Given licence to take away my licence
Stoep is in trouble for writing about trivia such as Joburg’s apology for rivers
OU know of course what a columnist’s real purpose is. It is to explain to politicians how to do their jobs better. Columnists are pretty excellent at that, but then, this is one field of human endeavour where excellence is widely displayed. Practically any bar that you go to, there’ll be a fellow on his fourth dop explaining precisely what the president ought to do.
Usually, you’ll notice that he’s an extremely generous fellow, quite willing to spread his advice. The leader of the Opposition is quite likely to need some. The Minister of Finance, too.
In fact, the Minister of Finance especially. In a fair world, Ministers of Finance would get only half the salaries of the rest of the Cabinet. They get more free advice than all the others put together.
They might, though, be pipped by quarters right outside the political spectrum. I mean, look at fly-halves. A fly-half can have several million people providing advice all in the same instant, at a hundred decibels each, to be reverse-transmitted via the screen. The only little problem there is that one third are screaming “pass”, one third are screaming “kick”, and the last third are screaming “run”.
Then there’s the coach. In one way the coach gets 15 times more advice than the fly-half or scrum-half or hooker or any of the team, because every time any one of them errs he gets re-instructed on team selection.
Goalies are also big beneficiaries, and bowlers. I suppose basketball and ice hockey and all team sports have their quota of free advice. It’s golfers and tennis players who are under-supported here. You never get the peanut gallery yelling “hit it harder”, or “hit it straighter”.
What is more, whatever golf and tennis coaches may be accused of, it isn’t bad selection. In these fields selection is plain arithmetic, no judgment calls.
Anyway, the Stoep is in trouble. An institution calling itself the Guild of Pseudo-Academic Semi-Literary Smartasses (they spell that word in Americanese and I leave it so in the hope of mollifying the propriety censors) has sent me a “summons, for abusing The Star’s newsprint to write about trivia like Joburg’s apologies for rivers and shades of off-white toothpaste”. So the Guild threatens to cancel the Stoep’s column licence.
It then goes into a long spiel that seems to be half klap and half compliment, and orders that “at least half of Stoep Talk must be devoted to giving or at least trying to give insights on the South African situation”.
Well that’s a demand, I suppose, and from The People, at that (which harkens to a sweet old-days recurring feature, foreign minister Pik Botha declaring in unrest times that “The People want Peas. The People need Peas”).
Okay, Guild, I’d sort of thought I was kind of doing something like that, perhaps the problem is that my “trying” produced nothing that you recognised as “giving”. But I’ll tell you for very real one thing that hits me harder every day, which is how staggeringly deep is the mess we are making by trying to balance races.
Never mind the government frantically ratcheting up its own attempts to do that – the worse it fails the more rebalancing it demands, creating the perfect vicious cycle. Now the Opposition is drowning in it, too. (See, properly column-like I squeeze them in).
That’s our situation. Slithering away by being a nation of four race groups, three thems and one us. We’ll start the lift when we recast as us, 56 million of us, to know by the content of our character.