Record player

Ugh. Mess at work for me at the mo in terms of one of last week's stories, so at least one hour today will be devoted to unpleasantness. And the rumour mill says, for a shockingly confidential and sensitive reason, that this is the year we must turn a profit, which may mean some people being sacked. I'm pretty sure it won't be me, despite being the newest full time person in our office, due to other shockingly confidential info the rumour mill has loudly spat at me. But whenever a little flap over a story rears its head, which happens often enough and isn't really much of a problem, I get to thinking about what liiiiiiife would be liiiiiiike if they sacked me. The standard payout here is three months. Not riches, certainly, but enough that I could take my sacking as a sign from God that this little flower was not meant to bloom from nine to five in an office block, or for that matter in such a cold damp climate.

Anyways, it won't be much of a flap over last week's story because I kept good records of my sources, and in this case the man flapping at me was my source, so it should settle down today. Playing with my imagination a bit because of a little comparison in Evolution for Everyone about thinking and self-perception in literate and non-literate social groups (I've finished the book now and it's interesting but annoying. I hate that).

Also playing with my imagination because I seem to keep stumbling onto the importance of sources and records on our perception in our literate society. It sounds like a no-brainer when you put it like that, of course; how can we perceive anything that we didn't experience ourselves unless there's a record of it, literate or not? But let's think of two colonial tragedies from about a hundred years back: the Congo Free State and the German genocide in Namibia.

When the Congo Free State was turned from the Belgian king's great big fief into the property of the Belgian state - a result of its flagging profitability as much as of international disgust over the mass slaughter of the Congolese - he ordered all the administrative records of his rule destroyed. The Germans, those organizational maniacs, didn't destroy the record of what they did in Namibia. Now the German state admits that what happened in Namibia was genocide, and the debate has moved to the idea of reparations. Whereas when it comes to the Congo Free State - well. Numbers aren't everything, but the more modest estimates still see millions killed. A shocking, disgusting tragedy, and the 50 odd years of 'paternalistic' Belgian rule that followed on it could only count as any sort of compensation to the most hardened racist - or the most insane, if we look at what's happening in the Congo now. But from the Congo Free State, there's no record, or at least no record from the right people - the perpetrators - the only ones we can believe. I tell you it sends shivers up and down my spine.

Speaking of crazy record-keeping German perpetrators: wow.