Colorado horror show
A GUNMAN mows down scores of people in a cinema in, Denver, Colorado after lobbing a couple of teargas grenades to get them running in a panic. They had been at the premiere of a movie about Batman.
America has an extraordinary capacity to combine the horrific with the banal.
The gunman had military-type automatic weapons, of a sort that could have no lawful application in a civilian setting. Yet he was able to buy them over the counter in a store, no questions asked.
It's as astonishing as it is appalling. The lobby against America's bizarre gun laws – which amount to non-laws saying: "Mind your own business, it's the citizen's right to bear arms" – has been activated yet again.
Yet nobody seems to look at the other side of the equation. What role does the digitalised mayhem of the playstation have? Where, from the earliest age, children are exposed not just to Batman, Superman and Spiderman but to conflict with a range of monsters and hobgoblins. Where the objective is to destroy – Zap! Zap! Zap!
What kind of reality do such people grow up in? It's surely just a shortish step to oneself becoming the Joker with an automatic weapon in a crowded cinema.
Who ever heard of anyone running amok after reading Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island or Ivanhoe?
Election non-issue
ALMOST inevitably, the Denver atrocity is being talked up into an election issue. But it's really a non-issue.
Even if Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney were to publicly agree that America's gun laws need radical overhaul and that they would each work for it, whatever the election outcome, not much would happen.
America doesn't have a House of Commons that can simply enact a law controlling gun ownership. The citizen's right to bear arms is written into the constitution. And it's the constituent states of the USA that actually decide what their gun laws should be. To override them is near-impossible. Let's not even talk about the powerful Gun Lobby.
So stand by for more horror, more banality.
Oval drama
IT'S A THREE-WAY match at the Oval between England, South Africa and the Clerk of the Weather. The smart money is on the Clerk.
It's also the start of a series to decide which is the world's top test cricket side. Some would say it's between South Africa A and South Africa B.
Some would also say it's to decide who is South Africa A and who is South Africa B.
Air miles
INVESTMENT analyst Dr James Greener is not exactly bowled over by the growing accord with China. Nor, in his latest grumpy newsletter, is he impressed by the constant jetting about.
"It's a pity that the air force VIP transportation unit don't award air miles to loyal and frequent fliers. Our Pres JZ would have bucket loads of them by now and might be able to take all the wives along on his jaunts instead of having to choose just one each time.
"This week he went off to China to bow very low to their President Hu Jintao before renewing the invitation for them to attend our forthcoming R3.2 trillion infrastructure programme. BYOC (bring your own cash).
"Apparently the official view is that the presence of a Chinese supermarket in every country village, selling plastic bowls and T-shirts, is a 'good sort' of foreign presence, compared to the previous invaders during the past 400 years who merely brought development."
Tailpiece
| A golfer accidentally overturns his cart. |
Last word
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
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