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Peter Wilhelm: Expanding Malema to JM Masutha “You know what I’ll do”. He does?

Getting the best out of Peter Wilhelm requires concentration. And at least a smattering of knowing what’s going on in the news. But it’s well worth the effort. This time around he has Julius Malema and lawyers in his unerring sights. – Alec Hogg

By Peter Wilhelm

As we shuffle past bleak alleys in which the pigeons are eating the rats (the Mummy City’s equivalent of Bunny Chow), we are often semi-conscious that we are being followed. There are the usual trolls and stalkers, not excluding displaced Russian brides who want a traditional wedding with a septuagenarian at the Mount Nelson. But I mean a supernatural gloaming.

To explain. In a recent meeting of the Judicial Service Commission a bitter exchange took place between the EFFpoo leader Julius Malema and the Justice Minister Michael Masutha. Julius was there for some reason probably related to his brave attempts to turn the giant Green Point dogbowl into a galaxy-sized jacuzzi for his expanding physique and slavering groupies; but also never to pay any taxes – a popular theme.

Anyway, Masutha kept raising “a point of order” – and his opponent got nasty: down that road, he frothed, “you know what I will do”.

Do we? Will he take a chainsaw to Masutha and sever his head to be frozen and kept as a model for the bloated bust necessary to decorate a portaloo with an icon? Will he cull his generator gerbils when the supply is restored by power infusions from the stench of sludge and the deceased from Bruma Lake? Will he post photo-shopped sex tapes of Masutha to evict him from the US Presidency?

There is a vibration of eeriness from the mere presence of Malema – let alone his “you know what I will do” snark implying either that Masutha does know, and we don’t, but does explain the spectre behind us.

Yet Julius is not that precursor of the Zombie Apocalypse – or not directly. What strikes one is just how much his various lawyers’ bills must be costing.

I recall a consultation with a lawyer (to check for slander in my Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of tik addicts at Bishops) when he leaned forward and set a cabbie-style time-clock ticking as loudly as my grandpa’s timepiece thudding penetratingly enough to keep us all awake. The rands spun by swiftly as LHC protons.

You can no more shed lawyers than you can your shadow. By temperament gentle and courteous, they can abruptly transmute into demons.

The detestation of lawyers is ancient – in Henry V1 – Part Two a revolutionary bystander looks ahead to the glorious utopia to come, but urges “first let’s kill all the lawyers”. I knew of Dickens’s loathing for the tribe: “Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans.” Uriah Heep is a red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger” makes “clammy tracks along the page … like a snail. Mr. Vholes , “eager, bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.” (© NY Times op-ed.)

Always looking!

Court-appointed lawyers for the prosecution – like the one who turned the assignment down after seeing his suspect shoot a fleeing black man in the back – know the true glory of the trade: Scrooge McDuck-style money bins.

Take this fictitious tale of a perfectly-normal, suburban mom with a Humvee for the maid to drop the kids at school (you). Suddenly you decide to divorce your husband. This is not because of his infidelity, porn-site addiction, alcoholism, theft and fraud, or because what he wants you to do in bed is catch his toenails like boomerangs as he clips them.

No, it’s because you have come to hate his face and his brainless chatter.

Foolishly you don’t murder him by spiking his mid-morning Scotch with drain-cleaner. You see a lawyer! He sizes you up in a nanosecond — a client!

So he deploys his rapid-response fangs and reels you in like a gnat in a spider’s golden web. He becomes your therapist, as the money clock tocks.

You are weeping. He asks sympathetic questions about your bastard’s dirty little secrets – even hiring a private dick to catch him. Then he phones your soon-to-be ex’s counterpart to swap notes. In time more money flows in to pay for endless meals at the Aubergine in Gardens. Ah! Those genetically-modified pawpaws flavoured with dried civet coffee bean droppings!

Then follows the dismal route to the Constitutional Court to determine whether the 798-page pre-nup that decreed your hubbie would pay you zilch to cage the children (who have taken to collecting Nazi memorabilia). And lose all the properties he placed in a mistress’s name; pay his bail; and he replaces the Humvee with a cardboard Trabant smuggled from East Germany as the Soviet Empire fell.

Now you have no money (guess who has it) and have to live with a drooling bulldog in an animal shelter in Delft. You sometimes wish your lawyer – or Julius — will move in when it gets bitterly cold.

You need more therapy.

As we shuffle past bleak alleys in which the pigeons are eating the rats (the Mummy City’s equivalent of Bunny Chow), we are often semi-conscious that we are being followed. There are the usual trolls and stalkers, not excluding displaced Russian brides who want a traditional wedding with a septuagenarian at the Mount Nelson. But I mean a supernatural gloaming.

To explain. In a recent meeting of the Judicial Service Commission a bitter exchange took place between the EFFpoo leader Julius Malema and the Justice Minister Michael Masutha. Julius was there for some reason probably related to his brave attempts to turn the giant Green Point dogbowl into a galaxy-sized jacuzzi for his expanding physique and slavering groupies; but also never to pay any taxes – a popular theme.

Anyway, Masutha kept raising “a point of order” – and his opponent got nasty: down that road, he frothed, “you know what I will do”.

Do we? Will he take a chainsaw to Masutha and sever his head to be frozen and kept as a model for the bloated bust necessary to decorate a portaloo with an icon? Will he cull his generator gerbils when the supply is restored by power infusions from the stench of sludge and the deceased from Bruma Lake? Will he post photo-shopped sex tapes of Masutha to evict him from the US Presidency?

There is a vibration of eeriness from the mere presence of Malema – let alone his “you know what I will do” snark implying either that Masutha does know, and we don’t, but does explain the spectre behind us.

Yet Julius is not that precursor of the Zombie Apocalypse – or not directly. What strikes one is just how much his various lawyers’ bills must be costing.

I recall a consultation with a lawyer (to check for slander in my Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of tik addicts at Bishops) when he leaned forward and set a cabbie-style time-clock ticking as loudly as my grandpa’s timepiece thudding penetratingly enough to keep us all awake. The rands spun by swiftly as LHC protons.

You can no more shed lawyers than you can your shadow. By temperament gentle and courteous, they can abruptly transmute into demons.

The detestation of lawyers is ancient – in Henry V1 – Part Two a revolutionary bystander looks ahead to the glorious utopia to come, but urges “first let’s kill all the lawyers”. I knew of Dickens’s loathing for the tribe: “Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans.” Uriah Heep is a red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger” makes “clammy tracks along the page … like a snail. Mr. Vholes , “eager, bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.” (© NY Times op-ed.)

Always looking!

Court-appointed lawyers for the prosecution – like the one who turned the assignment down after seeing his suspect shoot a fleeing black man in the back – know the true glory of the trade: Scrooge McDuck-style money bins.

Take this fictitious tale of a perfectly-normal, suburban mom with a Humvee for the maid to drop the kids at school (you). Suddenly you decide to divorce your husband. This is not because of his infidelity, porn-site addiction, alcoholism, theft and fraud, or because what he wants you to do in bed is catch his toenails like boomerangs as he clips them.

No, it’s because you have come to hate his face and his brainless chatter.

Foolishly you don’t murder him by spiking his mid-morning Scotch with drain-cleaner. You see a lawyer! He sizes you up in a nanosecond — a client!

So he deploys his rapid-response fangs and reels you in like a gnat in a spider’s golden web. He becomes your therapist, as the money clock tocks.

You are weeping. He asks sympathetic questions about your bastard’s dirty little secrets – even hiring a private dick to catch him. Then he phones your soon-to-be ex’s counterpart to swap notes. In time more money flows in to pay for endless meals at the Aubergine in Gardens. Ah! Those genetically-modified pawpaws flavoured with dried civet coffee bean droppings!

Then follows the dismal route to the Constitutional Court to determine whether the 798-page pre-nup that decreed your hubbie would pay you zilch to cage the children (who have taken to collecting Nazi memorabilia). And lose all the properties he placed in a mistress’s name; pay his bail; and he replaces the Humvee with a cardboard Trabant smuggled from East Germany as the Soviet Empire fell.

Now you have no money (guess who has it) and have to live with a drooling bulldog in an animal shelter in Delft. You sometimes wish your lawyer – or Julius — will move in when it gets bitterly cold.

You need more therapy.

* For more in-depth business news, visit biznews.com or simply sign up for the daily newsletter.

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