RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 185
other definite people too (and some, like Thabo Mbeki in the
Speaker’s chair, who you could argue over).
The second thing is: to a lot of people the concept of a shared
parliament was both mouthwatering and out of reach. There
was anger. “Naïve”, “deceptive”, “utopian”, “dreamland”…
The best complaint, though, came by phone to the answering
machine: “I protest at the errors in your picture of an imaginary
parliament”. Pause. “firstly, the Mace goes on top of, and not in
front of, the clerks’ Table. Secondly, the clock shows 9.00 but
the House is already in session.”
The third thing is: not a squeak from security police or
publications control. Did they like that cover? Did they fume
quietly, scare to look stupid thumping it? angazi, dunno.
Diane Victor, artist, pulled Frontline back from the brink, with
a marvellous rich drawing of changing times in the magistrate’s
court. and one time the lifeline was a piece of my own that
nothing to do with new-and-improved democracy. This was
furious paragraph called “circus clowns” .
In the 1987 election the Progressives, PfP, dipped out, losing
several seats by miniscule margins. I didn’t carry a special candle
for the PfP. Their policy was laden with what I considered
gimmickry, like the minority veto, and I’d heard too much antiafrikanerism,
anti-lower-classism, anti-blackism and general
snobbery underlying pious public pronouncements. But the
PfP was by a long way the best of a dud lot and I had no time
for the suicide-lefty line idea that you do not sully yourself with
nasty racist ballot papers; you wash your hands and pronounce
the election a circus.
The lefties got a campaign going, not least in the universities,
and the student union, Nusas, arranged an anti-election for the
noble in spirit. all very gung-ho until the day after the election,
when the sky fell in under the rise of the right and the collapse
of the Progs. Opposition voices wept and wailed, including,
with impressive effrontery, the Left voices that a day ago had
treated PfP voters as risible sell-outs.
Several constituencies where the Progs lost by a whisker