Long before I started watching the dismal soap opera that is our local politics, I regularly watched a famous one called Days of Our Lives.
At first, like many of us who spent our 20s in front of it, I watched to mock, rolling my eyes at the satanic levitations, mind control implants and apparent five-year age gap between mothers and their daughters.
As Days turned into weeks and then months, however, it all began to feel quite normal. Cartoonish caricatures became familiar acquaintances. Absurd storylines gradually seemed almost sensible. Even the dialogue, a parody of human speech, took on a shabbily pleasant theatricality.
My fellow DOOL watchers and I tried to stay hip and wry, but secretly we found ourselves starting to wonder: were the space twins in the glowing capsule really from space? Was the opera singer hiding in the swamp possibly the long-lost sister of her new boyfriend? And why, when you’re caught in a storm, and you seek shelter in a barn, and snuggle close to your forbidden love, do you always produce a baby about eight weeks later?
What we never asked, however, was: what happens next?
That seems strange given that soap operas are designed to keep you watching. But I learned that they don’t hook you by promising you new delights. They hook you by recycling old ones. That’s why, when she wasn’t being levitated by Satan, Marlena Evans was getting married over and over again — ten times in all, and six of those to the same priest-slash-mercenary John Black.
It was why I could miss a week and tune in to find the same evil imposter still undergoing the same face transplant. In classic soap opera, the pleasant, faintly diverting past is always recycled and reconstituted into an endless present.
Entirely wrapped up in that soothing, unthinking present, drawn in by the perpetual shenanigans of pantomime heroes and villains, we never needed to ask about what the future held, because we knew the answer: more of the same.
And when you stop imagining that the future might be different, you stop thinking about the future entirely.
Filmmaker Adam Curtis, whose latest documentary covers the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turmoil of Russia in the 1990s, was recently asked if he saw parallels between the implosion of that empire and the current state of the UK. After all, prompted the interviewer, the UK is also a crumbling empire, uncertain even of keeping the union intact, with a gloomy population getting poorer ruled over by a cabal of hypocrites getting richer.
Curtis wasn’t entirely sold on the comparison but said he could agree that Britain is similar to the USSR in one important way: while a great many citizens have lost faith in the system and in politics, few can imagine an alternative.
In the UK, Curtis suggested, this phenomenon was most clearly seen in the British media’s reaction to Rishi Sunak taking over from Liz Truss, where the overwhelming consensus, at least on the right, was that sense had prevailed and normality had returned.
This normality, says Curtis, is simply a return to the economics of David Cameron, which produced austerity, which in turn produced resentment of the EU, the rise of Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson, and finally the feverish premiership of Truss. In other words, says Curtis, the UK is stuck in a nightmarish policy loop because it can’t imagine a different future.
In Russia in the late 1980s, when the absurd Soviet soap opera finally ran out of money and was cancelled after almost a century on air, the impact was shattering: few Westerners, says Curtis, can imagine what it was like to experience an entire world simply vanishing in a couple of years, and then, still reeling, to watch the new hope — a free country with capitalist riches for all — curdle almost immediately into a hypercorrupt gangster state.
It was no wonder, therefore, that when Vladimir Putin took power he did not promise to take Russia into a daunting, abstract future. Instead, he promised a return to a beloved and proud past.
Here in SA we’re still bold and beautiful, young and restless, and properly sucked in. Every day I read about who’s done what, whether it’s Ramaphosa or Eskom or satanic levitation. Every day I accept that tomorrow’s episode will be exactly the same. And every day I am little less able to think about the future and imagine something different.
And yet I must. We all must. Voting isn’t enough: if all we vote for is something abstractly better than what we have now, we’ll soon end up with Mbeki 2.0, which means we’ll end up with Zuma 2.0. Or our very own Putin, version 1.0, stepping in to offer leadership, direction, and a slow retreat into the antidemocratic, patriarchal before-times that so many seem to find so appealing.
It goes without saying that the ANC must be removed from power in 2024. But if that is to be a true new beginning, and not simply the start of a new soap opera, we must all break free from the melodrama and this attention-grabbing, ambition-sapping present, and ask ourselves: what does “better” look like? Who is most likely to help create it? How can I help them?
Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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