SOB... Kant, cant, and the M&G

When "I was young and easy under the apple boughs/ About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green/", as Dylan Thomas might have said - in those good old days before I had to deal with late middle age and the medicines for diabetes type 2, the major aim of which appears to be erectile dysfunction - I used to fancy the opposite sex big time.

Oh yes. Poet John Berryman said it best in Dream Song 26 [Henry is the name of the protagonist in Berryman's very long poem, but you can replace Henry with Jeremy or John or JvR or Sad Days or Cicero or Gedleyihlekisa or Denis or David or Alec, or whatever name you like]: "All the knobs & softness of, my god, / the ducking & trouble it swarm on Henry, / at one time."

Nowadays of course, especially here in Seffrica, it seems, you're not supposed to say such things. One does not express one's unabashed admiration for the female gender - all the knobs and softness of, etcetera, the perfume of, and so on.

I suppose there is just so much violence and malevolence involved with cross-gender relations these days that, well, it's just frowned upon - and, if you go around saying the sort of things I've just been writing, well, you'll get a serious putsch on the tuchis, a serious tremolo on the derriere, from Lisa Vetten or Colleen Lawn Mower.

Anyway, one of the problems, as Berryman succinctly suggests, was all the ducking and diving one had to do - all the trouble that attended, like a swarm of bees, one's lustfulness and desire.

Why was this? Why did I find myself saying, like a latter-day Lenny Bruce, to one girlfriend: "I don't know what happened, really. I mean, this chick came into the flat wearing a sign around her neck that said ‘I have swine flu. Lie on top of me and keep me physically busy or I'll die'."

Or: "Listen, honey, you know that I was thinking of you the whole time." (How many times have you heard that one?)

Why couldn't I learn from the aforementioned Bruce (not to be confused in any way with the former editor of the Financial Mail or the present editor of Business Day)?

Lenny Bruce, the guy who wrote How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, used to say: "Whatever happens, deny it. Flat-out deny it! If you really love your wife, deny it. If they walk in on you, deny it. Even if they got pictures, deny it. Even if she catches you with a chicken, deny it." The trouble was that too many people, such as I, believed Jesus when he said in the New Testament (it's in John chapter 8, if I remember correctly) that the truth would set us free.

Most of us, you see, are deontologists (from the Greek deon, "obligation, duty"). We believe that acts are inherently good or evil, regardless of their consequences. Deontological theorists believe that we have, for example, a duty to tell the truth because it is inherently good to do so.

Deontologists who are also moral absolutists believe that some actions are wrong no matter what consequences follow from them. Immanuel Kant, for example, famously argued that it is always wrong to lie, even if a murderer is asking for the location of a potential victim.

Kant, cant, and I. This was why I always felt a driving need to tell the truth - and, why, when I didn't, I was always found out anyhow (my eyebrows would wiggle or my nose would twitch, or I would tell some sort of outlandish story - see above).

But there was no need to tell the so-called truth! One just has to give it the time test - now, 30 years later, it doesn't matter whether X or Y happened, and if my pesky ex-fiancée hadn't been so insistent, she would never have known, and everyone would have lived happily ever after anyway.

I have been musing on such deep ethical issues ever since reading a remarkable piece in the Mail & Guardian by an alleged journalist called Sello Alcock (aka Selebi). Alcock also wrote a remarkable piece the previous week about Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe.

According to the judge - who clearly has a torrid time with the media, as well as just about everyone else - he never said certain things that Alcock claimed he had said.

"It's all cock!" the judge ejaculated angrily.

One thing that Hlophe is said to have said was that he would never shake Chief Justice Pius Langa's hand because he would thereby be shaking the hand of a white man. (Confused? Yes, me too - and apparently Hlophe as well.)

Hlophe denied he had said this.

Another thing Hlophe is alleged to have said was that King Goodwill Zwelithini had been exiled to protect him from Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi's shenanigans.

Hlophe also denied he had said this.

So far, so good. Or: so far, so bad. He said; he said.

But then this Alcock fellow writes a piece - and, what's more, his editor allows him to do so - in which he writes (and I quote): "I ...decided not to take notes during the interview, but rather to transcribe the conversation immediately [sic] after it took place. I now think that was a mistake."

You think?

I also think it was an even bigger mistake to tell the "truth", china, whichever of Kant's works you might have been reading on the flight to Cape Town.

You just don't lead with your chin when you've stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson. It's not good for your health. Same goes when you're dealing with the Judge President of the Western Cape. Jeez, buddy, you have to keep pretending for as long as you can that you recorded the conversation on your cell phone. This guy is now going to eat you before breakfast.

The story gets even better. The M&G editor, young Nic Dawes, who was shaping up nicely, I thought, as a half-decent editor, wrote an editorial defending his wayward son. In it, he wrote: "In hindsight, perhaps we should have insisted ... on the reporter being allowed to take notes."

Well, ja, Nic, since it was run as an interview, and since certain of the judge's words were placed between quotation marks, it might have made sense for the reporter to have made notes.

Dawes continued: "This episode has again underlined why Hlophe is grossly ill-suited for [the position of judge at the Constitutional Court], or indeed any judicial office."

Why? Because a reporter wrote down later - how much later? - what he thought he remembered Hlophe saying - they had dinner and drinks, yes? - some of which makes little sense (why would Hlophe refer to Chief Justice Pius Langa as a white man?), or suggests in any case that the Judge President might have had too much to drink. As might the reporter perhaps?

No, no, this won't do. A quiet analysis of the life and times of Judge Hlophe suggests that the judge is a massive pain in the posterior. Nonetheless, he is entitled to more professional treatment than this sort of codswallop and cant.

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