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Speaking as a Boomtown Rat A comic look
at gated communities in As published
in the internationally award-winning Mail & Guardian.
Lev David is
a writer and media consultant with a startlingly fresh approach to
communicating your message. The words and ideas are lean, precise &
simply unstoppable. Smacking the
mainstream media’s arse since he was 15, good enough is never good enough for
Lev. Screw ordinary. The world is
a mess of messages. Cut through. |
So, President Thabo Mbeki, exquisitely dressed as always, had a little
huffy the other day about gated communities, accusing them of perpetuating
apartheid-style separation. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of them either. As much as I love
those grandiose fountains and dinky conifers, all in a row, I worry that one
day I’ll visit That aside, it’s
absurd to suggest, as some naughty liberal leftists have, that race plays any
role in deciding who gets past the boom gate. I’m delightfully dusky toned
myself, and only last Tuesday I visited a friend for a DVD night in a gated community,
and I was flagged past the boom without any question. I happened to have a
pile of pizza boxes piled on the passenger seat beside me, though, so there’s
every possibility that I was mistaken for a delivery guy. Regardless, I
find the greatest obstacle to my getting into Poshville
is not the colour of my skin, but the condition of my car, an ‘84 Volksie, rust-coloured, except where there’s a bit of
paint left. The way I see it,
however, the best bit of being rich has to be pointing and laughing at the
less-thans. I’d do it. And until I’m the pointer,
I’m happy to be the pointee. If you don’t want
to live in Tuscan bliss, playing out scenes from The Taming of the Shrew on
your lawn with the neighbours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you can always
consider illegally booming off your public road. The beautiful
dream, of course, is that the little kiddies will be able to play gaily in
the street. Hopscotch. In slow motion. Dodging fast-moving German automobiles, and sparing the perfectly manicured kikui lawn daddy paid so much for. We must do
whatever we can to protect what is ours. Electric fences
are another option. I know this guy who put up one such fence two months ago
and he hasn’t had a break-in since. Of course, it helped that his house burnt
down the day they installed the thing. Damn dodgy wiring. Perhaps it’s best
to stick to the sign-in-sign-out system. A security guard with a clipboard is
a powerful deterrent, as anybody who’s had a finger trapped under one of those horrible metal clips will know. The clipboard
system is second in infallibility only to the supermarkets’
anti-shoplifting-system that employs a little bit of neon tape to stick your
shopping bag shut. Which dastardly criminal mastermind could navigate its way
past that impenetrable band of gumminess? And who could
doubt the keen observational powers of the average security guard? Then
again, I’ve been sneaking into the staff parking of a major shopping mall for
over a year now by flashing the guard everything from my movie club card to a
tin of sardines. (I was on my way
to return said sardines, along with 19 more tins I’d bought while caught up
in the intense euphoria brought on by a No Name Brand Sale. So great was my
excitement that I’d temporarily forgotten that I’m a vegetarian.) And yes, I’ll
admit that I’m that nasty bastard who signs in as I.R. Baboon, but I’m sure
you can rely on criminal-types to be less silly and write down their real
names. “Oh, no!” thinks
the would-be baddie, burgle bag slung over his shoulder. “It was all going
so well! I remembered to wear the ski-mask and everything! And now I have to
sign in?!” The jig, as they
say on the streets, is up. * * * [The print rights
for this article are available for all markets outside © 2005 Lev
David |
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