Robert Kirby
LOOSECANNON
As a quintessence of the dark obscenity that is the Hansie Cronje affair we need look no further than the hastily doctored television commercial for Standard Bank, sponsors of the current one-day cricket series. This must rate as a prototype of the cheap absolutions of the marketing mind.
To the well-known advert, where Cronje hits a prodigious six and the ball knocks out not only the stadium lighting but that of the entire city, a few lines of vomit-inducing copy have been added. ”When an idol falls. When heroes make errors. A gap is left for someone to fill.”
Try to explain Cronje’s wrongdoings to your 10-year-old grandson and to whom, like hundreds of thousands of others, Cronje and the cricket team members are demigods. Try to explain how one of the foremost among of his most admired people, the jealously emulated idol that smiles from a poster on his bedroom wall, has been revealed as fake. Is this some sort of cruel adult joke?
Perhaps just tell him that the doctored Standard Bank advert explains it all: that somehow it is not only predictable but entirely acceptable for heroes to be treacherous.
And that, in Standard Bank’s triumphant opinion, there is profit to be found in all treachery.
That this cheap thinking extends beyond the Standard Bank boardroom is plain to see.
Cronje’s apologists have attempted to adorn his calculated deceits in the sleek vernacular of populist religion. He is even being put about as some sort of martyr to the greater criminal exigencies of ”international” gamblers.
People are actually saying that he’s been brave and that he deserves admiration for having single-handedly assumed the moral responsibility of exposing the rackets.
The media throbs with excuses and cries for forgiveness that flow out of a public long conditioned to pornotropic sentimentalities.
It’s the Truth and Reconciliation Commission all over again. Hear how the cricketing hero admits to nothing more than being ”not entirely honest” and then hear his champions talks about ”the mistake” he made, the ”error in judgment”. Give him amnesty?
But then the Cronje sewer boils fouler by the hour. In essence profoundly venal, in resolution already showing every sign of becoming as long and sordid as the Alan Boesak matter and as dressed in convenient piety.
No wonder the politicians have come running, their mouths bubbling with indignation and pledges of integrity. Like flies to the coffin, for this is the corruption on which politicians long to feast.
And who more suitable than the eminently ridiculous Aziz Pahad to lead such a pack? The sight of him and Minister of Sport and Recreation Ncgonde Balfour, that oily charismatic church leader, Ray McCauley, smugly flanking a morose Cronje, is a vision from a nightmare.
In fact Hansie Cronje is an unscrupulous liar and the thief of far more than money. His greater iniquity is that he has stolen trust and faith from the young, that he has crudely eroded the happy optimisms of children.