My first reaction to reading about ET’s death was that it was an April Fool gag. But the news had already been reported worldwide, and I realised it wasn’t. And felt nostalgic.
Let me speak for the good guys, people like me. Good guys, regardless of political leaning, seem to need people we love to hate, to jeer at, to make us feel comfortable with our own good guy beliefs which are often seen in stark contrast with the likes of ET, Juju Mamela, or fictional characters like Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson’s The Joker or JR Ewing. Their bad ways make the good guys feel better about themselves. Those bad guys are dinkum nasty, and the non-fictional ones in my list above are often viewed as utter blatherskites. Their images do not need to be skewed by a biased portrayal. Their dangerous buffoonery is as self-evident as steaming cow droppings on the white linen of a wedding banquet table. All four of the characters mentioned are clowns: they often make us laugh (not Heath Ledger’s Joker, which is a grotesque of comedy) and laughter is the best medicine. They are all such simple characters, wrought in black and white strokes. Often they are childlike and simplisitic in their uncomplicated bad guy roles. They make the world seem a simpler, even safer place: just good guys versus bad guys. And good guys always win at the end of the day. Ask John Wayne or Clint Eastwood before he did Unforgiven.
Maybe I can’t speak for all us goody-goodies, and certainly not for the baddies. But a South Africa with a baddie like ET falling off his horse, his empty, overblown rhetoric, his grassroots portrayal in Nicholas Broomfield’s 1991 documentary The Leader, His Driver, and the Driver’s Wife, and his role in the oxymoronically named The Battle of Ventersdorp (vok julle) just made the world a simpler, more hilarious place to be. And the world is what you make of it. Ask Tom Hank’s character Forrest Gump. Now there was a good guy who helped us see the world in an uncomplicated way, who almost returned us to a primordial Eden with his innocuous but powerful heroism. Remember the famous running scene? After a personal trauma, Forrest decides to run and run week after week, month after month, until he became a silent guru renowned and televised throughout the USA, with his loyal acolytes running after him. Then he stopped one day and all his disciples stopped too, hushing one other as they waited in breathless silence for their avatar, their bodhisattva, their messiah, to cast his pearls of wisdom. But Forrest just announced he was tired now and was going home. Gump retained his unassailable innocence, while the followers looked like clowns, and we, the know-it-all viewers laughed, smug in our all too complacent acceptance that we knew better than to be duped into following another fake guru, be it a Ray McCauley, an Obama Bin Laden, a Mamela or a pyramid scheme. Or someone who is a lot like Juju, but who just had no teeth or real clout and wants white power (for a independent boerestaat) instead of black power. That of course is our murderous buffoon, ET, whose AWB movement, apparently by popular demand, was rising again like a cocky sparrow from the phoenix ashes in the last two years.
At the end of the day the roots of ET’s passion and raison d’être were ones I respected: to protect and preserve the Afrikaner identity. His methods, ideology and lunacy, like the rest of us good guys, I jeered at, because that made me look better (I can’t speak for the other good guys). Malema also makes me, a good guy, look better. The PAC’s lunatic wish to kill Juju because he has “misrepresented” the cause of the Sharpeville killings also makes me look better, more intelligent, wiser, with heaps of common sense. Drunken judges and other VIP’s caught driving under the influence also make me realise I am superior to others. That’s what being a good guy all is about. We’re better. We need our clowns to look down on. We may not do anything concrete about all the bad guys, but we are “gooder” than them.
Here in New Zealand, I am also seeing clownish behaviour among the local politicians. The mayor of North Shore City, where we live, was recently accused of drunk driving, urinating against a tree in public, and using the mayoral car to get home so as to avoid being stopped by coppers for drunk driving. The story has been taken up with relish by the local media, all good guys I am sure. He has also been defended for just having a few drinks with his pals, nothing wrong with that, mate . We goody-goodies just seem to need a “fall guy”, a scapegoat, to laugh at. Politicians, mouths full of dangerous fangs, or toothless, provide us with a ready supply.
A prince with dignity and determination
Prince Ngarambe’s goals are to become Rwanda’s first transgender model and to uplift the country’s youth
The EFF’s principles are unshakeable
Unlike the ANC, the core values of the freedom fighters do not change with each leader it elects
