It’s been a startling few days, not least for the great and the good (and also some ANC people) roped into Cyril Ramaphosa’s National Dialogue™ (terms and condition apply), who learnt over the weekend that the process will cost about R700m, presumably because their musings will be engraved directly onto sheets of platinum.
According to Mduduzi Mbada, deputy president Paul Mashatile’s chief of staff, the reason for this price tag is that “democracy is not cheap”, which is, I suppose, why the Guptas paid so much for it when they bought it from some of Mashatile’s current and former colleagues.
(Normally at this point I would make a few more jokes about Mashatile, but given that his security detail has neither a sense of humour nor, apparently, any requirement to obey the law, I will move swiftly along.)
Speaking of people who have turned cognitive dissonance into an art form, it’s also been quite something to watch Israeli officials, drenched in the blood and ash of thousands of Palestinian women and children in Gaza, denouncing Iran for firing munitions into populated areas.
They say there are no winners in war, but it’s now fairly clear that when Benjamin Netanyahu looked up into the night sky this weekend he would have seen not Iranian missiles raining down but manna straight from heaven.
On Monday, likewise, when Iran suggested it might leave the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and, like Israel, develop nuclear weapons off the books, it would have been yet more proof to Netanyahu that there is a god.
Given all these spectacles of human weakness, wickedness and wilful self-delusion, it’s no wonder that poor old Youth Day shuffled past so quietly here.
At least Florida Republican congressman Randy Fine has it all figured out, as he demonstrated when he tweeted “I want to congratulate Israel on its mostly peaceful bombing of Iran.”
Granted, it sounds a bit Orwellian, but before you mock, consider that this is the same man who had “Regards from Randy Fine” written on three artillery shells before they were fired into Gaza, and who also called for the strip to be destroyed by nuclear weapons. In other words, it’s possible that “peaceful bombings” do actually exist in the universe in which Fine floats like a morality-free tardigrade.
Given all these spectacles of human weakness, wickedness and wilful self-delusion, it’s no wonder that poor old Youth Day shuffled past so quietly here. To be fair, we’re not the only ones with hoopla fatigue: when the heart of the military-industrial complex stages a parade like the one that dribbled past Donald Trump on Saturday — less a show of force than an evening ramble by some very well-equipped re-enactors — it’s fairly clear that the keepers and boosters of national myths need some new material.
But Youth Day seems to have become exceptionally threadbare as the last traces of its former nobility are stripped away by the ever more absurd and transparent ritual of our governing gerontocracy wheeling out nothing but the rhetoric that’s been stale for a quarter of a century; each year adding nothing but another layer of mould, another year of slow-blinking, slow-chewing consumption as it makes its true feelings about the youth ever clearer.
After all, actions speak louder than words, and by its actions and inactions these last many years the ANC-led state told us exactly where it stands on young people: the teenagers of 1976 were heroes, revolutionaries and nation-builders, but the teenagers of 2010 or 2020 or 2030 … well they’re a complex issue that needs honest and careful discussion, say, R700m worth of discussion.
And if that doesn’t work you can always do it again in 10 years. I mean, it’s not as if the teens are going anywhere, right?
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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