Have yourself a merry little Xmas!

Man, oh man, is it ever Xmas time again!

Not Christ-mas. Crass, crumby, commercial, crappy credit-crunching Xmas.

Today’s Sunday Times is the most eloquent reflection of the sordid, sleazy, gimme-gimme world we have become. And I, for one, am deeply ashamed to confess that my ears and eyes and taste-buds and olfactory sensors are electric with the overload.

Aside from the glitzy high-cost glossy supplements from Clicks, Stuttafords, Woolworths, Makro, Truworths (that oxymoron always makes me cringe), Pick ‘n Pay, Look & Listen, Musica, Incredible Connection, Builders’ Warehouse, CNA, Hi-Fi Corporation and the obscenely ostentatious Pam Golding pornography that feed the hurricane of marketing bringing the annual floods of guilt, and greed, and lust that kill thousands in landslides of overspending every year, the ST today goes one step further — it publishes a 10-page “Rich List”.

While you and I will be mucho luckios to afford a gift that doesn’t come with an apology this year, these paper prostitutes would lure us into deeper penury. Hey, I’m only as human, but every time I open another seductive spend-fest of specials I seem to hear voices in the background noise whispering, “Hey, buddy, My seester ees nice clean one. No cooties. Fucky-fucky all night. Cheap-cheap special for you, buddy!”

In times such as these when we’re being bludgeoned with belt-tightening blah-blah, this kind of marketing smacks strongly of setting up a bootleg bottle store outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting offering discount doubles to every alky who comes out. “One for the road, buddy. After all, it’s a long, lonely road home. Go on, you owe it to yourself!”

And that’s just a block away from dope dealers outside the school hall where NA meets at night and your kids go to school each day.

If ever there was a gallery of conspicuous success. the Business Times’ special edition “Rich List” is it. And some of the people listed are even personal friends of mine. I’ve worked for some, helping to enrich them no doubt. I’ve consulted to many, counselled a couple and even taught others.

As with any list of more than 10 people, there are flat-out rogues, scoundrels, scumbags and crooks among them. It would be defamation to tell you who they are, but you don’t have to be a CSI to recognise them.

There are also caring, visionary, altruistic, kind, good people in the supplement. You might have to look a little harder to identify them. Sorry about that.

Some of the headlines say it all: “So much money that it boggles the mind”, “The angst of being wealthy is a bit rich”, “Who says you can’t make money in the public sector?”, “Crisis? What crisis?” and so on. I never knew how hard-up the rich are.

Shame; do you realise, sitting there in your ergonomically designed comfy office chair reading this blog on your personal computer or (wow!) your very own laptop, that 10 of these people lost R61-billion in just eight months? Poor old Patrice Motsepe lost R12-billion and you probably didn’t even give his troubles a second thought. How callous can you be?

The list has a great spread this year. There’s the usual preponderant welter of wealthy whites from my former boss, Bobby Godsell (who scraped by this year on only R54,2-million) to both current supreme beings who hold my future in their hands.

Which proves just how well trade unionism pays, because they’re up there with comrades Cyril “Who Needs A Day Job” Ramaphosa and Tokyo “My pal, Zuma” Sexwale and a credit-crunching crash of commies who find Das Kapital quite comfy. Even our prez, former unionist Kgalema Motlanthe doesn’t do too badly on R2-million a year (though one wonders with everything including KFC for free, what does he spend it all on). His unterführer Baleka makes ends meet with only R100 000 less.

It’s a thing of Zen beauty to see how the money rolls around among the purses of the powerful. While Eskom’s “Don” Jacob Maroga graciously declined his battery of bonuses after plunging the country into impotent darkness earlier this year, his counterpart at the equally disastrous loss-leading SA Airways (supposedly our flagship for bringing the world here in 2010) Khaya Ngqula gets R688 000 just to keep him interested in his job. He then also gets R3,7-million if he actually does anything. Which of late seems to have been to lose money so that our tax-rands can be used to bail SAA out of the dwang. Again!

The demograpohomaniacs will be happy to see Patrice has overtaken Nicky Oppenheimer for second place while Lazarus Zim didn’t just rise from the dead, he catapulted into spot number 21!

Of the top 100 on the list, 29 are black and two are women. We’re making headway, people! This is transformation!

There are some gorgeous ironies to boot. Amid the roller-coaster win-a-billion-lose-a-billion annual game of musical chairs, there aren’t many who manage to cling to the same seats. Chief among these are

gamblers

— casino bosses (Abe and Maxim Krok) and serial black empowerment brokers (Cyril and Tokyo, who dug into his R714-million back-sky to buy a group of coral islands off Mozambique the other day — so we didn’t even get some kick-back in the form of taxes) are in there. Everyone knows the house never loses.

Am I bitter? Am I turning all communist, all red? Aw, c’mon guys … I’m still the filthy imperialist greedy capitalist pig-dog I always have been.

Okay. Well, maybe I am a little miffed that while our bosses get multimillion-rand bonuses so they don’t have such a tough time eking out on a meagre million-a-month salary, most of us will get a couple of hundred bucks or maybe a grand or so, so we can fly economy class on Kulula.com to see the old folks one last time.

Most companies have done away with perks nowadays ’cause Pravin Gordhan and his merry men got into “redistribution” — our salaries for MPs’ joy rides and a couple of corvettes. And many Mercs and shares and jobs for pals and wine farms and game lodges and extra houses for the shoe collections.

If the unwashed rabble that we are leave our jobs, our employers fight tooth and nail to make sure we get the barest minimum the law allows. They have entire divisions called “Human Resources” (what a viciously offensive thing to call “people”) to make sure we give back even that tatty access card. Meanwhile, Andre de Nysschen got an extra R43,6-million from Highveld Steel when he left, and the ferrous company also paid more than R10-million each to Luigi Matteucci and Eben Bernardo to piss off.

And despite the droppings we in the media get paid, with not a perk in sight and threatening letters if we spend too much time on the internet or exceed our R250-a-month phone allocation or park our antique Prestik-and-paperclip jalopy where some mogul’s Merc should go, it seems a very lucrative business. Aside from Johnny Copelyn becoming a billionnaire, Koos Bekker, Jannie Mouton and Terry Moolman don’t seem to struggle too much with their bond repayments.

Having been dry for eight years now, I confess I don’t know what a case of Amstel costs these days, but SABMiller’s ûberbrewmeister Graham Mackay earns in one hour what I get in a month. In fact, if you really want to be made to feel small and insignificant, don’t stare at the vast expanse of heaven. Just compare your pay slip to his … it would take me 13 years to earn what he does in a month!

But, don’t misunderstand me. I hail their expertise. I applaud their diligence, their dedication their vision and their undoubted skills. Many of the top people are the paragons of leadership — Bobby Godsell, Ian Cockerill, Keith Rumble, Cynthia Carroll, Meyer Kahn, Maria Ramos, Santie Botha, Cyril Ramaphosa are but a few that leap off the pages at me.

Others are more astute that I could ever dream to be — Investec’s Stephen Koseff, for example. Lakshmi Mittal did not get to the top of the heap by luck or dint of marriage. Craig Duff of AdVTech is as sharp as a laser beam, and equally injurious if you get in his way.

In fact, personality flaws are as multitudinous as their money. Egos the size of our solar system abound and there behind the mahogany doors of their offices Jekyll-and-Hyde transmogrifications take place to rival the tyrannical tantrums of Sol Kerzner in his heyday.

Of course, Lady Luck’s fulsome curves rest cosily with many of them. Keith Rumble narrowly survived a ruthless attack that claimed the life of of Ally Weakley, with whom I shared digs back at Rhodes University. Handsome and rakish, he was also as naughty as an ADD poltergeist. But weren’t we all?

One of the few university friends to have taken the trouble to keep in touch, he left Impala Plats with a R7,3-million golden handshake. He was worth about R40-million last year.

But then there are the others I have met. I see their names and images of Dickensian nasties spring to mind. Not even a R3,5-million salary and R8-million bonus buy Tom Boardman the right to rudeness. You couldn’t get me to work for Steve Booysen if you matched his R13-million bonus. His successor I’d work for at the drop of a hat, but Booysen is of the same cloth as Whitey Basson, Patrice Motsepe, Ruben September, Prakesh Desai and Adrian Gore (in the latter’s case, the sole reason I am no longer with Discovery).

Of course, everything I say here is subjective, based solely on my interactions. If you met them on a Jekyll Day, that’s nice. My experiences (and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone) suggest that they and scores of others in the “Rich List” epitomise the most common flaw among the bulk of the over-opulent — the malevolent, brutish arrogance of office.

They talk the Talkshow Talk, but walk not with the common man. MOMS, the Mind Over Matter Syndrome (“I don’t mind and they don’t matter”) is all too ingrained. There is a martial mentality in Mahogany Row where, (with apologies to the Bard) the instant criticism of any kind is heard, they “cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of law”.

Between Them and Us, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, yawns a gaping chasm as real and bridgeless and tangible and self-perpetuating as the immoral gaps between our relative earnings.

On paper and in the eyes of the mindless millions, these people are better than you and me. Their lives are worth more. The lives of their families are worth more than those of our loved ones. They have more freedoms than we do because freedom has a price, and they can pay. They enjoy more access than we do. They hold the power of life and death in their back pockets.

And schadenfreude, oh schadenfreude, I delight in hearing of the hammerings they have taken. Even if that R61-billion was just Monopoly money, mostly ethereal, mist before the wind, I get a kick out of seeing the Haves have a little less. Just as orgasmically satisfying as seeing the head honchos of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors squirm on global TV recently. No matter what else comes of that public humiliation — is there such a thing as “self-defamation? — those ultra-arrogant toss-pots squirming will remain as iconic as Ford’s first Model-T.

When the bell has rung the close of day at the JSE, the Haves still have their uncrunched credit cards, their unearned bonuses, their brokered power, their sycophantic stature and the adulation of the addle-brained who judge a book by its cover and not the content of its pages.

So you better watch out, you better be nice, they’re making a list and they’re checking it twice — yeah, Santa’s Claws are on the take so be good for goodness sake!