Tune in but don’t tune out
dbeckett@global.co.za
THE CAR radio is on. It’s a call-in show, of course. Extraordinary to think that for half my life there was no such thing as call-in. The subject is again trusty e-tolls – we have a life sentence.
The caller labours under the standard mass delusion – system is an incompetent fraud. He is conveying the News that (a) he has just been in Austria, and (b) Austria’s electronic tolling system, the prototype of our own, has collapsed, its gantries are an eyesore and a public disgrace.
I give his News a capital “N” as that is much how he is portraying it. The tone is “Here, people, is information you must know, to be even more indignant about the rip-off that your state is perpetrating upon you”.
The studio staff are duly impressed, shock and delicious horror duly expressed. Anybody tuning in will believe that a court or ministry in Vienna has issued a major statement.
A few minutes later another caller presents the News that a certain hospital – not a name known to me, apparently somewhere on the East Rand – was in free fall. The hospital had more than 40 executives when it needed only four. They were all paid more than R1 million a year. No patients were admitted. No hospital work was happening. The place was filthy… All that.
This sounded like the classic ex-employee venting an anonymous grudge. Not to the studio people. There was instant weeping and gnashing of teeth. Oh, oh, oh, our poor, poor, nation, look at the abuses inflicted upon it! And nobody is doing anything!
Never doubt that instant access by all of us to endless info is a wonder of our world. Just maybe not to be taken as a replacement for our critical faculties.
THERE’S no way you can write “gees” in English. Whether you give it quotes or italics or what , it looks like “jeez”, whereas everyone can say it entirely right, as gh-year-ss.
The World Cup gees has eclipsed 1995’s and 2007’s. I’d put it on a par with – even possibly ahead of – 2010. And this for rugby – played in 10% of the world’s countries, some of which we can’t find on the map. Such love and enheartenment. Some ous suspended their emigration plans.
Just one thing, there’s an award been skipped out. That is the award so deserved by the media mense who, during the long hours of waiting for the Bokke at the airport or following their victory bus touring the cities, took on the challenge of keeping up running commentary on nothing happening.
A thing that is enough to put a person off a media career, no kidding, is the times of having to open and close your mouth when you have nothing to say.
Often – this time, too – that can lead you into going overboard on the rah-rahs, so you sound like the sounding brass or the tinkling cymbal (and – whisper! – are left quietly internally knowing that your unstoppable excesses are devaluing the occasion’s authenticity).
But hey! For effort, be proud of the journos who were cursed to be holding those mics in front of greedy cameras, assuring us that the gh-year-ss was great and the bus was coming.
Perhaps a bit of extra pride for the Bokke themselves – all that fitness, all that courage, all that breakneck hurtling and pushing and smashing your bones and cables, crowned by days and days of leaning from the top deck of an open bus, waving.