There are few things more painful than a proud parent talking about an overachieving child. You can’t shut them up. They go on and on about recent adventures in sentence construction and, later, maths Olympiads and, later, university scholarships.
I know one such parent in the quaint seaside hamlet they call Durban. You couldn’t silence Vinod with a squash racquet and a good follow-through. But there’s something about the humidity on the coast that suits scandal.
Word got around that one of his little darling’s most recent distinctions was being the teenage underworld’s most successful cellular glamour model. Vinod wasn’t so eager to share anymore. And, yes, being human, I enjoyed his fall from grace.
But let me tell you about another proud father who won’t shut up and whom I actually enjoy.
Bradley wears sensible shoes and diarises his haircuts. He walks into the office with a smile a little wider than a human face is designed to accommodate and from that I know he has a new story about his eight-year-old, Tyler.
Tyler is a little thick. Bradley says so.
The kid has no learning disability, he’s just stupid. Bradley not only acknowledges this but celebrates it as he celebrates every hair on Ty’s head, even the ones glued together with correction fluid.
Today, laptop bag still slung over his shoulder, Bradley tells us that his son tried make a peephole in one of the doors at home. Ty tried to poke through it with a Phillips screwdriver. It was a glass door.
Thick is a great word to describe the unsmart. Thick like the doors and floors of my apartment, swollen to a squeak after a week of wet weather. Thick like day-old porridge.
I’m a bit thick too. It’s the thing that I’m least comfortable admitting. There are many failings I won’t deny. Selfishness. Pigheadedness. I’m even proud of these things, sometimes. It’s okay to be a dick. It goes well with my ankle boots and aviator sunglasses. But a moron?
Of all things, don’t accuse me of that. I’m a columnist and, if I’ve never read Kierkegaard, at least I can spell him.
But the truth is, I am thick. I was once The Weakest Link in the second round of a charity edition of the show. The one where they dumb down the questions so that the shivering orphans get their beanies and blankets. Radio disc jockeys lasted longer than I did, and we all know how thick they are. And last night I did a thing with a can opener that, if anybody found out about it, I’d have to kill myself.
Today, however, there’s one particular idiot I’m thinking of as the power gets sucked back down the cable, the room goes dark and I finish this column by candlelight.
The energy crisis in South Africa has been blamed on many things. Inefficiency. A lack of skills. Shortsightedness. But the more I look at the story of how all this happened, the more I think: they were just being a bit thick.
‘We said not now, later,” President Thabo Mbeki said in a recent speech. ‘We were wrong. Eskom was right.”
He might just as easily have said: ‘My bad. Really fucked that one up.”
Americans take great pleasure in calling their president an idiot. Many nations do. It seems that everybody has an idiot in power but us.
In fact, in South Africa it seems unthinkable to accuse our president of being thick. He, after all, not only reads Kierkegaard, but knows to put the little line through the ‘o” in his first name.
Still, stupid is as stupid does. And therefore I want to suggest not only that our president may be a thicko, but also that we are allowed to call him one.
He is, perhaps, not the obvious kind of fool. He’s certainly not a Noeleen-grade dummy. He’s the undercover kind; thick in the way those advertisements before the movies at Cinema Nouveau are thick. (The ones with the Scottish accents and the polar bears and Van Gogh hawking unit trusts.) But he’s still thick.
In a way, it’s the most forgivable failing. Far more forgivable than shortsightedness. And maybe even he, like Ty, deserves a bit of love for that.