed by actual chimpanzees. They want, of course, to make sure they keep on making money out of the site by selling ads and having the (awful) app in the Apple store. They have shot themselves in the foot with a small tactical nuke, taking out as collateral damage a whole thriving, interconnected and delicate ecosystem of fans, artists, small businesses and social-justice-focused communities who have made Tumblr into a vital living space despite everything the owners (Yahoo) have done to try and sabotage it. Not everyone on Tumblr is into porn or erotica or explicit fanart, but its free expression is a weirdly important thread in the whole ideological identity of the site.

I mean, capitalism is stupid and short-sighted, we know that. It goes for the easy short-term profit in defiance of long-term damage. But what the hell are these idiots even thinking, to alienate their user base like this? They are ejecting, effectively, their actual product. People are making migration plans in droves. (Many of them are coming here to Dreamwidth, which is a silver lining for me because I prefer to blog in this sort of environment and have never quite dared fling myself into the Tumblr stream, it scares me). There is no point in being "safe" for ad sales if the 10 million users have evaporated in shocked distress. Tumblr has its issues, with its community identity as much as with its owners, but its flow and focus and discourse are unique, and they broke it. I am very sad.

(My subject line is New Model Army, because the current state of my personal zeitgeist is tending a bit to the post-punk).

God, but horrible things happen to students. I have just sat in a readmission appeals committee for six hours, giving curriculum input on all these poor kids. Apart from the usual transition shock and the need to struggle through the challenges posed by finance, housing and travel issues and the truly appalling academic grounding provided by all too many of our schools, we have today contemplated the lives of young people suffering date rape, violent rape, assault, theft of laptops and books, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, unplanned pregnancy, serious illness, hospitalisation, AIDs diagnosis, estrangement, the illness and/or death of sometimes multiple family members, bizarre legal wrangles, learning disabilities, social stigmatisation, victimisation, stalkers, and the occasional curse. I can identify what I call a "depression transcript" at a single glance - the horribly revealing slow slide from competence into lower marks, a few fails, and finally the long, telling strings of absences. A day like that, you start wondering if anyone ever succeeds at anything at all before the inevitable nastinesses get them.

I want to have several cups of tea, a good cry, and an evening of vegging out on the sofa in front of something incredibly Hollywood and fluffy. Except I can't, because they stole the TV. It'll have to be the old fallbacks, viz. Skyrim and fanfic. Anything that distracts from the feeling of complete helplessness in the face of evil.

If I meep and tremble at odd stimuli a bit in the near future, please don't hold it against me. I have too high a bloody empathy stat for this job, is all.

You know, this planet is fundamentally screwed. It's the middle of December. (And, in related news, how the hell did that happen? I've wandered around for the last two weeks firmly convinced that it was around the 3rd of the month, and here we are with a totally unexpected public holiday to the side of the head on Friday, and Christmas itself leering just around the corner. Also, I forgot friendly_shrink's birthday, by dint of not realising the month had progressed that far. Fatigue does the weirdest things to one's perception of time.)

Anyway. It's the middle of December. We have had solid, heavy rain all morning, with a truly marvellous episode of actual hail for about fifteen minutes in the middle of it. We are supposed to be a Mediterranean climate, i.e. all about the winter rain, not the summer (see High Veld Summer Thunderstorms, Lack Of, Tragic, for the use of). If we have stuffed with this climate to the extent of hail on the 14th December, it's pretty bad. Put it together with the merry billboards advertising the US/China hijack of the climate change summit to try and weasel out of emissions accords, and it's perfectly obvious why we're doomed.

This wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans. I bet orang-utans wouldn't feel the need to get all protective of their bloody oil-based economy.

I should point out that all of the above did not in any way prevent me from spending ten minutes this morning with my third-floor office window flung open all the way while I stuck my head out into the rain, laughing like a loon, and tried to catch the hailstones out of the air. Bits of thing falling from the sky apparently regress me to the joyous age of 8, or thereabouts. My morning was materially improved by having to comb the hailstones out of my hair before I could deal with the next dose of student angst. Strange but true.

The inexorable advance of December towards Merry Festive Wossnames reminds me that I did, in fact, send out the Great Boxing Day Braai invite a couple of days ago. If you're in Cape Town and didn't receive it but would like to attend, please leave plaintive meepings in the comments. I probably only left you out owing to cheesebrain, which I have a lot of just at the moment.

One of the things that book club has taught me is to read non-fiction. Which sounds ridiculous, I'm an academic, I read non-fiction all the time. But, mark you, it's non-fiction about fiction. What I never read before joining the book club, despite being really rather a science and culture geek, was the cultural history and popular science stuff that several of our members are into. It's taken me a while to work up an appetite for it; I've toyed with things like Freakonomics and Jeremy Legget's Half Gone on the oil crisis, but in the last few exhausted months I've found non-fiction particularly easy to read where some kinds of fiction simply aren't.

A lot of the reason why I enjoy this kind of writing, is, I think, because it confirms in pitiless detail everything I ever believed about the blindness, self-destructiveness and addiction to bad stuff (advertising, capitalism, religion, oil, media spin, ignorance) of the human race, particularly the Western cultural bits of it. There would be no need for this sort of book if we were all orang-utans, but since we aren't, there's a grim satisfaction in cataloguing our manifest stupidities. Here's a brief round-up of recent discoveries.

• Ben Goldacre, Bad Science. I adore Ben Goldacre. It's the calm, rational, urbane and slightly ironic way in which he socks the deserving savagely in the eye. He is ruthlessly rude about all sorts of things in this book - bad journalism, high-profile quacks, snake oil products, poor scientific method. As a crash course in evidence-based scientific enquiry it's highly illuminating. I shall love him forever, however, for his beautifully rational dissection of homeopathy and exactly why it's a load of bollocks, and for the trenchant, succint and damning account he gives of the culpable homicide perpetrated by Mattias Rath in South Africa in the name of curing AIDS with vitamins.
  
  
• Malcom Gladwell, What the Dog Saw. This is more traditional journalism than Goldacre, in that Gladwell investigates odd topics in some depth, including a lot of interviews with interesting people. The collection of essays is only really loosely connected by the idea of digging beneath things we take for granted to explore how and why they work. I loved the chapters on kitchen gadget salesmen, the development of the birth control pill, and the Dog Whisperer guy; the later, more conceptual sections - data analysis in mammography and air crashes, the mechanics of panic, the value of interview techniques - are also interesting, although not quite as colourful. This is a thoughtful book, and far less polemical than Goldacre - quite often the upshot of the detailed exploration is a sort of equable shrug.
  
  
• Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You: Why popular culture is making us smarter. This wasn't a book club book, Jo lent it to me. It offers the popular version of quite heavy media theory, people like Fiske and Henry Jenkins who espouse the cultural value and active appeal to intelligence of popular forms. Johnson is entertaining and persuasive on topics such as video games and why they don't cause violence, and modern television and why it requires a brain. It's an interesting read.
  
  
• James Fergusson, The Vitamin Murders. Fascinating piece of investigation and cultural history: stumbling over the 1952 murder of Jack Drummond and his family in France leads the author off into an exploration of British nutrition during the world wars, the decline of healthy eating in contemporary Britain, and the presence of pesticides in food. Another of these books which demonstrates in pitiless detail just how badly and culpably our lives are affected by the marketing drives of big business.

Now I have to persuade myself to read Wuthering Heights by Monday for a tut, and five Steven Erikson fantasy tomes in the next few weeks so I can mark a Masters dissertation. Instead I shall read Phryne Fisher, a quartet of which arrive from Loot this afternoon. Frivolity rules! particularly decadent Australian 1920s detective frivolity. Memo to self: also blog about Lilian Jackson Braun.

Today's delirious bit of billboard poetry: SPAIN DEFENDS PSYCHIC OCTOPUS. I love this because it's absolutely, literally true. We live in a world where a psychic octopus has made world headlines because of its apparent ability to predict World Cup match outcomes. This makes me very, very happy because it externalises neatly everything I've ever believed about the frivolously demented nature of human society. As a race, we have no sense of proportion.

I'm on leave for the next week or so, taking time out to write the paper for this conference. There's a giant pile of critical tomes variously and separately on vampires and fairy tales all over my desk; my act of possibly hubristic synthesis is not being materially aided by the Hobbit's characteristically feline need to sprawl all over them. If I try to move them he bites me, lovingly. I assume it's lovingly. He hasn't actually drawn blood yet.

I have also spent large chunks of the last day or so Running Errands, such as collecting my passport from the visa people and applying for forex (this latter because I have a deep and terrifying fear that my credit card will get nicked or decline to work for some reason and I really want back-up cash). In addition, the lovely agent lady in France has found tenants for my house! which means I'm now trying to jump through about a zillion French and South African bureaucratic hoops in order to (a) set up a French bank account, which I didn't have time to do in all the frantic of the French trip, (b) pay the French company which did all the required assessments for woodworm and footrot and what have you (requires official translations of the documents, have spent the morning locating French translators and plaintively emailing them) and (c) pay the nice agent lady, who has seriously earned it. This house-earning lark is costing me a fortune, but hopefully it'll be worth it in the long run.

In other news, I don't really want to mention that the internets seem to be back in case they immediately fall over again in an attack of petulant self-consciousness. (The squid has been gnawing on them intermittently for several days, but seems to have given up, possibly in favour of predicting World Cup outcomes). This means I have been able to play a reasonable amount of Echo Bazaar, which is a beautifully-designed Twitter game set in a subterranean steampunk Victorian ur-London with vaguely decadent and Cthulhoid properties, and which functions as a cross between a card game, a text adventure and a RPG. I am a Charming and Keen-Eyed Lady with a Sulky Bat. Let me know if you play and we can loiter with intent or have risqué cosy dinners together or something.

A random thought has occurred to me. I have burbled before, in this forum, about my complete love for disaster movies, and for watching large tracts of human civilisation explode, erupt, disintegrate, drown, get swallowed by earthquakes, get blown up by aliens or otherwise interestingly fall apart. However, watching the Na'vi Hometree char and collapse, despite its lavish provision of explosions and giant things going crunch, gave me no enjoyment at all, engendering instead a sort of sickened disgust.

This has been somewhat revelatory. I think I enjoy disaster movies, in the average expression of the genre, because they offer an apocalyptic response to something I feel very strongly about, which is that human civilisation simply doesn't work. On average it's an unreflecting, unintegrated, fundamentally self-destructive society we belong to, one that is probably stuck in a downward spiral to some kind of collapse. Being gleefully destroyed by some imponderably and irresistably enormous external force, whether alien or environmental, operates on some level of my subconscious not just as a lovely externalisation of inherent qualities, but as something we probably deserve. The Na'vi, on the other hand, are a functional society in perfect and harmonious balance with their habitat. They didn't deserve to be destroyed. Hence, no enjoyment.

This basically suggests that somewhere in my subconsious is a sort of stern Victorian governess with a very large ruler, saying over her pince-nez, with steely determination, "If you break one more thing there will be trouble." I'm OK with that. I'm also going to stop talking about Avatar now, I seem to have mostly expelled the fury by blogging.

Gawsh. This is the first time I've travelled in Europe since I started blogging. It feels very odd to be posting from Dorset, not the least because mother's computer uses Explorer (ritual ptooey) and has the quote key in the wrong place. Think of this as the cracking of a champagne bottle across the bows of the perambulation tag, whose outings have hitherto been entirely local. Also, I think you may be in for infrequent, giant posts rather than my usual inconsequential fragments. Brace yourselves.

Cape Town airport is undergoing a massive overhaul for 2010, when we host the (cower) World Cup¹. In practical terms this has two main upshots: (1) ongoing and total chaos with parking at the airport, since they've basically been constructing the dimensional folds necessary to fit in new parking garages for upwards of two years; and (b) a rather gaudy simulation of the new terminal in giant screens as you queue at passport control. Said sims employ computer graphics circa approximately Wolfenstein 3D, and feature giddy James-Cameronesque camera passes through enormous and seductive vistas of glittering chrome, glass and other media likely to suggest slick and efficient passing of passengers like so much suspect Tex-Mex. Unfortunately the animation of the virtual people who inhabit the sim is extremely dodgy: they lurch about the environment, suggesting not The Airport Of The Future so much as The Airport Of The Future Under Zombie Attack. Fortunately the Undead Denizens are also perfectly equipped to represent my actual limping stumble, bumping into things, after a thirteen-hour plane flight.

I can't sleep while sitting upright, which means I can't sleep on planes. Intercontinental flights are thus strange Twilight Zone experiences, in which the basic shrinkage of one's universe to a tiny, claustrophobic vista of adjacent seats and cramped muscles becomes inextricably involved with all the movies I watch, so I'm subsequently unable to separate my own experiences (this time round, quite epic and unlikely nausea from a minor gastric bug plus travel-sickness) from the 3am absorption of, say, Mama Mia. It is also a necessary corollary that any cinema I watch must be either light and fluffy or pre-digested, as otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever to my shrinking, befuddled brain.

In the former category, re-watching Quantum of Solace offered, in fact, a quantum of solace. In the latter, the cheesy antics of Mama Mia (a movie redeemed solely and marginally by Meryl Streep, who's fabulous, and by my own addiction to spontaneous giant dance numbers) were in good company with the latest Wallace and Grommit (dough! a theme for claymation that has been inevitable since time began!) and with Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, a thoroughly heartwarming little flick with endearing leads and an inevitably lovely soundtrack, although there's one cellphone-in-toilet scene midway that should be avoided by anyone already fighting the gag reflex. Fragments of watching for the sake of argument were also useful - the first half-hour of The Day The Earth Stood Still revealed enough giant plot holes for me to be able to mock it significantly in future, and 45 minutes of Twilight were, if anything, slightly worse than the completely imbecile teen dreck I'd been led to expect. I lasted all of ten minutes of Hancock.

However strong my impulse which still finds the moment of actual surging uplift from terra firma incredibly sexy, the flight was, unfortunately, the one which tipped my flying experience from "Whee! Clouds! no hands! Magic!" to "aargh! get me off this plane! orang-utans wouldn't put up with this, it's stupid." We sat on the tarmac in Cape Town for half an hour after our scheduled departure time, while the crew warbled apologetically about "outstanding paperwork". What with being unable to eat from nausea and consequently light-headed from more than sleep dep, I swear there was a twenty-minute stretch somewhere over Central Africa where we entered a möbius state that endured for about seven hours while Mama Mia! recycled plot points, before we eventually blundered loose. Then Heathrow kept us sitting on the tarmac for forty minutes before they'd let us park, while I suppressed not only the gag reflex but the desire to slay six and make for the exits.

On the upside, England is strangely beautiful, with drifts of daffodils all over the show. The country is still doing that gut-tearing, tear-jerking thing it does of randomly embodying bits of my childhood reading, so we pass a rookery, or hawthorn in bloom, or a magpie in a field, and suddenly I'm in tears.

We leave for the France flight at 3am tomorrow. I'm going to bed now. Wish me luck.

---

¹. Non-football-fans among Capetonians are obliged by charter to insert the (cower) parenthesis before the event name.

Reading Obama's acceptance speech is making me cry. McCain's concession speech (linked from that page) is also surprisingly graceful.

I've carefully ignored local politics recently, both the South African and the despair-inducing Zimbabwe version - I certainly don't follow them in the way I've been following the American presidential race. America's fundamentally crazy system is much better theatre, for a start. But I think my comparative disinterest also comes down to two things:

1. In a weird sort of way, disenfranchisement. I'm a white person in black Africa. Zimbabwe is insoluble, South Africa is not my country even though I've adopted it, and in any case it feels as though, as part of a postcolonial discredited minority, these struggles are not about me. I freely admit that this is illogical and probably defeatist, but there you have it.
   
   
2. I don't actually like any of the people involved in local politics. I'd support them for what they say they stand for, rather than who they are. Kerry/Edwards left me lukewarm, but I like Al Gore a lot, and it is a happy astonishment to me that someone who projects integrity as Obama does should have made it through a corrupt political system focused, at least in the last four years, on narcissistic venality.

In a way it doesn't even matter if Obama's aura of thoughtfulness, integrity and reason turns out to be a carefully-crafted political façade. Current African politics only really echoes the tendency the world over, to take for granted the politician as corrupt, money-grubbing and fundamentally uncaring about the health of the polity. (The Onion is not far wrong). Obama is politician as emblem in the same way that Mandela was, and it's hugely hopeful that America, an influential society whose cultural choices tend to ripple out into the world, should have started to recognise the need for him.