Monday Monologue

The kind of famous people who we look up to and respect. The ones we try to emulate, imitate and who take up the majority of our conversations at the water cooler, in passing at work, whilst watching TV, over meals at home or cocktails after work or on social media and in every-possible-gap-in-between.

 

They permeate our brains and completely lower our expectations, and standards...of what it actually means to be educated and erudite.

 

It used to be that to present at an awards ceremony all you had to do was clean up, dress up and read off the TelePrompTer.

 

Now -  thanks to John Travolta and Kendall Jenner - you don't even have to be able to read!!

 

Reading is sooo 9/11

 

More and more apps are making it possible to convert the spoken word into text and then even into other languages!  

 

With the correct  app a Swahili goat header can have a pen pal in Cannes in the south of France.

 

And closer to home - not only are you not praised for celebrating your prodigy, you are judged and belittled for it. SA's No1 has now coined a derogatory and even victimizing term to the young future intellectuals as those 'clever blacks'.

 

It would seem that world leaders and celebrities are cut from the same cloth and they don't want you to be a clever either.

 

And woe betide if, as a critical discerning mind, you realize that your world will NOT end if you don't have Britney's or Kim's new perfume.

 

Or Kanye or Ronaldo's T-shirt.  

 

It is not only okay - but integral - that you question our leaders and institutions on how they are leading or more correctly, institutionalizing us.

 

Now, as ever, money does not buy class. And your social status is certainly not an indication of intellect. 

 

More people know more about 1 Direction, the boy band, than the 1 Direction climate change is taking us in.