Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Days in the sunshine capital | Feb 28, 2005 10:09

Get a few locals on the turps in Nelson and they will tell you that wages there are too low, relative to living costs; local government lacks vision; and the city is missing a cultural heart. But it's still a great place to live, and that is why they stay.

The idea that Nelson could do with a rock star mayor to raise its game is not altogether new. Even more than other regional centres, Nelson has established its own, to some extent global, character, through tourism, wine and the settling of the wealthy. The impression is that it needs to be a bit more purposeful in growing into that identity.

The trouble is, of course, that you can think you're getting Tim Shadbolt and wake up the next day to find you've got Michael Laws. Imagine that.

The experience of the World of Wearable Art franchise is instructive. The women who started it copped a furious local backlash when they announced that they had been wooed to a new base in Wellington. One of them had a load of shit dumped at her front doorstep. This is understandable in the sense that the locals who bought into the concept at the beginning will feel let down.

But the organisers seem to have faced a choice between moving onwards - with the active support of Wellington City Council - or curbing their aspirations at home. WOW could easily become a Cirque du Soleil-style roadshow, launching each season at home. Had local government made a better investment in it, it could have been a travelling advertisement for Nelson.

The mayors of neither Nelson or Tasman District turned up on Wednesday night for the live recording of Outspoken and Off the Wire last week, as part of National Radio's 101FM rollout, although 300-odd listeners did. (Both cited a 4pm engagement with visitors from their sister city, Eureka, California.)

I have, with my comedy news hat on (you should see it, it's a lovely hat), been part of Off the Wire panels in several places, and it has consistently worked better where local leaders have embraced the chance to have the national broadcaster come to town. In Christchurch, a cast of local notables turned up, hooked into the wine and got hugely engaged in both the Outspoken debate on local issues and our bit afterwards. One woman was so engaged we had to wait for her to stop laughing before we could start recording. Napier was a good little event too.

The Nelson recording took place at the Nelson School of Music, a really nice venue with a pipe organ and the most daunting stage access for a disabled performer I think I've ever seen. The manager breezily said to Mike Loder that it had been that way for years and this was the first time it had been a problem. Mike's response was terse.

But people were friendly - as they are everywhere in Nelson, except perhaps in hospitality - and the show went quite well. I was particularly impressed with Matt Lawrey, the young morning host of the local independent radio station, Fresh FM. He's a former community newspaper journalist and a clever chap, and the station seems to offer an intelligent alternative to the tide of networked formula radio that is increasingly the lot of the regions.

(Matt also clearly knew where the local audience's funny bone was, while I, on the other hand, discovered that blogging jokes don't really play in Nelson.)

After the show and a meal, several of us headed down to Bridge Street, the entertainment precinct, where Fat Freddy's Drop were playing. It was rammed, and the band just amaze me every time I see them. What I like is the way a subtle shift in one of their long jams takes the tune - and an attentive crowd - on a whole new trajectory. They're a national treasure already.

I had enough time - just - the next morning to discover Q Books in Hardy Street and leave with an armful of the sort of curious stuff that I go to secondhand bookshops for. I was particularly pleased with Deviant Behaviour: New Zealand Studies, which includes the full text of the 1955 British Journal of Psychology paper on the Parker-Hume murders, which is a great read (as in, jeez, this'd make a good movie). Also, Computer Culture: The information revolution in New Zealand, written in 1985 by Waikato University's Colin Beardon, who I must get hold of some time soon. I signed the visitor's book and ran for the taxi.

Nelson wasn't all good. It's easy to go to a restaurant and pay $25 for a plate you could get for $22 on Ponsonby Road. The long black at Morrison gallery café was thin, too hot and essentially not what you'd expect from the local café of the year. One of the Downlow lads (our producers for Off the Wire) bought a couple of vodka and sodas at Phat and I swear they were contenders for the worst drinks I've ever tasted. I paid $15.80 for two pints of beer at the Victorian Rose. The Downlow lads found the manager of their "motor lodge" (converted office building) angrily trying to charge them an extra night's accommodation after they left their packed backs in their room for a whole 20 minutes after checkout time. That seemed a bit unnecessary.

And yet, as we cast our parting glances along Tahunanui Beach on the way out, I didn't want to go. The day before, I had wandered long and quiet down the same beach at low tide, paddling in the warm water while little fish scooted about. That was great, and so is Nelson. You just get the feeling it owes itself a little more.

On Saturday, I partook of the hospitality of Fairfax New Zealand at Eden Park, along with several other journalists. The Fairfax brass bought us drinks and regaled us with rude stories about APN, and it was nice enough. It would have been better had the Black Caps' confidence not taken another shredding from the Australians. To witness Daryl Tuffey's 14-ball opening over was to see a grown man fall to pieces in front of 20,000 people. In both innings, the New Zealanders got to a position where the might have had the winning of it, and both times the Aussies put the hammer down. I think they've got us spooked.

On Sunday, I got on my bike and popped down to Western Springs for the Live at the Springs tsunami benefit, catching Pluto, the D4 and Che Fu before I had to go. Thousands of people were there by then, and the event was looking like a real credit to the organiser, Patrick Fife, and his team. It was particularly pleasing to see so many families in attendance.

Two observations: (1) Asian Aucklanders - whethere short-term or permanent - are integrating more these days. It's not uncommon to see groups of Asian kids, often with a European friend or two, out at events now. And (2) Auckland has more blondes than nature originally allocated.

So, onwards. I have too much work and no childcare to allow me to take up an invitation to the Variety Club's annual Oscars long lunch, which is a shame. But I'm in Wellington later this week, again with Off the Wire, and I expect there'll be some fun to be had there.

Just finally, I liked Saturday's editorial in the Weekend Herald, which surveyed this year's Halberg Awards:

There is no weakening of national spirit in these confident, well-travelled world champions. They wear their representative pride with fun, rather than the solemnity of old, and it seems stronger for it. Again, it is the much-maligned school system that probably can take a bow.

For a generation now, primary schools in particular have put a great deal of effort into giving children the confidence and ability to express themselves to an audience. They probably did not set out to correct a deficiency in the national character but if they did, it was social engineering of the best kind.

At the same time, they have instilled the best elements of national pride, giving younger New Zealanders the ability to enjoy the Maori dimension of the country as well.

This kind of credit is too rarely extended these days, amid our panic about NCEA and the familiar tedious bullshitting about political correctness. New Zealand schools set goals and achieve results of a nature they hardly even thought about two or three decades ago. The kids are alright, and it does us good occasionally to say so.

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Big Long Rant | Feb 24, 2005 11:27

Time magazine's "blog of the year", Power Line, called former US president Jimmy Carter a traitor recently - and then issued a "clarification" which essentially made it clear that the authors really did think Carter was "on the other side" with America's enemies.

And the former president's act of treason? Last September, he expressed the view that the security situation in Iraq was such that it would not be possible to hold national elections in January. In the end, he was wrong - the elections were held and a mere 44 people were murdered on the day. But did Carter's analysis really constitute working for "the other side"? Of course it didn't - especially when you consider that only three or four months previous, what Carter said was actually the official White House view regarding the viability of national elections.

There were various expressions of shock and surprise at what Power Line said, but there really should not have been. In 2003, Power Line regular Hindrocket (aka John Hinderaker, the source of much of the most deranged material on the site) mused as to whether another former president, Bill Clinton, could "officially be called a traitor". The offence in this case? Clinton suggested that "in an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal." (Ironically, Power Line was recently ebullient at a report that the US might be, er, making a deal with Sunni insurgents in Iraq …)

The flagship of online conservative opinion just loves calling people traitors - especially journalists. That's when it's not calling people Nazis or something. Last year, in response to a brief and innocuous occupation of a Republican Party office by some professed Democrats, it compared the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party:

The Democratic Party has spun far outside the sphere of normal political debate, and has taken a pro-violence position whenever it thinks that violence will advance its political interests. John Kerry has never once condemned criminal conduct, when that conduct has sought to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. In this campaign season, there is seemingly no length to which the Democratic Party, like the National Socialist Party of seventy years ago, will not go.

Observing today's Democratic Party raises a deadly serious question: Is it inevitable that a party of hate will become a party of violence?

Power Line, for all its pomp, is paranoid, bigoted and hysterical - which actually puts it pretty much in line with the zeitgeist of online conservatism. Really. Trawl through Power Line's back pages and you'll find zingers like this:

Some look at Israel and fear that its current besieged state is a preview of life in America in years to come. Maybe so. But there are at least two basic differences between our situation and Israel's. First, Israel is a tiny island of western civilization amid three hundred million Arabs. Notwithstanding recent patterns of immigration, it will always be more difficult for Arabs to operate secretly in the United States than in and around Israel. And second, Israel is a far more liberal country than the US. (If you doubt this, you haven't been listening to Toby Keith lately!) Israel has shown an unbelievable (and unwise) degree of restraint in responding to Arab terror. Should Islamofascist attacks on the US ever begin to approach the magnitude suffered by Israel, we would mercilessly crush those who harbor and encourage terrorism. I was reminded somewhere recently (I forget where or I'd link to it) that the Islamofascists are not our first enemy to use attacks on women and children, and civilians generally, as a tactic. Various Indian tribes were there first. The results from their standpoint were not good, and if terror attacks start getting out of hand, I don't think our current enemies will fare much better.

Leaving aside the "No shit, Sherlock!" wisdom on the geopolitical differences between Israel and America, this is a shockingly racist little mind-burp. Not only does it gleefully equate Arabs (all 300 million of them) and terrorists, it goes so far as to propose native Americans as the original terrorists. He talks about "our first enemy": who's "us" in this context? White people?

From the moment they set foot in the New World, Christians (Spanish, in the first place) slaughtered Indians by the millions. There are accounts of children not just being systematically killed, but cut up for dog food As a prolonged act of genocide, what befell American Indians is considered only to have been exceeded by that perpetrated by Christians on Jews over nearly 2000 years, and for sheer numbers by the secular killing sprees of the USSR (41 million) and communist China (35 million) last century. In terms of the cruel ingenuity of slaughter - from dismberment to mass poisoning - it [probably stands alone. And geniusboy appears to be promising to open up another can o' genocide whup-ass?

Hinderaker recently sent a deranged and abusive response to an email from another blogger. He apologised, but in a way that made him look like the victim - a view endorsed by one of his colleagues. You might actually think that these people actually invented this mode of discourse, but, no, they're the victims.

And that's one of the things that annoys me about contemporary conservative opinion: the weeping sense of grievance it has developed. This, of course, is what the political right has long liked to allege of the political left; just generally nastier, more paranoid and more threatening. In particular, I'm bored with their cutesy little acronym, the "MSM", for mainstream media, which, of course, is full of lying leftist malcontents.

Case in point: a rant entitled The Berlin Wall's Revenge has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere. It makes the learned case that Europeans are poor, smug, jealous, racist, blinkered and and treasure unpleasant stereotypes about Americans. Billmon linked to it, and suggested some background reading.

Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, on the other hand, simpered of Ascher's piece "I wish he were wrong," perhaps risking the unfortunate impression that Ascher was actually right, in the old-fashioned factual sense.

Let's start with the easy stuff. Barely able to contain his disgust, Ascher holds forth on economics:

Now, why doesn't the Euro left criticize the Euro elites, even when it is not part of it? First, there are pragmatic considerations: the Euro left has been bought off with jobs, prestige etc. When you work directly or indirectly for the state (in a university, say, or the movie industry) and the state actually pays attention to what you say or think, you're much less tempted to criticize it.

Ascher's assertion that anyone who works at a university or makes movies is an employee of the state makes rational analysis a bit tricky. But buried in this document, you will find tables showing that while the proportion of employees in the US public sector is indeed, lower than that in France, it is higher than that in Spain, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria, and increased steadily through the 1990s.

But there are other reasons as well: with real socialism dead, state-centered Europe became the next best alternative. And for those who really believe in it, because they feel (quite rightly, by the way) that they wouldn't do as well in an open, competitive and "savagely capitalistic" society, it must be quite painful to see exactly that kind of society outperforming their own in, well, everything.

Uh-huh. So this would be the Europe that could count six nations in the Top 10 of the Heritage Foundation's 2005 Economic Freedom Index, from which, under Bush, the US has fallen out of for the first time. Or as the Heritage authors put it:

Looking for the "land of the free"? Try Estonia. Or Ireland. Or Chile. Or Denmark. Or even Iceland. These countries now offer more economic freedom than the United States. Long a symbol of economic prosperity and might, America for the first time ever no longer ranks among the top 10 "free" nations of the world ...

Of course, the Heritage folks, along with their commie co-authors at the Wall Street Journal, are clearly just disaffected leftists who would say that anyway. It would probably be rude to point out that five of the seven countries in the OECD's "high" per capita income category are European, three of them outranking the US. That would spoil the fun of making things up. Or that the US centres where those high incomes are concentrated voted for the other guy anyway. Or that the rate of child poverty in the US is increasing, nearing a quarter of all American children, compared to rates of between five and nine per cent in the European countries Ascher most reviles. They have doubtless sacrificed a degree of economic vitality to be that way, but that is the decision their people made.

And then there's this part:

The sad truth is: though the press and the media are still free in much of Europe, they're not independent anymore. The kind of criticism one reads in the NYT or the WaPo against the US government is almost impossible to find in Europe against any government, except, obviously, the American one. Well, and the Israeli. But Europeans were never particularly fond of Jews, not of the living ones anyway

What a lovely stereotype. As I read it here, I think he's slinging off at European lefties for not being left-wing enough. Or something.

But lest anyone think that he has any actual facts or anything, this study of European newspaper editorials, the "claim making" recorded in leading newspapers was "overwhelmingly" (about three quarters of all editorials in the UK, France and Italy) directed at governments. It's completely ludicrous to suggest that the kind of criticism run in the New York Times or the Washington Post is absent from European papers. It might also be noted that of the 10 top countries in Reporters Without Borders' 2004 Press Freedom Index, nine were European and the other one was New Zealand. The USA came in 22nd and Australia a dizzying 41st, below El Salvador and Costa Rice, but a place above Namibia.

Ah, but the Europeans aren't only to be found in Europe. Check this:

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends' bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America's superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

Okay, let's parse this: a "newly ever-growing Western left" (is there a syntax doctor in the house?), present even in America itself, is aligned with radical Islam in a campaign to destroy American society and indeed the whole damn country? As a payback for the Berlin Wall? Who knew? And did somebody say "paranoid"?

And then: "tie down America's superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones ..." The rule of law is such a downer, isn't it? "... political ones ..." How dare they have a sovereign foreign policy? "... with propaganda and disinformation etc." Etcetera? Would , say, a few examples be out of the question?

And what do these bad people want?

Now, whatever they wanted to defend or protect doesn't exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let's not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.

See. I knew the Europeans made up all that stuff about global warming! Just to annoy America, no doubt.

Ascher is doubtless correct in saying that some on (ahem) The Left demonstrated a regrettable blinkeredness about the intrinsic merit of allowing Iraqis to freely vote. But isn't it just a little bit like conferring "some kind of innocent legitimacy" on oneself to profess to be a champion of democracy and human rights as a means of ignoring the small stuff like a few tens of thousands of deaths, a new and disturbing embrace of torture and secret internment, and pretty much everything to do with Uzbekistan?

In the end, the point isn't the largely fact-free status of Ascher's diatribe, nor that neither Europe or America are actually, on an empirical basis, what he imagines them to be. It's not the creepy (but common enough) distrust of expertise shown in the crack about global warming. He's just a blogger after all, and I imagine being an American in Paris gets a bit irksome sometimes. The point is that silly, xenophobic, paranoid bilge like this (and there's plenty more like it) could get lofty endorsement from Reynolds, who fancies himself as the intellectual anchor of the right-wing blogosphere. It's actually embarrassing. Reynolds and the rest of the herd have spent too long eating Freedom Fries.

PS: Nothing from me tomorrow, seeing as I'm off to Nelson for the evening. But do call in anyway ...

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