S.O.B.

Those readers who like to skip the really interesting stuff in the SOB column (and there are a quite few of you) may now move directly to paragraph 13 below...

One thing that has been made abundantly clear to me during my long and interesting life is that if I ever give up my day job (whatever it might be), one thing I should not give it up for is singing. Dancing, maybe (so Robyn Orlin said); writing e-mails, maybe; but not singing.

That singing is not my forte has generally been pointed out to me by someone of the other sex and it has usually been on a gorgeous summer's day on that lovely road that runs around the Cape coast from Muizenberg to Kalk Bay and St James.

The reason for this is that, as I have steered my luxury German vehicle with the built-in sauna into St James, I have never been able to stop myself from singing, "I went down to St James Infirmary/To see my baby lyin' there".

Ja, I know there's apparently no "lyin'" in the second line - but to hell with Wikipedia, that's the way I sing it.

And I would keep singing it - loudly too - all the way to Simonstown. It marked the end of many a potentially beautiful relationship as definitely as a stake through the heart.

Do you know this old and touching blues song? Oddly, I have never heard the Louis Armstrong version but the Dave Van Ronk one. According to the aforementioned Wikipedia, "The title of the song is derived from St James Hospital in London, which was a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy. ...‘St. James Infirmary Blues' is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called ‘The Unfortunate Rake' ... [which is about] a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease.

"Different versions of the song expand on this theme, where in general, variations typically feature a narrator telling the story of a youth who is ‘cut down in his prime' (occasionally her prime) as a result of some morally questionable actions."

The first stanza of the best-known versions runs as follows: "I went down to St James Infirmary,/Saw my baby there,/Set down on a long white table,/ So sweet, so cold, so fair."

It is one of the most chillingly touching first stanzas of all time. But then it continues (in most versions): "Let her go, let her go, God bless her,/ Wherever she may be,/ She can look this wide world over,/She'll never find a sweet man like me."

Do you get it? I don't. The scene is set - his "baby" is dead. As far as my generation was concerned, she had clearly died from an overdose. But then the (so to speak) narrator turns narcissistic and says his baby will never find a sweet man such as he. But who cares about him? It's she whom we care about.

It's a glitch. Our credibility gets suspended. There's disturbance in the force. We shall perhaps return to such disturbances.

(This is paragraph 13.) In the meantime, let me say that on Wednesday midday I did not go down to St James infirmary. I went instead to a building on the west campus of Wits University.

The reason was that, with strangely little fanfare, it seemed that our former president Thabo Mbeki was going to deliver a lecture entitled "A futurist's perspective: Legacy leadership and the challenges faced by young emerging leaders". And it had been organised by the Association of Black Securities and Investment Professionals (ABSIP).

I wasn't sure what the title meant but I'm not sure what many of the titles of many of the lectures at Wits mean. And I wasn't sure either if the professionals of ABSIP were actuaries or security guards.

Anyway, notwithstanding having done all the correct things (phoned to reserve a seat), there was no way into the hall for the likes of me. Chock-a-block. Organisationally, a balls-up. Even members of the fourth estate were being turned away.

Why not the great hall for such an obviously popular and important personage? Why such poor pre-publicity? I don't know. I guess because it was organised by the ABSIPs. But even if it had been organised by "the university", I think it might also have been a mess. Even if it had been organised by the ANC, it might have been disorganised. [O shut up you fat fool and get with it - Ed.]

A few years ago, when it might have been my job to get in, I might have used my elbows and all the skills I learned as a young man boarding buses in Israel. But nowadays ... my learned colleague Masibulele Yaso and I trekked back up the hill in the direction of caffeine.

Now, then, what did the former president say? Well, according to the learned and comely Fienie Grobler of Sapa, Mbeki criticised outgoing SA reserve bank governor Tito "just call me gov" Mboweni for not providing adequate leadership to prevent the global financial crisis.

"The effective exercise of leadership must, in part, be based on as thorough an understanding as possible of objective reality," Mbeki said, according to Ms G.

I know that my generation - or some of its members - has tried to fiddle with reality, either via Mary Jane or booze or magic mushrooms. But, notwithstanding such attempts at creating a subjective reality, surely "reality" is by definition "objective" - it's the reality that exists independently of our perceptions and thoughts.

Besides, why would our former leader bash poor old Tito? I mean, one can blame, say, Jacob Zuma for most things. But you can't blame Tito for the world financial meltdown. Or can you?

These questions having been raised in my inquiring mind, I therefore have been studying for some hours Mbeki's speech, which is available on the Net.

It's actually - if I might say so - a pretty good speech, albeit too long and slightly laboured. It's also a derivative speech - the former president is not an original thinker and he quotes more people than Xolela Mangcu on a bad day. But no matter; Mbeki seems to read a great deal - and he reads some pretty interesting stuff - and he cobbles the stuff together cogently (it's a carefully-argued speech). Above all, it's actually a moving speech.

He does indeed talk about "objective reality": what Mbeki is saying in a long-winded way is that if you don't know what the hell is going on - how the economy works, for example - well, you can't be a decent leader, can you?

And how the economy actually works - not the way we would like it to work - is what Mbeki calls "objective reality". And where people such as Mboweni went wrong, in Mbeki's opinion, is they didn't pay sufficient attention to "objective reality" and therefore failed to make "interventions" that they should have made.

Mbeki then goes on - it is, as I have said, not a short speech - to quote (as he has before) George "tsuris" Soros: "Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system - which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society - is liable to break down...

"There has been an ongoing conflict between market values and other, more traditional value systems, which has aroused strong passions and antagonisms. As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of non-market values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them.

"Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor."

Mbeki: "The point we are making is that the Young Emerging Leaders will also have to take on the difficult task of mediating the processes immanent to [maybe he meant "immanent in"] the capitalist system which Takaki and Soros described, exactly because it must be the central task of these Leaders to help build the ‘just civil society' to which Fulker referred."

To cut a long story short, what Mbeki was saying was: a lot of those f***ers out there failed the poorest of the poor because they didn't simply pay proper attention; and, secondly, that money lust and greed has run amuck so much so that no one seems to have any values left.

A moving speech, as I said. But here's the thing. As I said up late at night pondering Mbeki's words, my credibility would not settle down and be quiet. There was that disturbance in the force.

Mbeki talks on the one hand about objective reality. But then there's his attitude to HIV-Aids or to crime or, for that matter, to Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Billy Masetlha and/or Vusi Pikoli.

Mbeki talks on the one hand about having respect for the most miserable (to use a quote from Bernard Malamud). But then there's those people with AIDS or the Zimbabweans or the people whose bodies and souls have been crippled by violent crime.

And then think about some of the objective realities that poked their ugly little snouts above the rims of the rubbish bins just this week.

In his report on the SABC, the auditor-general Terrence Nombembe mentioned that 11 senior managers clocked up R11,3-million in fuel claims between January 2007 and August this year, while former chief executive Dali Mpofu signed a contract for R326-million with a consultant in September 2006 even though he did not have the authority to do so.

One of the other findings in the 72-page report was irregularities in the awarding of seven tenders, valued at R174-million, between September 2007 and June 2009. Those are just some of the things the AG mentioned. And while Mbeki obviously cannot be blamed for the venality of others, all this happened on his watch and in "his" SABC.

Then there's the much-vaunted "crime figures", finally released. As someone from one of the less affluent suburbs in Johannesburg remarked, "War zones have fewer killings than SA."

We have just more than 18 000 murders a year, which means about 50 a day. And this is in turn a result - albeit partially - of the Mbeki administration's attitude, its refusal to commit more and better resources, and its appointment of bozos to the two key positions.

The poet WH Auden had a strangely mystical ending to his poem, The Fall of Rome. "Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast."

I've never known what Auden meant exactly and (clearly) I am no mystic. But, reflecting on Mbeki's speech, I had this vision of myself, an ordinary Seffrican, walking along a dusty road, not too unhappy in the sun and dust - when suddenly two huge slavering boerboels, the objective realities of life, came out of nowhere and ripped my arse to shreds. And I had to start looking around for St James Infirmary.

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