High up in the sky, at the top of the tallest telephone pole in the street, Jacob Zuma is smiling like a dope.His expression is that of a Roman emperor being fellated on a tiger skin while listening to an ensemble of harpists and a briefing from a temple priestess who had a dream in which the emperor was riding a burning elephant through a barley field, sure proof that this year's barley crop will be the best ever. So pretty apt, really.The impression of distant, untouchable, delusional power is reinforced by the location of Jacob Zuma's face. In Cape Town, the ANC's elections posters tend to be very high up on the lampposts. This is because if they are anywhere within reach, Capetonians tend to attack the placards, clawing and biting at the cardboard until it hangs in ragged shreds. Defacing campaign posters is illegal, but then again so is building a private home with public money, so perhaps we'll call that one a draw.Lower on the poles and lower in the polls, the DA candidates have grown wings: a clever designer has placed the hopefuls in front of the national flag so that colourful stripes rise from their shoulders like the feathery pinions of archangels. The trouble is, nobody likes people with wings.Like that X-man with the giant pair, who looked like the unfortunate result of an upsetting tryst between a human and a swan. We were encouraged to pity him and the prejudice he faced, but I got to tell you, if I saw that dude flapping past me I would properly freak out and throw a wrench at him before the pro-mutant lobby could conscientise me. As for the other superheroes that had wings poking out of their shoulders: do you even remember their names? Was it Kiewiet-Girl? The Silver Hadeda? Night-Chicken?Speaking of forgetting people's names, the FF+ posters are next, emblazoned with the smiling face of Constand Viljoen. Ag, not him, the other one. Connie Mulder. No, wait, he was the Information Scandal guy. (To think that a government-funded newspaper used to be called a "scandal". Bless.) So not Connie. His son. Something Mulder. Japie? Fox? Pieter! Anyway. There's Pieter.There's nobody on the EFF posters. That's one of the fantastic benefits of a personality cult. You know The Face is etched into the hearts of the faithful, and by not showing The Face you remind everyone of The Face. First rule of razzle-dazzle showbiz: always leave 'em wanting more.So there they are, all asking me to vote for them. Except for the EFF. They're ordering me to vote for them. "VOTE EFF", their poster says. I can respect that. It's a clear, concise announcement of centralised, militarised power: a barked instruction, undiluted by wishy-washy nonsense like promises or explanations or track records.Not like the ANC and DA posters. Those are full of - actually I'm not sure what they're full of because, even though I've read them a thousand times, I can't remember the words. To be fair, the ANC ones are too high up the pole to read clearly - something about power and people and Dora the Explorer's pirate adventure, no, wait, that's an ad for some school holiday theatre. But the DA slogan is actively repelling my mind. Why? Because for some reason they decided to use the word "progress". And "progress", my friends, is what polite teachers write in the report cards of idiot children. I know, because it's what my music teacher used to write about me. "Tom is making steady progress through Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's Book of Elementary Tunes for Tone-Deaf Children Who Can Only Use Two Fingers at a Time."Last week I wrote rather cynically about wanting better lies from politicians, but that supremely vague and euphemistic "progress" got me thinking about how tired I am of the jargon and the coded language, and it made me think about how refreshing it would be to hear the truth, no matter how banal or unsexy it might be.Imagine how much more you'd respect the ANC if its posters showed Zuma mashing a slice of cake into his face under the slogan, "We were pretty fantastic until about 1998 and then the wheels fell off because let's be honest, money is lekker, and in theory most of us would like to do the right thing but we've got hungry interior decorators to feed so please don't cut us off."The DA? "A few parts of Cape Town are run like a Swiss watch-making factory and we might have just enough capacity to replicate that in one other metro, so pull in and it might be your metro! Maybe. Terms and conditions apply." The FF+? "It's flippen scary here, yo."The EFF, though, don't need to change a thing. "VOTE EFF" says it all, doesn't it?..