Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
Nigeria gets Pope John Paul II, we get Bill Clinton. From such respite we may hang conjecture. I believe the pope’s visit to Nigeria was so he could administer last rites. When an entire country is shuffling off its mortal coil, the Vatican likes to send the foreman along to murmur all those desperate petitions.
South Africa is clearly not about to go belly up. No pontiff is rumbling over our horizon in his mobile telephone box – yet. Instead we are being drenched in an entirely different brand of piety, in the shape of the opportunistic Mr Clinton, saxophonist and wannabe Pantagruel.
When you consider what has gone before him, you realise it takes some doing to be quite as unremittingly horrible as Bill Clinton is. As Christopher Hitchens wrote recently: “… the utter post-political vacuity that has descended since Bill Clinton became able to proclaim himself heir to a styrofoam Round Table and – one is forced to add – all the vulgar perks that went with it”.
It’s bad enough having people like the Clintons and Blairs slithering around our television screens. The trouble is that Clinton, like all his fellow Americans, frequently yields to his primitive instinct to be a tourist.
And when Clinton goes touring, try to avoid playing the host. Not a believer in modest travel – Six Third-World Triumphs in 11 Days! – Bill arrives in his personal 747 along with a 1 000-strong touring party of advisers, legal experts, bodyguards, a bomb squadron, economic gurus, fly-zip-tuners, political analysts, sycophants, a large slice of the secret service, foot-kissers, orthodontists, barbers, all seven White House urologists, several ready-to-use sophomores, bible-carriers and all the rest of them. Not content with the sort of wheels the various heads of state might be able to lay on, Billy Boy brings altogether 15 of his own vehicles. If he’s feeling really callous, he also brings along the most vulgar of all his perks, his wife.
In order to lubricate all his gaudy pretensions, Mr Clinton lays down strict rules for his hosts. He demands that great big areas of central city business districts are closed down while he drifts his godly presence around town.
This week central Cape Town has experienced Clinton Freeze. Motorways have been closed, various routes in and around the city blocked off “as circumstances dictate”, access to business premises obstructed, ratepayers expected to sit patiently in four-hour traffic jams just in case the exalted Bill Clinton suddenly decides he wants to go sightseeing.
Remember the way he idly closed down an international airport because he decided he wanted his hair cut and blow-dried while his plane occupied the runway?
We are expected to feel patriotic and touched when Bill drapes an empathic arm around Nelson’s careworn shoulder, whispers in that troubled ear that he needn’t look so tetchy as Hillary still thinks his 1994 inauguration was (verbatim) “… the greatest single event in the history of mankind”.
What is it about modern politicians that makes them so matchlessly repulsive. Truly they are the scourge of the 20th century. I have recently been re-reading transcripts of the elegant series of radio talks that the “incomparable Max” Beerbohm gave on the BBC in the 1930s and 1940s. One of these – in 1936 – Beerbohm called “A Small Boy Seeing Giants”. “I hasten to explain,” he said, “that the small boy is myself – or rather was myself, half a century ago; and that the giants were some more or less elderly Liberal or Conservative gentlemen who governed England in those days.”
Beerbohm went on to describe how these men were portrayed in the cartoons of the great John Tenniel. Nobly mythical, the Gladstones, the Disraelis and their colleagues wore togas, but more often they wore chitons and breastplates and were wielding or brandishing swords.
By today’s standards they are sentimental and overstated, I would agree. But in 1936 Beerbohm had recognised the early malignancies which would metastasise into latter-day politics, when he said those men he remembered as a boy were “statesmen, as we no longer call them”. Those of 100 years ago seem to have been more worthy of description or glory than the squalid charlatans of today.
If there is ever to be a good resolution to be made as the end of this century looms, it will be that everything possible be done during the next 100 years to rid the world of its most pernicious plague, the politician.