It can’t be too long until Jackie Selebi and Glenn Agliotti are referred to as the Joost and Amor of the criminal world, in the same way that the latter couple are yearningly known as the Becks and Posh of South Africa by the poor unfortunate mutts condemned to write about SA celebs.
After all, the Jackie/Glenn love affair has all the ingredients. A sweeping love affair, featuring passionate betrayal, grandiose dreams, broken promises, drugs, stylish shoes and secret video tapes.
And don’t even get me started on the pet names (apparently Jackie called Glenn ‘the landlord‘, which secret tapes reveal was, and I quote, ‘because I’d given him my heart to keep, and to rent out to Brett Kebble as he wanted.” (I am quoting from ‘secret tapes’ that I made up, unfortunately, but hey — it has a certain poetic truth to it, you must admit.)
Glenn’s haphazard testifying in court is turning out to be very similar to Joost’s buffoon-like attempts to lie about his misdeeds. In fact, Joost’s clumsy attempts to evade retribution remind me of nothing so much as Naas Botha’s tackling style in the 80s. Lots of hand-waving and running in circles, but no actual attempt to play the man. (Sorry, that was pathetic, but I’m still smarting from another Blue Bulls Currie Cup victory.)
So in the same way that Joost has gone from ”That is not me in that video engaged in various types of feline consumption” to, ”It was me, please buy my book”, Glenn went from ”I never bribed Selebi, and I won’t testify against a friend†to, six days later, ‘I have never maintained that I never ever bribed Selebi and that I was not going to testify.â€
Of course, I’m making up these parallels for the sake of poking fun at Agliotti and Selebi, rather than implying that there is a real similarity between Glenn Agliotti and Joost van der Westhuizen. Joost was a great rugby player, and is now an unfortunate man whose private life has been exposed by an unscrupulous jumped up ho called Marilize van Emmenis (for our overseas readers, that translates as, lit., Mary Scraping the Bucket).
It would be tedious to engage, yet again, with what Heat magazine (the Adriaan Basson of celeb journalism, if you will) has called Joostgate, although one has to comment on how terribly revealing that term is. To name a prurient, sales-driven expose of a man’s private life after one of the highlights of investigative journalism in America, is to spit on the profession that you’ve already ground into the dirt. Who knew Heat was that clever.
Serendipitously enough, one @walterpike tweeted this on my twitter stream this morning. ”Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Eleanor Roosevelt.” If only it was that easy. The Glenn and Jackie show is all about the idea of constitutional and governmental accountability, but also about the trial as event. And you can’t possibly divorce the personalities involved from the way the trial is progressing, and how we understand it as event and idea.
In the same way, the tabloid-like feeding frenzy around Joost is an event worthy of analysis, because it reflects the always uneasy tug-of-war that media products have to engage in between economic survival and responsible reporting. But we can’t avoid the personalities involved, unfortunately, as they provide the narrative framework on which to hang the analysis of the idea.
Still, I feel a lot happier making fun of scum like Agliotti, than of discussing the lives of two people whose main crime appears to be that they’re fallibly human, and that one of them once played for the Blue Bulls.
Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisroperza
