TOM EATON: Flattery gets you everywhere, even on Cloud Nine, if you pay for it
Remember Musi Maimane? He can tell us why Vladimir Putin is such a flop too
His entourage said it with no irony whatsoever. I think they might even have addressed him directly the same way: I was disoriented at the time, fighting the sense that I’d slipped into a fever dream in which I was hovering in the wings of a very on-the-nose political satire, but I’m pretty sure I remember someone gesturing obsequiously towards a door and saying, “this way, Leader”.
The object of this cultish genuflection on that particular day was Mmusi Maimane, arriving at a DA event in Cape Town in 2018. Less than two years later he was no longer the Leader, but on that day I watched people work as hard as bees around a queen to wrap an ordinary person in pure, glittering unreality and projection, and I was struck by how hard it must be to hold on to who you are when, dozens of times a day, people avert their awe-filled eyes from your face and call you “Leader” or “Your Holiness” or “Your Excellency”...
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