Various tableaux today, dear readers, various tableaux; and some questions.

We begin with a poem by Kenneth Rexroth (1905 -1982), an American. He was a great poet and witty fellow: when he was accused by Time magazine of being the "father of the Beats' [the San Francisco beat poets] because he'd been at one of their "founding" meetings, he replied, "an entomologist is not a bug". Here's his poem:

Empire

Here I sit, reading the Stoic
Latin of Tacitus.
Tiberius sinks in senile
Gloom as Aeneas sank
In the smoky throat of Hades;
And the prose glitters like
A tray of dental instruments.
The toss head president,
Deep in his private catacomb,
Is preparing to pull
The trigger. His secretaries
Make speeches. In ten years
The art of communication
Will be more limited.
The wheel, the lever, the incline,
May survive, and perhaps,
The alphabet. At the moment
The intellectual
Advance guard is agitated
Over the relation
Between the Accumulation
Of Capital and the
Systematic Derangement of
The Senses, and the Right
To Homosexuality.

You're with Rexroth, right? He's being tongue in cheek - slightly bitter, sad, actually - about lucid, straightforward writing and thought (it glitters like dental instruments) versus the abstract, fuzzy rubbish (linguistically and therefore in our thought) in which we tend to get embroiled in the "modern" world.

We switch now - segue, what! - to me chatting to one of my learned colleagues in the Journalism department at Wits.

I tell her about a case that has come to the attention of one of my colleagues who works on the Justice Project. The details of this case really do not bear repeating here. They are enough to make you ill for the rest of the year. Suffice it to say that the matter involves the alleged sexual assault (by sodomy) and death of a 14-year-old and the alleged difficulties experienced by his family in getting an inquest.

The colleague to whom I am talking turns pale.

"That," she says, "is exactly what I am talking about. Why should anyone have sympathy or patience with the media? That story you have just told me bespeaks the dissolution of our society - that's what the media should be reporting. Instead all they do is report on elites. All they care about is whether Zuma broke wind yesterday and Malema today. It makes me sick."

We switch to Wednesday evening at Wits University. It's the Johannesburg launch of the New South African Review 1, edited by John Daniel and Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay and Roger Southall, the last three of the Wits University Sociology department, and published by Wits University Press.

Loosely based on the South African Review of the 80s - of which, if I am not mistaken, Glenn Moss was the moving spirit - also if I am not mistaken, he and his merry men and women called themselves SARS (South African Research Service) - and also based on the publications put by Daniel and Southall when they were at the HSRC, the sub-title of the book is 2010: Development or Decline?

In other words, it's a serious look at serious issues - Economy, Ecology and Sustainability; State, Politics and Policy; Education, Health and Land; and Crime and Sex - by some hot academics and native intellectuals (well, not all native actually): Neva Makgetla, Anthony Butler, Loren Landau, Southall, Daniel, Hein Marais, and David Bruce. (They also allowed in one or two exceptions to prove the rule, if you follow my drift, and I have a chapter in there on awaiting trial detainees.)

But serious and somewhat given to academic jargon, NSAR 1 alas is. Rexroth, were he around, would have a chuckle or two and I don't think that Playboy magazine, for example, will use this particular book as a special offer.

But what interested me especially was that - following short presentations by Naidoo ("A strategic response to the struggles of the poor in post-apartheid South Africa"), Sam Kariuki ("The Comprehensive Rural Development Programme"); and me (awaiting trial detainees) - the MC for the evening, Tawana Kupe, dean of humanities, looking to liven up the proceedings, asked Jacklyn Cock what her feelings about the presentations had been.

Remember Jacklyn Cock? You ought to. Professor of Sociology extraordinaire, author of Maids & Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (1980), and co-editor of War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa (1989), etc. etc.

Cock thought for a second - genuinely looked surprised (not at Kupe's question but at what she'd been listening to) - and then said: "It really seems clear that [16 years down the line] we [in this country] have a crisis on our hands ..."

We now switch, brothers and sisters, to the little fandango that Justice "the sky is falling" Malala and Pallo Jordan, a former cabinet minister and now a so-called "senior" ANC member, have been dancing.

I don't need to rehearse for you, as Abba Egan might have said (no, that's not a pop group - he was the SA-born foreign minister of Israel), all the moves. You've doubtless been following them. Personally, as you can tell from my nickname for Malala, I have long agreed with Jordan - he should have acknowledged my so-called input - that Malala is a bit of a "wannabe-Cassandra".

Then Malala got beaucoup annoyed, asked Jordan why he was being such a Dr Feelgood about the ANC when the ANC had treated him so shoddily in exile, and also pointed out that the changes in this country had been precipitated by the mass democratic movement (MDM) inside the country not by the bozos outside. It's the old inziles versus exiles issue in the ANC. (Why Malala chose to trumpet the "wonders" of Peter Mokaba, that impimpi, I do not know - but so it goes.)

Jordan then came back punching, pointing out that Malala didn't seem to have a very good understanding of who was driving the MDM and so on and that in any case there was no way that the ANC wanted in any way to threaten press freedom.

We then had a rant from an unnamed source in the ANC - full of the same old tired balderdash that the ANC always trots out - the wonders of "giants" such as "Percy Qoboza, Steve Biko, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Dan Tloome, Ruth First, Joe Gaby, Sol Plaatjie and John Tengo Jabavu," blah, blah, blah.

No offence to any of the aforementioned, you understand; it's just the tiresome repetition of the old litany - without any clear understanding of any individual's actual work - that gives me a pain where the sun don't shine.  

It was, as Paul Trewhela noted, a Hitlerian rant of note. Who writes this crap for the ANC? Little Julie Malema?

Then a fellow called Nic Borain weighed in and was, I think, genuinely a voice of reason: "But I am absolutely clear that a government that continues to command around 70% of national electoral support (primarily because that electorate perceives the government as the main heir to the mantle of national liberation movement) has got to be engaged with, has got to be encouraged to be ‘the solution' more than it is ‘the problem'."

But here's the question - or questions.

If we do have a crisis in our society - as suggested by Cock and by NSAR 1- why are we focusing on debates such as the Malala/Jordan one? Is this not a classic example of eructation rather than substance - as suggested by my colleague at the beginning of this piece?

And aren't Jordan's pieces more worrying than the Hitlerian rant from Luthuli House? Aren't people who tell us that all is well and that no one is going to arrest Malala - aren't they much more sinister than the ANC nutters?

Because with the nutters at least you have some idea of what you're going to get; their real agenda glitters like a tray of dental instruments.

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