It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...

..Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.....

Err.No, that's not it.

Let's start again:

Twenty years ago, on this day, Nelson Mandela walked out of what was then called Victor Verster Prison - Free At Last.

Oh great, now I have Al Green running through my brain.

Today, as in this day lying before us, we have the doubtful pleasure of having President ShowerHead giving us the State of the Nation Address.

I wonder what kind of spin he'll subject us to? It's unlikely that he'll refer directly to his recently-much-discussed proclivity for spraying his sperm around like a bloody fire hydrant even given his pointed defense for having more than one wife - a practise which is supposed, in Zulu culture, to decrease extra marital infidelity. Hollow laugh.

OK then - the State of the Nation. Will we be focused on:

The state hospitals having no money to pay their suppliers of medical equipment, and the resulting bankrupting of several small business, not to mention the medical waste building up in the hospitals themselves?

The R200 billion-a-year state of the potholed roads across the country?

The unusually violent crime in South African urban centres, a state which is often exacerbated by corrupt and greedy cops, not to mention their cynically profit-motivated scare-mongering counterparts in the private security services?

And I must mention here that the attempts of certain sectors of the security industry to maintain the populace in a permanent state of fear have been working quite well - people don't get that life is not meant to be a pain free ride from cradle to grave, and are perfectly willing to throw sums of money at companies who purport to protect them from criminal elements which, truth be known, often reside within their own ranks.

Or will we be discussing the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, a set of circumstances which displays the sleek latest-model luxury car, driven by the sleek, well-fed, well-connected fatcat, sitting at the traffic lights practically on the toes of the dispossessed on every street in this land?

I don't know what will be said at parliament this evening.
If I were Nelson Mandela, I'd be bitterly disappointed at what this country has become - but since I'm not him, at least on the surface,I'm just going to note that, given the brutalisation of a whole sector of people before 1990; given the promises broken and the ideals forgotten; given, in fact, the cannibalistic nature of civilization itself, we could hardly have hoped for any other outcome.

Thou Art God - good disguise you've got on there.