I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Congress of the People: a political obituary
I NEED to collect my black suit from the dry cleaners today because I am attending a funeral service tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit tender, however, so I am not sure I’ll have the strength to attend. But it is going to be a huge funeral service and as someone who was not very close to the deceased, I might, at the risk of sounding macabre, get away with not being missed.
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
The 18 -month-old toddler, who passed away recently due, officially, to spontaneous combustion, was known as the Congress of the People (COPE).
His birth was a popular affair in December 2008, so you too might have known a little bit about him through occasional press coverage. It is only fitting to write my own political obituary of this unexpected passing, considering I may not be able to attend tomorrow. But before I do so, I sadly have to berate the various family members for their unnecessary squabbling, at the time of writing this column entry, about the funeral arrangements. It seems that COPE’s family cannot even find dignity in death.
Usually, one would expect family members to set aside differences during a time that should be devoted to mourning. If necessary, you should fake family unity for the sake of giving the loved one a dignified send-off. Not so with COPE’s parents.
COPE was very much a New SA black boy. He was a would-be coconut complete with two middle-class fathers, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa , proud to be in a same-sex political union with joint custody over their son. This rainbow, and rainbow nation, story went south very quickly, however.
The family is now split into two camps. Some support daddy one (the angry one), while others support daddy two (the calm one). Things have turned so nasty that they are even disputing when to bury little COPE’s lifeless body. There are three different family views on how long to wait before releasing COPE to the ancestors.
Some think they should keep the corpse until December. Others think it should happen tomorrow. Others, in their turn, are in such denial they think that COPE has not actually died but will live to see through both the 2011 and 2014 national political festivities that are called our local and national elections. This last group includes, as you might have expected, people who also remain convinced that rumours of Elvis Presley’s death are grossly exaggerated. They are in denial. But something like AIDS denialism is one thing, but to imagine that death itself is a social construct ... that’s so not ayoba.
My advice to the family is that they ask an ancestor to help them confirm, first , whether COPE really is dead and, second , when an appropriate date for burial will be: tomorrow, December 2010, some time in 2011 or maybe even in 2014. The family would do well to put these questions to one of their most learned ancestors, the politically late Thabo Mbeki .
So where did it all go wrong? I, for one, am not convinced that COPE died of spontaneous combustion. That’s a family cover-up. But, of course, we all resort to little lies once someone is no more. Brutus, you will recall, was an honourable man. If I was forced to offer a pithy but, despite social convention, brutally honest obituary tomorrow , I would perform the following soliloquy:
On November 1 2008, surrounded by the promise of upward mobility in Johannesburg’s posh northern suburb of Sandton, COPE’s imminent birth was announced. The birth itself only happened weeks later in Bloemfontein. Bloemfontein was chosen by COPE’s parents in an attempt to cover up the elite family’s Living Standards Measures bracket. Everyone was excited. While some believed that the seeds of one Thabo Mbeki would be evident in the newborn’s face and mannerisms, this was not the case.
For one thing, the new kid was very friendly to all and sundry; even Mbeki-averse white aunties gave up their business careers to help raise the new Messiah. There was much promise of a bright future with an instant personality thrust upon the youngster: progressive, nonracial, social democrat, liberal, a force for good....
The early days were that of a happy childhood. But soon the kid fell ill. Problem? He was not allowed to grow into a personality of his own. Far from spontaneously combusting, the vivacious little youngster was secretly dying a slow death due to getting an overdose of this and that medicine, all of which made him sick. One dad wanted nonracialism to the point of scrapping affirmative action. Another wanted to retain the feeding trough for black tenderpreneurs. Some wanted a left-of-centre state that does not tell Nozipho in Diepsloot to pull herself up by her white madam’s old bootstraps. Others wanted a smaller state that gives Nozipho the incentives to make her own bootstraps.
Simply put, the youngster died because everyone forced themselves on to him. And so things went. In the end, asphyxiation did him in.
COPE is survived by two feuding daddies and 1,3-million orphaned voters
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