Put your money where your disapproving mouth is

We are provoked to outrage by the extremes of the vulgar rich, but the ugly truth about SA lies closer to (Tuscan-style) home

THERE was an interesting, if one-sided, commentary running on Facebook on New Year's Day about the vulgar party thrown in Cape Town by businessman Walter Hennig.

In the picture accompanying the story about it in this paper last weekend stood Khulubuse Zuma, the president's nephew and the person who has single-handedly turned black economic empowerment into a twisted joke.

The comments were largely unanimous that this kind of shindig was morally out of bounds in a country such as ours where four children recently died of hunger.

The outrage is justified, particularly when looking at Zuma hanging with Joost van der Westhuizen and some hot babes. This is, after all, the man who couldn't get himself before an inquiry into how he and his associates ruined two mines and the livelihoods of many, because his weight weighed him down.

Those tossers who attended the Cape Town party are at the extreme scale of obscenity. They hire fake celebrities who have been bought and bartered by ugly middle-aged men to give their parties as much glamour as a badly applied fake tan.

They pay these starved girls - whose only role is to look like starved girls on stilts - anything from R20k as an appearance fee.

It is so easy to look down on these creatures as dissipated champions of the swanky life who deserve nothing but our contempt.

But, as we stand with one foot in a new year that looks depressingly grim economically, maybe we realise that we can't go on this way, because the emphasis on materialism in our society has stripped us of some pretty basic values such as compassion, modesty and caring.

Those old neighbourhood values we grew up with - a cup of sugar, a few tea bags, and a plate of food passed over a fence - have been pushed aside for a solitary kind of selfishness.

Kindness and compassion are no longer admirable virtues, but merely nostalgically referred to when we talk about the "old days".

We no longer subscribe to the edict of being our brothers' keepers. As far as many of us are concerned, our brothers could easily become the penniless sentinels of South Africa's street corners and we wouldn't give a toss.

In this regard, I have to agree with an aspect of what President Jacob Zuma recently said about the breakdown of South African society - that orphanages and old age homes have become the norm rather than the exception. Religion is not to blame, though. Upward mobility has everything to do with it. For when we purchased our middle-class dreams, we abandoned much of what we knew was the right thing to do.

An extended family that absorbs death and orphaned children is replaced by a nuclear family whose primary concerns are the mortgage, car payments, school fees and the occasional holiday along with golf or gym membership and racking up frequent flyer miles.

So let's not pretend that we - the middle class of South Africa in all our rainbow splendour - are models of goodness either.

We, too, get our kicks in our own special way, albeit with a reduced budget.

When we sit down - all the while congratulating ourselves for the integrity that is pinned to our bosoms like a virtual medal - at a restaurant, we think nothing of ordering a R300 bottle of wine. We tease each other for days afterwards about having been "naughty" by ordering a second bottle while commenting about what a fine winemaker so and so is.

We shake our heads in pseudo-shame when we recall that scandalous night of drinking single malts and waking up the next day with a hangover and a bar bill that could have put three children through school for a year.

We joke about the new car we've just acquired, justifying the trade-up with keeping up with the taxman's crazy car allowance rules. Who will want to drive the 2008 C-Class when the order book is filling up for the new model? The monthly down payment is slightly more than before, but the service plan is really excellent, we say.

Those "little" holidays in Plett or in the quaint house on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal might not compare to flying out a B-class celebrity from the US, but many of us have it pretty good too.

Yes, Khulubuse Zuma is an eyesore in many respects in a country of malnourished children who will be lucky enough to reach adulthood and then get a job as street cleaners.

Forget about Zuma, forget about every symbolic Zuma (black or white) out there.

Instead, take a drive to the closest township and find one child on whom you can spend one night's bar or dinner bill. Buy that child a school uniform and books instead.

Now that, my fine outraged friends, as Robert Frost once wrote, would be the road less travelled and it would make all the difference.

But, I would imagine, it is just so much easier to wallow in a deep pool of outrage and righteousness.