RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 201
that they quote the Brit press – the “normally balanced Daily
X” or the “hostile Sunday Y” and grasping the moment for
an extra fusillade: British writers didn’t need labels like “the
nauseatingly smug Hogarth, the invariably soporific Harvey
Tyson, or the increasingly depraved Johnny Johnson.”
Hogarth was the Sunday Times column written mainly by
the editor, Tertius Myburgh. Harvey Tyson was the editor of The
Star. Myburgh laughed, Tyson ignored.
Perhaps 10,000 people read the article, of whom I’d strongly
bet that only one saw “depraved”, in that context, as anything
other than a sideswipe at Johnson’s writing style.
But he sued, and “increasingly depraved” became a brief
buzz-phrase before the eyes of millions,
Johnson’s Silk was anton Mostert, who had been a judge
and made enormous headlines when he gave a ruling that
proved the Info Scandal of 1978. Now Mostert was back at the
bar, and saying “My Lord” several times per sentence to Judge
ezra Goldstein who’d been junior counsel when Mostert was
in the high seat. Mostert and Goldstein got into tangles. In
one exchange they yelled at each other about how “singularly
unimpressed” each was with the other’s conduct. Mostert and
Martin Goldblatt, barely a decade out of school, got into tangles.
Mostert and I got into tangles. In one of these Mostert tried
to slither a phrase of Stephen’s – “crimplene toadies” – into
looking like a snooty put-down of Citizen readers. I said it had
nothing to do with The Citizen or its readers. (It was attacking
State officials who used “the complexity of our situation” to
excuse apartheid.) Mostert said “I’m saying it does.” I said he
could say what he wanted but he was not allowed to say it
on the strength of Stephen’s article. Mostert stood stock still,
glowering nuclear missiles at me and turning purple.
We thought he was having a stroke, but no, he pulled himself
together and we went into a marathon wrangle about whether
I’d said that “anybody” who didn’t read The Citizen would not
have heard of Johnny, or just “some people”. Then we went
through the etymology of “depraved”, from the 16th century