Chuck Norris, where are you when we need you?

Walk the talk. Chat is cheap, money buys whisky. Meer bek as binnegoed. Don’t tell me — show me. These are threadbare cliches. And deservedly so because it is a helluva lot easier and cosier and neater and ultimately innocent to fill the good air with carbon dioxide through rhetoric and oratory than it is to do so through sweat, tears, toil, aching bones and muscles, isn’t it.

Hey, c’mon we’ve all been there and we’ve all done it at some time or another. None of us guiltless.

I’ve just been watching Barack Obama selling his stimulus package to Indiana voters where massive job cuts in the transport sector have resulted in doubling and trebling the unemployment rates. He was hit with uncompromising and even rude questions from an audience of all ages, sizes, sexes, persuasions, colours and circumstances.

Not once did he flinch from even the most particular and individual grilling. The only US president with the balls, honesty and humility ever to admit he “made a mistake”, Obama answered with disarming candour, with specifics of who, what, where, how much and how many. And not the kind of obtuse cant to which the likes of Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, Gwede Mantashe, Carl Niehaus and Jessie Duarte seem uncontrollably addicted.

It is hard not to admire and applaud this man. While Republicans filibuster and blather and argue for argument’s sake, the most powerful man in the world is out there chatting to a nine-year-old boy about what is going to happen in his school. Once the Republicans stop bandstanding, that kid will hold his president to account. Something completely alien to the South African populace, who will swallow up whatever asinine drivel that gets trotted out from Tuynhuys.

It is common for opposition parties to play delaying tactics, to childishly hold out for a few more futile moves when it was far wiser to tip the king in submission a long time ago.

But few countries in the world, developed or developing, sophisticated and astute or backward and brutish, find themselves in the position South Africa does. There it is the ruling oligarchy that digs its heels in against progress, that stoically and foolishly refuses to roll up its sleeves, that won’t get its hands dirty because it is improper for the pseudo-deities they are to get their Armani suits soiled when it comes to unplugging the clogged sewers of society.

Having studied the so-called State of the Nation speech Motlanthe mouthed out on Friday, I shudder at the state of the nation. Not only was it hackneyed repetition, but it reminded me so much of the character in Joseph Heller’s classic, Catch 22, who insisted on walking backwards so that no one could sneak up on him from behind that it beggars comparison to that archetypal satire on absurdity — except, of course, that Heller wrote about war and Motlanthe blathers on in peace time.

Tomorrow’s Budget speech is going to be interesting, because at its core, money and the lack thereof are the world’s paramount concerns. As I sit here just south of Washington DC contemplating the astronomical distances that separate the responses of SA and the US to the global financial mess, I hope Trevor Manuel will pull some rabbits of his ministerial hat — in fact, rabbits, even dozens of them, are far too prosaic and petty for what is needed. Clever Trevor needs to meld the skills, imagination and creativity of David Copperfield and David Blaine if SA is to avoid going down screaming its innocence as it burbles beneath the quicksand of global interconnectivity.

Sadly, so far where his boss and the other puppeteers needed to show both intestinal and testicular fortitude, they have shown no signs for anything but wild and fantastical hope. Where we need Chuck Norris full of skop, skiet and donner, we’ve got Woody Allen full of cliched satire and black comedy.