They say you should never read the comments, but they also said the internet would make us cleverer and now we all know someone who believes Queen Elizabeth is a lizard, so I suppose we should just read the comments and be damned.
To be fair, damnation isn’t the only thing that’s been wished on me in the comments under my columns. Sometimes the heckling is simply bizarre, like the person who pops up every so often to tell me that they hate my columns and refuse to read them, rather like a swivel-eyed eccentric who storms into a deli every few weeks to yell at the proprietor that he will never, ever buy a salami, no matter what anyone says, before storming out again.
Firebrand-for-money Andile Mngxitama, too, stands out for once declaring that I have “a monopoly of stuff” (chapter 3 of Das Kapital, I think). Certainly, it’s the most original and intelligent heckle I’ve ever received from the far left, whose usual efforts — “Racist! Imperialist! Person who know how to balance a budget!” — are as over-used and threadbare as a copy of Pravda left in a barracks toilet in Havana 60 years ago.
This needs no explanation: every hour that the ANC stays in power is another job lost, another child abandoned to the streets, another year of hope and potential and money stolen.
As for the far right, well, you never know what you’re going to get, mostly because it takes so long for local right-wingers to get the latest talking points, sent across by paddle-steamer from Ole Alabamee, after which they still have to learn them, slowly moving their fingers across the new words and sounding them out syllable by syllable: “On...the...pay-role of... Djorj Saw-ross. Oh! Wait! I know this one! George Soros! Look, pappy, I read a word!”
Many simply can’t wait that long and instead make do with lobbing last year’s efforts at me, sending across volleys of “Cultural Marxist!” and “Beta-cuck!”, or whatever else they can find among the debris in their mom’s basement where the live and host their podcast.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that it takes quite a lot for me to notice a critical comment these days.
And what it takes, it turns out, is politeness.
Under a column of mine in which I had wished ruination about the ANC, a certain person had written a request to me so quietly sincere, and so startlingly without vitriol or threat, that I found myself transfixed by it.
All he was asking, he wrote, was that I respect those South African voters who don’t want the ANC to disintegrate.
It was his plain language and undemonstrative tone that hooked me, but it was that word — respect — that got me thinking. And the first thing that I thought was that he was right.
Respect is absolutely fundamental to the health of democracy. The moment we lose respect for personal choice or difference in outlook, compatriots become a sinister “other”, to be demonised and ultimately dehumanised, with ghastly results.
But the tricky thing about respect is that it has to be earned.
I suspect that this idea is falling out of favour, with respect increasingly seen as a basic human right, a benevolent baseline that should be established automatically and without hesitation or interrogation.
I can imagine why this is the case. The old world, with all its inherent horrors, was built upon treating certain populations with an automatic and unquestioned lack of respect. To those wanting to build a better world, the granting of automatic respect probably seems like a healthy intervention, or at least a step in the right direction.
And yet even the most passionate and progressive builder of the new world would have to admit that many of the social ills they are fighting are the direct consequence of respect being demanded without being earned, whether in patriarchal societies, religious cults or dynastic, Big Man political set-ups.
Which brings me back to the ANC and that voter who no doubt logged on to the Independent Electoral Commission’s website on Saturday to check his registration details, found that it was broken, tried again on Sunday, found that it was still broken, and was then told by the IEC in a tweet on Monday to “please be patient and keep trying”, six little words that perfectly sum up life in modern SA.
I doubt that he’s reading this, mainly because he’s probably still hitting refresh on the IEC website, chewing on his knuckles and sobbing. But if he is, I’d like to explain why I can’t respect his wishes.
Of course, I respect his right to vote for the ANC. But I can’t respect his choice to do so. This needs no explanation: every hour that the ANC stays in power is another job lost, another child abandoned to the streets, another year of hope and potential and money stolen.
If my acquaintance from the comments section wishes to self-harm, then that is his choice.
But when his decision to hurt himself spills out of his home and out of millions of homes like it, then he is not asking me to respect his choice. He is asking me to abandon my own self-respect; to pretend that his decision to wreak yet more harm on this exhausted, wrung-out country is somehow of equal merit to a decision to try to unseat the ANC and start mopping up its vast, hideous mess.
And that, I’m afraid, is as laughable as my monopoly of stuff.
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