There’s an art to scorn… you pour it like custard

It can’t be shaken or stirred and short bursts amount to mere insults

THE ZULU king and his counterpart, the king of Swaziland, have each made some extremely damaging comments lately which have done enormous harm to whatever is left of southern Africa’s already tattered reputation.

Deservedly, commentators have hit back with some well-aimed scorn. There’s an art to scorn. Scorn has to be neither shaken nor stirred, but poured like custard.

Short bursts of scorn often amount to mere insults. And anyway, off-the-cuff, spoken scorn, unless it is brilliant and disseminated via the media, is often blown away by the wind.

The usual recipients of scorn are politicians, politicians and politicians, roughly in that order. They are also very good at dishing it out themselves.

I remember fellow journalist Stephen Mulholland writing in The Citizen years ago, saying: “Our President, Thabo Mbeki, is a truly miserable piece of work. He is bitter, narrow-minded, vainglorious, officious, arrogant, pompous and racist.”

Having listed Mbeki’s good points, the curmudgeonly Mulholland then went on to detail his bad ones.

An example of an immortal piece of scorn (or does it rank as merely an insult for it was uttered rather than poured?) was Dorothy Parker’s comment when she heard that American President Calvin Coolidge was dead. She said: “How could they tell?”

Another, quite as famous, was Lloyd George’s comment about Herbert Samuel, one of the first Jewish members of the British cabinet. Lloyd George said: “When they circumcised Herbert Samuel they threw away the wrong bit.”

Yet another was Gore Vidal’s delightful description of President Ronald Reagan: “A triumph of the embalmer’s art.”

I have come across a book titled Scorn –With Added Vitriol, by Joburg-born Matthew Parris of The Times in London.

One delightful example that he used was by a 19th-century West Point general. He was told that Adolphus Greely, the Arctic explorer, was to be promoted to general. Greely’s recent expedition had ended in the deaths of almost the entire party which had resorted to cannibalism. The indignant West Point general said: “He never commanded more than 10 men in his life – and he ate three of them.”

Journalists, perhaps the second-most arrogant profession after politicians, have come in for a fair amount of scorn themselves.

British playwright Tom Stoppard, in Night and Day, said: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

And I’ve always liked this anonymous verse: Much ado about nothing A lot to do about less Is the function and prerogative Of the gentlemen of the press. My favourite quote regarding journalists is equally critical: “Newspapermen are the sort of people who wait until the battle is over before rushing on to the battlefield to kill all the wounded.”

I rather think it was aimed at those who write editorials.

A popular author of the 1920s, Humbert Wolfe, is remembered for his epigram uttered long before the News of the World scandal and phone tapping: You cannot hope to bribe or twist thank God! the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. Really good scorn, correctly poured, must afford the scorner a huge sense of glee while, ideally, leaving the scorned speechless.

Take this letter received by that celebrated columnist HL Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, whose own quality of scorn was legendary.

“Mencken, with his filthy verbal haemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die, it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottommost pit of hell.”