Two Bits – 18 April 2014

We were all amused when, a few years back, Julius Malema ranted and raved and called a BBC reporter a ‘bloody agent’. There were running jokes about his having failed woodwork class and the cartoonists had a field day with JuJu in nappies throwing yelling fits.
Fast forward to today and wee Julius is only a hair’s breadth away from taking up a seat in Parliament. Come May 7 there’s a good chance him and his effing mates will form a noisy kindergarten in the house of assembly. Julius has become a serious contender in the political landscape, yet it’s also clear that juvenile tantrums have only been papered over. He’s scrambling to find a way out of paying R16 million in back taxes (or else he can’t get into the house) but says the debt is there only because the ANC is persecuting him. Boo hoo!
You gotta love the logic, but what’s new in our Dali-esque political landscape. There’s Zuma telling the crowds that anyone taking a state grant is a traitor if they vote for the opposition, and our heroic minister of education Blade Nzimande (God suffer the learners) says the DA in the Western Cape only creates jobs for whites. With this level of rhetoric, don’t wonder that the politics of parliament is less and less relevant in the realpolitik of everyday life.
It occurs to me, for that reason, that JuJu and his kind are probably less dangerous inside Parliament than out. Once he starts polishing the red leather seats and noshing in the dining room, he’ll clip his wings all by himself. Heaven knows, he might even become an elder statesman!
Stranger things have happened. I was brought up RC, so it was a mortal sin or something to even talk to an Anglican. But I fell in love with an Anglican and so, having no hope of redemption, even got married in the heretics’ church. Anyhow, my in-laws and their generation were, at the time, apoplectic with rage at the behaviour of one Bishop Desmond Tutu. Remember the joke of the day – what do you find in a Tutu bucket from Nando’s? All left wings and arseholes.
We Catholics were a little more sanguine about turbulent priests. After all, we’d lived through the ragings of our parish priest, Father Hourquebie, and the more dignified but no less savage criticism of the state by the standards of the day by Archbishop Denis Hurley. Nevertheless, where is Bish Desmond’s star today? Every Anglican, every right-thinking person in the world, thinks he’s a saint.
No, politics, for most voters, has come right down to the local government level. It’s what you can see and touch. We see the taxi violence, potholes, the broken streetlights, the dismal health service, the price of electricity but, at the same time, the ‘power outages’. Call a spade a spade, it’s a power failure and the ruined appliances in your home, from hairdryer to deep freeze, and the shootings at the taxi rank, are testimony to the failure of the politicians to deliver. It’s time to choose a better future.
* * *

A political activist named Dave was just arriving in Hell, and was told he had a choice to make. He could go to Capitalist Hell or to Communist Hell.
Naturally, Dave wanted to compare the two, so he wandered over to Capitalist Hell. There outside the door was Harry Oppenheimer, looking bored. “What’s it like in there?” asked Dave. “Well,” he replied , “In Capitalist Hell, they flay you alive, boil you in oil, chain you to a rock and let a vulture tear your liver out, and cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”
“That’s terrible!!” gasped Dave. “I’m going to check out Communist Hell!” He went over to Communist Hell, where he discovered a huge line of people waiting to get in; the line circled around the lobby seven times before receding off into the horizon. Dave pushed his way through to the head of the line, where he found Ronnie Kasrils busily signing people in. Dave asked Kasrils what Communist Hell was like.
“In Communist Hell,” said Kasrils impatiently, “they flay you alive, boil you in oil, chain you to a rock and let vultures tear out your liver, and cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”
“But . . but that’s the same as Capitalist Hell!” protested Dave.
“True,” sighed Kasrils, “but sometimes we don’t have oil, sometimes we don’t have knives . . .”