(Source: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/diary.asp?show=President%20Mbeki)

No, you nerd, the important thing here is not that he only scored a Google pagerank of 4/10 for importance (relative to Jacob Zuma whose Wikipedia page scores 6/10, making him 20% more important). It’s the fact that his official diary is telling us what we’ve all known for years. He’s not doing anything.

This got me to thinking about politicians who have too much time on their hands and the trouble they can cause. The US Congress is a good example (they have, after all, an unpopular lame-duck president from a different party presiding over them, and everyone is more interested in the Obama-Clinton race than in actually getting something done). So the “Joint Economic Committee” had a choice. Either finish off that game of strip poker they began during the Clinton impeachment campaign a few years back (the honourable representative for Wisconsin still regrets how Edna failed to point out the hole in his jockeys before he left for work that morning); or analyse 10-million flight records supplied by their pals over at the Department of Transportation. OK, let’s be honest. Those humourless jobsworths over at DOT didn’t actually send the data over. Someone just found the pages turned upside down in the photocopy machine while they were trying to make copies of the lunch menus.

In any event, data, or so the saying goes, is only data if it is read and a press release is issued. So it had to be analysed. Or at the very least the most junior member of the committee could be persuaded to stop playing Grand Theft Auto on his laptop, and told to cut and paste everything into Excel to see if anything interesting came up. He was, and it did.

Apparently, the committee found, US airlines are responsible for the biggest economic tragedy since, well, Ronald Reagan.

Last year, in America alone, 320 million hours were lost due to flight delays. That, dear voters of Puerto Rico (who everyone now seems to give a damn about), is unacceptable.

Let’s do the sums.

320 000 000 hours = 13 333 333,33 days = 1 904 761,90 weeks = 36 630,04 years

Now the average life expectancy of Americans is 77,9 years.

So the number of lifetimes lost a year through flight delays = 470,22

Or, consider this. What if the amount of time spent waiting around airports or circling overhead was instead focused on a more noble pursuit? The good members of the Joint Economic Committee can think of nothing nobler than the Nobel prize for Economics. (In fact many of them are hoping to be awarded it in a year or two). The average age that people are awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics is 67. And so, without airline delays, we could have found 546,72 more prizewinners.

Or maybe movies are your thing. While waiting for their plane, Americans could watch the new Indiana Jones film 154 838 709 times. I’ve seen it once, and regretted it. Imagine the mass depression the nation would face if every second person had to endure it? (There are 304-million people in America).

You get the picture? Now you know why the committee was so stunned. One of them mentioned it to a mate on the “Committee for the Environment” while they stood next to each other at the congressional urinals during a lunch break (staring fixedly at the wall in front of them, ignoring the foot tapping from Larry Craig in the stall behind them), who rushed off to tell Al Gore. Gore crunched some numbers, projected them onto the cinema-sized computer screen behind his desk, checked his hair and then clambered aboard his forklift ladder to take a closer look. He was amazed. And so, breathlessly, after checking his hair again, he had to tell us just how amazed he was. As a result of flights being delayed, an extra seven million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide was being released into the air. That’s more than the annual emissions of Namibia, Iceland, Fiji, Swaziland, the Falkland Islands and Samoa combined.

And — let us not forget — this data considers only flights from US airlines. Imagine if Nationwide, Aeroflot and Kulula were added to the mix. Al Gore would do himself an injury trying to show how high those graphs go. The study also fails to count hours spent searching for lost luggage (which, as I’ve already demonstrated, logically leads to more lost Nobel Prize winners). British Airways and Terminal 5 have a lot to answer for.

So what does all this have to do with President Mbeki?

Well the answer is fairly obvious. He’s been accused of late of being an absentee president — jetting around the world while his country burns. His diary, meanwhile, appears empty which means he’s either lying next to his pool sipping cocktails, or he’s stuck at an airport somewhere. Based on what the US Congress is telling us, I reckon the latter is more likely. But don’t worry. He’ll be back with us in 470 lifetimes. And not a moment too soon.

If not doing crime is playing a role in fighting crime, then I’m cool with that. If the president or Pallo Jordan wants me to don a flak jacket and get out there, leopard-crawling through the streets of Johannesburg looking for baddies, then they’ve got the wrong guy. I briefly considered a career as a policeman but then saw how badly they get paid for walking counter-intuitively toward gunfire instead of running like the blazes in the other direction.

Asking the nation to “all play a role in fighting crime” is abdicating responsibility. It’s also encouraging vigilantism, a slippery slope that could only end badly. It’s not our role to fight crime, just as it is not our role to fix potholes in the road or to speed around in those bright red shiny engines putting out fires. There are people who are employed to do those things, and get paid to do them. I just have to do my own job, pay my tax bill and then all of that comes as part of the service.

Sure, if I become aware of a pending crime I should report it. If I am contemplating doing something bad, then I should stop it. And I should raise my children to know that crime is bad, honest work is good. But that’s where my role in fighting crime begins and ends. I can do no more.

It’s not like other national priorities. Tell me that I have a role to play in alleviating poverty and I can see that: I can employ people, contribute time and money to NGOs working with the poor, and so on. Tell me that I have a role to play in educating our people and I get it — I can help my domestic worker to put her daughter through college; I can help her complete her own studies.

In a small way I can help with those. But I can’t help fight crime. I can help prevent crime — by building higher walls around my house, getting vicious dogs and lining the inside of my car with high-voltage electric wire — but those measures aren’t fighting crime. They’re protecting me from criminals. The problem has not been solved — it has just been diverted to the unfortunate guys down the road who haven’t yet had the croc-infested moat dug around their property.

There’s a loveable redneck singer called Charlie Daniels who once penned the poetic lines “Now I’m not the kind of man who would harm a mouse, but if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house, I got a 12-gauge shotgun waiting on the other side”. I’m with him. I don’t have a gun of any description, but if an unarmed someone tried to break into my house and I caught him, then I’d do my best to beat the living crap out of him. If he had a gun, I would pretty much do what he told me to do. It’s called the law of averages and when they’re against you, accept it and move on.

The problem with the words of our government on the issue is that they might embolden me to do something stupid and think, “Hey — the Prez said I should fight crime, so let me take on this dude with a gun … where’s my potato peeler?” Get real.

Those urging us to “do our bit” are engaging in a wily psychological trick — getting us to believe that we’re all in this together and we must unite to fight crime. In other words, don’t apportion blame for a crime rate that makes a holiday in Hanoi in 1966 seem like a honeymoon. If there’s lots of crime, then we haven’t been pulling our weight. And we must take the blame rather than place it at the feet of those who are actually paid to take care of it. Genius piece of spin.

While all that was going on, I was sent another screen grab from the president’s inbox at the Union Buildings. Here it is (click on the image to see it full size):