TOM EATON | The reality is badly serious, but the news can be seriously good

I know that writers writing about writing can be a special form of torture, but as the clapped-out merry-go-round of our news cycle takes another turn, and we cling to the sticky poles of the fake horsies and get ready for one more predictable journey to nowhere, I feel a duty to warn my readers that this column is the product of censorship and is therefore not a trustworthy lens through which to view the present moment.

To be clear, I’m not talking about editorial censorship. No editor has ever asked me to change more than a spelling mistake. I’m also not talking about the politically lucrative idea, popularised by Hitler and now being revived by the political right, that traditional media companies are a “Lügenpresse”, a press of lies, controlled by a cabal of [insert bigotry du jour].

I must, however, be honest about the tendency of some columnists to censor themselves, or at least to suppress those parts of themselves that might be deemed too light or optimistic to be taken seriously.

Of course, in many cases, the gloom of the pundit is real. Materially, it can be a precarious living. It can also be hard to remain sunny when it’s your job to drift in a cesspool of toxic politics. If you interrogated SA’s 10 most cynical, dead-eyed commentators, you would discover that six once had dreams of writing a play about a kitten who goes on a grand adventure, while the other four wanted to be that kitten.

Some of the grimness, however, seems self-imposed. People who express opinions for a living need to sound reasonably intelligent, and in our world, intellectual weight is associated with stern solemnity. It’s why comedies so seldom win Oscars or Booker prizes, or why you know it’s a really important novel when the reviews say things like “heartbreaking”, “gutting” or “the worst possible time you can have doing a leisure activity”.

To be fair, some media have started trying to sprinkle some brightness across the usual smorgasbord of misery, but these “good news stories” are generally banished to a special section, a bit like a ball pond in the corner of a Spur, where the young and naive can frolic while the rest of us get on with carving bloody flesh from bone.

You won’t read the one about the designer, the artist, the welder, the bricklayer, all taking the care that their leaders won’t, determined to make something honest or beautiful or strong, regardless of the decay around them.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why, even in publications like this one, in which opinion-havers have licence to discuss pretty much anything, there are many columns which you will never read, and whose absence will gently but relentlessly skew your perception of this country, persuading you that you and your family are alone in a midnight forest full of wolves.

You will never, read, for example, the column about the Gauteng surgeon mending a literally broken heart, thereby saving a dozen metaphorical ones, or her colleague performing reconstructive surgery on a baby’s face, unfurling its future like the opening of a flower.

You won’t read the one about the Free State farmer pushing away existential fear to go over the books once more to find a way to make the harvest happen; or the one about the teacher in Mpumalanga, waiting for the last child to catch up; or the Eastern Cape community leader, torch in hand, patrolling the dark streets.

You won’t read the one about the designer, the artist, the welder, the bricklayer, all taking the care that their leaders won’t, determined to make something honest or beautiful or strong, regardless of the decay around them. You certainly won’t read the one about the open-minded cleric and the honest political activist, taking the hard path away from seductive righteousness and reminding their followers that the people in that other group over there are just like the people in this group over here.

Perhaps it’s a blessing that we don’t consider any of these things as worthy of discussion; that we still believe them to be so common as to be largely unremarkable.

Perhaps, less happily, it’s also a reminder that human appetites change slowly, and that, as satisfying as it feels to berate the press for focusing on blood and tears, those primal spectacles still draw our gaze more easily than happier, prettier sights. The day you don’t see the car wreck on the side of the road because you’re too fascinated by a squirrel on the grass nearby is the day Rupert Murdoch’s launches Squirrel Weekly, backs a pro-nut-hoarding candidate, and the media changes entirely. Until then, however, it’s going to be car wrecks all the way down.

Next week I’ll get back on the merry-go-round and watch the car wrecks as they whirl by. But today, I want to think of all the columns I’ve read that confirm how bad things are; worse, probably, than we can know. And then I want to think about all the columns I haven’t read because they were never written; about those South Africans who remain brave and honest and professional; who are tired and soul-sick but who refuse to be broken by the predators who mock us every day from the headlines and from the comfort of their stolen wealth.

Predators kill by isolating their prey. In SA, they’ve done a great job of making us feel alone. But we aren’t. There are millions of us. And next year, we must show what millions of hooves can do to a wolf.

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