When they got Al Capone, it wasn’t for some heinous crime, it wasn’t for murder or extortion or racketeering, it was for tax evasion. Eliot Ness didn’t boot down the door and catch Big Al with a gun in his hand. No, he came at him on a technicality. He caught him crooking the books.
What a pussy.
As a great believer in the Hollywood take on life, I like front-on attacks. I like clear and direct actions. If you going to storm the castle, go in through the front door and not the tradesman’s. What are you, a second-class citizen? If your answer is no, then the direct assault is the only true and honest thing to do. The only way you can hold your head up high and say I won this fair and square.
For me, Ness’s victory was nothing less than a slur on the virtue of Lady Justice. From that day on she no longer shone like a bright light but took on the faint red glow of the girls who live in the windows near my house. Her scales weighed down by process. Her sword blunted by compromise.
It is the same today in politics. We have been given this beautiful thing called democracy. One man, one vote. It is a virtue that has kept imprisoned men alive. A principle that others have given their lives for. But everywhere around us democracy and her ideals are being usurped by practitioners of petty politics. When Delacroix painted liberty as a bare-breasted maiden bearing a flag and a musket, he wasn’t thinking about the gutter politicking that consumes us today. The peasants who fought the Ancien Regime, the cadres who fought the regime didn’t risk their heads for us to fight about the fruits of JZ’s loin. No matter how bountiful they may be. When Paul Revere made his midnight ride from Boston to warn the revolutionaries of the coming British army, he wasn’t doing it so we could spend millions of dollars discussing where a leader did or didn’t stick his cigar. He probably also didn’t do it to get his name on a box of smokes, but that’s another story. Revere rode for higher ideals. Delacroix painted liberty as a vision of beauty and not as a nattering ninny. Mandela sat behind bars for something bigger than the issues of polygamy and progeny.
But where are the leaders to take their place? Where are the leaders who are willing to square up to their opponents and punch them in the nose? Willing to take each other on with ideas and not fluffy word games. Where are the leaders who can say: right, these are the problems. You haven’t solved this and this and this. And these are my solutions. Bam! Power punch to the chin. None of this pitty-patting around the ring, trying to sneak in a little jab here and a little jab there. It seems these days, elections are won by default, by looking less shit than the other guy. What happened to being great?
How are we ever going to crack real issues like sustainability, HIV, poverty and unemployment if we spend our lives bickering about wives, kids and who called who a racist? Leaders of the “free” world spend millions every year trying to convince totalitarian regimes to give up on autocratic ideas and switch to democracy. But what example do we show them? That our elections are fought and lost on expense claims, cigar sex, number of children and who’s got the biggest potty-mouth? It’s no wonder North Korea and Iran are still tyrannies. They must look at us and think: sniveling bitches! And every country and every party is guilty. The British spent most of last year talking about a duck island in some poli’s garden and why it was bad to clean a moat on the government’s dime. The investigation into BAE’s dodgy arms deals probably cracked about a tenth of the press coverage and parliamentary time. While in the US, I read last week that the Democrats are trying to hammer Sarah Palin about some tax she didn’t pay on some cabin she built on a backcountry lot. WTF? We’ve got a woman who wants to drill the crap out of her state, says climate change is bullshit, doesn’t believe in abortion and is really pro-a-machine-gun-in-every-home. But no, they decide they want to get her on cabin tax. Who cares! Have you not seen the bumper stickers? They say PALIN 2012. Keep hitting her on the “hard” issues and they’ll come true.
The same goes for Helen, Jacob, Juju and the rest of the bell-ends we have to put up with as our leaders. We have a minister whose wife is on trial for drug smuggling and for the last week all we’ve been talking about is a baby. Hello, are we all on drugs? Mbhazima Shilowa of Cope said that JZ is not fit to rule because we are all talking about his baby instead of focusing on the real issues in the country. Mr Shilowa, has it ever occurred to you that the decision to stop talking about this baby lies with you and not Zuma? If you want him out of power, leave the baby-talk and start speaking about grown-up issues. Tell him, tell us why his polices are bad and what you’re going to do to fix them. The same goes for JZ, Zille and co. If you want respect, ignore the peanut gallery and tell people how you plan to sort out their problems. The broadside and the cavalry charge are the tools of true generals. Leave the snide remarks to the verbal snipers and gripers like us in the blogosphere and the media. You (if you are really cut out for this job) need to be thinking about bigger things.
OK, I will take you up, on that challenge.
Solution 1 to the budget deficit: The president’s salary becomes a fixed amount which he can spend as he likes. Even better if it is a fixed percentage of the tax earned for the year, which means less tax, less pay. I guarantee you that no-one will then care how many wives or progeny he has got or with whom. Same for the ministers, etc. No results, no BMW.
Solution 2: our democracy is based on a concept of: all are equal before the law. That means that each person should have the same opportunities, no matter their sex, race, culture or religion. So, can we please a sunset clause on the favoured elite club “redressing the wrongs of the past”?
Solution 3: Why not admit that OBE has worked nowhere else in the world and go back to good old education which did with teachers who are actually trained to teach?
Solution 4: Ditto for the police force.
Most of these solutions have been offered here and elsewhere. Without fail those who spend their time thinking up the solutions and are brave enough to offer them are called bleeding heart liberals, white supremists or traitors to the cause, if they happen to be black. Eventually one have to admit that it is just a waste of time, no-one wants to hear these solutions and spend one’s time doing things that actually bear fruit.
well said David- sense at last thank god almighty.
Nah, the thing about Al Capone is not how they caught him, but the fact that they did.
And the whole point of the Zuma babymama getting jiggy without condoms saga putting a lie to his words on the government’s stance on HIV/AIDS pretty much the same, if the man can’t own up to his mistakes from the start, then why should we trust him on the big things.
David, has it occured to you that we are talking about teflon Zuma here. NOTHING sticks to him! Eventually, it seems, there is something and boy, are we in the mood for a slapstick farce-cake in the face-feel good feeling.
I agree 100%. Zuma’s private life is just that – private. It is his presidential life that interests me.
And the Clinton stories were equally puerile. ‘I smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale’. What next? ‘I inserted the cigar but didn’t rotate it?’
Another entertaining read, and I wholeheartedly concur!
The striking thing about the expense claims scandal in the UK is that it was totally ignored by the media, and while the public was preoccupied and outraged by the media blitz against the “evil” politicians, the bankers were quietly rewarding themselves with hefty bonuses while their stocks tanked in response to the backlash against Wall Street bankers in the US. What are the chances of these two events occurring simultaneously? The moral of the story is that human greed is insatiable!
Here in SA, the ones that engage in gutter politics have a lot to hide and even more to answer for!
Spot on
Well said, but FAR too politically correct. Re-write but go the attack that lurks between every line.
“The striking thing about the expense claims scandal in the UK is that it was totally ignored by the media”
How do we know about it then?
Makes no difference to the fact that, in politics, Zuma has injured himself and his ANC in a massive way that could never have been engineered by an opposition party.
Zuma has awakened the electorate who have previosly been intellectually lazy about politics, by giving them something to debate that they understand. All people in all walks of life are talking about the president and cementing their opinions. These opinions will survive the next twelve months until the 2011 provincial elections. The ANC has lost 50% of its traditional support base. If elections were held right now, the ANC would be slaughtered at the polls.
@Robard
Good catch, I misspoke by saying “totally ignored by the media”
Sorry, I actually meant to say “totally hyped by the media”.
Anyway, by now you should know what I mean!
I like the idea as written “If you want respect, ignore the peanut gallery and tell people how you plan to sort out their problems”.
The problem starts when it stays with planning only -ie no actual work being done to effect the planning.
This is a serious shortcoming in the ANC and can be seen to happen all over the country.
panchetta, i wonder what you base your “active” opinion on. These “lazy” people do not debate you simply because your issues are not their issues.
Yours is a conceptual approach to the realities of everyday life in SA, theirs is a coalface approach. So i guess im accusing you of intellectual laziness: stating an opinion as though it were fact