Give a politician a bad name and hang him, we might have said, taking a variation of the old English adage, affording a reprieve for our canine friends. For sure, in the real world, dogs need much less consideration and empathy than their colleagues in parliament, and practice has shown us that it is these latter that will always hanker after a favourable press even when their actions are deplorable.
But then I incline to take some of what I have been made to lap up with a ladle of salt, for sometimes you do not know what leg to stand on. Is it not the Bard who taught us to ask the question “What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2).
To complicate matters a little further, you might want to listen to the maverick Irish poet Oscar Wilde, who weighed in with his mantra: “The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to work with one. It is the only thing he is fit for”.
Now, one may want to leave such considerations of linguistic discourse to the experts of Albion’s vernacular and keep to the workaday requirements of our dreary lives, being ordinary mortals and not poets.
Politicians love to be loved, and that is why they spend a lot of time and humongous treasures to publicise and extoll their virtues, even when it is obvious they have none.
In a way, it is almost natural that they do so, because if they did not have such enlarged egos, how would they ever get into their skulls the notion that they are the best for their society, community or nation? How could anyone have the idea that, having assessed their people’s problems and needs, and having surveyed the political landscape, they and only they were marked out as liberators?
The messiah complex comes naturally to such people, regardless of their levels of megalomania. And, in their sometimes-perceived madness, they attract adherents, including people who swear by their names and those prepared to lay down their very lives for them. Any number of hanged bandits would have become prophets had their efforts borne fruits in their lifetimes.
Part of what I am saying has something to do with Donald Trump, who has been given such bad names—some of them willed on him by himself—that if he were our proverbial dog, he would have been hanged many times over.
In 2012, Aaron James wrote a book with an unprintable name, in which he describes Trump as an exemplar of the persona of an individual entitled to what he wants, everywhere and all the time like every day is his birthday.
Elsewhere he has been described as a racist, a fascist, a liar, a bully, a misogynist, a narcissist, a bigot…the lexicon continues to expand.
Just think of it: the man who is now serving him so enthusiastically as vice president (JD Vance) once likened him to Hitler; another was his Secretary of State (Rex Tillerson) when he was overheard calling his president “a moron”.
He loves it because for many politicians the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity. Also, negative exposure excites, provokes, galvanises and polarises, and that is political capital.
It would be hard to imagine the January 6 hordes on Capitol Hill without crank heads with a messianic mission to accomplish, and maybe even Mike Pence, (whom the baying barbarians wanted to lynch) would have died a happy man, unlike Nancy Pelosi.
Yes, Trump is a human wrecking ball straight out of the cauldron of the American experience that spans: the Native American holocaust; the slave trade; the Civil War; the Ku Klux Klan; Jim Crow; Vietnam… to Tom and Jerry. He, not his detractors, is the blended, quintessential American.
And now that he has found a soulmate in another fascist in
Elon Musk, the two are going to reorder the world before they go to Mars. First on their to-do list will be light things like Panama and Greenland—low-hanging fruits—then slightly harder propositions, like Gaza and South Africa, where the Apartheid model will need to be recalibrated and finetuned.
This is how: Now that Gaza has already been razed to the ground (courtesy of Israel’s military) all it needs is efficient earthmoving operations and landscaping to allow real-estate developers to parcel up pieces of land and let the designers create rivieras in the Middle East while Gazans go to Egypt, or Jordan. Or Galapagos
South Africa could be a harder nut to crack—Julius Malema makes too much noise—but remember the Americans have just let loose upon the world a felon with multiple convictions—not by the International Criminal Court but by American municipal courts—and do you think they will give a hoot if he claims Gaza for Netanyahu and Orange Free State for Musk? After all, these are simply real-estate considerations, and Cyril Ramaphosa has displayed a penchant for profit that the African National Congress never knew.
If you think all this is fantastical, pause and remember that before May 14, 1948, there was no piece of land called Israel.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam.
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