Redress

For reasons that don’t bear dwelling on I have taken to watching Ugly Betty. It’s unusually exasperating in that it balances moralising with schlock, rather than trying to enliven either of those with levity (or the spurious reversal: grounding levity in morality). I don’t get this show - ham-fisted silliness with occasional, and neatly sealed off, packages of intelligent funniness. The latter deriving, of course, from the gay one and the hot one, especially their interactions with each other. I’m in awe of the writers. How do they do this? Clearly they’re smarter than we’re supposed to realise, though keeping up appearances will take its psychological toll: the cool likeability of the gay one’s likeable brainy slob boyfriend is an unsubtle, if unconscious, attempt to reflect his creators’ likeable coolness. But self-awareness in this context is, if at all, not especially useful; it’s other-awareness that is key. When in a singles’ bar, by inexact analogy, knowing the incorrect answer is ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘oh, anything tinged by Proustian melancholy’, is not the same as knowing whether the correct answer is ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ or ‘Sagittarius’. In a recent episode, the gay one and boyfriend are renting a movie (I should learn the names, but that seems like too much commitment. I do know that the one with braces is called Betty). Boyfriend wants to get a Truffaut movie. They go to the adult section, where there is also a flick called The 400 Blows. haha! But who is this for? Surely there are dumber sources of cheap laughs. I guess this is the conscious wink to boyfriend’s (existence’s) unconscious nudge. But how do they know how to make the other stuff? How do they know what kind of silliness will work? How do they know what everyone wants? Anyway, our goal isn’t demystification but remystification, so I’ll leave that mystery hanging and creep towards the subject of this post.

A recent episode of Ugly Betty featured a fashion show for ‘real women’ (you know what that means). Presumably, they were supposed to look good. I don’t need to tell you that they didn’t. Then there was the newspapers’ fawning because Beth Ditto wore a dress. (Stella McCartney, I probably misremember. Googling Beth Ditto + Stella McCartney reveals nothing, other than disturbing insights into the Googler.) Apparently she looked fabulous. She didn’t.

Designers say they want models who make their clothes look good. In a sense, fair enough. And in a sense, they’re right about who makes their clothes look good. This sense is, inevitably, a sensibility: the guiding aesthetic of haut couture is the one to which the models conform. In other words, the criteria of judgment come pre-loaded with content. You can’t meaningfully ask whether ‘larger women’ are beautiful until you refigure beauty’s subsidiary terms. The defining sense of elegant or svelte or toned or chic been long set, it’s too late to unbeg the question of their application because these are too intimately tied into a given visual form.

Pace Germaine Greer (actually, pretending her excellent piece doesn’t exist) Victoria Beckham’s mad dress skills have as much to do with thinness (and richness) as anything else. So what to do? Dunno. Yes, wear more of the cool and unusual. But it’s considerably easier to pose as an avant-garde style icon when you’re the leader of nu-rock band. Otherwise the best way to look good in streetwear is to look great in Prada. For everyone else, ‘quirky’ is seldom a compliment. Whatever the practical solution, the key is that any democracy of style starts with a repudiation of high fashion, not in Quixotic attempts at its reform.

Retracting the Intractable

Kicking off with politics. Next time, something important.

Our government has become so effective at controlling the way we describe ourselves that we no longer notice. Black economic empowerment, for example, is now such a normalised part of the jargon of business that no on stops to ask if BEE is about empowering ‘the people’ – i.e. the still disadvantaged masses (who are mostly black) – or about providing ethical credibility to business as usual. If one did, she might see that the relevant distinctions are now (mostly) about class rather than (mostly) about race.
This is part of the reason that President Mbeki and other leaders have been reluctant to make explicit statements against xenophobic violence. It is not that our leaders are never prepared to oppose the will of the majority (they have done this courageously and with integrity in, for example, not reinstituting the death penalty) but these incidences highlight fault lines that cannot be referred to directly, or it might become too clear that we don’t all stand on the same side. Not every politician has grasped the potential resentment to be caused by entering a squalid township in a convoy of luxury cars and ordering the inhabitants not to drive out migrants who (you believe) are stealing your jobs – itself revealing – but the cannier ones do. The apartheid government were equally conscious of the dangers of class solidarity, but while white workers could be induced to affirm allegiance the Volk against the swart gevaar, our government is running out of scapegoats. (If the cold war were still ongoing they might be said to be putting up an effective defence against communists.) Perhaps this is the root of Essop Pahad’s insinuations of a third force.

But politics is a fight over public rhetoric. It takes longer to change underlying assumptions. Indeed, public terminology is built upon those assumptions. How was BEE ever possible in a country with mass unemployment, extreme poverty and a sizable affluent minority? The poor aren’t stupid but most believe (because most people believe) in the global intractability of the status quo, which is capitalism. This is not ideology but (apparent) pragmatism. And in a day-to-day sense this is true. If mobs had targeted the Sandton CBD and beat investment bankers with sjamboks, the army would have been deployed in hours, not days. You can ask your government for a more efficient distribution of resources, but not a change in the basic way these are distributed. The obvious space for action, then, is against those with whom you share the margins.

The response of ‘ordinary South Africans’ (non-politicians) has been glorious and heartening. But we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: to what extent are we complicit in perpetuating these inequalities? Put another way, is there not the risk that treating the symptoms will mask the underlying disease?

Do we really want a return to ‘normality’ in our townships? Yes, certainly. And further pressure must be put on government to stop this tragic violence completely and to provide shelter and resources to the displaced. Indeed, few will disagree that there is an urgent need to provide more to South Africa’s poorest in general. But these events are not about poverty per se, but about the betrayal of the many by an elite, about the existence of an elite, even if this is never directly vocalised or acknowledged. When we (white or affluent or educated or for whatever reason comfortable) South Africans demonstrate against violence, this is correct, virtuous and brave. The right message is undoubtedly ‘Stop attacking foreigners; end the violence now’. But we need to decide the subtext. Is it ‘so everything can return to how it was’ or is it ‘because we are all human, we are all equal, and we must share’. South African history is a model of retracting the intractable. Are we willing to make that sacrifice?