Ten stories from SA’s press in recent months exemplify the attitudes, values and beliefs that rarely dominate front-page headlines or attract proper analysis or introspection. There are hundreds of these kinds of oddities that pepper the regional and local press — many horrific in their bizarreness. But, for the most part, they form the backdrop of a national conversation about other things. Meanwhile, less brutal stories speak to a range of other attitudes that are less bloody, but which do violence to ideas such as free speech.We spend much time worrying about the grand crisis, and rightly so; it is worth asking whether the government functions properly, if we have the right policies in place, and whether the right leaders are executing them, and what remains?Look past all that, and you will get a sense, in the many and varied cultural impulses that underpin so much in SA, that a properly managed state is a veneer. There’s a series of far more troubling characteristics we are yet...
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