Homework for a Pres: So far, SONA, so bad ...

10 February 2015 - 02:23 By Richard Poplak
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It's that time of year again, when our president drones into a microphone, miring the nation in a state of torpor.

What wouldn't South Africa do to jazz up the looming State of the Nation address? Blow half the GDP on hiring Denzel Washington to recite the speech in clipped action hero tones? We can dream. Perhaps some reading might offer the prez the requisite inspiration to deliver a truly memorable SONA 2015.

On politics, by Alan Ryan

Ryan shows how human beings have managed for thousands of years to organise around ideas (remember those?). Jacob Zuma might be jarred by the pertinence of a statement like this: "The history of the Old Testament politics is the history of a people who did their best to have no politics. They saw themselves as under the direct government of God, with little room to decide their own fate except by obeying or disobeying God's commandments."

Sacred economics, by Charles Eisenstein

Imagine an economic model in which money's inherent fakeness is exposed. Put another way, imagine living in a country that wasn't de facto governed by the Guptas. Charles Eisenstein has imagined such a country, and his Sacred Economics posits a post-money planet in which manufactured scarcity isn't the prevailing economic ethos.

From a place of blackness, by Andile Mngxitama and Aryan Kaganof

How far along is our vaunted "reconciliation project"? Can gangster capitalism trickle down ? Mngxitama (late of the EFF ) and Kaganof exchange short, sharp missives in the punkest book published in this country in some time, and it might suggest to Zuma just how ticked off his constituency is .

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

What is Lucky Jim but a book about a man in the lead-up to delivering the world's most boring speech? "Scolar" James Dixon' s entire future at a minor British university depends on a speech concerning "Merrie England", and he does what any self-respecting speaker would do before delivering an undeliverable address: he gets blitzed and passes out. So, President Zuma, drink more. We certainly will.

  • Richard Poplak's latest book, 'Until Julius Comes: Adventures in the Political Jungle', is published by Tafelberg.
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