Hell hath no fury like the Liz haters
● Memes involving lettuce and other perishable items that have outlived Liz Truss as Britain’s prime minister have been flying around, and some are very funny. However disinterested one might be in British politics, laughing at Liz is now an international preoccupation.
There is always an element of schadenfreude when plutocrats topple from their pedestals of power, but the malicious glee at Truss’s downfall makes one wonder: would the same spite be directed at a male leader tossed aside by the British ministerial old boys’ club?
If you compare Truss’s 45-day stint as the UK’s leader to the four days of economic chaos inflicted on South Africa by our shortest-serving cabinet minister, the cackling at Truss’s expense takes on a more sinister tone.
Des van Rooyen, who served as our finance minister from December 9 to 13 in 2015, was also widely mocked and ridiculed. There was much amusement (and bemusement) but there was not, as I recall, the same level of personal vitriol.
No-one’s suggesting Truss doesn’t deserve her fate, but she did not rise to the top on her own. She was aided and abetted by many others in the structure she formed part of. There is a lot of barely concealed scapegoating going on, and blaming a woman for causing all the trouble is an ancient hobby.
Many have also pointed out, however, that the UK’s administration seems structurally unsound. “Structure” is a word used in myriad contexts, always meaning something that is made up of many parts. From skin cells to skyscrapers, structures are constructed according to the ethos that each element does its part and contributes to the smooth run
Blaming a woman for causing all the trouble is an ancient hobby
ning of the whole. Unless you’re a poststructuralist who questions the concept of truth, or a deconstructionist who no-one understands, but let’s leave those aside.
Structure comes from the Latin root struere, meaning “to pile, place together, heap up; build, assemble, arrange, make by joining together”. Some governmental structures appear to be merely heaped up rather than thoughtfully assembled but, of course, there are both good and bad structures.
The study of word structure, incidentally, is called morphology and one of its branches involves the excavation of root words that give rise to many variants. Struere is not only the mother of structures and construction, it also birthed destruction, consternation and obstruction.
Structural integrity, in theory, keeps buildings standing and governments running. Things fall apart when one or more elements go rogue, or perhaps the architect got something wrong in the beginning. That is for political philosophers to argue about. And also computer programmers. A colleague was recently mystified by an email from our system administrator saying: “This is a content alert notification message. The message indicated below is badly structured and could not be fully examined.”
Our first thought was that someone had sent a grammatically incorrect message and that email-examining mechanisms had advanced to such a degree that they no longer accept prepositions at the end of sentences. On further investigation, the Mimecaster Central website revealed that a “suspicious structure” message is sent because of things involving encoding and malware and formatting, all of which make about as much sense to the average user as deconstructionism and artificial intelligence.
Speaking of which, last month it was reported that a robot has been appointed as CEO of global premium-liquor company Dictador. The corporation’s head of European operations, Marek Szoldrowski, said: “This first human-like robot, with AI, in a company structure, will change the world as we know it, for ever.”
All very well, but will human employees take orders from a robot? No-one likes being told what to do, especially by someone who never eats. I mean, one might as well put a woman in charge of a male-dominated organisation.
Incidentally, Dictador’s new virtual boss is named Mika, and she’s a female robot.