THE LOST ART OF THE INSULT

ith so many other things crumbling around our ears — there’s the Post Office, Eskom, railways and roads, to name just a few on a very long list — it might seem a little weird to worry about how low the standards of political insult have fallen.

But it’s become extraordinarily difficult to judge individual politicians by their actual performances, as even the good ones — there must be some good ones, right? — are mired in the quicksand of state capture (either they were beneficiaries of it, or they were screwed over by those who are).

So one of the only ways to really gauge whether they care or not is by how much effort they put into insulting each other.

I was reminded of this when I read a press statement by public works & infrastructure minister Patricia de Lille, responding to comments by the DA’s Sir Natasha Mazzone about the fire in parliament. (If you’re wondering about the “Sir”, I’ll explain later.)

Mazzone has accused De Lille of “gross negligence and a failure, at ministerial level, to adequately maintain and protect a national key point”, and charged that

“instead of owning up to her costly dereliction of duty, De Lille lied that it was irrelevant”.

In her statement, De Lille attempts to refute this in various ways, then decides to conclude with an insult. “Mazonne

[sic] doesn’t believe in facts and truths and makes conclusions even before the investigation is concluded by the Hawks into the cause of the fire. It seems that she has concocted together something in her brain with one brain cell that she alone believes in.”

When I first read that, I thought: wow, now that is a nicely turned insult. First, you misspell Mazzone’s name to indicate how little regard you have for her. Then you tell her she’s so stupid she only has one brain cell and, even worse, only she believes in the existence of that one brain cell!

Crushing stuff.

Unfortunately, a subsequent reading

Wrevealed that rather than being GOOD at insulting, De Lille is just bad at spelling and using commas. What the GOOD party leader actually meant, sadly, is that only Mazzone believes in her criticism of De Lille.

“You only have one brain cell” … that’s really kindergarten-grade insulting. How much better is Julius Malema’s recent takedown of Black First Land First’s Andile Mngxitama, who criticised the EFF as “flip-floppers”. “He is tweeting from a sick bed,” Malema said. “I cannot waste my time with such characters.”

And just to remind you of the gold standard of insulting, which of course is Australian, here’s that country’s then prime minister, Paul Keating, on an opponent: “He’s just a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”

The second-worst thing on election day is having to vote not for a party you believe in, but for the best of a bad bunch. The worst thing is when you realise you’re actually voting for the less worse of an awful bunch.

Our politicians haven’t just ruined democracy for us, they’ve also broken grammar.

Someone said they found themselves voting for the GOOD party purely because it occasionally mentioned the homeless in Cape Town. The struggle there, of course, is that you have to try to put aside the fact that GOOD has the stupidest name for a political party since Japan’s No Party To Support party (founded in 2013), and Denmark’s Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements (founded in 1979).

The Union of Conscientiously WorkShy Elements actually won a seat in 1994 and apparently had to take the job seriously, as it would often have a deciding vote when there was a split parliament. The party made some weird and wacky campaign promises, like good weather, and according to MentalFloss.com managed to accomplish three of them: “issuing Nutella in army field rations, rationing more bread for ducks in public parks, and the construction of a public restroom in a park in Aarhus”, where the party was started.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. A party that was started as a joke actually does a better job of keeping its campaign promises than the gibbering rent-seekers with which we’re burdened. Well, that’s not entirely true. Just mostly true.

But back to the GOOD party. The second-most annoying thing about the name is that it suggests GOOD believes voters are idiots, who think issues are simplistic and always come down to good vs evil. That, of course, is the dream of all politicians, and even more so those with a leaning towards complete authoritarianism: a polity that can be easily manipulated with crass messaging.

I tried to find the reasoning behind the name on GOOD’s website, but all I found was this: “We stand up for a country that has zero tolerance for racism, gender discrimination, corruption and poverty. GOOD is not afraid to tackle these issues honestly, and head on. The GOOD party is led by GOOD people, fighting to create a GOOD life for every GOOD South African.” I guess … GOOD for you?

Actually, I did find one other thing on the GOOD site, which was a drone picture illustrating inequality in SA, above a story that starts: “The expropriation without compensation debate: a section 25 constitutional amendment is not required.”

Funnily enough — and this really is a metaphor for how politicians operate — the picture has itself been appropriated without compensation. It’s not credited, and it’s not paid for. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is in fact stolen.

The picture was taken by someone who works for the same organisation I do, as part of a project called Unequal Scenes, so it would be GOOD if you ask him for permission to use it.

It’s these little things that show us the chinks in moral probity. The most annoying thing about GOOD, of course, is that shouty use of all capital letters. It indicates a certain lack of confidence in your goodness when you have to insist upon it so forcefully.

But back to the discussion on insults and how they work. For example, the reason I refer to the DA’s Mazzone as “Sir” Natasha Mazzone is to lampoon the big deal the party made about her getting a knighthood from the Italian government last year. This isn’t to denigrate the award, but to highlight, satirically, the fact that some DA politicians and supporters look to Europe as a model, rather than Africa.

This is what I’d like to term, perhaps optimistically, “insults for good”, intended to make citizens think critically about political issues. Insults like Malema’s sickbed gibe, which refers both to the state of Mngxitama’s actual poor health (get well soon, Andile), as well as the near-terminal political health of his party.

There’s another kind of insult that is a lot more dangerous, and that’s one that is used to dehumanise people and groups so as to justify violent action against them.

Colleagues of mine monitor social and news media in 21 African countries, looking for words like “cockroach” that serve as warning signs of xenophobia, and ethnic and gender-based violence. As with the example of Rwanda, the use and normalisation of dehumanising language can be the enabling precursor to terrible things. This is why Malema has taken to the equality court to try to get the Patriotic Alliance’s Kenny Kunene to apologise for calling him a cockroach, saying that “Mr Kunene compares me to a creature (vermin) that is subhuman and deserves subhuman treatment”. Though, given that Malema has happily called Helen Zille a cockroach, the appellation “hypocrite” does spring to mind.

Governments themselves hate being satirised, and anti-insult laws and arbitrary punishments are generally a good litmus test of how authoritarian a government is. Illegal to insult the anthem (Hong Kong) or call your head of state a moron (Poland)? Jailed for suggesting that the president’s son is obese, and that “God punishes the corrupt in a good way” (Uganda)? There’s a good chance your government is authoritarian.

And if we’re judging politicians on how primitive their insults are, or conversely, how much thought they’ve put into crafting ones with flair, we can also judge civil society by how uncivil it is with its government.

A great recent insult offered to a politician concerns last week’s “rave”, as the Daily Mail refers to it, outside 10 Downing Street. To protest against the UK government’s cavalier partying during a pandemic, about 100 people got dressed up in suits and Boris Johnson masks, and downed wine and beer while chanting, “We are Boris, this is a work event.”

When the insult offered to Johnson is simply that he is Boris Johnson, that’s an immaculately conceived insult. We need more of this kind of insult in our political environment, and less of the asinine name-calling.

A good political takedown has become vanishingly rare in SA. It’s a bitter disappointment — not least because we have so few other measures for the performance of our politicians

Chris Roper

He’s just a shiver looking for a spine to run up

Paul Keating