Clinton's cigar, Zuma's loins and the curse of petty politics

When they got Al Capone, it wasn’t for some heinous crime, it wasn’t for murder or extortion or racketeering, it was for tax evasion. Eliot Ness didn’t boot down the door and catch Big Al with a gun in his hand. No, he came at him on a technicality. He caught him crooking the books.

What a pussy.

As a great believer in the Hollywood take on life, I like front-on attacks. I like clear and direct actions. If you going to storm the castle, go in through the front door and not the tradesman’s. What are you, a second-class citizen? If your answer is no, then the direct assault is the only true and honest thing to do. The only way you can hold your head up high and say I won this fair and square.

For me, Ness’s victory was nothing less than a slur on the virtue of Lady Justice. From that day on she no longer shone like a bright light but took on the faint red glow of the girls who live in the windows near my house. Her scales weighed down by process. Her sword blunted by compromise.

It is the same today in politics. We have been given this beautiful thing called democracy. One man, one vote. It is a virtue that has kept imprisoned men alive. A principle that others have given their lives for. But everywhere around us democracy and her ideals are being usurped by practitioners of petty politics. When Delacroix painted liberty as a bare-breasted maiden bearing a flag and a musket, he wasn’t thinking about the gutter politicking that consumes us today. The peasants who fought the Ancien Regime, the cadres who fought the regime didn’t risk their heads for us to fight about the fruits of JZ’s loin. No matter how bountiful they may be. When Paul Revere made his midnight ride from Boston to warn the revolutionaries of the coming British army, he wasn’t doing it so we could spend millions of dollars discussing where a leader did or didn’t stick his cigar. He probably also didn’t do it to get his name on a box of smokes, but that’s another story. Revere rode for higher ideals. Delacroix painted liberty as a vision of beauty and not as a nattering ninny. Mandela sat behind bars for something bigger than the issues of polygamy and progeny.

But where are the leaders to take their place? Where are the leaders who are willing to square up to their opponents and punch them in the nose? Willing to take each other on with ideas and not fluffy word games. Where are the leaders who can say: right, these are the problems. You haven’t solved this and this and this. And these are my solutions. Bam! Power punch to the chin. None of this pitty-patting around the ring, trying to sneak in a little jab here and a little jab there. It seems these days, elections are won by default, by looking less shit than the other guy. What happened to being great?

How are we ever going to crack real issues like sustainability, HIV, poverty and unemployment if we spend our lives bickering about wives, kids and who called who a racist? Leaders of the “free” world spend millions every year trying to convince totalitarian regimes to give up on autocratic ideas and switch to democracy. But what example do we show them? That our elections are fought and lost on expense claims, cigar sex, number of children and who’s got the biggest potty-mouth? It’s no wonder North Korea and Iran are still tyrannies. They must look at us and think: sniveling bitches! And every country and every party is guilty. The British spent most of last year talking about a duck island in some poli’s garden and why it was bad to clean a moat on the government’s dime. The investigation into BAE’s dodgy arms deals probably cracked about a tenth of the press coverage and parliamentary time. While in the US, I read last week that the Democrats are trying to hammer Sarah Palin about some tax she didn’t pay on some cabin she built on a backcountry lot. WTF? We’ve got a woman who wants to drill the crap out of her state, says climate change is bullshit, doesn’t believe in abortion and is really pro-a-machine-gun-in-every-home. But no, they decide they want to get her on cabin tax. Who cares! Have you not seen the bumper stickers? They say PALIN 2012. Keep hitting her on the “hard” issues and they’ll come true.

The same goes for Helen, Jacob, Juju and the rest of the bell-ends we have to put up with as our leaders. We have a minister whose wife is on trial for drug smuggling and for the last week all we’ve been talking about is a baby. Hello, are we all on drugs? Mbhazima Shilowa of Cope said that JZ is not fit to rule because we are all talking about his baby instead of focusing on the real issues in the country. Mr Shilowa, has it ever occurred to you that the decision to stop talking about this baby lies with you and not Zuma? If you want him out of power, leave the baby-talk and start speaking about grown-up issues. Tell him, tell us why his polices are bad and what you’re going to do to fix them. The same goes for JZ, Zille and co. If you want respect, ignore the peanut gallery and tell people how you plan to sort out their problems. The broadside and the cavalry charge are the tools of true generals. Leave the snide remarks to the verbal snipers and gripers like us in the blogosphere and the media. You (if you are really cut out for this job) need to be thinking about bigger things.