Of Mammon and the Masaku Sevens.

It is reported by the more salaciously inclined and unrestrained members of the Fourth Estate that pre-teenage, teenage and most-definitely-adult tumescent phalluses had multiple coital contacts that transformed Masaku, that run-of-the-mill town-on-the-make into Pompeii of old. These execrable specimens of journalistic irresponsibility gleefully informed their equally mentally execrable readers that children of varying mental and physical development indulged in carnal adventures as to make the orgiastic pleasures of the Roman Empire seem like armatuerism in erotic experimentation.

At this our hour of moral despair, our desperation compelling us hither and thither to seek Divine Intervention, it is the essence of wisdom discern the true state of the decline in the standards that our forebears would have considered the banners to march behind in the long road of life. It is not just that parental and filial responsibilities have been eroded in the cauldron of high living costs for which various political and economic drivers are most certainly to blame, but that certain disintegrating social institutions are no longer blessed with widespread legitimacy, having been chipped away at by the unrelenting and pervasive cultural advancements that have the words "modern" and "western" stamped boldly across their visages.

Whippersnappers, it seems, are now to be found on each side of the gender line and all points between and they, sorrowful as it might sound, have as much consanguinitous attachment to their nearest and dearest as a mafiosi has with his victim. They have been socialised from the moment they could Oedipally suck at their maternal parent's teat that the universe owes them a debt of gratitude for granting it the chance to bring the whippersnappers all that their stone-cold cardiac vessels could ever desire. This the-world-owes-me attitude was displayed unabashedly on the sidelines of that modern day jousting tournament known or renown as Masaku Sevens. But if it were just a screed about how low the whippersnappers have fallen, we would have none to say but to shake our heads in sorrow, tut-tut in despair and mosey on to a sunset that does not have whippersnappers in the picture.

Sadly, we are unable to do so. Crotchety captains of industry, makers and shapers of opinions, doddering in their decrepitude have made the fateful decision to rob cradles in the hope of staving for all eternity the inexorable march of Father Time. In their fruitless expeditions in search of Fountains of Youth betwixt the comely and reluctantly welcoming thighs of barely-lettered village belles or more mercenary-inclined members of what passes for Nairobi's jet set, the, mostly,  septuagenarians and octogenarians have betrayed even their forefathers if not the gods of old. In the days before Victorian mores disturbed idyllic, though bucolic, lives, it was not the number of carnally-inclined couplings that declared you to be a man, but whether you could rule a house with multiple spouses without being thought of as Caligula come to life or a fool. Men of substance were renown for relative domestic peace, the dignity with which spouses and scions alike were held and the ultimate respectful recognition of being declared first among equals by their peers, the Chief.

But in the helter-skelter of modern commercial combat in which the global village sits uncomfortably with the notion of respectful recognition, modern-day robber barons are unrestrained in the cultural shibboleths they are prepared to desecrate and the fruits of their loins have taken that mercenary attitude to extreme ends, scandalising their extended families and eliciting ever louder calls for Divine Intervention from the peddlers of the Holy Word. It is almost certain that those squealing loudest about our national fall from moral glory are faced by apples of their eyes who have been deflowered by wolves in the shape of Benz-driving Lotharios at village jousts such as the Masaku Sevens and who have made it their lives' missions to be kept to the standards that the doddering Lotharios have promised to keep them. We have come to glorify Mammon; it should not befuddle us why ankle-biters learn that lesson as soon as their reluctantly pull their lips and teeth from maternal mammaries.