Saints and Sinners

Coffee with Costa - Pavement Philosopher

Saints and Sinners

It’s a well known but little publicized fact that every sinner has a future and every saint has a past. My opening premise is that given the passage of enough time, anyone can be transformed into a saint. And why is it that pleasure is a sin and to sin is such a pleasure?

Consider the splendid example of my illustrious namesake the Emperor Constantine. By 300 AD the Roman Empire was vast, fragmented and unstable. The empire was divided into two halves and ruled by two emperors each assisted by a junior understudy or successor. This was known as the rule of four. After moving through England and defeating several rivals along the way, Constantine triumphantly entered Rome “the eternal city.” Through military conquest he was now the Emperor of the West. He was welcomed by the Senate but shocked and outraged everyone by neglecting to thank the pagan gods at the Altar of Victory. He later claimed that he had seen a sign of the cross in the sky, which he read as a promise from the God of the Christians to grant him victory.

Constantine exhausted from all the bloodletting, needed to take a breather, so he brokered a peace deal with his last remaining rival, Licinius, the senior Emperor of the East. Under the new Edict of Toleration, the two emperors agreed that all religions including Christianity should enjoy freedom of worship. Then after several years of intense bickering and rivalry Constantine defeated Licinius and his troops in battle, took him prisoner, had him exiled to Thessalonike in Greece and then had him assassinated.

Constantine was now the Emperor of both the Western and Eastern Empires. The Empire needed a new capital in the east and so Byzantion was born and became known as Constantinople or the “New Rome.” Constantine supported Christian leaders and paid for the construction of Christian churches. The scheming old bastard probably understood the concept of patronage better than most and did his utmost to encourage the more docile and submissive Christian virtues of love, forgiveness, understanding, restraint and obedience to the laws. Naturally none of this applied to him.

It appears that a certain crafty old Egyptian assured Constantine that the Christian religion would wash away all his sin and guilt. The Emperor had good reason to feel guilty. Besides “clipping” the hapless Licinius, the paranoid happy clappy also “popped” his son who went by the unfortunate name of Crispus. Crispus took a fancy to his stepmother the Empress Fausta and was accused by dad of having “improper relations” with mom. Dad kissed Crispus on the mouth and sent him to swim in the eternal pond with the fishes, in the treacherous waters of the Bosphoros. Constantine then turned his murderous attentions to his wife the Empress. He locked her up in the bath house and gradually turned up the heat until she was well and truly cooked like a lobster.

His life’s work complete, Cozzie was now ready to be absolved of all sin and guilt and enter the kingdom of heaven. He was duly baptized into the new Christian faith but only as he lay on his death bed. This was common practice and considered quite sensible at the time by people who still hankered for the license the pagan way of life afforded but wanted to hedge their bets. The Emperor like most Christians wanted to avoid sinning after his baptism so the ceremony was conveniently postponed until the last possible moment of his eventful life.

Constantine was not cremated as was the custom in imperial Rome but buried according to Christian rites. All was now in place for the process of hagiography to take its proper course. After their deaths the Emperor and founder of Constantinople and his mother Helen were portrayed as Christian role models and duly transformed into saints of the Christian Church. Since then an entrenched naming system has been firmly in place and generations of boys and girls like me and my sister have been named Constantine and Helen under this franchise. In fact the names are so popular in Greece that Saint Constantine and Helen day in May is almost a national holiday and a permanent fixture on the religious calendar of the Greek Orthodox Church.

This brings us to our very own Comrade Jacob Zuma. JZ we can argue is a true renaissance man and a man with a past. He is warm, avuncular, charming and engaging. He could be your favourite uncle if you paid him. He has been called a political chameleon. He is a struggle hero. He has had several hot showers. He has already experienced the joys and challenges of polygamy. He is a reverend who sings and dances with gusto. Court appearances leave him unfazed. He like most of us has battled to stick to a monthly budget and balance the household cheque-book. He resoles his shoes and once battled to find R30 in spare cash and coins to get his car washed. So he turned to his Indian in the cupboard. It seems every ANC politician has an Indian lurking in the cupboard, a necessary insurance policy for rainy days. They have replaced the Jews, the Greeks, Italians and the Portuguese which the Nats had lurking in the shadows at their braais and frequently pestered for funding to stage coup d’etats on minor tropical islands, everyday pocket money and assorted gifts. Including but not restricted to biltong, chocolates for their children, HTH granular chlorine for their swimming-pools, cigarettes, brandy, Italian designer handbags for their mistresses and beige ostrich skin shoes for themselves.

Needless to say Zuma is now accustomed to the intricacies of Indian accounting practices which come second only to Greek accounting methods when it comes to inventiveness and creativity. When all is said and done he is undoubtedly a rogue but at least he is a likeable rogue and our very own Zulu rogue, not some Euro-trash, American or Australian import. If I was Zuma’s advisor, I would strongly recommend that when he gets the urge to get hitched again, he selects his new bride from the Afrikaner tribe. A robust and sensible vrou with a name like Magdalena Joubert would do nicely and work wonders for national reconciliation. It would be even better if her great-grandfather was a Boer war general. He is already viewed as a saint by impoverished Afrikaner families living in the gritty streets of Pretoria West, who until his recent visit to this community were forgotten and invisible to everyone else. All he has to do now is drop the rhetoric and act like a war-time leader, sell Cape Town to the Germans, grab the machine gun that he so fondly sings about and deliver results in the fight against crime and unite our racially divided and fragmented nation. His minor past misdemeanors will be forgotten and all will be singing his praises.

Why should a life of banditry, sexual indiscretions, lying and stealing preclude one from holding the highest office in the land? Most politicians break promises, lie and steal anyway, they just don’t get caught. Ethical truths and moral laws that we hold dear have their limits. We are not going to change human nature anytime soon. It is naïve and simplistic to believe otherwise. There is a shadow side that lurks in each of us.

Sending people to jail is not going to change that although it’s high time some corporate executives in the financial world and traders at global investment banks, trading high risk credit derivatives with other peoples’ money, were sent to jail. The executives at a leading food company involved in the illegal fixing of the price of bread should also go to jail. And while we’re at it, we might as well also throw in the bosses at one of its hospital products subsidiaries also involved in substantial price collusion. Instead they get a slap on the wrist, disciplined internally and a get to pay a fine of R98 million and R53 million respectively, imposed by the competition tribunal. These companies no doubt had corporate governance rules, models and procedures in place and probably believed that on the whole they were good corporate citizens. Rules however will never replace human responsibility.

A quick review of the political history of the world reveals a veritable rogues gallery of interesting characters. JFK was a notorious womanizer who shared girlfriends with known mobsters. Churchill was a drunk and practically insolvent and so we could go on. Hitler was a teetotaler, a vegetarian, honest, direct, sincere even, hated smoking, a one woman man, loved dogs, children, chocolate cake, sang Silent Night and Christmas made him sentimental. He was also a ruthless genocidal maniac.

Do we want our leaders and politicians to be moral saints? No, I like my politicians dirty and fallible. They always have been since the days of the fledgling Athenian democracy of Solon, Pericles and Demosthenes. One day they were hero worshipped the next day they were demonized, ostracized, their assets frozen and sent into exile. It goes with the territory. They may hold high office but they are also the bottom feeders of society. They are the whores of public life. You pay your money and get taken for a ride only unlike real prostitutes kissing is not only allowed it is obligatory. We need public theatre and spectacle in the daily arena. The political circus and the clowns who exhort us to take them seriously keep us going. They amuse, upset and entertain us. Their mistakes and follies make us feel better about our own failings. They relieve the mind-numbing tedium of our daily routine, give us something to talk about and keep the newspapers and political analysts in business. We are invariably all experts on various weighty subjects especially on how to run the country without necessarily being burdened by knowledge or public office.

The idea though of having people who are moral saints in public office deeply worries me. The messianic fervour of a right seeking moral zealot or crusader is a frightening prospect and history is littered with the corpses. The tamer ones are too high-minded, dull, boring and self-effacing. They are grey, colourless, card-board cut-outs, who have no personal interests and no personal vices. How do you trust someone who doe not possess that very resilient selfish gene that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speaks about. The deceitful and competitive gene that explains so much of human and animal behaviour that is not altruistic. On a deeply primordial level we understand the concepts of survival, exploitation and manipulation. They stir our baser instincts. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. You wouldn’t want to live with a moral saint. Who wants to be or even live with a goody-goody?

With the advent of metro-sexual males and gay wedding planners, real people everywhere bemoaned the fact that the real men had gone back into their caves to be uncompromising, uncommunicative and sulk. We entered a world of sexual-ambiguity, confusion, pink shirts, pointy shoes, facial creams, moisturizers, life-coaches, sandals, linen trousers and apologies. Knowing the thread count of sheets and being in touch with our feminine side became more important than drinking, swearing and smoking in the company of other bearded Neanderthals. The real politicians also disappeared replaced by the little Johnny Howard’s of this world. Predictable bores faithfully doting on a restless, indifferent and disinterested electorate, like puppy dogs eager to please. A new found morality unrealistically expected our politicians to be squeaky clean and holy. No more strippers, whisky and back-room deal-making. What happened to the heady days of real politicians only having time for women and voters when it suited them?

Enlightened self-interest and pragmatism may be the answer we are looking for. Deeply flawed characters, sinners and dirty politicians make interesting, riveting and absorbing history. Does anyone remember, know or even care about the politicians, the dull technocrats and uninspiring history of Switzerland? We only remembered them when we discovered that they banked all the loot, gold and art the Nazis plundered from the Jews of Europe. This immediately captured our imagination and awakened our atavistic impulses. By all means do good deeds if you must but please also have some reassuring vices to remind us that you are human. We can all live with inspired mistrust of our politicians. Trust me you’ll get used to it. As Seneca said, “Errare humanum est”, to err is human. Those who act and lead will err. Those who do nothing will commit no errors. As Oscar Wilde suggested maybe morality is simply an attitude we only adopt towards our enemies and not to our friends. In the war for domination and the quest for scarce resources and greater corporate profits, ethics may be none other than a necessary weapon that big business uses in its arsenal, in order to survive and gain competitive advantage over its rivals. It may just be another useful management tool to control employees, to keep them submissive, docile, compliant and in check.

The stupid public figures and intellectual lightweights like JFK, Ronald Reagan and JZ are actually quite good at being politicians and presidents. They remember their lines and deliver them with absolute conviction. War time leaders have it easier and will always be remembered whether they do nothing like Neville Chamberlain, are infamous mass murderers like the paranoid Stalin, indifferent, callous monsters like Napoleon or do great deeds like the civilized and sexually ambivalent conqueror and killer, Alexander of Macedon. As in Churchill’s case they are also hopeless at being peacetime leaders. Peacetime leaders are doomed like the rest of us to the scrap heap of history. How will Bill Clinton be remembered? For his tight nylon jogging shorts, for making cigars sexy and for appearing on the Martha Stewart Show to discuss his favourite barbecued pork belly recipe? In Russia today, Stalin’s image has been revived and burnished by the warm glow of a new wave of nostalgia and hagiography. History has been kind to him. He almost has a cult-like following and is revered as great war-time leader, his homicidal excesses against his own people now conveniently forgotten. This reminds us that everywhere the veneer of civilization is disturbingly thin.

You might argue that politicians are fair game. They should be accountable, be held to a higher standard and should be role models for civil society. Why? The good citizens of ancient cities like Athens and Rome have never placed excessive nor unrealistic expectations on their politicians. They don’t need their politicians to be role models. Grandparents fulfill that role. They understand that politics is a dirty business like cleaning sewers and rarely attracts top minds or talent. At best politicians are clueless imbeciles. Politics is usually the preserve of failed teachers, actors and lawyers except in Italy where anyone qualifies including porn stars. (Stalin incidentally studied to become a priest) They also understand and accept that there is a symbiotic relationship between big business and political office. It is not the politicians who have gone too far, it is more often a case of large corporate interests getting out of hand with obscene amounts of spare cash to buy influence and power. We all know that politicians get paid a pittance compared to corporate executives and senior executives receive handsome remuneration and severance packages even when they fail.

Besides it is unfair to pick only on politicians and single them out. We all know that the forces of globalization have shifted the centres of power from politicians and nation states to corporations. Do they not pose a greater evil to humanity? They control revenues and resources greater than the GDP of most countries. David Rothkopf in his new book calls this global power elite the new”Superclass.” The decisions of a just a few thousand executives affect the lives of billions of people all over the world. Consider that over 100 large companies and only 60 countries have sales or GDP in excess of $50-billion. So the question arises: should we be concerned with the temporary or fleeting positional power that politicians enjoy, in most cases for 8 years or less, or should we be very worried about the massive wealth, power and domination concentrated in the hands of some billionaires and the large corporations that they control? Their financial power lasts longer than political power and has a more direct affect on our lives. This global elite class and the decisions they make, determines how markets are run, how scarce resources and assets are allocated, what we buy, how we live, how we work, whether we have work or not, what we read, what we see on TV, how currencies are valued and which politicians are funded.

In ancient Greece when a politician became too powerful and was deemed to pose a threat to Athenian democracy, voters wrote the persons name on a piece of pottery shard called ostraka (hence the word ostracized) and threw the pieces of clay in a vase to be counted. The offending politician was then voted out of office, had his assets frozen and was then yellow carded or sin-binned and sent into exile for a period of ten years to cool off. Maybe this method should be deployed against the new economic Superclass. Why should the richest 1000 individuals control and own more of the planet that the poorest 3 billion? The counter-argument is that these individuals are innovative, hard-working, determined and super-intelligent risk takers. This may be true but most of them are smart enough to admit that they are also insulated from the everyday survival problems most of us face and they are also deeply self-centred, egotistical and very lucky.

Consider the latest political and corporate scandal to hit the shores of Greece. Siemens was playing both sides of the political coin. They were paying 100 million Euros in bribes each to the Greek government and to the official Greek opposition party to secure lucrative contracts. The reaction of people on the streets of Athens was stoical resignation. They shrugged their shoulders and replied: that’s what big business does and that’s how politicians are. It might not be right but it is real and is not going to go away in a hurry. There are numerous other examples of corrupt politicians like Berlusconi in Italy who famously offered to pimp his wife to the bemused Prime Minister of Denmark., Olmert in Israel, Ahern in Ireland and the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld triumvirate and their buddies at Halliburton effectively owning Iraq. These scoundrels make our very own Comrade Jacob Zuma look like a boy scout. Critics may object to the politics of equivocation and appeasement. Others will despise the cop-out inherent in accommodating corrupt political arrangements and deal-making. Unfortunately the reality is that sometimes the practicalities of political expediency win over moral principle.

Politics after all is the art of the possible and as Napoleon understood so clearly, one has to fight many petty squabbles to rise to the top and once they reach the top, few have the ability to rise above the pettiness and act like statesmen. As Kissinger the arch proponent of Realpolitik said of the global stage, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies only permanent interests. The consequences in the West are hardly noticeable because the game that is played is older and more sophisticated. Also the largesse is substantial enough to be spread among many players. In Africa unfortunately the spoils usually go to one tyrant. We can blame human greed and the deeply flawed capitalist system. Unfortunately it’s the only system that works. It is good at creating wealth; it’s just not good at distributing wealth fairly. As the economist John Maynard Keynes put it, “capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” The same could be said of politics.

The Greeks may be ethically challenged, quarrelsome, unusually fond of pillars, pediments and pavements, inventive with yoghurt, incapable of punctuality and struggle to run a country properly, but given all their flaws, their fascinating history of being repeatedly abused by invaders, occupiers and enemies foreign and domestic, makes them a pragmatic bunch. A fine old tradition allows old rogues and brigands to redeem themselves when they get old and weary. Once Greek bandits have sated their appetite for thievery, lying, stealing and cheating, those nearing retirement age who haven’t plundered or saved enough and face the prospect of life without a pension plan, are allowed to enter the priesthood or become monks on some remote island. They are fed, clothed and allowed to keep their beards. Not a bad way to salvage what is left of your reputation and exit the sordid fray with some dignity and privacy. A quiet and tranquil time to reflect while you tend the vegetable parch, watch the courgettes grow and reminisce about your colourful past. And when all else fails, you conveniently find God. Good news then for all our aspiring sinners and errant politicians.

So Reverend Zuma, when your personal struggle is over, when you grow weary of the grubby mauling, the in-fighting and petty squabbling, when you have served your time whether it is in jail or in office and you have no more fight left in you, please don’t despair. A suitable island or monastery can be found for you somewhere in Greece. Like the Emperor Constantine a saint-hood can also be arranged, for a small sum naturally. Given the passage of enough time you might even make it onto a future religious calendar. You stand as good a chance as anyone and as far as I can tell black saints are seriously unrepresented, which is a great injustice that needs to be redressed. The weather on the islands will agree with you. The Mediterranean diet will do wonders for your health and may even improve your legendary libido and increase your longevity. In lieu of strenuous exercise, dancing and singing is encouraged. You’ll have to leave all your wives and children behind but think of all the money you will save. Should this arrangement not suit you, you are free of course like Henry VIII to start your own religion.

Religion may or may not be the opium of the masses (I think television and consumerism is the sedative of the masses) but it is definitely the last refuge of the scoundrel.


Costas Ayiotis
Meditations, reflections and observations from the Republic of Hout Bay
August 2008