Hanover Park. The Cape Flats suburb is notorious for violence and gangsterism. File Picture: Tracey Adams/African News Agency (ANA)
I did not present a column last week, as a result of the irritatingly increased load shedding. I apologise to my readers by assuring you that it was poor planning on my part.
Frankly, I cannot detect an ounce of difference it made, for not much, or more accurately, nothing changed as a result.
As Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the great American writer and humorist) assured his readers: “The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated.” The wit and humour of the disclaimer, made on June 2, 1897, is riveting. As a linguist, I would call it a supreme example of hyperbolic irony and satire, designed to amuse, reassure and redefine exaggerated concern.
Why do I hammer the point? Because it has been done before, and one that comes to mind is Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal in Ireland in 1729. Poverty was rife, and children grew up uncontrolled and wild, and ended up as thieves and pickpockets. Swift authored a pseudo-economic essay that proposed that Ireland ameliorate poverty in Ireland by butchering the babies of the poor and providing the rich with the protein of the meat produced solely from mother’s milk.
Although the idea was to use bizarre humour to conscientise, it also was a serious and savage comment on England’s legal and economic exploitation of Ireland.
Although I do not claim the pedigree of the above luminaries, I would also join them and reassure my readers that the absence of my column last week had nothing to do with the deaths of two national figures, one an economist of note, the other a controversial politician in the South African historic-political narrative.
Put another way, I am soberly reminded of the minuscule dimensions of my weekly contribution to pray and advise towards a changing of the guard. We are at as desperate a place as those brilliant minds who realised that shock tactics are sometimes necessary when human beings lose the plot.
We are in dire straits. The children are hungry, not placed in schools, poverty and crime are rife, unemployment is a fact of life and a national sense of despair, wickedly underlined by power outages should have shocked us by now into realising that we are in a bad place.
Yet those whose voices should be heard are silent. The rulers in the country are powerless. They are unfairly and wrongfully rich and disdainful of the public who voted them into power and comfort. They loll like fat swine in a mud bath while children, women and the aged are brutalised. They openly raid the fiscus or unbundle those agencies that could be resurrected.
Add to this the conflicted Reserve Bank, that stolid bastion of fiscal integrity, which cannot touch a president who was vocal when he had to provide a running commentary on a pandemic, yet could not even fit a mask properly the first time, nor did anything after the pandemic abated, except perform more acts of folly that have put him in a place where he deserves neither sympathy nor support. Even Sars and the judiciary are in a tizz over what should be done.
We are just waiting out the time when, as sure as God made little green apples, South Africans of all races and creeds will again vote the sycophantic, megalomanic losers back into another round of inefficiency and ridicule.
And that is my column. My absence last week was noted by some kind people, which was gratifying for me as a minor role-player. It also reassured me that there are people who miss my drivel. Drivel is what you get this week. I refuse categorically to even suggest that the government holds any hope for us proles. We are stuck with them. Worse, they are stuck in their ridiculous ineptitude.
As for me, writing this piece and getting rid of some unwelcome gas registered in the methane section of the periodic table, has provided sheer and wicked, if well-intentioned, relief. God bless you all.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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