At what point does the columnist stop being a critic and become merely critical?
It is an upsetting moment, when the writer who likes to believe that he is creating small, diverting illuminations on the endlessly reproduced pages of our national manuscript looks up from his doodling, lays down his gold leaf and purple ink, and discovers that he is merely drawing unremarkable cartoons of mediocre grumpiness.
Humour, of course, doesn’t help, delighting as it does in the limitations of others. Aggressive criticism can be funny, but do it enough and the reverse also seems to become seductively true: to be funny, just criticise. Which is not to say that most of the worthiness that comprises government or mainstream culture doesn’t scream to be humiliated by slapstick, or that there aren’t ten thousand workshop facilitators who wouldn’t benefit humankind by being smeared in lard and shot, flaming, out of a cannon. But singed holes in the tent roof do not insight make.
Which was perhaps why the men crouched over the burst water main seemed so confusing. Dressed in prison-issue orange, brandishing dangerous blunt objects, they were shin-deep in muck as they hacked, sawed, twisted and wrenched at the pipes below. It was very upsetting. The council’s emergency number had been called less than half an hour previously: what rotten timing, that these brazen copper thieves, telephone wire footpads and plumbing pilferers had got here first, and were stripping the place. And still in their prison togs, no less.
To the habitual criticiser, who is always in danger of believing the great, disillusioned, self-fulfilling prophecy of the whingeing classes — that It’s All Going To Hell — it was inconceivable that these men were the same ones who had been summoned not 30 minutes previously. Surely it was one of the new laws of the Post-Accountability Universe that council crews did not respond within the week, or that when they finally did come, it would be with weed-eaters to ring-bark the saplings they planted last year?
Had one not been to the Receiver of Revenue a few days earlier, the thrashing figures in the puddle down below would have been utterly obscure, and one would have watched them rather as a rhesus monkey watches Test cricket, with lots of blinking, and fretful turns of the head this way and that.
But Sarshad been indisputably real, and appallingly efficient. The suited, skirted cyborg behind the desk had possessed all knowledge, and had spoken volumes simply by flicking a dust mote off her collar. One had left — reversing on all fours, with eyes on the linoleum — convinced that it Wasn’t All Going to Hell. At least not until it goes upstairs to Audits. There seemed to be a column in there somewhere, but where? The great chromed egg of perfect bureaucracy had left not one chink or cranny for the critic to wedge his poisonous little crampons into. One could say nothing at all, but mumbled thanks.
And then news came from Australia that focused the council crew and the Sars siren into a single affirming sense that places far richer, safer, cleaner and sunnier than South Africa are, indeed, All Going To Hell in ways that we can only dream of. For the good folk of Sydney — that metropolitan pot of white gold that lies at the end of the Rainbow Nation for so many South Africans — have been urged to assemble Go-Bags.
A Go-Bag, for those who don’t speak Australian Paranoid or Post- 9/11 Nanny State, is a rucksack, crammed with radios, batteries, first-aid kits and so on, that the city fathers hope will save their flock in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. It has, of course, escaped them that their own city and national identity are the products of the greatest terrorist attack and natural disaster ever to hit that continent; but one won’t labour the point: white South Africans living in bullet-proof glass-houses shouldn’t throw stones, and besides, what with the council and Sars and Madiba turning 350 and all, dissing Australians would just be a buzz kill.
The details were touchingly banal, the organisers of this nod to wholesale civic pandemonium taking the time to include a baseball cap and running shoes on the list of Go-Bag essentials: just because you’re a refugee in the Outback, there’s no reason to stop looking preppy, and besides, you never know when you might get a chance to do some Pilates in between foraging for lizards and brandishing burning cricket bats at hungry dingos from the perimeter fence of Fort God’s Own.
The criticiser retreats; the critic, temporarily rejuvenated, returns. And as he stops and smells the fynbos, he reckons it’s all right. We might be ruled by fear, but at least we’re not ruled by terror.