Personally, I had planned to have a long-overdue pedicure, to finish John Boyne’s latest novel The Echo Chamber (a sharp and enjoyable comedy of manners satirising the woke, pc-constrained, smartphone-dominated lives of the London elite), to catch up on some Femsplainer podcasts and perhaps get on to the next episode of Netflix’s number one global hit series, Squid Game.
If you don’t yet know, Squid Game is the latest bizarre South Korean cultural export grabbing popular attention (move over, K-Pop) and capitalises on what some writers describe as ‘radical anti-capitalism’ and the current socialist zeitgeist. Obviously it’s an appealing offering for one of my ilk – know your enemy is a basic rule.
But these leisurely retirement activities were put on hold by the need to briefly get back into harness to help someone out, and so, for the past several weeks, I have been forced to keep my eyes and ears unhealthily tuned to the 24-hour news cycle, the inputs and outputs of news media and every Twitter blurt as we canter into the final laps of the Local Government Elections 2021.
Platitudinous promises fill the air. New power deals are announced, potholes are filled, facilities are fixed after years of neglect, and long-overdue online customer services suddenly make their debut. Spokespeople are dropping voice notes like there’s no tomorrow. The media is summoned to the official opening of a tap in a previously ignored township as the blue-light convoys began to criss-cross the land in earnest.
Officials in a municipality in the Eastern Cape hand over what is supposedly R15 million worth of sports facility: scaffolding fashioned into a rickety, raised spectator stand, a not very robust set of goal posts, an ablution block without running water and a portable set of steps ready for the taking. Not surprisingly this prompts some raised eyebrows, and closer inspection by the Hawks.
Flurries of action
Pre-election flurries of action, service delivery protests, even a bit of ‘throwing politicians with stones’ and killing of rival candidates are nothing new in our world. Sentient voters, who’ve lived through a couple of cycles of South African elections are familiar with and generally unfazed by our pre-election circus.
But there were some things I noted from my weeks of watching the news that were more worrying than the hustings rhetoric, the blatant lies and the last-minute bids to reverse decades of neglect.
Over the years the public, the media and most political parties have colluded in treating the Electoral Commission (IEC) with kid gloves, drawing a veil of silence over its wobbles, avoiding rocking the boat with too close scrutiny of its leaders, its governance, its operations and its much-vaunted independence.
After all, we all wanted to hold onto our image as the best little democracy, with the greatest Constitution and impeccable free and fair elections on the continent. But several of theIEC’s recent snafus have been in full sight of the public and it may no longer be too outré to ask if the Commission is quite as free, and able to be as fair, at all times, as we liked to believe.
How exactly will it handle blatant breaches of the Electoral Code of Conduct? What will it really do if things get physically nasty?
We are only a couple of months distant from the most violent unrest we’ve experienced in this democracy, unrest in which the South African Police Service chalked up a big fail. Yet we, by which I mean both the media and citizens, are avoiding this issue.
We are also failing, mostly, as usual, to argue facts.
Indescribably idiotic elimination
But, be that as it may and notwithstanding, it was the jaw-dropping below-par standard of a couple of the latest nominees to the judiciary, the questions put to some nominees (didn’t we already agree the previous round of commission interviews was cringeworthy?) and the indescribably idiotic elimination of David Unterhalter from the final list of candidates put forward by the Judicial Service Commission to the president that raise a red-flag alert.
It is yet more blatant evidence that racist discrimination and identity politics aren’t going away anytime soon in South Africa. They’re digging down deeper and entrenching themselves in the institutions of the nation.
If liberals supporting individual rights and merit start caving in the face of this relentless assault we are lost; if we buy into the thought processes of those who lead this assault we are on a hiding to nowhere.
These days everything and anything causes offence to those who are determined to be offended. Some people make it their life’s mission to take offence or imagine it. Harridan scourges and dedicated grievance-gleaners stalk the corridors of social media. Their handmaidens are narcissistic grifters, their masters, any number of disputatious factions, forces and lobbyists. On the lookout for anything that will raise their personal profiles, and enable them to unleash their pet media hounds, their ultimate prize is a perceived grievance that revolves on race or gender.
Rolling over like Rover may seem the easiest and safest thing to do in response to attacks on your words and perceived thoughts, or in the Democratic Alliance’s case this week, a particular run of posters. Maybe it’s not a hill on which you wish to go down in flames, maybe you can retract what are after all, just words, and not central to your argument.
But such abject amenability raises a red-flag alert for me.
‘Hensopper’
It does the ‘hensopper’ no real good, as I’m sure New Discourses founder and dedicated Critical Race Theory critic, James Lindsay, or masterly comedian Dave Chappelle, will advise. It only sucks you a little deeper into the paradigm of those whose policies and actions you oppose and leaves you a little less able to withstand the future slings and arrows of manufactured outrage.
Perhaps the DA has learned a valuable lesson.
It’s a huge job to shift the ANC’s supreme domination of the narrative, a narrative that is close to the one being pumped into us by Netflix and other behemoths of popular culture. What’s needed for a win by those up against it is some of the steely determination of Outback Truckers, Everest summiteers, or perhaps, those debt-burdened Squid Game players.
I’ve watched only one episode of Squid Game so far, but I note that there is clearly a TV trend to feature red overalls. In Squid Game it is the faceless overseers who wear them and bring death and devastation down on the hapless competitors at the behest of the extremely rich.
In Money Heist, a Spanish hit series, the red-overall wearers are a ‘lovable’, or so the series blurb tells us, group of not very bright criminals and drug addicts (through no fault of their own, you know … it was, naturally, poverty and the system), out to steal billions, who are the heroes. (Our own red brigade may struggle for consistency on policy and be the real front runners on the racism front, but you have to hand it to them, they’re always on point when it comes to fashion.)
Worthy of admiration
But rather let me leave you with something more worthy of admiration: some lyrics from Bob Dylan’s All along the Watchtower:
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief.
You can read into the words anything you want.
But remember, Jimi Hendrix took the original and completely reimagined it. He made it even better.
So here’s to reimagining our future as a country on 1 November and in the national elections to come. Here’s to voting wisely and bravely and making choices based on facts not feelings.
[Image: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/340000/velka/jimi-hendrix-pop-art.jpg]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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