A FAMOUS GROUSE

Matthew Parris, former Tory MP turned columnist and broadcaster, has penned a curious article on Afrikaners in the latest edition of The Spectator. They have been “endlessly maligned”, he argues, and made a scapegoat for the politics and practice of white supremacy. “They do not deserve this,” he adds. “And they have nowhere else to go.” (His italics.)

It certainly seems as if Parris had travelled to the ends of the earth for grist to this particular mill; he says he started the column during an overnight stay “in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province”. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Ignore, if you can, the fact that there hasn’t been a Cape Province since 1994; we all know the part of the country he’s talking about — and yet it seems strangely foreign, as if drawn from another time and another world altogether:

“To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and windswept scrubland plateau, flat as far as the eye can see but cut by deep, rocky canyons tight with the most intense and diverse profusion of succulents on the planet: flowering aloes, spiky aloes, furry aloes, ground-creeping aloes and the strange giant palm-like aloe, the Quiver Tree.

“Jostling among them, the thorn bushes are murderous. You’d be mad, heroic or both to farm here, but our hosts do, grazing sheep over their thousands of hectares watered only by a couple of wind-pumps with drinking troughs. Scorched by day, frozen by night, to make your life here you’d need either to believe in Destiny with a capital D, or to have no choice. Both are true of our Afrikaner hosts: on their shelves are devotional paperbacks and a game called Bible Charades; above my bed a sweet farmyard painting illustrating Psalm 23, though its owners have hardly been led beside the still waters. Their church, I assume, will be South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC).”

This benighted corner of the country seems an odd place to learn about Afrikaners. I’ve met quite a few of them myself over the years and can, with some conviction, state that the overwhelming majority of them are not 19th century Calvinist throwbacks scratching a living in the arid scrub. Many live in the cities, do not farm and are quite rubbish at Bible Charades.

Parris nonetheless claims that he met “many such white families, all Afrikaners”, as he travelled on “both sides of the great Orange River”. These were people who earned their living in the “toughest of environments” and all devoted to the land of their birth.

“Their nationality is South African,” he states. “The Netherlands lost interest in them two centuries ago. The British mistreated and made war on them, incarcerated them in concentration camps where tens of thousands died, robbed them of the independence for which they’d fought, and have looked down on them and their culture ever since. Since the end of World War Two the wider world has regarded Afrikaners as pariahs: the architects of apartheid.”

It’s worth pointing out that Parris is a child of Empire. He was born in Johannesburg in 1949 to British parents but spent his boyhood in what was then Rhodesia, where he was raised with an “unthinking disregard for Afrikaners” and, along with other English children, was “imbued with the prejudice that they would tend to be oafs: the Boers were boors”.

He offers readers a “potted history” from an Afrikaner perspective. It’s all a bit like the stuff I was taught at school. Very Voortrekker-centric — and quite damning of the British, who expressed little interest in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State until the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. The war that followed in 1899 was a “shameful episode in British history, little dwelt upon in our classrooms”.

The enormity of British perfidy continued to fuel Afrikaner rage even after Jan Christian Smuts “achieved a post-second-world-war reconciliation” and, in 1948, the Nationalist Party took power. “Apartheid was born,” Parris bluntly states. 

This is not entirely correct; the term may have been coined by Paul Sauer, the NP chairman at the time of the 1948 elections, but the policy had in effect been in practice for decades; black South Africans were exploited for cheap labour on the goldfields from the get-go. The concentration camps may have been a British invention, but so too were the single sex men’s hostels on the mines.

That said, Parris has now “come to admire these people” and their “considerable literature and poetry, the many brave internal dissidents their culture produced, and their unquenched farming spirit in hostile landscapes that others spurn”.

Judging by the comments below his piece, most readers appear to agree with his sentiments. But, as for others, well, some are firmly of the Jacob Rees-Mogg ilk (“dirty Boers”) and others whine on about Nazis.

Ultimately, though, I couldn’t help wondering whether being patronised was as bad as being maligned.

TDS

My critics say I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. It’s a common condition among those who believe a lying and broken-brained grifter, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a raging narcissist, an aliterate xenophobe with fascist leanings and a golf cheat to boot may not be the ideal sort of person to lead the free world.

For what it’s worth, I would argue that symptoms of derangement and irrational behaviour are way more pronounced in those who insist that such a person is, in fact, precisely the right person for the job. 

These people are unwell. You may recall how Donald Trump’s cheerleaders piled into the 17-year-old son of Tim Walz, the Democrat vice president nominee. 

Gus Walz, who has a nonverbal learning disorder and suffers from anxiety and ADHD, had been listening to his father’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As Kamala Harris’s running mate spoke of his love for his family, his son leapt to his feet and, with tears streaming down his face, shouted out, “I love you, Dad!” and “That’s my dad!”

Many Americans were moved by this spontaneous demonstration of affection that was captured on live TV. The reaction from the Maga faithful however was markedly different. 

New Jersey podcaster Mike Crispi mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X (formerly Twitter), adding, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.” Crispi then added, “Does Barron Trump cry? Nope. Does he love his father? Of course. That’s the type of values I want leading the country.”

The Chicago-based radio host Jay Weber reportedly tweeted, “If the Walzs [sic] represent today’s American man, this country is screwed: ‘Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud’.”

Another podcaster, Alec Lace, tweeted, “Get that kid a tampon already.” This being an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law Walz signed as governor requiring schools to provide free menstrual products to students.

The conservative columnist and hard-right provocateur Ann Coulter also mocked the boy. “Talk about weird…” she tweeted. 

The backlash from moderate Republicans was considerable. Many of these sneering posts were hastily deleted and best ignored. Coulter’s post, though, is noteworthy as it reaffirms Republicans’ frustration with Trump’s inability to defend himself against the charge that he and his running mate, JD Vance, are simply “weird”. 

It is, at the best of times, an ineffectual term. But in this context it is a powerful electioneering weapon. As the Financial Times columnist Jemima Kelly pointed out, this is now a defining word of the presidential campaign. Walz introduced it in July, even before he became vice-presidential nominee, telling MSNBC, “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. Don’t sugarcoat this, these are weird ideas. Listen to them speak, listen to how they talk about things.”

The word stuck and the Democrats and their supporters have run with it to great advantage. It has clearly rattled Trump, and his attempts to dismiss the label are dismal. Last week, for example, he told a rally in Wisconsin:

“[Walz] is weird, right? He’s weird. I’m not weird. He’s weird … See, they come up with sound bites, they always have sound bites, and one of the things is that JD and I are weird. We’re not — that guy [Vance] is so straight . . . He’s doing a great job, smart, top student, great guy, and he’s not weird and I’m not weird. I mean we’re a lot of things but we’re not weird.”

The great irony about Trump’s opposition to the word, as Kelly points out, is that his “natural weirdness” is a large part of his appeal. “It makes him come across as authentic, and means that he is entertaining and instantly recognisable. So why is he so bothered by it, and why is it so effective?”

She suggests a number of reasons: the label is simply funny, it’s devoid of “moral grandstanding” and it flips the Trump attack line that it is his opponents, American liberals and anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, who are the nut jobs threatening democracy. (This is an opinion endorsed by Elon Musk, the Space Karen, so there must be something in it, not so?)

“It comes down to this: the Democrats are currently beating Trump at his own game,” Kelly writes. “The intellectualising, the moralising, the hysteria over Trump’s threat to world stability — all of that was too dull and depressing and too obviously partisan to be persuasive. Cackling at him and his ‘cat lady’-obsessed running mate, though — now that’s something that everyone can get on board with.”

That cackling, if I may, is striking home. Trump is used to being the bully. His insults about his opponents (“Sleepy Joe”, “Low energy Jeb Bush”, John “Gone on to Greener Pastures” McCain) have worked in the past, but he’s struggling now. The current crop of slurs (“Laffin’ Kamala”) are failing, futile attempts at nastiness that have been parodied in the satirical magazine Private Eye:

“I’m here to unite this beautiful country behind my new nicknames for the Democrats. Remember Sleepy Joe. Not even he does! FACT! Crooked Hillary — that was a good one! Altogether now: ‘Lock me up!’ And what about Barack Obama. He used to be black, now he’s Irish. Barack O’Bama! Make your mind up! Anyway, I’ve got new ones. You’ll like these. Forget ‘Laffin’ Kamala’ and ‘Lying Kamala’. How about; ‘Kambalaya-crawfishpie-and-a-filé-gumbo!’ No one’s going to forget that. Unlike her, she’s gonna be history. And how about her new running mate? Some white kid. I mean, he’s only 60! What’s he ever done. Okay — teacher, football coach, national guardsman. Just like me — if I hadn’t had the bone spurs. The guy’s called Tim Walz. You know what I call him — ‘Walz ice cream!’ Cos he’s soft and he’s gonna melt and he’s Flakey. We need to Build a Wall! To keep Walz out! A big beautiful wall. I like sharks. Sharks like ice cream. Who doesn’t? Hannibal Lecter he likes beans…”

It was the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson who coined the motto, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” It doesn’t appear to apply to Trump though. Monday was Labour Day in the US, which traditionally marks the start of the last leg of American presidential campaigns. From here on in, the race to the White House usually becomes markedly more intense. 

A lot hinges on Tuesday’s Trump-Harris debate. The more seasoned Republican Party members will be hoping that, for once, Trump will lay off the personal insults and talk about policy. 

The economy, his advisers say. Home in on that, for example, it’s strong stuff. You could beat Harris with that.

But it’s unlikely that Trump will change tack. Innately contrarian, he only takes counsel to chart a course in the opposite direction. It’s worked for him in the past, but it’s different now. When the going gets weird, you could say, the weird just get a whole lot weirder.