Is David Bullard arrogant?

“Oh wow,” said the Canadian classical guitarist, Norbert Kraft, to me, ” … you mean to say you watched me play through your binoculars for most of the show … must have been boring,” he chuckled self-deprecatingly while he signed my copy of his album after a live show in Montreal, Canada. I winced. What he said jarred. Lovely music, though, nails bright and true on those nylon strings.

“Oh can you help me with my English, it is so poor … ” I often hear from competent Chinese students and teachers here in China. I swallow in mild distaste, scowling wryly, shaking my head.

Regularly, when I buy fruit and vegetables from the street-side stores in Puxi, Shanghai, I use my basic Mandarin to negotiate prices. Simple stuff, really: “twenty bucks for a dozen of … those fruit” I airily point at the nectarines, and then wail, “discount, discount, eighteen kwai, not twenty … ” and the young vendor might grin and accept: “Your spoken Chinese is very good … ” and I grimace smilingly at the colossal untruth. He cannot tell from a one-minute negotiation on the price of fruit I want to buy how good my command is and I regularly get these cutesie, complimentary arse-lickers. Such cast-iron bullshit.

Or the introductory bios on Thought Leadership: “Sentletse Diakanyo has a keen interest in everything else that is beyond the realm of his expertise; from world politics, history, economics, philosophy, to motor-racing. He is inquisitive about everything and a master of none … ” (aarrggh, cringe, pull hat over head). “Khaya Dlanga knows nothing and shouldn’t be here … ” (cower, groan, make lip-farts while thinking, well then, why are you here??) But then, refreshingly, “The Sumo is a strapping young man in his late 20s who considers himself the ultimate transitional South African”. Hell yeah! Now that’s what I’m talking about … say it like it is!

“Now over to my better half, my wife … ” the speaker might say with an ingratiating smile as he sweats through the finale of his speech. Why should she be the better half?

I am sure my drift is well grasped by now.

Let’s take David Bullard’s comments in “The new media ‘racists’ ” on Zapiro and Max du Preez approving of his dismissal from the Sunday Times, (even though the newspaper approved that infamous article in the first place, a dead horse of a point I wish to flog myself):

“Firstly, I have a rather posh English accent which may suggest that I had a privileged upbringing. Zapiro likes to think of himself as a struggle hero and that would put him at the opposite end of the social spectrum from me. Max is an Afrikaaner and that’s probably reason enough. Secondly I wrote a spectacularly successful column for the Sunday Times which was reputed to attract 1.7 mln readers. That would have been enough to engender the most awful envy in anyone less successful. Thirdly, I drove fast cars, travelled down the sharp end of aircraft, went to great parties, hung out with good looking women, was paid a fortune to MC events and generally seemed to be enjoying life. When you’re a professional miserable sod there’s nothing worse than having to endure someone who is fabulously successful and who eclipses your own meager efforts every week. So it was with good grace that I acknowledged the obvious schadenfreude of my inferiors.”

That snippet was a burst of fresh mountain air after thrusting wide open the bay windows of the latrine of false modesty and excruciating PC where most of the mildewed, sagging piping has noisome blockages in dire need of clearing.

In that David Bullard extract I count about ten instances of wonderfully honest, deliberately overstated superciliousness, ranging from “spectacularly successful newspaper column” (This sure as hell beats the candied, simpering: “I shouldn’t be here” and then going on to write the bloody column anyway) to the superbly condescending “with good grace that I acknowledged … ” Well, yeah, sure, David Bullard is not just arrogant, he makes an art of it — refreshingly so I might add. It beats false modesty and other polite fabrications, to arrive at the shatteringly obvious.

David Bullard’s “The new media ‘racists’ ” is a study in counterpoints, ranging from the cutting remark on Xolela Mangcu’s column title as, “the modest title of ‘Urban Legend’ ” to being open enough to acknowledge the acumen of others, “someone much wiser than I” to the in-your-face mimicry of colonial racism, which is surely going to offend the semi-literate: “[Max du Preez] just has that unfortunate colonial habit of patronizing the darkies and talking down to them as though they were children. You can understand where the confusion lies can’t you?” Oof! Yep, the semi-literates are not going to like that. Semi-literates? In other words, those who, for example, read into Bullard’s texts their unreconciled infancy distress (racist! arrogant cnut!) such as wishing to retain their pooh much longer than Mommy wants and being ashamed and traumatised by the burgeoning contents and waft of their nappies.

Pierre de Vos then (“David Bullard’s weird view of press freedom”) inveighs against the Bullard piece with a verbal stodginess that comes across as someone who has overdosed on Imodium (“stops your bottom in its tracks!”) when diarrhoea was never the initial problem:

“No one has a right to have a column in a newspaper — not even someone with the high selfesteem of Mr Bullard.” (sic) “Similarly, if I organise a seminar and I decide not to invite Thabo Mbeki, John Hlophe, or Dan Roodt, I have every right to do so.” I can just hear all the anal-retentive r’s rolling on has a rrright and everry rrright.

David B is obviously rattling people’s limiting paradigms, stepping back and looking at how bloody silly people can be. Well, to me and the other literates that is obvious and hilarious, we being those fortunates who can see the sub-texts in his prose and not just project unresolved drivel into his writing. The semi-literates’ right hands are stiff with Wankers’ Cramp from perpetually playing the Race Card and human rrrights. Semis take themselves too seriously.

To paraphrase David Bullard’s quote from Albie Sachs (a man who lost his arm in the Struggle and spent a fair share of jail time) we need to stop seeing every criticism and joke as a menace to our identities, collective or otherwise. Humour opens us to more possibilities, both the public, cooperative life and our interior lives. It’s what sneezing is to Buddhist non-attachment: in mid-sneeze, which sometimes, alas, also causes a sphincter-betraying, popping fart, you are neither here or there, with a daffy, startled look on your face … which unfortunately then … ahems, pardon-me’s and congeals back into the rigours and limited, limiting composure of the daily, mundane grind.

But only the literates will get that last bit.