Friends, do you remember - or are you all too young? - a movie titled Don't Look Now? It was a bloody stupid title - but so it goes.

It was avant garde for its time, I believe. Made in 1973 and set in Venice, it starred Julie Christie (the mere name is enough to make me swoon) and Donald Sutherland, was based on a Daphne du Maurier book, and featured a strange, vertically-challenged creature (i.e. a dwarf) in a red anorak, who sort of appeared but then disappeared, all the time.

Most importantly - well, at the time - was a Sutherland-Christie sex scene that afterwards became famous because it was unusually graphic for those days: it included a rare sight of cunnilingus. (If you don't know what cunnilingus is, please write to the editor of this site.) So graphic and convincing was the scene that there were subsequently rumours - for years - that Sutherland and Christie actually had sex in front of the cameras.

Anyway, the year was 1973 and I was a sweet young thing of 21 living in Jerusalem, Israel, supposedly studying English literature and philosophy but actually focused on rugby, chasing the fairer sex, and trying to understand Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore Jnr., and Penny Cohen. The October 1973 war was about to descend on us all, but it hadn't happened yet.

Now, besides knowing what I have just told you, you need to know two other things. First: in those days going to a movie in Israel was an "unusual" experience if you were from a place like the states or Seffrica. The language of 95 percent of movies was English, with subtitles in Hebrew - so movie "theatres" (as Barry Ronge calls them) were not places of silence. Au contraire; because they could read the subtitles, the locals were wont to argue about the movie being screened - and just about everything else - at the top of their voices.

Second thing you need to know is that the (politest and loveliest) modern Hebrew phrase for "making love" is oseh hayyim - "making life".

So there we all were watching Christie and Sutherland messing around with the big chiluga and so on, when some some fellow in the audience stood up, and walked to the double doors of the nearest fire exit. He flung these open, flooding us all in unwanted light, and said loudly and indignantly, as he marched off down an alley: "anee meshalem - ve-hoo oseh hayyim": "I must pay [for the movie] - and he's making life".

Please hold that image for a while while we segue forward to 1982 and another movie. This was called 48 Hrs and starred Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte and it was in this movie that Murphy (playing Reggie Hammond) uttered the famous lines to a bunch of rednecks in a San Francisco bar: "I'm your worst nightmare, a nigger with a badge". (I always thought he said "a nigger with a gun', but apparently not.)

We now move to 2010 and reflect that our worst nightmare might not be a nigger with a badge, but Julius "little Julie" Malema, the president of the ANC Yoof league and the guy who is singing the theme song from another old movie, Midnight Cowboy: "Everybody's talking at me./ I don't hear a word they're saying, /Only the echoes of my mind. /People stopping staring, /I can't see their faces,/ Only the shadows of their eyes. /I'm going where the sun keeps shining/ Thru' the pouring rain, /Wah wah wah wah wah wah ..."

What do we know about Little Julie? Well, he's 29 years old and he was raised by a single mother, a domestic worker. I have seen reports, though I can't remember where, that he has a child somewhere. Having various children "somewhere" seems to be de rigueur for our leaders, but let's not go there right now. I have, however, never seen Little Julie (in photographs or TV footage) with a woman - he's always with that bunch of guys from the league who look like clones.

His school career seems to have been rather undistinguished. He failed two high school grades as well as several subjects in his final secondary school examination. His highest mark attained at school was apparently a "c" for second language English and he's reported to have scored less than 30 percent for maths and woodwork.

I would have been inclined not to take too much notice of Julie's school marks. Not everyone is cut out to be an intemallectual and, if you think about it, what did you learn at school and university that was worth diddley? C'mon, be honest. And, well, I have soft spot for people lousy at woodwork - I think I got three percent for the subject (besides setting a Transvaal record for biology, 8 percent).

But last night I listened to some stuff on the Net from Debra "pat-a-cake" Patta's interviews with him - and I came away, not only with a new admiration for Pat-a-cake, but with a new understanding that Little Julie is a prize moron - what my father would have called, with his eyes flashing, "a bloody fool".

I mean - you have never heard such crap in your life, not even in this column. He is so stupid and offensive during the Patta interview that I have come to realise that his famous controversial statements were actually crafted for him - and then he learned them off by heart... Do you think JZ, the wives, and the 20 kids sit around the ol' computer of an evening playing the Malema interview and rolling about on the presidential Persians while guffawing uncontrollably? Could be.

But how, I wondered to myself, can Julie be so stupid - and yet so effective a politician? I read yesterday in an intemallectual analysis, by a professor nogal, that Malema was an effective campaigner during the last election because he said all the things that the ANC leadership actually wanted to say but were to afraid to articulate publicly.

And - it turns out - Malema is a rich boychik. He drives a number of expensive cars, has a pad in Sandton, wears a 250-grand timepiece on his pudgy wrist (can it be so expensive?), and wears designer clothes, like that little cap.

Now, being a pretty unwealthy chap, and having never come up with a cogent answer to my father's question - "If you're so clever, why aren't you rich?" - I have come to the conclusion that, contrary to what my medemense and I believed in 1973, money is good stuff to have in your pocket and the bank and, what's more, you have to be reasonably smart, or very bent, to amass it.

Anyway, Little Julie is the quintessential new Seffrican. He's gone out there to make money for himself - using the ANC, which is where the money and power are if you're a poor black boy - and he doesn't give a shit for anyone else. It is his due, in his view, because he's black and was poor. Hot damn, he didn't fight in the struggle (not that he did, anyway) to be poor - right?

But Julie's now in the kak. Turns out that his boodle allegedly comes from intervening on behalf of his own company in government tenders in Limpopo. He's come up with all sorts of bullshit excuses - the dog ate my resignation letters, and so on - and has, like his elders and betters, blamed the media for his woes. But it looks as though the fat is in the fire.

Why has it all come out now (bearing in mind that it was quite a while ago that Jacob Dlamini - he of the brilliant book, Native Nostalgia, with the appalling cover - told us exactly what Malema was up to)? Well, it does remind me of the dirty "info wars" of 2005 and 2006 when the Zuma camp leaked such and such a story and the "other" side (Mbeki or Ngcuka) leaked such and such a story. Why have there been leaks now?

Ah, I think the little prat has been over-reaching himself, just like Icarus of yore, and we all know that Icarus had his tochis burnt. Little Julie has gone to war with Gwede Mantashe, the secretary general of the ANC, by pushing Fikile Mbalula, the deputy sheriff of the police department, as a "better" SG. He's gone to war with Jeremy Cronin, the deputy general-secretary of the SACP and deputy minister of transport, over nationalisation. And so on. In short, he has - to quote yet another movie - been f**king with the wrong marines.

But why - I hear you cry - has it reached this public pitch? Why has it not been sorted out in-house? And why did I tell you that long story about the man in the Jerusalem movie house?

The answer is that there are a lot of fellows who have discovered that Uncle JGZ has not delivered exactly what they thought he would deliver to them or theirs. This was bad enough. But, in addition, some of them have had to put up with a bunch of humiliating folderol from Little Julie. This was bad enough - but it would be okay if the president were, so to speak, in the trenches with them. It would even be okay knowing that the president's modus operandi is not to do anything at all - which is what he's likely to do vis-à-vis Little Julie - if he were, so to speak, with them.

But - it turns out - while they were paying various prices, such as having to deal with Little Julie, the president has been making life! It's just not cricket - and now, besides wanting to poke Little Julie in his tender places, they're also  rattling the non-existent rafters at Luthuli House.

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