Years ago, I spent a couple of days in Oudtshoorn during a touring holiday. If you like ostriches or are in the market for feather dusters, ostrich-skin shoes or indeed anything else made from the skin of an ostrich then Oudtshoorn is definitely the place to be.
I tired of ostriches pretty quickly on my visit. After all, if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, so I wanted to see what other delights a couple of days in Oudtshoorn had to offer. There were the Cango Caves not far away and they were well worth a visit, if only to escape the summer heat. The only other attraction seemed to be an early morning close encounter with meerkats. So we booked for that and were at the appointed rendezvous just after sunrise to join the local meerkat man on his quest to lure meerkats out of their burrows by making strange coughing noises. This seemed to work and our admiration for a man who could speak fluent meerkat rose enormously.
So where is this all leading, I hear you ask? Well, as the final days of 2019 drew to a close, there was a major scandal on social media involving our very own Jerm and Helen Zille.
Naughty Helen posted a cartoon by Jerm which depicted a brown cartoon character saying to a white cartoon character, ‘You should give back the land you stole’, to which the white cartoon character responds: ‘You should be jailed for raping my wife’. In the third frame the brown cartoon character is depicted sweating, with the caption, ‘But I didn’t do that’, to which the white cartoon character replies: ‘Exactly’. Neither cartoon character is identifiable as a person, living or dead. Admittedly, the brown cartoon character is dressed in red and wears a red beret which may suggest a link with our beloved Egregious Fascist Fat-Cat party. Apart from that, the message is pretty clear, as Helen Zille explained in her tweet which read: ‘This aptly captures the fallacy and racism behind race generalizations’. It’s worth noting that the cartoon in question was published on this site last June but only came to the notice of the woke community last week. Maybe they need to upgrade their reading habits.
Predictably the fallout was huge. The cartoon was condemned as implying that all black men are rapists (even though the cartoon character wasn’t black and had distinctly European features….small detail) although I don’t recall anybody complaining that the cartoon portrayed all white people as land thieves. But this is where the meerkats come in.
In the morning, a meerkat pops his head out of the burrow and has a good look around. Then, if the coast is clear, other meerkats pop their heads out of the burrow and start running around the place looking for something to eat. Soon the whole place is full of meerkats scurrying around looking for something interesting to do. All the while there is a meerkat sentry standing up and looking out for any approaching danger. If he sees anything, he sends a signal and all the other meerkats shoot back into the burrow until it’s safe to come out again. They’re not the boldest of creatures. Appropriately, one of the collective nouns for meerkats is a ‘mob’ and the behaviour of ‘woke’ lefties is not dissimilar to meerkat behaviour.
Every morning, a woke lefty pops his head out of the social media burrow and looks for something to be offended by. Then he lets out a little yelp of outrage and suddenly the place is swarming with outraged lefties all trying to outdo one another in the virtue-signalling stakes. The woke lefty on sentry duty warns the mob of approaching rationality, whereupon they all leap back into their burrow until the coast is clear again and they can emerge once more to search for something else to be outraged about.
One of the interesting aspects about woke lefty hunting is the need to both misinterpret and blow out of all proportion anything their prey might write or say. This makes them pitiable in the eyes of more evolved creatures but seems to keep them happy. In the evening they return to their woke burrows and congratulate themselves on their extreme cleverness.
I take some comfort from the fact that this ‘wokism’ is a global fashion statement and is increasingly mocked the world over by those of us who can manage to separate fantasy from reality. You would have to be particularly stupid to have seen Jerm’s cartoon as anything but a message to all races not to be so dogmatic and judgemental about each other. But, with a bit of propaganda tweaking worthy of the Nazi party, the ‘wokists’ can change the whole meaning and stamp their censorious jackboots over the intended meaning.
One cannot help but wonder what empty and unfulfilled lives these poor woke folks lead. The very peak of their life’s ambition seems to be to get someone sacked from their job, to force a public apology from them and publicly humiliate them or to get someone banned from some or other ‘social’ media platform. They justify this fascist behaviour by pretending that it is in the public interest and that anybody not sharing their perverse world view is an uncaring bastard who deserves to be outed. Fortunately there is a growing backlash against these appalling cry-bullies, but, for many, the damage has already been done.
Since rational argument doesn’t seem to work, I’m afraid the only way to deal with such people on social media is to ridicule and laugh at them. You may risk being ‘outed’ by them as a result, but consider that an honour.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, become a Friend of the IRR if you aren’t already one by SMSing your name to 32823 or clicking here. Each SMS costs R1.’ Terms & Conditions Apply.