Every story is actually the same story: another weekend, another scandal, another former prominent Conservative MP.
A decade ago I lost the capacity to be startled by these people and what they get up to, because when you become a politician, it is all but confirmed you can just forget about being a politician, and toss the work you’re meant to be doing onto the bureaucracy belt that shifts around you.
Then you can do what the latest Tory did; remove your suit, ignore that you represent constituents − never mind your wife and children − and dress up like a dog to be led around on a leash by obese woman with pink hair (people who do this are known as “furries”).
This argument for complacency affects businessmen too, most absent depravity. This could be advanced against Johann Rupert who, for reasons that have yet to be explained in acceptable detail, accompanied Cyril Ramaphosa to Washington.
Rupert makes bad political decisions. He always has. His exceptional business mind does not possess the understanding required for why Donald Trump exists. Unwittingly, he has admitted as much.
On 7 January 2021, Rupert took to Instagram under his account “cutmaker”. He had something to say about the events in Washington the day before, so chose a picture of Donald Trump superimposed on a photo of Adolf Hitler. Those paying attention had noticed before the South African’s hostility to the American, but what interested me more wasn’t that post (since deleted), rather another that appeared shortly after.
That was a photo of Rupert on a golf course with former US President George H. Bush and his wife Barbara with a remark to the effect of “when America had real Presidents”. In hindsight it was a prescient comment, because less than two weeks later an unreal man – already suffering noticeably advanced dementia – would be sworn in. But Rupert considered Bush, someone central to the US military complex’s rapid expansionism, with all the bad that it did in all the places it was, “real”.
Smear
Rupert’s choice to smear Trump was daft, as it was clear even then that Trump had no role in that riot to litigate. As grasping as the farcical committee assembled to investigate those events were, they were particularly hopeless in trying to explain Trump’s own instructions to his supporters that morning: do not protest, go home, respect the blue. How could a man who initiated an insurrection, they reasoned, have instructed his supporters to do exactly the opposite?
In 2018 Rupert was excoriated following his performance on stage at a Power FM event. I felt sorry for him at the time − his advisers should have checked the contents of their heads before they accepted that invitation, suspecting at the very least that there might have been supporters of Julius Malema or Jacob Zuma in that audience. Irrespective, Rupert came off detached, marginally insensitive, and inappropriately bored. It was a disaster and word soon surfaced that he was done with the country.
His performance in the White House on Wednesday was only just a little better. It wasn’t his boardroom but the man who he’d described unflatteringly in 2021, and before that in 2016. He was flat, unpolished and unconvincing – before he entered, some of the room’s occupants suspected him of being Ramaphosa’s patron. Every sentence he uttered appeared to vindicate that.
What could he have said instead? Given that we’re already airing dirty laundry, how about taking the temperature of the three-decades’ long tradition of the ANC smearing any critic as a racist? He needn’t have been mean about it: he could have addressed Ramaphosa, pointing to the media lobby: “Because your party has behaved in that way, they’ve infected the minds of the most impressionable, stupid, and lazy people on the planet – activist journalists – so now they go around calling everyone racist too.” Or maybe: “Yes, there could be a sort-of link between calling for the murder of a group…and some of their group actually being murdered…so I would encourage the President, my friend, just to, at the very least…acknowledge that.”
Gatekeeping
But that would have been to see the world as it is now, which Rupert can’t – or doesn’t want to – probably because such a view would necessitate outdating his stature. Gatekeeping is no longer the moderate position. It is an accelerant, partially responsible for the state of the media (loathsome), education (hopeless), and corporate behaviours (cowardly, mischievous). No truth is spoken to power and no sunlight is let in to disinfect. The model as it exists – as Rupert very clearly articulated – is just elite human capital running cover for elite human capital.
What these groups don’t get is that few care that it happens to be Donald Trump who is rupturing this command structure. This is a much bigger issue than just South Africa so the insulators of any kleptocratic or hostile regimes are viewed in context – on a global scale, excusing the incompetent, or corrupt, or greedy, or stupid. Given the profound, dynastic generosity from the Ruperts to South Africa, he should want no part in this current unfolding.
Donald Trump is just not programmed to accommodate politicians who dress as dogs or judges who shield people who break the law, or pro-Palestinian savages who execute innocent couples at museums. He is not wired to accommodate the complacency of the establishment or the uni-party – or the agenda pursuing this mythical “social justice”.
Today’s zeitgeist sits – evidently – at correcting the imbalance of an English-speaking world buckling under the weight of its absurdities and double standards and self-harm empathies – by any means necessary.
That it happens to be Trump – so what? One other South African billionaire in the room on Wednesday seems to get that. Probably Ernie too.
[Image: By Szekszter – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30115019]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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