We’ve passed the test of breaking news

CONFESSION time, good reader. Beneath the innocent surface of your respectful Stoep beats a wicked little revolutionary heart.

I do not refer here to the Heroic Speedhump Rebellion, which some months ago made a noise about our tyrannical city cursing us with speedhumps sponsored by the Shockabsorber Manufacturers Association.

That mission did send a revolutionary army to beard the tyrant in its den, an army consisting of Honorary Major-General Rob, a supportive reader, with a Corporal of Communications and Parking, who would be the undersigned. But we were foiled on several counts.

For one, the tyrannical city was beardless. It consisted of two women, young and Afrikaans and engineers and highly impressive (ANC appointments, too, showing us that the nation is not as racially imprisoned as we’d come to think).

They had fine replies to our allegations, and the revolution whimpered its way homeward feeling fine that our city thought its way so well through things.

They also show that we were the vrottest revolutionaries since Woody Allen and the Vargas Coup. Which may be why you never heard of the Stoep’s small revolutions, which keep humming away invisibly.

One has been a revolutionary rejection of the word “Zuma”. That’s not especially a rejection of anyone of that name, not any more than of anyone else who has driven the country into corruption and inefficiency. It’s humanitarian. We take pity on readers.

For months, the nation has suffered an overdose of Zuma. On posters, on screens, on headlines, we’ve had Zuma all over us, all day, every day.

The Stoep’s strategy and welfare divisions joined forces to devise a Zumafree zone, a subtle reminder that, despite appearances, things other than shenanigans within a ruling party do happen.

But after this week, a non-Zuma headline would be sued for treason. We are beaten back. Best we can do is ask a question that perhaps has not yet been asked more than a few thousand times.What is the right way to respond to the circus; are we on balance amused, ashamed, or proud?

On the “ashamed” side of the ledger, I don’t think that my chief entry says as much about South Africa as about modern politics. It’s all insanely solipsistic, nice big word by which I mean “about one individual”.

Person-for-person, I doubt that South Africans have suffered worse from Zuma headlines than Americans (and the world) from Trump. Putin and Xi are surely as bad. Merkel and May are both now dangling on the How-long-canthey-last hook.

So we are not alone, but it’s still bizarre that the replacement of one person by his former deputy can take this much ink, and airtime, and talk time, and the attention of personages supposedly doing vital work to get an embattled country on to a fair and just path of growth.

As for the amusement factor, that has belonged largely to we in the media world, with the terrifying promise of breaking news hanging over heads but stubbornly refusing to break.

I propose to the industry bodies that this year they have an award for inventive busking.

Not least, that’ll be a great excuse to rerun numerous courageous endeavours to keep filling airtime. We could have a competition, too, for the best piece of “breaking news”. I’ll be putting my money on “The deputy president has left a Pretoria hotel”.

Finally we come back to good old trusty pride.

We’ve just been through another round of the kind of fiasco that frequently creates corpses, kills economies, cripples the lives of multitudes. There was a basic test here.

We passed, again.