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Nathaniel Manheru The Other Side
Alexander Pope was one hell of a poet who brooked no bald critics. Not that he hated criticism. He hated dullards who pretended to be critics, the same way he hated pseudo-poets who gave the world doggerel so bereft of wit. And for him and his generation, wit was everything.
His Augustan age hated dullness, a sin excoriated through harsh, clever aphorism that seared, aphorisms one could never ignore, never forget. It is an age where anger expressed itself as profound verse, an age that gave us great poetry, greater prose, greatest essays that laid enduring canons for western art.
Who forgets Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the source of that memorable I-hate-mankind-although-all-my-love-is-for-Tom-Peter-Jill-and-James? Or something like that.
He hated human nature, found it supremely repulsive or offensive, although he conceded to instances of human goodness, human nobility by way of individuals of high moral stature.
How could he not, lest he would have condemned himself too, in that broad, near-misanthropic sweep?
Unfinished things
But this is not about Swift. It is about Alexander Pope, Swift’s generational and literary sibling, about his attitude towards poor art he so derisively called doggerel, about stupid critics he called worse things.
To get you to sample this great poet’s acerbic pen, herewith:
“Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn’d Critics next, and proved plain fools at last.
Some neither can for Wits nor Critics pass,
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.
Those half-learn’d witlings, num’rous in our isle,
As half-formed insects on the banks of Nile;
Unfinish’d things, one knows not what to call,
Their generation’s so equivocal:
To tell ‘em, would a hundred tongues require,
Or one vain wit’s, that might a hundred tire.”
Missing the mistress, wooing the maid
You cannot miss the utter contempt in those compressed lines. Pseudo-critics are reduced to half-formed vermin creeping on the banks of the great River Nile, itself the bedrock of human civilisation. They exist within the precincts of great, fecund civilisation, yet remain empty, dull and ignorant.
And unrestrained by their forceful ignorance, they hold severe opinion on matters hardly ever comprehended. To correct them, to advise them to temper their haughty judgments, “a hundred tongues require”!
Not that Pope saw no room and role for criticism. He saw its value in shaping great poets, great poetry, in shaping a greater, dynamic poetic tradition fashioned along the lines of Ancient Greece whose culture he revered.
In his own words, “The gen’rous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire/ And taught the world with reason to admire.” But the critic had to know that in the beginning was the poet, was the poem, respectively the creator and the creature.
Without the creator and his creature, they would be no work for the pretentious critic so given to sounding knowledgeable and clever about rules and canons of creation, yet unable to bring anything into being!
The critic, Pope memorably said, was the proverbial suitor who having failed to win the mistress, wooed the maid. Bat-like creatures who belong to neither the bird nor animal kingdom, yet bearing traits of both. In a word, mules which belong to no fast category, which bear no scion.
The good turn that never deserved
Since the beginning of the thank-you rallies of Grace Mugabe, wife of President Robert Mugabe, and the First Lady of Zimbabwe, the media have gone mad, seemingly getting madder with each rally. My beef is not with the First Lady.
Or with all those persons and officials she has excoriated at her rallies. I leave that to her fans and critics, the former adulating her sky high, the latter trashing her well beneath their stomping feet.
She is no minor: by age, by status and by the branch in governance she has elected to join.
No one gets into the boxing ring hoping to gain lipstick and a cuddle. Boxing rings are settings for bare knuckles, for transferring hurt. She knows that.
So does her husband who has consistently maintained he has never sought to foist politics on any of his family members.
My beef is with the media, themselves players upgraded to constitutional notice and consequence since our referendum on the new constitution.
They are a clause of, and in, our constitution; they are a feature of our democracy as we now have it. Whereas the old constitution hewn at Lancaster, in Britain, recognised freedom of expression, of course with those universally acknowledged derogations, the current one goes beyond that, mentioning media freedoms by name, implacably implanting media organisations’ right of establishment.
And as they say, to those granted so much, a lot more is and should be expected. We have gotten a lot less, so pitiably less.
I am angry.
Our faculties are full
The other day I had a warm discussion with a old hand in the media industry.
He confessed to me that he faced a stark choice between deserting the field altogether for something else different, something not even remotely connected to journalism, or expending the mortal remainder of his life overturning the media as presently constituted, as presently practised, overturning all its rules and incinerating them for something completely new and edifying.
I am not so sure what he is up to nowadays, although I have never known him as a quitter.
And in his diagnosis of what is wrong with our type of journalism, he boiled it down to two key, related maladies: poor training, and poor education, the latter made poorer by a culture that shuns reading.
Another friend, also a veteran in the craft is uncomplimentary on the latter deformity: rarely, he laments, do you find a journalist holding a book. Or even a booklet, much as all of them — to the man, to the woman — crave to be read. And to be read seriously as a thoughtful guild. I seem to agree with both gentlemen.
Come to think of it, unless it is a dash into solipsism, the act of writing implies a belief in reading, does it not? How does one write unless one believes in the human urge to read? Unless one has faith in language, in words and their capacity to carry and convey meaning?
Journalism is inherently an interactive craft, a profession founded on the belief of man as a reading creature. How then do those at the heart of it shun reading? Or do they think that their faculties are already full, turgidly full to the point of not taking in any more knowledge?
So tautly full that all that remains for them is rendering knowledge, downloading it to all of us, lesser beings?
Looking for a thumptician
In my cynical homely moments, and in the company of my children, I taunt them for being a generation reared on the staple of fingers. I call them a finger generation. Their fingers are knowledgeably agile, their brains empty, at best basic.
This nation is badly de-educating. Take a moment to watch your own daughter, your own son, in between morsels from your hard-earned cash.
Most probably you will find their exemplarily nimble fingers on the phone, I-pad or computer, depending on family endowments, on the family degree of e-readiness. It is always a marvel to watch their fingers at work on those ever caressed, diffident keyboards.
They are tweeting, ever tweeting! Always chasing talk and gossip in the nether, assisted by latest platforms as if a whole generation of inventors has been created from Adam’s other rib, all to distract this curse generation.
In my days, you sought and consulted an optician on eyes grown tired from too much reading; nowadays they need a thumptician to mend their broken fingers from too much twiddling, tweeting.
I really wish those damn things were operated by toes, in which case behold, a sedentary generation would be born. How does a father cure an addiction contracted through restless fingers? And all told, they are ten, ten mindless fingers that could very well have been dead toes.
Enter an era of monosyllables
I am no techno-phob. I hate all technology, although I love thimble, I-pad, internet, basic cellphone, and of course my reading glasses. I love books, real physical books, never virtual ones.
But I can’t stand a generation which thinks through its fingers, a generation whose vector is summed up by a restless thumb.
A generation whose knowledge and verbal universe amount to the few letters permissible in a tweet. I hate it when such a finger-short generation occupies the highest stool in the newsroom, watching the world through its fingers. I hate it, sorely.
Seeing the world through fingers, vainly thinking it knows enough, knows all there is.
Need we wonder that this finger generation has given us finger journalism accusatory in tone, damning individuals for no apparent reason.
The one thing a finger does well it to point, to pick a pricking quarrel. It is like we live in an era of swords, where everything boiled down to duels. And fingers and just that: fingers! They do things, mess them up even.
They don’t think. They don’t remember anything. They point, accuse. They are short, very short. And coarse too, caroused.
Don’t all these summarise our journalism nowadays? But what began? A short finger or a short brain? What shrank?
What sank what? What long brain tweets “Luv u”? What long finger writes thus? What long attention span is ever needed for a monosyllabic generation? And they shun their first language.
It is unwieldy: “mogozondipindurawo kuno kwaMudzimuirema.” Or “maita Ziendanetyaka”. How do you tweet that? Real death of a people, a mind, a culture, a language!
My daily serve, please
Now transpose such an abridged finger-mind to ZANU-PF’s lengthy politics.
Transfer that short world to the Zimbabwean reader with his gargantuan appetite for knowledge. How does a twit fulfil my right to be informed? My right to know the world about me?
Is that right of establishment, the right of media freedom, merited by a tweeter generation? Tweeting journalism? Get me right: I am not contesting their right to tweet, that despicably short generation. Let them tweet themselves shorter, even to finger lameness.
After all who knows, Alzheimer might just visit them, slowing their vast appetites.
What I contest, and contest vehemently, is to so vastly abridge, even wash away, my right to be informed, by subjecting me to mindless twits. You seek a career in the knowledge industry, you just have to make sure you have the facility, the equipment for transmitting that knowledge, wholly! We pay you, both by the lewd Obama dollar (like a harlot, the dollar goes to, in, anyone), and by that constitutional concessions we made. Why won’t I get decent facts, decent interpretation from those facts? Why won’t I get my full daily serve from journalism?
From pillar to post
One morning I read that the President is out to create “a Mugabe dynasty”.
The following morning I am told Grace Mugabe is rooting for Mnangagwa. And next I am told she is a nobody, yet, I soon discover, a nobody awarded acres and acres of newspaper space? Sei nei? Even front-page, run-on editorials in succession, all devoted to a nobody, to a nothing? Surely that kind of great act or ode in tribute to nothing can only come from a nobody? Is that the new name for journalism?
When journalism limbs from one speculation to another hurriedly, repeatedly, inconclusively, can it be trusted to inform anyone? And if it does so, do we pay for it, credit it with constitutional rights? I wonder. How am I supposed to arrive at some informed opinion on the world about me from such a confused and confusing narrative? But all that can be forgiven, is forgiveable.
Press off post
What to me is unpardonable is when fact and comment enmesh into vile, hate-filled copy completely unworthy of journalism. Grace Mugabe is angling for the post of Secretary for the Women’s League of a party called ZANU-PF. That to me sounds like a personal decisions to join the political fray. That to me is a political choice whose immediate consequence is to disrobe her as a First Lady, to enrobe her as a full-throated lead politician who cuts and stabs.
She will get and deserves mud, brickbats and jibes in return. But these must come from her peers in politics, not from smears from newsrooms. That can’t be.
I have absolutely no problem with her getting lashes from Madhuku, Biti, Makoni or Tsvangirai’s hireling and aptitudinal alter ego, Luke Tamborenyoka, however severe or demeaning these lashes may be. She, too, must learn to lash at them in similar fashion.
Or should, to the best of her tongue. That is the world she has chosen to inhabit, a world of claims and epithets. Very indecorous, very vile. But when a newspaper headlines “Angry Grace goes berserk”, or “Grace’s blitz: 10 mad points”, do I feel justly served as a reader? Why is the media doing a hatchet job for rivalling politicians? Why is it being a legionnaire of a politician angry or surmised to be so? Accused or surmised to be so? Wronged or surmised to be so . Abused or surmised to be so? Attacked or surmised to be so? Since when have the media been an air-rescue service for prostrated politicians? And as they go on those rescue missions, as they get irate on behalf of politicians they think angry, what happens to the expectant, constitutionally deserving reader? The wielder of the mighty pen has abandoned post, all to post an angry twit for an embittered politician. Today mice jump, all the time nibbling at decent journalism.
When MISA, ZUJ erred
Much worse, what is the media-attacked politician supposed to do? What is her recourse? Demure silence? This is how fundamentally the media skew the political playing field. Once we have headlines such as those quoted above — decidedly opinionated headlines -—headlines that prance about with the dignity stolen from decent, crying facts, we introduce a new phenomenon in politics, namely editing politicians. To my reckoning, these don’t deserve any rights under our constitution, or worse, a day longer in the newsroom. They should join propaganda departments of political parties where they can exhaust their political ardour, to no complaints.
That world which politicians inhabit has its own rules, its own sense of poetic justice. You cannot discharge a fusillade from a political trench, only to plead a constitutional parapet, only to retreat behind the breastwork of constitutionalism when retributive brickbats come flying. MISA was wrong, wrong and partisan. ZUJ was wrong, wrong and partisan. An editor and a paper which takes a frontal political position in flagrant violation of the rules of journalism cannot be a beneficiary of the same rules it has flouted.
And a politician so assaulted by such errand journalism becomes a victim of that act, never a threat to journalism. And any association which comes to the rescue of such errand media destroys journalism by appearing to save it. And it does so by pledging unconditional support to miscreants of the craft, merely on a strength of registration formalities of the offending paper.
Membership to journalism is not about registering with the Zimbabwe Media Commission; rather, it is about adhering to a set of rules and practices that define the craft and industry. For me that must be the litmus test, the essence of earning, deserving and meriting solidarity and collective defense and protection. Even the powerful politician can be sinned against by an untutored media organisation. And when that happens, a true defence of journalism is to stand by the injured persons, politician or not, while calling the errand media back to proper ways. This culture of unconditional defense is partly at the heart of the journalism crisis we face today.
Glibness in a foreboding moment
Going a little further, a good defense of journalism must count the costs of bad journalism to the reader. Looking at the coverage of the incoming secretary for the Women’s League, and in the absence of verbatim coverage by ZBC, would ZUJ and MISA say the Zimbabwean reader is a whit wiser for it? Does a paper that sells an attitude, that incites hate, bring any useful service to its readers? Surely when a monumental development like a public fallout between a sitting President’s wife and a sitting Vice-President of that country takes place, the media have a responsibility to search for the whys and wherefores, well beyond the shorthand of thoughtless, finger journalism and gossip?
The allegations being levelled against the Vice President are very serious. Equally, the act of raising them brings with it very serious risks, possibly a major fracture in the body politic. To imagine that a journalism going through such a foreboding moment can be that glib, is surely simply irresponsible. Not even parallels of such or similar fallouts elsewhere in the world have been drawn to help the reader frame what is before him. And there are many in our region and beyond.
The matters that were left to sleep
I said fingers are no limbs for memory, only for deeds and misdeeds. It was left to the outgoing secretary for Women’s League to remind the reader that ZANU-PF Women’s League has been led by a wife of the President before. Why is the media treating Grace Mugabe as a nonesuch in politics? We still have to be told that the current Vice President in fact provides a precedent to a League Secretary who becomes a State Vice President. Why does entertaining such ambitions now look so wayward?
No one has told us what becomes of the outgoing Secretary. Or drawn an obvious distinction between a Grace Mugabe who asserts, strictly on point of principle, her right to aspire to the country’s presidency by dint of her being a Zimbabwean, and a Grace Mugabe who makes it plain and loud that she only seeks the post of Secretary for the Women’s League. Surely that is not too fine a distinction to comprehend?
Who needs, brings gamatox?
The Grace Mugabe/Mujuru story badly needs competent print journalism to bring it into our homes and consciousness. Thank God we have the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation which, as Tazzan Mandizvidza correctly says, bring us politicians in their own words. We have been able to meet the President’s wife because of ZBC, in spite of a liberalised, incompetent but opinionated print media which are the very partisan ways of the same politicians they deride. And with Alexander Pope, we wonder whether we are looking at a horse or an ass. And given that this is a very educated nation, we wonder why this country is banefully afflicted by these “unfinished things”, these “half-formed insects on the banks of Nile”.
Who brings the gamatox? Icho!
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