Trying Not to Laugh

I speaks to cultural entrepreneur Justin Nurse, the engine behind the Laugh It Off anti-empire which took on the corporate might of South African Beverages in a landmark legal case that went all the way to the Constitutional Court.

I am a conspiracy theorist. I am walking along the sun-bleached sands that line the stretch of coast between Blue Lagoon and Battery Beach in Durban. It is a breathtaking November day, one of the few properly hot days that the weather has granted us this far into the year.

I remember November days in Durban in the late 1980s. The onset of summer both promised and threatened in the slowly building heat. The humidity had not yet arrived, spring breaking its smells and colours into the air, the odour of chlorine rising up from municipal swimming pools. The sweet stench of cut grass in the air. Urban reclamations of spring rites as ancient and predictable as people.

Now, a decade and a half later, the seasons pile into each other like a motor accident, a Rubik’s cube of weather patterns that make nonsense of the notion of discrete seasons. And the worst natural disasters on record have all happened since the caring ’90s opened its arms in hope and environmental awareness.

Lining the watermark on this crisp, beautiful day are scores of jelly fish. Lying flat on the sand, deprived of their fluidity, they are arranged along the high tide mark of the last waves that brought them to their end. They look like a flat, squelchy musical score.

They are also very effective at dissuading me from swimming in the viscous embrace of the Indian Ocean.

I am a conspiracy theorist. And I can’t help connecting these jelly fish, whose beached numbers I had never seen until a few years ago, with the environmental damage caused by the rampant onslaught of uncontained capitalism and globalisation.

Of course, if you say these things too loudly people think you’re nuts, or at least a bit odd. And while there’s probably no connection between the two, what interests me is the feasibility of the notion, the fact that it is possible and that all possibilities should be entertained.

I am walking along this coastline with Justin Nurse. Nurse is the progenitor of Laugh It Off Promotions – the company that produced the famous 'Black Labour White Guilt' T-shirts that instigated the ongoing SAB Miller legal fracas and which catapulted Laugh It Off into the headlines. As well as offending a whole catalogue of other brand names with his T-shirts, and incurring a small mountain of lawyers’ letters, Nurse has just released the Laugh It Off Annual, an attempt to inject some political energy into South African youth culture. It is, as Nurse suggests, a cultural snapshot of the country’s youth. A vibrant delight of a book, it is an explosive antidote to the hegemony of You magazine culture.

It is a place to think rather than to simply absorb. Featuring contributors as diverse as Tumi Molekane, Pieter Dirk Uys, Naomi Klein, Waddy Jones, Toast Coetzee and Zapiro it tells us more about our collective soul than possibly any other single publication.

I am not really a conspiracy theorist. And neither is Nurse.

He is a rational, passionate observer and commentator whose primary medium is bastardised logos on nicely cut T-shirts. He also has the unfortunate desire to want to change the world. But despite the fact that we are both actually quite rational beings, the things that we talk about, the things that are written about in his annual, are, for the most part, usually relegated to non-publication.

I am ostensibly taking this walk with Justin to talk about the annual. This should be something of a PR exercise for him, something to accelerate sales of the substantial volume. He has, after all, been trekking around the country, introducing himself to booksellers and ensuring that his product gets good positioning and support from the merchandisers. He should similarly be working on the hard sell with me.

But we end up talking about other things, or at least other aspects of things.

When I last saw him, Justin spoke enthusiastically about the annual, about how it was going to be something that was going to blow the world, or at least the little world of middle class South Africa, right open.

Now he has completed the book, he feels a little deflated. All the joy was in the doing, he says, not in the achievement. And now that it is done, he is experiencing a classic case of anticlimax. But more than that, he has realised that this latest little barb of humanity in the face of the whirring beast of globalisation, isn’t going to split the world wide open. Because nothing, it seems, can do so on that kind of scale, except capital itself. In the last decade we have seen the rise of political and economic consciousness across the globe, with protests from Seattle to Bombay. Access to information via by the Internet and the increasing popularity of politically expressive writers such as Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein all fuel this awakening. And the world’s mind has changed on some fundamental level. Increasing numbers of people are aware of these inequalities and try at various levels to express their discontent. And yet the beast moves on, constantly feeding the desires it has created, while failing to satisfy even the most basic needs of a large proportion of the planet’s people.

This imbalance is the crux of the matter, but reading through a century of writings about political economy, from Marx to Friedman, it is always impossible to remove the thinker’s own set of circumstances from the thoughts, and the world in which they were born. Justin and I are no different. The world seems even messier when you’re feeling a bit down, and it is a difficult process to separate the two.

We have both recently read French writer Michel Helouabach’s Atomised, a searing account of humanity that offers little hope for a species that cannot help but define itself by its mortality. It is one of those life-changing books, destined to become a classic. But the book’s power flattened Nurse. For someone who wants to change the world, or at least wants the world to change, Helouabach’s predictions for the possibilities of peace and fraternity are somewhat shattering.

And so, his work for the year done, his battle with corporate giants on hold, Nurse is planning to catch a bus to Malawi, hang onto the edges of the great lake and try to piece together those shattered pieces. Try to make some sense of this damaged world.

In the meantime, hopefully tens of thousands of consumers who are normally more circumspect will buy the Laugh It Off Annual. Not just because it might change their world a little, but also because it is a very fine product – a snapshot of our culture that reveals a dynamic, self-aware society that is infinitely more exciting than the visions broadcast by the bulk of the mainstream media. It’s a labour of love and the love shines through.

But to return to the coastline. ‘This old world won’t ever change the way its been’, sang ’60s singer Tim Buckley. But Nurse sees one thing that might change the way that the mechanisms of capital and government work, since the protests of millions haven’t managed to impact sufficiently to instigate far-reaching change. That factor is environmental damage and all the repercussions that accompany it.

So when it is too late for even the middle class to have a healthy meal on their table or to breathe cleanish air, then, to borrow from a wise old Native American, and only then, will those who run the world, realise that we can’t eat money.

But, who knows, maybe we’ll be eating jellyfish sushi instead. And maybe someone, somewhere will still be making a profit.