RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 161
skip this bit”. I could never forget that, very literally, because
Tony Sutton never ever missed an opportunity to say so. Tony
designed Frontline because he loved it. It was far from his most
lucrative contract, but to him it was “incisive” and “important”
and “good sense”. Traditionally, whether your paper says Hang
the rich or Nuke the Poor is immaterial to your design man,
who only cares that the visuals are good. Not Tony. His thing
was making right words look good. In his eyes, no words were
righter than Frontline’s words, until I hit the democracy binge,
which he saw as sabotage. Month after month he designed
this thing of beauty that was going to be buggered-up by my
aberration. He got ratty, and no matter how manifold his other
sins nobody ever called Tony devious. He spoke up.
It was a relief to him when I took Democracy out of Frontline
to put it in Book Two, same logic as Book One and same
phenomenon of the damaging headline. The fallacy of Heroes;
who needs to read a book whose title lays it bare? Hermann
Giliomee summed that up, “I haven’t read it but I know what
it’s about; you’re against heroes”.
Ja/nee. The title of fallacy came from a Brecht quote. One
character says, “Pity the nation that has no heroes” and another
replies, “No, pity the nation that needs heroes”. Hermann was
partway right. I want to belong to a nation that doesn’t need
heroes. What I like about Brecht is that his No 2 figure doesn’t
say, “pity the nation that has heroes”. He says, “Pity the nation
that needs heroes”. as I see it there’s a sizable difference, and
neither the having nor the needing has any particular bearing
upon the notion of leaders. I certainly expect leaders to lead, and
I have no particular problem with the idea of heroes emerging.
My hang-up is with the syndrome of relying on some mystical
figure to pitch up and make everything right.
Where Permanent Peace had been a rush job, fallacy
took long in the writing, with the main effect that Frontline’s
ailments veered from the chronic towards the terminal. In June
of ‘88 I gave the draft to a few people for comments. aggrey
Klaaste wanted to serialise the entire book in the Sowetan.