Africa's convulsions reverberate, on aged Somali skiffs, and in deadly Gripens.
The bad attitude virus
Instant karma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
- John Lennon.
In 2004, if the Internet is to be trusted, Eric Clapton put together a CD titled Me and Mr Johnson. Given that my Son of Bliksem/Son of a Bitch (SOB) column of last Friday was titled Peter Bruce, Karen Bliksem and me, and because this column involves someone called Johnson (RW or "Bill", as his friends call him), perhaps this column should be called Mr Johnson and me.
Interestingly too - though I know some readers hate my digressions like rat poison - Clapton is alleged to have had a flirtation with the English skinheads. The relevance of this is that "our" Johnson (Billy boy or RW) has also over the years, like many former lefties or quasi-lefties, drifted so far rightwards that he's scratched the hubcaps of his battered ideological vehicle against the pavement on the far side of the road.
But if I use the Clapton title, I suppose Tymon "of Athens" Smith of the Times (the local fish wrap) will come after me for plagiarism. Geez, I have a tough life.
Anyway, there I was on Tuesday morning, doing some forced and unexpected research for my (other) forthcoming book (on service delivery). What happened was that a man arrived at the gate clutching a piece of paper which he claimed gave him the right to cut off the electricity for non-payment.
Knowing that a gentle answer turneth away wrath, and might even keep the lights burning and the washing machine chugging a little longer, I invited him in and said I would have given him a cup of tea if there had been water in the pipes.
But there wasn't any water, he wanted to curtail the power, and my wife wanted a divorce: Tuesday was a truly Seffrican day. I was then about to examine the papers in the man's hand to see if his mandate was for real, when the phone trilled. It was not Bobby Godsell or Jacob Maroga but was the person at Independent Newspapers who these days assists Blikskottel.
"Ho, ho, ho," he said, "you crass, puerile and hugely self-regarding - not just self-regarding, but hugely self-regarding - little wanker..."
"What?!" I expostulated, unused to such language from an elderly, bearded fellow who's generally punctiliously polite and actually bought me an Appletizer at his club just the other day.
It turned out that Bill Johnson had written an e-mail to Business Day - a public place, nogal, read by my friends (both of them), my enemies (their name is Legion), my publisher (who might wish to be placed in the former category), my children (both of them), and my creditors (their name is also Legion and includes, apparently, the city of Joeys).
In this public letter, he had uttered the above vile words about me - crass, puerile, hugely self-regarding, self-indulgent, and so forth.
I remembered Charlie Citrine, a character from one of my favourite books, Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, saying that "to be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine".
But Humboldt was based on Delmore Schwartz the poet, a talented, erudite and basically kind man, none of which attributes can be attached to our Bill.
How shall I describe Johnson?
Bill is, I suppose, a sort of soutie's Rian Malan, if you follow my drift. He went to Oxford and all that tiresome tiddley-pom and is unfortunately way more audible than Malan, talking in a hugely irritating and grating RP (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC or former BBC) accent. He is also, alas, the owner of one of the world's leading limp handshakes.
But not everything about him is negative. R Suresh Roberts, one of our leading and best comedians, went through a period of trying to savage Johnson (during which time, by the way, I manfully protected Johnson - this was on the pages of The Sunday Independent (TSI), before the Rinderpest) - and if Roberts has ever attacked you, well, you can't be all bad. QED.
Johnson does not, however, write anywhere near as well as Malan because no one does, except Nadine Gordimer, Maureen Isaacson of TSI, and the aforementioned Roberts.
It seemed to me, then, that the best thing to do was to ignore Johnson. But, as is commonly known, Bill's been through a very tough time; obviously doesn't have a great deal to do at the minute (or why bother with the likes of me?); and so clearly wants some attention.
Moreover, it's all very well to insult me publicly. Everyone does that; it's de rigueur. But Bill went further and attacked Politicsweb - in another publication, nogal (does he imagine he's Jim Jones?) - by stating that he "used to be a regular Politicsweb reader until Mr Gordin started writing for it".
This is serious stuff. I know that on Tuesday night, at Politicsweb, meetings were held until late. Those responsible for strategy and public affairs burned the proverbial midnight oil, trying to work out how the site was going to survive if Bill Johnson was not going to be reading it. I tossed and turned as well.
I thought therefore that rather than offering a cheap and nasty riposte - and very funny ones do spring to mind, but I must be strong, dear Lord, I must be strong - I should rather treat Johnson seriously and analyse his letter and consider his motives.
The learned David Beresford, the former Grauniad correspondent in this land, and also someone given to kicking me smartly in the unmentionables from time to time, once remarked that Bill's latest book, South Africa's Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (it's what Charles Dickens would have called a portmanteau title), was "a record of pretty well every piece of unsubstantiated gossip to have circulated in South Africa's rumour mills" for the last decade or so.
I never went to an Oxbridge university, but I nevertheless deconstruct this to mean that our Bill sometimes plays a trifle fast and loose with the facts and evidence. And indeed in his letter, he mentions something about helping a hack "who's down and out".
I am unsure who this hack is supposed to be. Is it Peter Bruce, Karen Bliksem, or me? Because, as best I know (though, unlike Bill, I don't always know everything), I am neither down nor out, notwithstanding the city of Johannesburg's misunderstanding of debits, credits and payments. In fact, despite diabetes type 2, the general vicissitudes of age, having to "work" for a living and not smoking, and my wife resolutely refusing to read anything that I have written or am writing, I am, like Shakespeare's Mercutio, "in the very pinke".
Then Johnson talks about my "lavatorial" humour. This puzzled me for a long while. I had no idea about what he was rabbiting on. But I woke in the middle of the night realising it was a reference to Bruce's reference to my reference to something said by my new hero, Eric "goddamn it" Cartman of South Park.
That's not lavatorial, Bill. You souties, and Natalians who went to those boys' schools in the midlands, really do have some queer notions about these matters. Bill, "lavatorial" is related to faeces, farts, micturition, and such-like. Germans (particularly from the eastern part of the reich), if I might generalise, generally like this sort of joke. Performing oral sex on a donkey and his testes is, however, from an altogether different sector of the humour spectrum. Vide Freud on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
And not only is Johnson inaccurate, he's unfair. Think about it. Crass - well, ok. I can be pretty crass. Puerile (from the Latin, "puer", a boy) - well, I can accept that. Self-indulgent? Ja, well, at 57 you're allowed to be a little self-indulgent, or so my shrink tells me. Self-regarding? Also okay. But hugely self-regarding? C'mon, Bill. You really know how to hurt a guy, don't you?
Now what about motive? I'm at a loss here. I've never done anything to the fellow. I enjoyed his latest book - I love gossip as much as JG Zuma does - and read with admiration his first one, How Long Will South Africa Survive?
I actually read resolutely through How long while I was in the army - and, believe me, I was hugely busy just then, unsuccessfully trying to ensure that Seffrica would survive. Heavens to betsy, I put Johnson on my bookshelf, next to the books of Julius Lewin, Edgar Brookes and Karl Marx. What else does this oke want from me?
Last year, about this time, Johnson called and asked - well, actually, he demanded - in the aforementioned invasive RP accent - that I send him the manuscript of the Zuma biography so that he could write an article.
I explained, painstakingly, that it was not yet finished and that, even if it were, Jeremy Boraine of Jonathan Ball Publishers would curtail all my lavatory privileges if I even thought of allowing anyone outside the family to see the mss. before it was printed. Johnson clearly didn't believe me that the book was still unfinished. Might he still be annoyed about this?
Nah, I think that Johnson's just being protective of Paul "stuck record" Trewhela, who has written a number of paeans of praise about Johnson on this very site, hailing our Bill as a sort of messiah. And I think Bill thinks that Paul needs protecting.
Relax, Bill. Paul Trewhela could chew me up and spit me out before breakfast and then, before lunch, polish off Marx's Grundrisse, relating its manifold faults to the implementation in Durban of its main principles by the local communist party.
Or maybe Johnson simply thinks, as he mentioned, that I am not hugely funny: Hannibal the cannibal, borrowing from Marcus Aurelius, said to Clarice Starling that the most obvious explanation is always under one's nose.
But then why write letters to our leading business publication, being nasty to poor Peter Bruce and to Politicsweb? Why not just skip my column? It's not bloody rocket science. Some 43-million Seffricans, including my wife, live without it every week.
There is also, finally, I believe, a further problem. I believe there is a toxic virus going around - that is polluting the Seffrican air, blue and pristine as it might appear to be. Its main effect is to make people wake up in the morning with a really bad attitude - with the milk of human kindness curdled by the poison of nastiness.
I know that Malan (Rian) would think that I'm just saying this because I want to get a grant from someone to study the phenomenon; and that you probably think I'm loopy.
But consider the angry words that have been exchanged over the issue of the nationalisation of the mines - which, according to a piece I read by Barry "fear and loathing" Sergeant on this very site, are on their way out anyway.
Why would a gentle soul such as Jeremy Cronin, the deppity sheriff of the commie party, suggest that the young chaps at the ANC Yoof League might be more interested in bling than beneficiation? Why would Little Julie Malema contemptuously refer to the gentle Jeremy, Malema's brother in revolution, as a "white political messiah" in his response to Cronin - which he, Malema, pretended to have written?
Why would the aforementioned Sergeant refer, with a sneer on his lip, to Cronin being a "self-confessed poet"? Don't knock poets, Barry. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, some even know a thing or two about mining and Cronin's a damned good poet.
Is Julie just a prize bozo, a national treasure? A living symbol - a kind of Frankenstein - of our bloodless revolution of 1994?
I don't know. I read a very interesting article in Business Day last week by Jacob "Dlums" Dlamini in which he argued persuasively that Malema was at the centre of the new revolution, the National Tender Revolution (NTR), which is sweeping this country. Is he correct?
Again, I don't know. But I do know that the bad attitude virus (BAV), or bad karma, has gotten its hooks into everyone, even a sweet and jovial character such as RW "Bill" Johnson.
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Comments
Excessively boring, and long-winded to boot.
Perhaps you should have these sort of squabbles in private?
by Peter on November 25 2009, 23:16
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I find his writing a cross between eliot's stream of consciousness and the newspeak of journalists and poets like ginsberg and the author of fear and loathing, it's always interesting to read because I believe he always refers to something real, tangilbe . .more
by Ekenj on November 26 2009, 00:46
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This is great, hilarious stuff. Comments like yours are excessively boring. Who cares what you think anyway? and gordin's point is that such squabbles should be in private. cant you read?
by Ben on November 26 2009, 05:53
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Well I love Jeremy Gordin's weekly piece and in fact look forward to it as the cheerful light in South African news. He makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis!
Thaks for that Jeremy!
Although I do appreciate it when people criticise him, . .more
by Natalie on November 26 2009, 05:58
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You're fired. (We all wish)
by Gus Gosling on November 26 2009, 06:29
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Verbal incontinence.
You know the criticism is there. You acknowledge it, yet you plow on regardless, Jeremy.
If you want to study "bad attitude", start with this. Start with yourself.
What pisses people off is not your initial . .more
by Domza on November 26 2009, 06:48
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The one reason i read politics web and recommend it to my friends ,is jeremy gordin articles, i am sure those who criticise him are jealous or hypocrits, they have nothing better to do than criticize him, imagine spending time and energy on critique -ing . .more
by Lisa on November 26 2009, 08:41
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There is not much wrong with it but it's better in smaller helpings, Lisa
Great big slabs of it come at the reader like an imposition.
Just break it up a bit, that's all.
by Domza on November 26 2009, 08:53
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I think that Mr Gordin is secretely jealous of Ben Travato
Strange he is not even mentioned here.
Not even in realtion to Freud (or Jonathan Ball )
by Bibliophile on November 26 2009, 09:02
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It's spelled TrOvato, btw. anyway, no, it's domza and goosie gosling of whom i'm envious. to be so painfully stupid and carping and yet so happy!
by jeremy gordin on November 26 2009, 09:44
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As others have noted, it's very amusing that all the critics of Jeremy's articles clearly take the time to read them nonetheless. I love them... I can pretend to be working (since they're on Politicsweb) but get a fabulously entertaining read at the same . .more
by Reader on November 26 2009, 10:01
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Keep your hair on
by Domza on November 26 2009, 10:02
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Just read little bits, one at a time, my dear Domza.
by Marduk on November 26 2009, 13:34
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Jeremy, being The Dancing King's personal praise singer must be pretty informed when he speaks about the Clown Prince and the NTR.
Just wondering if the new JG book is about the rtealationship between the Dancing King and the Clown Prince
by Geanann on November 26 2009, 13:36
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now jeremy, this really is self-regarding.
by witbooi on November 26 2009, 14:49
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Who is this Johnson? He must start his own blog
by Mando on November 26 2009, 15:12
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Johnson with his own blog? You enjoy self-flagellation don't you?
by Jean Racine on November 26 2009, 16:54
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I cannot believe anybody is capable of reading this load of codswallop in one sitting; and then there are even those who heap praise on it!
Reminds me of the time when "modern painting", i.e. modern art came to South Africa; the kind of "art" . .more
by Oompah on November 26 2009, 20:25
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nah, i NEVER write for the plebs, they are so tedious, i write only for the patricians - with 5 exceptions (which prove the rule): yourself, myself, Domza, my brother Bullfinch, and the Dancing Master (aka Mr Love Pants). PS i think that painting was a . .more
by jeremy gordin on November 27 2009, 10:02
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As one of the comments says "criticism brings out the best in Jeremy". A good, biting article. Criticism from people (I assume he's a person?) like Dom ZA should be taken as a compliment; his name says it all. Dom, as JG says, if you don't like it; skip . .more
by Amos on November 28 2009, 07:51
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