RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 97
long words as every editor and commentator ground out one
or other answer. To one editor and commentator, since a “Yes”
was out of the question and a “No” was unthinkable, it was
best to duck.
In the September edition, I ducked.
and I got a howl of protest.
This was genuinely instructive. I’d been sounding opinions
all along, occasionally hearing that someone had read them but
never suspecting that anyone would miss them. But yep, people
were missing this opinion. Wow! I felt obliged. I wrestled. Others
wrestled. Pieter le roux, prof of economics at the university of
the Western cape; rykie van reenen, recently retired as Rapport’s
super-enlightened genius columnist; Hazel Moolman, deputy
director of the Institute of race relations. We discussed.
Others, too. everyone said the question was a “Have you
stopped beating your wife?” You were damned by a Yes and
damned by a No. Of course, if someone actually asked you that
question you wouldn’t say either Yes or No. You’d say, “I have
never beaten my wife.” (Or klap the questioner.)
What a pity the referendum did not let us choose our own
way of answering. Hmm. Didn’t it? It told you to put your X
against the Yes or your X against the No, But it didn’t stop you
putting a big X across both. This act would be counted and
recorded, as a “spoilt vote”.
Normally the spoilt vote was a meaningless half-percent
thing comprised of people who changed their minds in midstream
or wrote abuse. But if a meaning was allocated to that
space, anything more than a percent or so would constitute an
expression. In some countries the “spoilt vote” was known to
take on meanings that the legislature did not intend. In australia
it was called “voting informal”, and had won a referendum – on
forestry in Tasmania.
The October Frontline displayed a two-page article called
“Sense and conscience in the Third Option”, claiming route
3 for the cause of “it’s a try but not good enough”. That was a
large claim and a twopenny magazine was not the ideal source