Every day, in the choices we make or don't select, we display a degree of dualism or opposing ideas jostling for our attention and selection. Poetically, Walt Whitman's 1892 epic poem on the human condition, "Song of Myself", summed this up neatly: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I [...]
When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as "American Carnage". Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor's oration: "That was some weird s..t." [...]
I hope that the new government of national unity (GNU) both endures and delivers real change in the lives of many citizens. As one Cabinet minister expressed to me recently, the answer to estimates on its longevity is summed up in the acronym TINA (there is no alternative). Of course, his sentiment is sound, even [...]
"The butterfly effect" explains how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon triggers a massive storm across Europe. As John Gribbin explains the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who first developed this chaos theory: Some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give [...]
Consider an alternate history written for the 29 May elections in South Africa. As a work of historical fiction – based on real characters and actual events – it could include these "facts": The DA leader, the largest opposition party, is banned from participating in the poll; the ANC, the governing party, is accorded unfettered [...]
My recent reimmersion into the murky waters of SA politics during the negotiation for the new and very large government of national unity was a reminder of why I quit political leadership in 2007. I have renewed admiration for those who toil at the political grindstone but, politics like acting (and former British prime minister [...]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
Last Friday evening, I attended a dinner in Cape Town addressed by the writer and associate editor of the conservative magazine, The Spectator, Douglas K Murray, and author of the best-seller "The Madness of Crowds". In an interview there with Gareth Cliff, Murray suggested that South Africa's case against Israel on genocide charges before the [...]
In 1843, Lord Thomas Macaulay, an English politician and historian, wrote: "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Substitute the ANC government and update it to present times, and you achieve a neat fit for the crowing and posturing of President Cyril Ramaphosa and [...]
