Eusebius McKaiser
There is something distractingly pathetic about evoking an impressive past in an attempt to have one’s present-day failures be looked upon with kindness.
It is a form of blackmail to do so, and a performance of moral bankruptcy.
It is sheer trickery. Especially when the past was never completely known.
In the less objectionable of such cases, these performances might be genuine but still misplaced pleas for mercy, the fallen now begging to be judged by their entire life narratives, and not to be reduced to a few dark moments in time.
Even so, when the effects of what one has now done are grossly harmful, inviting everyone to look back over your shoulder sympathetically doesn’t help your victims and survivors.
Take the case of Bill Cosby. This sexual predator had a past that appeared to be wholly admirable. Or, so we thought.
The past, of course, isn’t always as fixed as the earliest memoirs and biographical sketches may lead us to believe.
Cosby’s television portrayal of Dr Huxtable became, for many of us, an imagined alternative way of being black, escaping a cycle of compulsory failure, disappointment and wretchedness.
Bill Cosby the actor and Dr Huxtable the television character morphed into one and, armed with his mountain of invented moral authority, Cosby lectured black men in particular about the need to set aside inglorious social facts about our kind, and to be present in our own self-development and in the lives of our families and communities.
And then it all crumbled.
Little did we know, until some of the survivors of his predation bravely spoke out despite the odds hugely stacked against each one of them for upsetting Cosby’s sturdy position in cultural folklore, that Bill was a monster all along, and not merely fallible like we all surely are.
Many of his fans are so unwilling to let go of their romantic views of Cosby that they prefer to demand nothing short of a criminal conviction before accepting that women across generations with lots to lose in a patriarchal society that sustains rape culture are far less likely to lie about sexual violence they experienced than to manufacture lies that generate no gain but guarantee plenty of scorn.
Some stick-in-the-mud Cosby fans appeal to his place in history instead of revising the biographical record in the light of compelling new testimonies.
We sometimes seem desperate to hold on to memory of our ordained heroes in a world crowded with anti-heroes. We also seem scared of the emotional cost of letting go of false heroes.
This isn’t restricted to superstars in the world of entertainment.
In each of our anonymous domestic worlds similar temptations arise to ignore new evidence about loved ones, and so we often simply choose to cling on to the nicest bits of the stored knowledge about the people in our lives.
This is how treasure trunks of family secrets come into existence.
This resistance to upsetting an established narrative is also not restricted to the worlds of domestic, familial and friendship relations.
It is also true of our relationships with our public institutions and political heroes.
This struck me over the past few days as I see friends of mine on social media desperately trying to convince themselves that the ANC is not a spent force, morally.
There is melancholic nostalgia in the way they perform these speech acts.
But for some diehard ANC supporters, who are intensely aware that the impressive past of the party, just like the impressive past of one Jacob Zuma, doesn’t ameliorate the effects of gross present-day failures, there is now an existential dilemma they are experiencing.
Should these ANC supporters review their settled beliefs about the ANC as a moral force for good, a couple of decades after the political collapse of apartheid, and perhaps even be willing to open up silent questions about the political biography of the party before democracy’s birth?
This might be the political equivalent though of being willing to listen carefully to the testimony of a predator’s survivors.
Indeed, many of these ANC supporters and voters, like all citizens in South Africa, are survivors of the worst of the ANC’s post-colonial sins.
The emotional cost of revisiting these fixed views of the ANC is like opening up the family’s treasure trunk of dirty secrets.
If, on the other hand, ANC supporters suppress the evidence of an ANC no longer as morally spotless as they had imagined, then there is the danger of blindly and imprudently propping up an organisation that has severed ties with its own past.
Ignoring this possibility would be as irresponsible as pretending you never heard testimonies about what Cosby did, and being willing to simply continue laughing at his jokes, or taking seriously his finger wagging in the direction of other men.
Will ANC supporters fetishise the unexamined past or help secure our collective future?