I’m here for you, Jessie

SO WHAT exactly was Jessie Duarte’s sin? Every scrap of media that swims my way proclaims her villainy in capital letters – the spoken brand of capital letter not least. THAT JESSIE DUARTE, OH, OH,

ISN’T SHE TERRIBLE!

Each time I momentarily assume that she, too, has burrowed away a billion of our money, or sneaked a few hundred million into a river that runs through a relative’s account, or at least has taken some appalling decision that is going to cost our children and their children and their children’s children. Or at very, very, least has avoided taking a stance that might have put us back on economy-building track.

Nooit. All it ever is, is another wail about how she let down the nation and the human race, plus morality, civilisation, motherhood and apple pie, by her treatment of a journalist.

Before I saw the offending clip I imagined that at minimum she gets blood all over her iron teeth, clamping them into the guy’s jugular. But what turned up was a person who has an issue with another person and presents it in forceful terms.

She doesn’t threaten violence, she doesn’t evince the slightest intention of using her access to the state’s muscle to take her anger out on him, she doesn’t even lose her temper. She tells him she doesn’t like him and she tells him in a way that precisely fits the In-word “robust”.

“Robust”, originally meaning sturdy, brawny, rugged, has reigned high for the last decade as the approved cliché for forthright discussion. It becomes one of those characteristics that South Africans like to claim, an extension of the original cliché “Africa is not for sissies”. We unsissified types of course applaud robust debate.

Unless it comes from a non-approved source. We forget to mention that part. Though that part in itself contains a noteworthy oddity. Most of the press now is run by people who were born and bred ANC, yet most of the press now views the ANC through spectacles akin to those the American media establishment use when viewing Donald Trump.

I wonder if the days are gone when Action X would be given the same treatment whether it was committed by your side or the other side. I hope not, the world is supposed to improve. In this case, I still await a representative of the indignant and the outraged to explain to me who struck the lowest blow in this affair. Was it Jessie doing her robust thing or was it the journalist’s channel, hunting up their ugliest picture of her to use as the logo for their coverage?

AFTERTHOUGHT, on changing conventions: striking how the man-hug has spread, I’d guess in much less than a decade. No longer just oldest friends or long-lost brothers, now with anyone short of a total stranger, a greeting isn’t a greeting unless you’ve shoved a shoulder into each other’s chests.

In tandem, the handshake has shifted too, at least in informal first acquaintance. Taking a seat next to a stranger, for instance, perhaps on an airplane or at a seminar, you’d now cause a bit of shock just sticking your hand out and saying your name.

No. Correct procedure is to sidle into conversation. Only approximately over Kimberley does the bolder soul say “I’m Joe, by the way”. At which point shaking hands is obligatory, and

obligatory can be awkward if you’ve just messily wrestled open your tublet of airline jam.