For some time now I have been struggling to keep my spirits up, stay focussed on the positive and live in the state of coruscating optimism that any balanced citizen should be feeling about contemporary life. “Just look around you,” said a friend, “and you’ll see there’s no real reason for anyone to feel edgy or depressed. Alright, the performance of our national rugby team tends to bring on the glums, but our national cricket team is not nearly as bad; its consecutive defeats still number in single figures. Why, we’ve even got a World Soccer Cup coming our way. So buck stumps and get that idiotic grin back on your face.”
Alas, it’s not only the flagging efforts of Jake White and The Backwards which burden the spirits. Rather, it’s a dingy fusion of various forms of mental exhaustion which, added up, stifle otherwise sanguine, cheerful outlooks on life. The meaning of the word “fatigue” has been expanded, now used to specify a repression of cognitive and emotional stability. It’s become part of popular usage, meant to nominate the feeling of indifference that comes with being exposed to the endless, detailed and unmitigated reporting of human suffering, which still fills so much of television and newspaper space. The term used to explain away this acquired detachment as compassion fatigue. When you “suffered” from compassion fatigue you found that, in some stroke of sublime relief, you had gained a psychic state immune to the prickings of conscience, empathy, guilt at your own privilege and advantage. You found yourself becoming quite remote from normal human responses to the sufferings of others. Compassion fatigue was, therefore, among the most desirable of privileged afflictions.
But the fatigue is coming at us in many other shapes and forms. For some time now, my feelings of outrage at corruption and generalised bureaucratic felony have been all but anaesthetised. I no longer even shrug when learning how some small town mayor has managed — quite blatantly and without visible penalty — to rip off a couple of million meant for starving children; that some brother-in-law of a deputy minister has plunged his fingers deep into the till; how money meant to buy electricity generators for a rural hospital has bought, instead, a new Mercedes for the hospital’s medical director. It’s all grist to a thundering mill I’ve not a chance in hell of closing down. I am suffering from corruption fatigue.
There was a time when I believed there was hope to be derived from the glib promises of a corruption clean-up, which emanate in steady drippage from the presidency. Travelgate fatigue has put paid to that sort of self-delusion, as has the continuing presence in civil society of Tony Yengeni. Why get upset? Yengeni certainly isn’t and the Travelgate accused continue to sit in Parliament drawing salaries and benefits. In the end, someone will stump up their fines and they’ll go on thieving, just like before.
Then there’s crime, now categorised into the acceptable, inevitable and, here and there, the unforgivable. Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula has told those of us whinging about crime to get packing. He’s quite right. He’s also been swamped by a veritable tsunami of trespass, rape and violent death. He owns up to the fact that he has no chance whatsoever of stemming this terrible flooding. Nqakula is just like the rest of us; he’s got a bad case of crime fatigue. He doesn’t want to hear any more about it. We shelter nervously behind our Rottweilers, our razorwire and electric fences, he behind a formidable battery of security guards and presumption.
Then there’s one of the most benevolent of all states of affective detachment, which is called idio-pathic Jacob Zuma fatigue. I fell into this state about halfway through the seventh preliminary hearing into the rape charges against this Zulu demigod. Since then, but for a few careless moments, I have kept what remains of my intellect uncontaminated by a national obsession of an almost pathological quotient.
Being force-fed a diet of both our president’s daily maunderings and the SABC’s morbid fascination with these, has coaxed many into a state of Thabo Mbeki fatigue. As Groucho Marx once said: “Too much is enough.” The same applies to the embarrassing exposures of political swindling which attend the dying weeks of the vile Tony Blair’s occupation of 10 Downing Street. If you’re really nifty with the remote control, or a hasty turning of the page, you can avoid looking at his even viler wife. Along with George W Bush, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and a host of others, these have delivered those lucky enough among us into a particularly happy state of politician fatigue. We simply don’t want to know, let alone give a toss.
I know that it’s a cop-out to claim compassion or any of the other fatigue-states as being alibis to mortal indifference. But, on the other hand, faced with the horrors that a cruelly efficient media serves up with such enthusiasm, the soul cries out for sanctuary. As one of Shakespeare’s sonnets begins: “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry …” Compassion fatigue and others like it are partial suicides, actuated in us by the monsters.