The pain of being right

The worst part about being a “pessimist” is you keep being proved right.

I’m pretty sure that deep down inside this “pessimist” is an optimist crying to get out. He only needs a motive — not an alibi or an excuse or empty promises or false comparisons or even options. Just a valid motive.

Like a starved prisoner I snatch at any trivial passing reason to hope in the future and ravenously swallow it in a transport of euphoria. But each is only a morsel and its passing leaves me starved for more. Maybe it is aggravated by my depression, but I know dozens of others whose pretence at optimism is only a thin, diaphanous veneer, an extra dab of base to hide the the latest ugly pimple of despair.

A black female friend who was born with extra strands of smiley genes confessed to me the other day it was “getting harder and harder to pretend everything’s just dandy and the ANC is doing a good job”.

The half-full people and motivational speakers (I was one once and spoke with missionary zeal, and made good money) say that not even all the darkness in the universe can dim the light of just one candle. But they don’t say anything about the effect of a gentle zephyr on that flame of hope.

In South Africa, we can’t even get the candle lit amid this perfect storm of idiocracy, moral decrepitude, might is right, hierarchical command administration, sloth, envy, lust, gluttony, corruption, hypocrisy and lies.

And if the bad news is not bad enough, add to it the daily tsunami of bad views. The misguided belief that we are doing fine, that things have been worse and now they’re better, and the kind of warped logic best expressed recently by mob boss Frankie “The Lip” Chikane.

Being interviewed by Feargal Keane, he began each answer to each direct question with the same three words: “No, no, no.” When John Robbie interviewed the “political editor” of the SABC, Abbey Makoe, chairman of the racist group the Forum of Black Journalists (who can’t get employed anywhere Snuki doesn’t hold sway because he is simply not up to scratch), it was the same script — in response to every direct question, there was obfuscation, burbling, stuttering and the ANC party pledge: “No, no, no.”

In the past 24 hours I’ve really spent time studying two recent blogs — “It’s resonant leadership, silly” by Dumisani Magadlela and the most perspicacious, lucid and insightful analysis of the ANC I’ve read this year, Christi van der Westhuizen’s “The ANC guide to truncating democracy“.

And when I say study, I mean it — print-outs, textual analysis, comparisons — and both pieces deserve meritorious mention. I cannot necessarily share the views, even where the bloggers have set out to persuade, but, boy, have they made dents in my resolve.

That is exciting. As mentioned before, I love the challenge and the numinous shiver when a hitherto closed curtain is flung wide open. And such is human nature that you want to share your new discovery, your new insight, your new learning with the world around you.

And before you can open your mouth, the awful reality truncates your joy like a “birth-strangled babe”. One reads the comments below Christi’s blog and it’s like reading the manifesto of the Flat-Earth Society. I often wonder how many commentators actually read what is written, and not what they think the writer meant to write. To my recurring disappointment, many have yet to learn that the closed mouth gathers no foot. Many times reading the comments is more depressing than my own acknowledged negative take on South African politics and the kakistocracy that hold this country’s future in its awkward butterfingered hands.

Of course things have been worse in the past. Of course we have triumphed over much disaster, war, famine and pestilence. Of course there is much to be thankful for (though the list has gone from many pages to only a few lines, most of which pertain to the weather). If Thabo the Timid looked a shadow of his former valiant self, and Trevor the Tentative looked positively nervous as he pointedly did his best to curry favour with The Godfather, it was probably because even they realise the worst is yet to come.

If things are better, they’re nowhere within a million miles of the future both Mandela and Mbeki promised us only a few years ago. Those bright-eyed pledges are now faded from being rubbed and rewritten a thousand times, and any tangible results, say, houses built, are cracked and crumbling from Mitchells Plain to Messina.

Pity all the whiteys who so adore the ANC and the struggle cred of comrades and comradesses, pay their party dues and like faithful sheep will vote the same asylum back into power again next year for even more destruction under the Last King of Nkandla, couldn’t go and listen to old Showerhead today. Why? Because they are white!

Aside from the comments beneath each blog, which are mostly thoughtful even if I can’t get weepy about the ideologies expressed, I get about 20 direct emails a day (rising to 40 or more on weekends) from people worldwide commenting on what I have written. Incidentally, MFB, to a man and across all races, most consider themselves exiles from their homeland by a de facto undeclared civil war and an unjust system that is premised on government-sanctioned racial inequity. Like the kind endorsed by the FBJ, BMF and BLA.

Among my mail I’ve had threats from ANC supporters (“We know who you are …” Who doesn’t? “We can get at you …” grammar, although the one that had my address correct was rather worrying), juvenile blatherings from militant students who believe I have something to do with the high unemployment rate and offers to increase the size of my penis (which should be rather interesting because it too is unemployed of late).

But, hey, that comes with the turf, although the threats worry both my sons. But since the cops don’t seem to care much about them, why should I?