No need to doctor his capabilities
DEAR SIR — Though Pallo Jordan has confessed to his sins, politics will never be the same. I commend him for apologising to the nation for his wrongdoings. With his brilliant intellectual prowess, there was no need for him to doctor his capabilities.
If you gave a politician truth serum and asked him what he did for a living, he would quote Leo Tolstoy: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me and assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means, except by getting off his back.” If you gave truth serum to those who vote for our politicians and ask them why they vote as they do, they would quote Frederic Bastiat, who described government as: “That great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Ambrose Bierce defined politics as “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.
Poet John Dryden wrote: “In friendship false, implacable in hate, resolved to ruin or rule the state.”
In a democratic age, with people stupefied by TV, with myths in place of facts and ideology in place of moral ideas, politics necessarily become a competition in mass corruption, with each party attempting to win public support by avoiding or twisting the truth in accordance with plausible and serviceable fictions. Under such a regime, honesty is inconvenient.
James Fenimore Cooper said: “Contact with affairs of state is one of the most corrupting influences to which men are exposed.” Niccolò Machiavelli believed men were weak and temptation in politics was great. He believed that politicians lie, cheat and betray just as poisonous snakes slither upon the ground, shed their skin and produce venom.
It is a severe indictment of our society that the honesty of our politicians no longer seems to matter. Mr Jordan was hailed as an uncommon kind of politician and garlanded for his supposed integrity. His exposure will rock SA’s political landscape. Many of us will miss his supreme intellect. He was, and remains, the most polished intellectual in post-apartheid SA. Farouk Araie Johannesburg