Carnivorous Cow

The Cow shook her head sadly. A comment posted to her blog had left her wondering about the relationship between politics and intelligence. "Of course," she remarked to Gramsci, "one often reads of cases of inbreeding being correlated to mental impairment. And throughout history, European royalty has been thick with examples."

Gramsci rolled his eyes at the pathetic pun. "What does inbreeding have to do with politics?" he asked.

"Well," the Cow sighed, "The white Right-wing is all for 'racial' purity, so they only breed with each other. Which, given that population increase for white people is in decline world-wides, but also locally, is an ever-shrinking gene pool. So that does amount to inbreeding, albeit currently on a marginally different scale."

Gramsci conceded the point. "True," he added, "plus of course they only associate with people who share their own views, and in places like Orania it's even sharper. Given the miniscule number of people who today confess to having ever supported apartheid, how they find anyone to breed with is beyond me!"

The Cow chuckled. "You need look no further than the first year blogs!" she pointed out. "Just the other day there was someone calling for a return of conscription 'as it was in the 80s'!"

Gramsci blanched - and then thought better of that, as it rendered him a potential hottie for the Right-wingers. "Surely not!" he spluttered in disbelief.

"Oh yes," insisted the Cow. "And what's more, raising the spectre of separate universities for separate colours!"

Gramsci was appalled. "Still," he conceded after some thought, "given what's on most students' agendas, at least in such institutions they'd have a better chance of finding breeding partners. Assuming, of course, an adequate supply of coffee and deserted stairs..."

The Cow had been feeling a little off colour of late, but Mr Timberland's diagnosis was spot on.

 (More)

The Cow has been a little disappointed with all the fuss about the SA Male Prostitute sex blog which offered gloating details of encounters with 50 "prominent South Africans" released in next gripping installment serialisation.

Gramsci shrugged. "Powerhouse Pat's call for censorship of Mxit and blogs was a bit over the top," he conceded. "There have been many recent discussions about ethics for bloggers, but to have a formerly progressive politician arguing for censorship is stretching it a bit far!"

"Perhaps," shrugged the Cow, "but that's a sideshow, really. What's of far greater concern is the substance of the allegations! 50 'prominent South Africans', we were promised! But reading through the list of alleged clients on the blog is like reading through a Who's Who from some small backwater! If the likes of Barry Ronge and Simon Grindrod are the best he can do, fame-wise, that's pretty pathetic!"

"It wasn't Barry Ronge!" insisted Gramsci, "It was 'Richard'. And don't forget Small James. He used to be famous once upon a time, if only for allegedly beating up his model girlfriend."

The Cow rolled her eyes dramatically. "Exactly! Once upon a time, in a land far far away. Next on his list will be some 70s NP cabinet minister and the Rosenkowitz sextuplets, with Glenda Kemp as an accessory, no doubt. Does he not get the point?"

Gramsci was starting to wonder if he did. While they might all be yesterday's men, surely they were still cultural icons? A dominee? A dubious cabaret performer or two? Some cultural figures no one had ever heard of?

The Cow sighed impatiently. "If you're going to do character assassination, surely it makes sense to go after someone that people might care remotely about? But I suppose by blogging in Afrikaans it was always going to be a niche market anyway."

Gramsci found the use of the term "niche" disturbing, given the content of the discussion. He changed the focus. "Do they have any idea who the perpetrator is?" he asked.

"Speculation has that it's Juan Uys again," the Cow revealed. "That guy seems to have more of an attention-seeking disorder than some of the first year bloggers!"

Gramsci paused. He was sure that Shathley was mightily relieved not to have to deal with this one.

Mr Timberland was reading bout doping in sport. He looked terminally miserable. "It makes it seem pointless watching sport!" he admitted.

The Cow cackled! "Aha!" she roared. "You've reached a plane of enlightenment where women have been waiting for aeons!"

Mr Timberland looked abashed and protested feebly. The Cow was having none of it, however.

"You see!" she crowed, "your Y chromosome is under threat! I told you all that cycling and leg shaving could only lead to tears!"

Mr Timberland abruptly changed the subject.

Later, the Cow asked Gramsci, "how is it that augmenting levels of testosterone has led to men becoming neutered?"

Gramsci shook his head. "Blame women!" he suggested. "Since someone let them out of the kitchen, men are having to compete not only with each other, but also with a whole new bunch of contenders!"

The Cow rolled her eyeballs.

"Besides," Gramsci added, "if women are out there taking part, who's going to bring the beer during the Rugby? No wonder men's Y chromosomes are wilting!"

Gramsci was very intrigued to get this photo from his UK cousin Bronstein:

"Facebook has been getting quite a bit of exposure in the press of late," Gramsci muttered to the Cow, "from the producer of Big Brother cautioning about 'loss of privacy' - can you believe - to its exploitation in the search for Madeleine McCann. But this one's at least a little interesting."

The Cow took a closer look. She couldn't quite figure out how a misanthrope had friends - either real ones or virtual - but the author didn't dwell on that point. But she wondered if it was al coincidental. Suddenly, her inbox had been flooded with friend requests, including from people she'd never met.

"Those are the difficult ones," she admitted to Gramsci. "It's very easy to reject some Bremnercrat who feigns interest or intimacy, or to diss some person who wouldn't share their chips with you back in primary school, but how do you deal with 'Blake from Dalhousie' or 'Angel'?"

"Ignore them?" suggested Gramsci pragmatically.

"Yesbut," protested the Cow, "What if Blake turns out to be that real hottie you scored back in the pub in second year when the noise was too loud to catch his name? What if Angel is the professional name of your best friend from high school who went into the pole-dancing industry?"

Gramsci rolled his eyes dramatically. "Chances are," he pointed out, "that even if Blake was a hottie back in second year, by now he's got a wife who doesn't understand him, a tribe of children he can't support, and a pickup truck that only runs when the weather's good. And that his sixpack long ago became a papsak. And as for Angel - do you really need the competition?"

The Cow sighed softly. Perhaps there was a reason one lost touch with people, after all, and technology that helped undermine the distance wasn't necessarily a good thing. Her hoof hovered over the "reject" button, ominously.

The Cow's eyes widened as she stared at her screen. "Look at this!" she called out to Gramsci. "Now research shows that the perception of being treated unfairly can increase one's risk of heart attack!"

"I suppose that's a bit obvious," shrugged Gramsci. "No one who feels they're treated unfairly is likely to be full of the joys of life - so they're likely to be feeling stressed, disempowered, depressed, anxioius - and all of those other labels which spell 'heart attack' or 'stroke' or 'suicide risk' in great huge neon letters!"

"Maybe so," conceded the Cow, "but this is providing evidence of a direct causal link - or at least, a correlation - between the perception of unfair treatment, and the health impact. Given the mood on Campus, this is something that someone down in HR should be taking seriously."

"Well, not just down in HR," suggested Gramsci. "Fairness should characterise all of our interactions, with colleagues, with students, with everyone. And if we're aware of how we treat others, and the impact that might have, we can perhaps also feel more empowered to challenge treatment we receive which we perceive as unfair, protecting our own health too!"

"Hmmm..." reflected the Cow. "More likely someone down at Bremner will get a fright reading this, and decide that information is hazardous to our health, and switch off the bandwidth!"

"Perhaps they already have," chucked Gramsci. "When last did you actually see anything you recognised as bandwidth, anyway?"

The Cow was seriously shocked to read that last year saw more than 31 million prescriptions issued for Prozac in the UK. Assuming no one got more than one, that implied that more than half of the population was on happy pills. At the same time, in our own back yard, research showed that "the average number of days per year an employee was ill for psychological reasons was 4.6 days, double the time the average employee takes off for other illnesses".

Gramsci shrugged his multiple shoulders. "That's the difference between Discovery and the NHS," he suggested. "Here, no one can afford Prozac, so they sit around glumly at home struggling with the Su Doku. There, give them a dose of chemicals and send them back to work."

The Cow sighed. She recalled vividly the former acting HR Director admitting that it had long been common cause that UCT was a disproportionate consumer of psychiatric services, and that was even before the era of Reviews.

"Perhaps the time really has come to put it in the water?" she suggested tentatively.

Gramsci snorted, "Have you forgotten about the water restrictions?" he asked. "Not to mention the vanishing practice of 'tea time'."

"So what do you suggest?" the Cow challenged.

"Well," he suggested, "the studies on eco-therapy seem promising?"

"Ha!" exploded the Cow. "90% reported increased self-esteem? Can't see anyone taking that chance! Next they'd be demanding a living wage, and human working conditions!"

Gramsci pondered long and hard. "Well, they do have nice views from their Mountain offices...." he ventured.

Gramsci looked puzzled. "How do they sort out the valid responses from the others?" he asked.

The Cow shrugged. Apologies notwithstanding, her level of alienation from the institution still precluded her participating in the climate survey, however well-intentioned its aspirations, and so her level of interest in, and engagement with, it had blocked such musings.

Gramsci persisted. "They say they're monitoring IP but are not linking it to response. So then... if they get 253 responses from the same IP, how do they know which are the 252 multiplicate responses to disregard?"

The Cow sighed. "Who says they warrant disregarding?" she asked. "There are many people in the University without a computer on their desks, or even a desk. If you're a shelver in the Library, say, you're likely to use a shared PC to access your mail, and so several responses from a single PC could be quite legitimate!"

"Perhaps," conceded Gramsci, "but how could they tell if those responses are from bona fide staff, and not arb others? Students, for example, or even - shock horror - contract workers belonging to the outsource companies?"

The Cow snorted. "I suppose if they get more than one response claiming to be from an African woman full professor, they'll realise something is amiss, but perhaps not otherwise," she guessed.

"And what about off-Campus IPs?" Gramsci demanded. "On the one hand, those could quite legitimately be from staff members trying to do the survey from home, where there's bandwidth, rather than from their offices, where there's none... but they could just as easily be from disgruntled former staff now working at Stellenbosch, or anyone else wanting to register an opinion!"

"Perhaps," shrugged the Cow, "but I'm really not sure what all the fuss is about. Those opinions are all out there, anyway - it hardly needs a survey to validate them. If people stopped to listen to what their colleagues said, once in a while, or read what was freely posted on discussion lists or blogs, or even raised in meetings, they'd get a sense of the issues."

"But not a sense of how many people felt like that!" insisted Gramsci.

"Oh?" the Cow raised an eyebrow. "And a survey with contestable means of ensuring representativity and validity will do that how?"

Gramsci rolled all eight of his eyes dramatically. Circular arguments were very bad for his blood pressure.

"Still," he added, "We do have the first recorded admission of strategic error, and written apology from a member of the SLG. That in itself constitutes an historic event."

The Cow chuckled. "Perhaps they've just never made mistakes before?"

The Cow was interested to see students in Paris behind the barricades once more - this time in protest against Sarkozy's planned reforms of the Higher Education system. Thirty-nine years after the student-led protests of May '68, students were again objecting to Right-wing intervention in their lives: in this case, greater privatisation of the universities, and greater vocationalisation.

"Funny that," muttered Gramsci. "Students here didn't protest when local universities surged to the Right with the neo-liberal realignment of the late '90s. They just stayed away and didn't enrol."

"But," the Cow reminded him, "Neo-liberalism and its attendant manifestations were co-opted by the ghost of the Left, locally. Much of the change was presented as Transformation, as progressive, as liberating. And for some sectors, excluded from the 'collegiality' of the Golden Years, it genuinely has been - if somewhat of a double-edged sword."

Gramsci was sceptical. He failed to understand how anyone could be dumb enough to believe that deification of The Market translated into a shift to the Left... but there was enough evidence to suggest that that had happened on a significant scale. Admitting that, and understanding how, were clearly two very different things.

"We could do with a bit of the Spirit of '68 here!" he sighed.

The Cow shuddered. She recalled an earlier tea-time conversation where the imminent retirement of the student activists of '66 was under discussion, together with reminiscences of those days. She wasn't entirely sure Campus was ready for that...

In addition to the Cosmic Twins the Cow had identified, she'd also found a pair of Comic Twins, and was amused to see Gramsci Skype chatting to his cousin Bronstein about them.

"So your Tony's actually done it, then?" Bronstein asked, incredulously. "Our Tony's been promising for ages, but has yet to take the plunge!"

"Well," Gramsci admitted, "our chihuahua's bark has always been worse than his bite, but I see your Bambi's come in for a bit of a bashing! Perhaps they've both reached their sell-by date?"

"Long past!" agreed Bronstein. "What's rather worrying though is where it's headed. I see your Tony's been replaced by a local mock-up of the Iron Lady!"

Gramsci paused. An iron lady could be useful, he mused. After all, the Cow had been looking a bit wrinkled....

The Cow was gobsmacked. Perhaps it ought to have occurred to her that Carel Boshoff must have a sense of humour, given his ideological beliefs, but she was nonetheless surprised to see it in action in his response to Beau Brummel's plans for a nudist colony in Orania.
Still, she wondered if it had any bearing on Rottweiler Rita's alleged plans to settle in Orania.

Gramsci chuckled. "Do you think after years on UCT campus. the sight of naked white flesh bouncing around in the cold would be an attraction?"

The Cow paused. It was true - some students persisted in their summer attire way beyond the change of seasons, taking on an increasingly cyanosed shade. But she wasn't sure if Rita noticed students much, anyway.

"It's a nice idea though," she ventured. "If all those hectic right-wingers got to see each other naked in daylight, instead of the duvet-clad night-time fumblings of respectable couples, they might be less inclined to breed, and their ideology might die out with them!"

Gramsci rolled all eight of his eyes. Sometimes, he wished life really was that simple.