Fans of the late AA Gill will remember his life advice. Forty was crunch time. Don't buy anything worth more than £1,000. "If you want to avoid a mid-life crisis," he wrote, "then don't buy one." Getting past 60, however, was cool. It was where you got to "pick up the fruit of your life, the age when you start smoking again. Sixty is when you can offer opinions whether people want them or not."
I'm well past 60, but I've been amazed at the response to some of my opinions here in the readers' letters above. Obviously only a few letters get published, but the one from a DA MP, Ghaleb Cachalia, a few weeks ago was extraordinary for its length and rage. I'd spotted him a few days before and remember wondering if he was chewing an Alka Seltzer.
Cachalia's frothing was best expressed in the headline "This Bruce & Buffalo bromance is baffling". I've been writing about the clear signs I think I see that a significant white vote may go to President Cyril Ramaphosa next year as a tactic to diminish any possible hold the EFF may obtain over the ANC in the forthcoming elections.
This mere musing has freaked the DA out completely. My judgment is poor, said Cachalia, and the record shows it. A follow-up letter the next week said much the same. Party leader Mmusi Maimane has written about it too and I see Jeremy Gordin going on about it somewhere. According to Gordin, Max du Preez and I are "being played".
Really? I have no contact with the ANC or its leader, so the playing must be incredibly subtle. Or perhaps it's just Gordin - washed-up author of a cloying biography of Jacob Zuma and the only editor I know of who has managed to close down a pornographic magazine in this sex-starved country - making stuff up.
A baying DA mob is not a pretty sight. I don't need to be reminded what a catastrophe the ANC is, or that Ramaphosa sat beside Zuma as his deputy for five years and did not do much to stop state capture.
But I'm also amused at how the DA conveniently forgets that it is the DA that empowered the EFF by allowing Julius Malema to dictate the terms under which the DA controls big metros in SA. It is the DA, not the ANC, that has "insourced" municipal security in Johannesburg at the behest of the EFF.
If insourcing is now DA policy, how does it propose to encourage the growth of small business? Where will a black Brian Joffe spring from?
And do you remember this joint statement from DA policy chief Gwen Ngwenya and James Selfe, chair of the party's federal executive: "It is clear that the ANC's model of broad-based BEE has failed dismally . we will offer our own, alternative model of real broad-based empowerment"?
That was in August, and since then no sign of a new policy has emerged. Why? Because the DA is as divided as the ANC is. It cannotmake policy.
So why not vote for Cyril? If he gets a good majority next year, perhaps it will help him survive his own ANC demons. Maybe, maybe not, but the balance of risk, in my opinion, says we're better off with him as president, particularly as he strengthens our institutions, than we are voting for a DA that is way off the electoral pace and which has infused the EFF with a confidence and swagger it doesn't deserve.
And don't think the DA is merely in "minority governments" that the EFF happens to tolerate. The DA leadership actively courted Malema after the local elections in 2016 and saw him as a decisive leader they could do business with. They may now regret it, but I see no reason to reward them for their conceit and hubris.
As for land expropriation, which DA critics throw at people who support Ramaphosa, we have no idea what the constitutional change will look like. It could be as bland as adding the words "zero compensation may be regarded as just and equitable" to the existing property clauses.
In that case the EFF would oppose it and the ANC wouldn't have a two-thirds majority to make it law. Seeing as the DA argues that the constitution already allows for expropriation without compensation, would it then not support a motion that merely makes it explicit, and supply the ANC with its required majority and take the sting out of the land issue once and for all? Or does it stick with the EFF?..