People are looking for the stamp of approval conferred by longevity, the comfort of consistency, and for places that have established a rhythm and tradition that you don’t get in the establishments of the flashy new tsars of the restaurant firmament. Or do I mean stars? Either way, there’s something fantastically reassuring about knowing that style and quality can be lasting, and that you don’t have to keep endlessly embracing the new in a quest for worth.

The restaurant I chose in Cape Town is Miller’s Thumb, which has been in Kloof Nek Road since 1995. I first reviewed it around 13 years ago, and at the time it was one of the few restaurants that had embraced the strange concept of fresh fish. Quite why restaurants in a seaside fishing village never realised that people might want fish fresh from the ocean, i’ve never worked out. And in truth, not much is different nowadays. Cape Town is still famous for having a thousand restaurants without a view of the sea, although some have sprung up over the last few years.

Incredibly, the menu at Miller’s Thumb appears to not have changed at all. On this visit, I was again offered fish that had been caught that morning. The food was as tasty and simple as I remembered from my last meal there, years ago. And even better, the service was immaculate and friendly, again exactly as I remembered.

Johannesburg was a little more difficult, given that I’ve only become a proper resident in the last couple years. Most Joburgers with a sense of history recommend the Portuguese food at the Radium Beer Hall, a venerable institution that was established in 1929. My first visit there was many years ago, and it wasn’t memorable. But Joburgers rave about the Mozambique prawns and chicken livers, so I gave it another, more purposeful bash.

I don’t know… what is it about people in Johannesburg and restaurants? The food at Radium is decidedly average. Nothing wrong with it that a couple of beers can’t drown, but hardly worth raving about. The decor is probably best described as absent, although the appeal to history is made through some choice old newspaper posters. Seriously, Joburgers – I’m all for eating with rose-coloured chopsticks, but you need to work on making your menus match your myths.

Unusually for a newspaper column, I’m going to leave this open-ended. I need more in depth local knowledge, so I’m hoping an eager Joburger will point our readers in the right direction to a restaurant where pedigree and product do each other justice. I’m sure there must be many out there.

A Suitcase full of Winter

Piet Botha

Popular wisdom has it that the blues was born in Africa, and exported to America on ocean currents of blood and pain. A long journey later, it’s ended up back in Africa, but on the southern tip and in the hands of what we could loosely, and probably incorrectly, define as the genetic and cultural heirs of the original slave traders. Yep, in South Africa, one version of the blues belongs to the whites.

Like the mythic search for Robert Johnson’s burial place, finding the home of blues rock musician Piet Botha is not easy. Instead of a street address, you get a plot number. It’s way out beyond Pretoria, that city grimly defined by a bad history and a sometimes bitter present. That’s a description, I reflect as I navigate the baking intricacies of the N1, which could fit Botha himself.

Just before I get to Botha’s homestead, I find myself in John Vorster Drive, a road named for the man who succeeded Verwoerd after his assassination, an erstwhile member of the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag, and the evil comedian who used to welcome foreign visitors to apartheid South Africa with the words “Welcome to the happiest police state in the world.” Up on the brown koppies that line the road, picked out in whitewashed rocks, are the words “God is Great and Good”. Except in Afrikaans, of course.

When I arrive at the locked gate to Botha’s plot, I have to phone him to come and let me in. He appears, a long-haired and bearded man wearing only a pair of camo baggies and flip flops, his body sunburnt. He ambles down the dusty driveway and waves me through. Standing dolorous guard by the side of the gate is a decommissioned artillery piece, either a relic of the Botha family’s military past, or some new form of Pretorian status symbol that I haven’t heard about.

Piet Botha has been making music for over three decades, and has been the frontman for the band Jack Hammer for 28 of those years. He’s the only constant in Jack Hammer, a band that in its infancy actually featured Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton. Yes, the star of , and supporting actor in his marriage to Angelina Jolie, played drums on the first Jack Hammer album, Jack of All Trades. His contributions were recorded when Botha was living in Los Angeles in 1985, working as a construction worker by day, and recording by night. But that’s just a bit of musical trivia for a pub night. The real story of Jack Hammer is of a variety of talented musos aiding and abetting the musical pilgrimage of Piet Botha, and of contributing to a discography of some 12 studio and live albums, and a few compilations as well.

Never has the word seminal been better applied to a musician. Botha has the sort of voice that David Bowie, singing about Bob Dylan, described as “a voice of sand and glue”. Botha himself is typically self-denigrating about his famous gravelly voice. “I never wanted to be a singer, I just wanted to be a guitar player in a band. I would have loved to be in Tom Petty’s band, just playing the guitar. Still today, I hate the sound of my own voice. But I’ve learned how to put honesty into a song, to tell the story. To use simplicity to do something great.” And this is why we care about Piet Botha. Because he’s simple, in the way great love is simple, and the way terrible pain can speak for itself.

Botha and his daughter make me a breakfast of bacon and eggs, in a kitchen that I would describe as rudimentary if I was interviewing Kurt Darren, but which is homely and normal in this context. I’m offered a beer. It’s 10am! “I can’t have one myself,” Botha says, “but feel free.” I have to ask the traditional question, about rock ’n’ roll, addiction and excess, and the path that leads not to wisdom but to endless cups of rooibos tea.

“I became a heroin addict in 1997, just by chance. One is very brave, someone says ‘Try this,’ and instead of being calm and levelheaded, you want to be the cowboy, always. ‘I can handle this.’ Boom! Ja, that put me in a bad place. Then I got clean, by 2001. It took about a year with the methadone treatment. So it’s been 11 years clean.”

Botha pauses to roll a cigarette, one of many over the course of the interview. When a coughing fits takes him, he cajoles his lungs into obedience, addressing them like recalcitrant puppies: “Come on, yeah. Come on… there we go.” He tells me he has a touch of bronchitis, and his constant hawking and coughing is oddly contrapuntal to his tale of addiction and near ruin.

Photo by Jessi Botha

“That was a terrible mistake I made, thinking you can fool around with heroin. I’ve had a terrible history with substance abuse, unfortunately. Especially with alcohol. When it really gets you is when you wake up in the morning and you need a drink. It really destroys you. I’ve kicked the booze a lot, but every now and then I fall off the bus again, then I binge for a month, then I kick it again and stay sober for a year. I’m trying to stay sober now for good. It’s so wonderful when you’re sober, because you’re positive and you get stuff done. But I’ve been in a good place a lot in the last ten years…. Just now and then… but it hasn’t escalated to epic proportions.”

Botha serves breakfast outside on a rough wooden table, still entirely at ease in just his baggies. We talk about the culture that partly created him, that oppressive, patriarchal, and violently petty society that the rest of the world knows elliptically as apartheid. I quip that the newspaper I work for has just had to censor its front page, the first time that’s happened since the apartheid government did it in 1986. I show him a picture of that old cover on my iPhone. I’m vaguely embarrassed when I suddenly realise that the apartheid minister quoted on the censored newspaper is his father.

It’s probably not important to know Piet Botha is the son of Pik Botha, minister of foreign affairs in the last apartheid government, unless you believe that rock ’n’ roll is an always recurring revolution. But since I’ve gone there now, albeit accidentally, I run with it. Pik, incidentally, was known as a liberal, and was the first apartheid member of parliament to publicly state (as early as 1986) that South Africa could one day be governed by a black president.

So the paternal connection, has that been – “A burden, yes. Over the years I’ve tried to figure it out. It’s like ancient times, when there were kings. His enemies become his children’s enemies, but his friends don’t necessarily become his children’s friends. But history has a habit of illuminating things eventually. It’s been a burden, it still is, because you’re always linked to him. You can never be yourself. And some guys hate you because he’s your father. So be it, you know. All I’ve learnt over the years, is that politics is a frightening place. One day this guy’s your friend, the next day he’s your enemy. But that’s why we got into rock ’n’ roll, into the spirit of the 60s. We wanted to change the system.”

A 1984 shot of Jack Hammer

In a sense, Afrikaans artists are the exemplar for rock ’n’ roll, if you think rock ’n’ roll is either about pissing off the establishment or being co-opted into it. You can’t talk about Afrikaans musicians without analysing the relationship between their work and their culture, and that is probably as true for Die Briels as it is for Fokofpolisiekar. Unusually for an icon of Afrikaans music, Botha only made his first Afrikaans album, the marvellous classic ‘n Suitcase vol Winter, in 1997, four English albums into the Jack Hammer career.

“I never thought I’d write a song in Afrikaans, I was always too angry. I’m still angry. But you can’t be angry at a language. I was angry at a system, so I didn’t want to use the language of the system. Which is kind of childish I guess. Then Afrikaans music changed, with guys like Koos du Plessis, who wrote some incredible songs. But when I think of Afrikaans music today, it’s all these Kentucky Fried Bands, this crap getting pushed down people’s throats, it’s just awful. It’s like Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in the Halls of Huisgenoot.

Botha’s antipathy to the dominant culture in apartheid South Africa follows a trajectory many South Africans of a certain age and race will find familiar, involving as it does an oppressive education system (“These dumbass teachers trying to make Nazis out of us”, to quote Botha), a sternly Calvinist religion and a soulless and evil military ethos.
Botha’s song Goeienag Generaal (Goodnight, General) is about the pointlessness of the white race’s attempts to preserve its “purity”, and the existential anger at the waste of young lives, and anger that still festers for many white South Africans.

“Yes, it was a war for the New Day/ For the church elders, and for the pregnant girl waiting/
In the rain/ all the children blessed by the dominee/ All the young boys fresh from school/ Welcome, welcome…./ Ah whitey, your eyes on that day/ were blue like the sky/ But when we looked again/ An AK had shot the fuck out of you/ Goodnight, General.”
(“Ja, dit was die oorlog vir die nuwe dag/ Vir die kerkraad, swanger meisie wat wag/ In die reën/ al die kinders wat die dominee seën,/ Al die jong laaities nou net uit die skool/  Welkom, welkom…./ Maar Whitey, jou oë op daar dag/ Was blou net soos die lug/ Toe ons weer so kyk/ Het ‘n AK jou fucked-up geskiet/ Goeienag Generaal”)

I’m almost ready for my breakfast beer now, listening to Botha talk about this part of South Africa’s generally tortured past. “It’s a violent history.

A shot of Piet Botha, by his daughter Jessi.

Unfortunately there are still those old generals around, those Nazis. Still talking about the Angolan war, and still trying to justify themselves. That scares me.” It’s an uncomfortable subject, but in the same way that having a passing knowledge of racial politics in 70s America is crucial to understanding Neil Young’s “Southern Man”, you need to remember South Africa’s recent past to contextualise our musical history, and events like the Voelvry movement.

Botha was on the sidelines of Voelvry, that famous manifestation of Afrikaans counter-culture that writer Max du Preez referred to as “the Boere-Woodstock”. Johannes Kerkorrel, James Phillips and Koos Kombuis are the three most closely associated with this musical revolution of the 1980s, a series of concerts and albums that provided a soundtrack for Afrikaners disgruntled with the oppressive regime.

Botha remembers meeting two of the progenitors of Voelvry, “Dagga” Dirk Uys, a legendary figure in rock music, and Johannes Kerkorrel, when they walked into Grand Central in Pretoria, a club run by Botha and others in the late 80s. Bands like Tribe after Tribe and Psycho Reptiles played there and, says Botha, “The cops hated us. They always wanted to close the club down. So they arrested me a few times. They didn’t like these rock ’n’ roll boys, they were forever trying to bust them.” Botha already knew James Phillips, Bernoldus Niemand in his Voelvry guise, from the army, and from playing festivals with Phillips’ band Corporal Punishment.

Botha’s take on Voelvry contradicts populist hagiography. “The Voelvry [participants] were against government censorship taking away their personal freedom, they weren’t buddies with the ANC. People say they helped the struggle, but they never helped no black folk. That was about their own personal freedom of expression. For example, it’s quite obvious from his later works that Koos Kombuis is quite conservative. Voelvry is exactly the same phenomenon that happened with Fokofpolisiekar, exactly the same. They’re anti-establishment, but the establishment loves to read about them every day. James Philips was very outspoken politically. He wrote some great songs, like “Africa is dying”, the one that Vusi Mahlasela covered. And then of course he died so tragically, there in Grahamstown in a car accident, so young.”

We spend a few quiet minutes thinking of South African musicians who’ve died young, like Sweatband’s great guitarist John Mair, who also died driving to a gig, in the same year as Voelvry’s Johannes Kerkorrel was found hanging from a tree in Kleinmond. And that ineffable pianist, Moses Mololekwa, found in downtown Joburg, hanging next to the body of his wife. Botha is moved to reminisce about the last time he saw Phillips. “I saw him shortly before he died, at a gig in Yeoville. It was two in the morning, and we were packing gear, and he came past and said, ‘Piet, this is no way to make a living.’ He was a wonderful man. He came from Springs. A lot of good folk come from Springs.”

But we’re straying into a gloomy cul de sac here, and I’m in danger of caricaturing Botha as a political musician. The majority of his songs traverse a far wider landscape, one of beauty, love, wistfulness, passion and death. His last album, 2011‘s Spookpsalms (Ghost Songs), contains sweetly painful love songs and limpid vignettes of landscapes and cemeteries, people and places. It’s in that great tradition of people like Gert Vlok Nel, or a stripped down Valiant Swart, where vast landscapes and endless distances give perspective to intensely personal revelations. The album’s lineup includes another musical great, Ollie Viljoen, who Botha describes as a maestro. “When I play with him I’m the happiest guy in the world.”

This reminds me of the constant refrain I hear from other musicians when Botha comes up in conversation: that he is the kindest, most supportive elder statesman in music, and will give his last cent to help out a fellow musician who is struggling. Botha’s career has certainly never been about competing, or about making massive amounts of money. Famously independent, he’s never signed a deal with a major record label. In 2002’s “River of Love”, Botha sings about his acceptance of the choices he’s made. “One thing I have to say/ I’m not sorry/ This road that I’ve been on/ Trust me I got nothing/ but a burned-out soul/ And this old guitar.”

“Ja, It’s been a battle for 35 years, but… I never think about that money thing. Because that destroys the art, the minute you start thinking, ‘I’ve got to write a certain kind of song.’
That’s like telling a painter he can only use oils or watercolour. Or that he can only paint buildings. You get a certain kind of musician who doesn’t think about the money. The energy when three, four, five guys play together, that is the most wonderful thing, not the money. I still find that today. You get great musicians who’d normally charge exorbitant fees, who’ll do it for free because of that thing. Music is not supposed to be a competition, it’s about creating something that’s beautiful. And when it becomes a competition, that’s when it becomes obscene.”

Botha’s early antecedents include the likes of Abstract Truth, Freedom’s Children, Otis Waygood, Tusk and Silver Creek Mountain Band, to name just a few of the great bands that sometimes graced, and sometimes grated with, the music scene in 60s and 70s South Africa. It’s hard to situate Botha in today’s rock scene, with its skinny jeans sponsorships and viral marketing vibe. I ask him what he thinks of it, and if he feels alienated or aligned.

“There’s a lot of local stuff I love. Laurie Levine, Josie Field, Black Cat Bones. They’re so talented, but hey, they don’t get the breaks. There is brilliant new music now, but you never hear it on radio. Radio stations are an evil empire, with their formats and playlists. Radio has become the enemy of music, and the internet the saviour of music. The Afrikaans stars scare me the most, because their music is so shallow. They’re like greedy pigs in a sty.”

It’s getting time for me to take my leave, and I’m left with just one question for Botha. How does he feel about his status as a legend of South African rock ‘n roll? Being Botha, he adopts neither of the two easy default answers. He doesn’t deny it, or accept it. Instead, he interrogates it.

“Guys started with this legend thing years ago, I don’t know… What do you think? I don’t think I’m really that important, you know. I’ve just managed to make all this music over the years, and survived, and stayed independent of the system. Because the system is a very cruel place. I’ve tried to build up a body of work, that’s all you can do.”

I’m touched by something I learned earlier, when Botha tells me he never listens to his albums after they’re released. “I hate listening to myself, when my kids play it, I tell them to put it off.” It’s revelatory: after the serious personal mistakes that Botha has made, those apparently inevitable bad choices that go with rock ’n’ roll, his three daughters still play his music. I’m irresistibly reminded of the lyrics of “Bury me when”, off 2005’s The Pilgrim, which are the finest statement of the philosophy of the blues. “Bury me when the stars/ Shine bright over Zanzibar/ The moon can be the preacher/ And the tide can do the rest/ You don’t have to be perfect/ Just do your best”.

Visit Rolling Stone South Africa for more music. And read my review of Spookpsalms, Botha’s great 2011 album.

A selection of albums by Jack Hammer and Piet Botha. For a full discography, go to Piet Botha’s website.

The Judas Chap

Ghosts on the Wind (1994)

The Pilgrim (2005)

George Orwell wrote that “Political language -  and with variations this is true of all political parties… – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.”

I don’t care whether Helen Zille thinks that the Western Cape is London, and the Eastern Cape is Rwanda. One insensitive politician (wow, didn’t see that one coming) isn’t going to make a difference to the fact that our government has not only failed to redress the evils that apartheid did to our education system, they’ve actually managed to cock it up even further.

Oh, my, there are SO many good reasons why our education system is failing. But cut through all the self-serving debate, the litany of obstacles apparently rendering our politicians impotent, and we’re left with one stark fact: we are destroying the children of our country. There have been hundreds of reports of violence against students in the last year, by teachers and fellow learners. What passes for a pass mark is so insultingly low, your average dolphin could matriculate, and still have time to taunt Japanese fishermen.

So shove it, you whining ninnies. What more could you possibly need to allow you to make it right? Fighting about whose fault it is might help pass the time while waiting for the gravy Gautrain to stop, but perhaps you could use the time a little more fruitfully and actually fix the damn problem.

And I’m sure there are huge and complicated reasons why our unemployment rate was roughly 25% in the fourth quarter of last year. That’s one in every four of our potential work force out of work. Again, so many good reasons why this is the case. And to be fair, many initiatives trying to address it. But when plainsong is your soundtrack, there’s only one chorus: we are going to be in severe trouble when the youth of our country decides it’s more fun to topple a government than starve at home.

Many will find this crude analysis offensive. Good. It’s time we got angry about injustice, and stopped taking excuses. The problem is not just of the politicians’ making. Sure, most of them are cowards trying to please everyone so that they can keep their jobs, and their first loyalty is to their party, their second to their stomach, and their country appears to come a very distant third. But we’re the idiots who voted them in, and who’d rather keep in the devils we know then allow the smug angels of the opposition any leeway.

It’s an exercise I recommend, this simplification of essential truths. In ten years time, South Africa’s children won’t even be able to spell refugee. They really won’t care how many points you scored off each other while furthering your petty party political agendas.

(First published in the M&G, March 2012)

Yep. We'll respect them in the morning.

And here’s the spoof ad:

So we don’t want to get too scary about this, but it’s true that numbers rule our lives. Even worse, those numbers are controlled by a secret society of stern faced men and women clad in implacably neat uniforms, who speak an arcane secret language and have an unimaginable higher purpose of which we wot not. Yes, I speak of the Accountants.

Ah, you thought I was talking about the Illuminati? Nah. There’s no mystery left there. By now we all know that they’re a bunch of clowns in funny robes chasing little boys. Possibly I’ve confused my clandestine organisations with my papal posses here, but it’s all the same thing from a certain perspective. I’m talking about a far more dangerous bunch, the people who really understand how numbers work, and can make them work against you.

Another guy in funny robes, St. Augustine of Hippo, who lived from CE 354 – 430, wrote that ‘Numbers are the universal language offered by the deity to humans as confirmation of the truth.’ This would mean that accountants are the only ones who walk among the living who are privy to the truth. And this is possibly why they often look depressed.

Incidentally, St Augustine is one of my favourite saints, and certainly one of the most pragmatic. His classic potboiler, “Confessions” of Augustine of Hippo (not, in fact a self-help diet book), is famous for his youthful prayer to God, “Grant me chastity and continence, only not yet.” Apparently, he was a victim of his own popularity as a young man, with many admirers (what we’d call ‘Facebook friends’ nowadays).

But enough of poking fun at accountants and saints, which is as foolhardy as poking a rabid snake with a rolled up balance sheet. Some of you reading this might be accountants, although very few will be saints. So you’re probably feeling the same irritation I feel when government officials start criticising ‘the media’. Not all of us are the same. In the same way that, conceivably, there’s a non-muckraking, honest, not-embittered journalist somewhere in the world, there’s probably an exciting, cool, gorgeously dressed accountant out there. The basic point is that numbers are what make the world go round, in all sorts of ways. According to those wacky lads over at the Numerology Church, the study of numbers can determine their influence on your life and future.

In ancient times, when calculators still had big red numbers, you’d take your average life expectancy (say 65), divide it by the average amount of times per meal you have to beg a Cape Town waiter to bring you your bill (5), add a randomly chosen number based on the chances of there being good news on the front page of the Sunday Times (the always mystical zero), and you’re left with, oh oh, 13. Then you consult an approved, paid-up member of the Numerology Church (say, your Aunt Dora, or a wise old sangoma smelling of beer), who will tell you the appropriate place to spend your month’s salary so that you can double it.

It was failsafe, really. Worked almost every time, if by ‘almost’ you mean never. But that was then, and this is now. And the only numbers that count now are how many friends you have on Facebook, and how many people are following you on Twitter. Yep, numbers aren’t secret anymore. Now, anyone can go to a website, do the basic maths of divination, and predict your future. Only 70 friends on Facebook, divided by only 30 followers on Twitter, equals no chance in hell of getting laid Saturday night. It’s the mathematics of loserdom. An Illuminati for people who aren’t the brightest lightbulbs in the chandelier, if you will. And it’s proof that numbers still determine our lives, and that Dan Brown is right. [Ominous pause.] About everything.

First published in Obrigado magazine.

Spookpsalms (2011)

A weary effortlessness imbues Piet Botha’s first Afrikaans studio album for eight years. It’s not the weariness of ennui, or of rote. It’s a worldly acceptance of the enormous weight of time that makes the bluer side of rock ‘n roll the contradiction that it is. Both a vital expression of the immediacy of life being lived, and an atemporal testament to the eternal tropes of existence.

What is Piet Botha? Elder statesman of South African rock, certainly, even it is is Minister without Portfolio. But also, on Spookpsalms, a channel for some sweetly painful love songs, and some fragile sketches of towns, cemeteries, roads and lives we’ve all reluctantly passed through at some time. A beautiful album, for those who know what they’re listening to.

(First published in Rolling Stone SA, 2011)

Read my feature on Piet Botha, courtesy of Rolling Stone SA.

KONY 2012

Perhaps the best way to understand the multiple and contested ways in which the video has been, and will be, interpreted, and why it’s had the tremendous impact it has, is by the juxtaposition of three related video scenes. The first is from Kony 2012 itself, the second a video response by a supporter of the movement, and the third, amateur news footage shot serendipitously on the streets of San Diego.

First, a clip featuring Jason Russell, an energetic, slim man who typifies the blonde Californian look, interviewing his young, toddler son (introduced, revealingly, as “This is my son Gavin. And just like his dad, he likes being in movies.”). Gavin is also blonde, and dressed in a black and red striped jersey. “What do I do for a job?” Russell asks Gavin. “You stop the bad guys from being mean”. And, “Who are the bad guys?” ask Russell. Gavin thinks about it. “Um… Star Wars people!”

Secondly, a clip from a video made by former porn actress, Bree Olsen. She’s also famous for being one of actor Charlie Sheen’s two “goddesses” who lived with him during his infamous meltdown that got him fired from the television show Two and a Half Men.

The video shows Olson writhing in a variety of provocative poses on a beach and in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and perched on rocks in a skimpy dress – all juxtaposed with shots of mutilated victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The most horrifyingly inappropriate image is of Olson posed sexily in a bikini in the mud. There’s a close-up of her face, lips parted and painted red. She pouts at the camera in approved porn star style. There’s a smear of mud on her cheek. We cut from this to a close up of a child whose nose and ears have been hacked off, and lips mutilated. Apparently, we are supposed to make a link between Olson’s beauty being smeared by the streak of mud, and this child being tortured.

Bree Olson for Kony 2012

The third clip is from a video shot by a passerby. It shows Jason Russell, naked, prancing manically up and down a street in San Diego, and pounding his hands on the pavement. He swears, and rants about the devil, the Apple iPhone, and its digital assistant, Siri. Russell’s wife, Danica (who appears in Kony 2012, giving birth to their son Gavin), released a statement saying that “The preliminary diagnosis he received is called brief reactive psychosis, an acute state brought on by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration. Though new to us, the doctors say this is a common experience given the great mental, emotional and physical shock his body has gone through in these last two weeks.”

The first example above, of Russell’s son Gavin equating the Lord’s Resistance Army with the villains from the movie Star Wars, points directly at the mechanism around which Invisible Children is mobilising. It’s the classic tale of good versus evil, of identifiable baddies and unquestionable goodies, of superheroes rushing to the rescue. It’s the same impulse that led to the christening of the 2003 invasion of Iraq as “Operation Iraqi Liberation”. Kony 2012 attempts to configure its supporters, and potential supporters, as fighters for a simple justice, a comprehensible justice. This is one of the ways they’ve harnessed the inherent power of social media, that impulse that people on the networks have to share, and to share in, communal endeavour without nuance.

An early Invisible Children claim of success, made in a self-congratulatory section of the Kony 2012 video, was convincing Barack Obama and the U.S government to send 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to Uganda to help regional forces, namely Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, capture or kill Joseph Kony and his senior leaders. “After eight years of work,” Russell tells us, “The government finally heard us.”

Jason Russell's naked meltdown.

Detractors of U.S involvement have criticised it on grounds that it provides military assistance to countries, like Uganda and South Sudan, who have themselves used children as soldiers. Jo Becker, child rights advocate at Human Rights Watch, points out that “Countries that keep using child soldiers aren’t going to get serious about ending the practice until they see the US is serious about withholding the money…. These military aid waivers show a lack of leadership and a disregard for US law.”

The second video clip cited above, featuring porn star Bree Olson, can be seen, on one level, as a gross exploitation of a cause to garner personal publicity. But it’s also a (perhaps unwitting) deconstruction of some of the key elements of the Kony 2012 campaign. At one point, the pneumatic Olson tells us that “Right now, you’re watching a video of me outdoors in California, interspersed with pictures of the effect Joseph Kony had on the people of Uganda. I put the two together because I know a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. The Kony 2012 documentary runs on the same principle. It’s nice packaging on something that wouldn’t be an inherently fascinating topic to that many people otherwise.”

It is, of course, a grotesquerie worthy of Antonin Artaud, an absurdity worthy of Thomas Pynchon, this mashup of soft porn and hard tragedy. It does, however, highlight – perhaps unwittingly – the pleasure that Jason Russell evinces in doing good. It also underlines the disquieting contention made by both Russell and Olson – that the world, or America, to use the elision they sometimes fall into, cannot feel empathy unless they’re entertained.

This isn’t the first time Russell has put forward this idea. In a bizarre 2006 Invisible Children dance video, which tells the tale of Russell’s attempts to get cynical schoolchildren interested in the cause, Russell sings “We’re on a mission to put Uganda inside your mind. It needs attention and a dance to make it sparkle and shine.” He also does some remarkably twee ninja dance moves, which are guaranteed to make any young person instantly hostile. Do yourself a favour and watch the video.

Read the entire essay  “Kony 2012: Taking a closer look at the social media sensation“.

Coney 2012. Although spelt Kony 2012.

Hellwood is a side project of Jim White, one of the finest singer/songwriters America has ever produced. Saw him playing at SxSW in March, after years of longing to see him live. A great experience. Should probably have chosen a solo song, but I like this band.