Malegapuru Makgoba’s angry outburst about the cynical exploitation which has taken place around the dying child, Nkosi Johnson, spoke loudest in its subtext. People of unpretentious sensitivity have writhed in shame at the media junket that has been made of this child’s impending death. And heaven help anyone who might object and recognise all the melodrama for what
it really has been: a coordinated display of fast-food public compassion.
And if you are going to have one of those what is better than a subject which, by even its more evident textures, forbids too much open objection. Few want to be seen as being cynical about the remarkably conspicuous grief surrounding a black child dying of Aids. This is a serious hands-off area, even in response to a series of repellently manipulative television items, the bogus tears of radio phone-in shows or, as Makgoba observed, the deposit on to an innocent tongue of the fine words of his handlers.
If nothing else this ostentatious sentimentality has again revealed an energetic new modification of censorship which has come upon us. It might be termed Mad Sacred Cow Disease and it’s spreading like wildfire. By definition Mad Sacred Cow Disease is the prescription, more often by implication than degree, of subjects, persuasions and conditions which are entitled to special protection: from criticism, from complaint, most especially from rebuke.
The more recent aetiology of this disease may be traced directly to the overbearing monster of Political Correctness, but in fact it’s always been there in some way or other. In the days of the Inquisition the stake rewarded those unwise enough to question Catholic dogma. Though nowadays the punishments might be less severe, the prescriptions are far more numerous. In its amplified contemporary mutation, Mad Sacred Cow Disease goes as far back as when the organised degradation of human cultural taste was first recognised for the pecuniary floodplain it has proved to be.
The current senior BBC honcho, Greg Dyke, recently described his organisation as being “hideously white”. Had Dyke expressed parallel sentiments about say, the West Indies cricket team – called them hideously black – it is easy to imagine the outrage. But then Greg Dyke is of that order of creepy social apologists who believe that reverse racism is both cause and excuse. In his eyes black people inhabit an elite social status which guarantees automatic selection to the ranks of his organisation. The feelings of white people, on the other hand, are up for molestation.
In Mad Sacred Cow Disease the bounds of latitude are similarly widened so as to make sure that those people who occupy special social categories are regarded not a little like endangered animal species; enclosed by prudish fencelines, not to be subjected to the rough and tumble of the quotidian. Even worse, those who are currently adjudged as having been history’s victims are offered metaphoric compensation. In the most abject of the disease’s symptoms, white South Africans are currently being invited to sign declarations of regret for a political system over which they had little or no say, but from which – or so say a cabal of arch politicians – they “benefited”. All my life I have “benefited” from living in a society the mores of which are largely compatible with Christian principles, but I do not at all feel obliged to apologise for the crucifixion.
Each month sees new mines laid, each month it becomes more tricky for journalists and commentators to negotiate the perilous and diligently patrolled pathways of what have become strictly defined social wards under preferential custody. Across a growing geography of no-go territories the normal ebb and flow of human intercourse is constricted, intimidated by those who would codify moral demeanour by means of modularity. Women, black people, the elderly, the poor, the downtrodden, the homosexual, the deaf, the blind, the forgotten and the halt shelter under Mad Sacred Cow Disease, not curiously because they might need to, but often more because they are the subjects of projected contrition.
An entire page of a Sunday newspaper was recently given over to the revelations of a late-flowering homosexual love affair. Had its theme been heterosexual the piece would have been seen for the rather maudlin slush it was. The fact that it was “gay” apparently cancelled out any reservations. Such exemption from critical rudiment was an act of searing patronisation.
Much the same disquiet attends the personal tragedy of Johnson. Once the SABC, the grieving celebrity visitors and the cheaper press are done with their gnawings there is no dignity left, let alone valid sympathy. Behind all the gnashing of teeth and wailing, young Johnson has been turned into just another liberal road-kill.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby