RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 103
out 80,000 words and two more to delete 70,000 of them. That
was mistake Number One. Heavyweight arguments must come
in heavyweight packaging. People say they want brevity and
accessibility, but when they get brevity and accessibility they
call it frivolity.
I thought the franchise argument would spark debate.
Months previously I had sparked debate with a shorter and
easier article – the spoilt papers – and I assumed there was
some correlation between effort of input and effect of output.
Mistake Number Two.
There was a trickle of replies. Vause raw, the leader of the New
republic Party, sent one. Willie Breytenbach of the Department
of constitutional Planning sent another. I ran about ten in the
end, and would have run more but they all said the same thing:
Nice to be idealistic, what about the real world?
Well, what about it? The “real world” was in a straitjacket,
moving in to the turmoil of ‘85. I acquired the habit of relating
the conflicts we were seeing to the thought of how the
accountable society I had in mind would handle them. The
answer was always: with less difficulty. chain the politicos to
the people who elected them, and you’d get a dull and stable
society.
Impotence was the thing: impotence, present, perceived,
or prospective. Why were people throwing stones? To protest
their impotence under white rule. Why were the babas of
the townships terrified of stonethrowers? Because they were
impotent. Why were the liberals emigrating? They were already
impotent and they saw black rule making them more impotent.
Why were the police hammering protesters? Because black rule
would plunge them into impotence.
What I was getting at was: let the majority really rule and
you’re going to have all kinds of people making most of their
own decisions over the things that bother them most. Majority
rule didn’t need to mean “black rule” and it didn’t need to
mean a mess. I was sure that once the nation had a moment
to wrap its mind around an unfamiliar proposition, it would