The lynch mob

Ms Walters said in order for the community to move on, Parker needed to be punished for his crimes.

"That man, he's a poor excuse for a man.''

She said the future would be difficult for Parker's victims, the "poor, innocent little boys''.  [NZ Herald 15.8.13]

Ms Waireti Walters is a kuia, tribal old lady, at Pamapuria, where James Parker was deputy principal at the local school.  

James Parker was up for sentencing, having been convicted on multiple charges of sexual abuse including sexual violation of boys aged 9 to 16 at the time.  Justice Paul Heath gave him preventive (indefinite time) detention with a minimum non-parole period of 7 years.

Such were the crowds wanting to attend the sentencing that an adjacent courtroom had to be wired up for the overflow.  The Pamapuria gentry had travelled about 150 km from Pamapuria and environs to be at Whangarei High Court.  There were 74 charges against James Parker involving 20 victims.  The locals had waited through months of harrowing media coverage and district court hearings.  The district court judge decided that since only the High Court in Whangarei could deliver an adequate sentence he would send James Parker there.  The locals followed.

It is sometimes pointed out that one of the reasons we have courts with their rituals and order, tedious and all as it may be at times, is that they stand between criminals and victims.  The judicial system is what we have developed in place of the lex talionis, the law of the jungle, the eye-for-an-eye brigade, the lynch mob of frighteningly recent memory in numerous marginally civilised cultures including the USA.  It was as well, not only for James Parker, but also for justice, order and decency, that a High Court judge could preside and decide. 

But we perennially underestimate the extent to which frightened society needs to see people punished and put away.  Government departments and bureaucracy these days throw up all manner of debacles, heaven knows, for our delectation and rage, but none hit the headlines quite like some apprehended child abuser, or some recidivist out on parole who offends again.  It simply illustrates to the simple minds of Simple Sentencing devotees that they always were right all along.  What you have to do is punish, and in the current excruciatingly ignorant cliché, lock them up and throw away the key. 

Clamour for (another cliché) the voice of victims to be heard has led the courts into a procedure called Victim Impact Statements.  When the time for sentencing comes, we now typically get a string of Victims reading out their more or less literate, let alone logical, essays on how they think they have been permanently damaged and how they feel about it.  Sometimes if it is altogether too distressful, a lawyer will read it out for them.  I understand that the judge receives and vets these statements beforehand – but then we get anguished public statements from Victims who were not allowed to say what they wanted to say.  Hearing what they do get to say in court, I shudder to think what was edited out. 

And so it was that James Parker, over some hours sitting in the dock, was relentlessly and publicly humiliated by some of the righteous Pamapuria citizens.  Am I the only person in this country who finds this hideously distasteful and unnecessary ritual demeaning to us all?  Ms Walters contrasted James Parker to the local “poor, innocent little boys”.  Huh...?  It is pathetic sentimentalism.  I too am horrified at what James Parker did.  I make no excuse for him whatever.  He needs to be taken away from decent society and put into some serious reform programme among people who can help him.  Precisely how is Ms Walters’ silly sanctimonious tirade going to help?  She says the poor innocent little boys of Pamapuria will never be the same again.  In 10 or 15 years, she says, those “poor little souls” will still somehow be unable to cope... Ms Walters was somewhat unspecific in this area. 

I realise that we are often surrounded by this level of sentimental humbug, but it concerns me when the courts actually facilitate it and give time to it. 

(Justice Heath said) to Parker: "I could not help but notice that when you were listening to the victim you did not have the courtesy to look him in the eye. You simply sat there holding your head in your hands."

Oh please…  What posture then is appropriate for an utterly shamed, humiliated, defeated man, being led around like a sacrificial goat, sitting in the dock getting verbally stoned to death by judge, lawyers and victims?  I think in that situation I would have got up and walked out, hoping someone was there with specific orders to bludgeon me down for contempt of court and attempting to escape. 

I don’t want to make fun of victims of this kind of crime, of course.  But we have now a well-developed Victim culture in this country.  Victim has actually become a respectable thing to be.  We have developed a government-subsidised Victim Support network, and I suspect they do some commendable work.  But when you are a victim, surely the trick is to find ways out of it and away from it.  We seem to be encouraging victims in the view that their “childhood was stolen”, that they can never be the same again, that their lives were wrecked at the point of the abuse and cannot recover. 

Society however is replete with people who could have become Victims, but chose instead to fight their way back.  Part of that process very often is the decision not ever to be labeled a Victim, and certainly not to wallow in memory and bitterness.  These people generally don’t speak to the media, neither do they consider they have become authorities – or for that matter even hold opinions worth hearing – on complex issues of crime and punishment. 

Our courts and our judges, in my view, should know better than to give space to yet more victimizing.  Somehow at the hands of Justice Heath’s court this man has become labeled a “Monster”.  Yes, that makes people feel better too.  Deny his humanity, turn him into a non-person, an untermensch… does that sound familiar?  Then he doesn’t matter, you see.  Blinded by his deeds, blind also to any good or possibilities in him, all we seek is to have him put away and out of sight, forgotten.  I think the judge and the system ably assisted this. 

And now we can all feel righteous.  Perhaps even as righteous as the indignant, wounded victim-citizens of Pamapuria. 

Clashing monologues

A local phenomenon of Mahurangi is a weekly walking group of women.  Twenty or more of them meet at the specified time and place and then set forth at a brisk pace.  At the end of their walk they treat themselves to coffee and muffins in one of the local cafes.  It is a good idea not to be in that café when they arrive and take over. 

But to get to my point…  If you are hanging around, one might say contemplatively, at a spot being approached by this group in their orbit of the vicinity, you hear them before you see them.  Strangers and others without local knowledge tend to think there is suddenly some looming threat, a plague of locusts perhaps, or an Aussie secret surveillance drone.  It is simply that the women are all talking simultaneously.  It is an extraordinary sound, made even more so by the doppler effect as they pass.  No one of them is listening, or at any rate hearing, any other, much as they may think they are.   Each of them is telling her monologue.  At best, there is a process in which one of them is silent while the next one speaks – but she then responds with her narrative and how she felt. 

In the Guardian Weekly recently, Charlie Brooker identified that 99% of all human discourse is little more than a series of clashing monologues.  We need to be seen and heard to be present and existing, the more so as others are proclaiming their existence to us.  In what is normally called dialogue, Person A speaks part of his narrative, and Person B responds with his story.  I am thinking of people I know who, whatever you say to them, will respond with something about themselves, replete with First Person pronouns. 

The opposite of this is listening, hearing, understanding, not feeling under any obligation to respond unless it is about the speaker’s subject or issue.  This can’t be done by anyone who constantly needs their own presence to be validated and affirmed.  Neither is it done by those who all their lives have assumed, been formed and trained, that all you have to do in conversation is say something about yourself.   An exception maybe is Sybil Fawlty, who actually did listen to her callers and customers, not responding about herself, but intoning, I know… I know…

Not only the walking group – and I do admit it’s difficult to have meaningful dialogue while briskly walking – they could simply shut up -- but cocktail parties also, many social things I have given up attending, church “study” groups, telephone conversations, are really a series of clashing monologues. 

The Guardian writer cites also what happens with cellphone texting, Facebook, Twitter and the like.   We’ve already boiled communication down to acronyms, emoticons and shrtnd sntnces, all of which are simply more efficient ways of transmitting the PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE signal from the fragile core of our souls out into the wider world.  Whenever it’s possible our youth reach for their cellphones and text:  I’m here.  Where are you?  I’m bored.  Any suggestions?   There may also be photos, a real reinforcement of existence. 

I am indebted to Charlie Brooker however for a valuable insight into TV soaps.  For years it has puzzled me why I immediately get impatient with the script writing and dialogue on Coronation Street.  It is unreal in some way.  It is often too quick-witted, fluent and clever to be credible.  And I get very weary of the relentless antagonism, the abuse accusation, vilification.  But the real problem is not that.  Brooker points out that the characters on Coronation Street and Eastenders actually listen to each other.  In real life, especially under stress but also in their relaxed moments, they would rarely do that.  It is unreal because it is not the way discourse is done in such a suburb of Manchester, or in most other places.  They react with such rage at times precisely because they have listened and heard.  Usually they have heard wrongly – but the point here is that the script writers are giving us dialogue instead of clashing monologues. 

A tyranny of meetings

An item in the Guardian Weekly [03.05.13] speculated on how fine the world would be without meetings.  It claimed that the average office worker, presumably in the UK, spends more than 16 hours a week in meetings.  That is two “working” days.  The average civil servant allegedly spends 22 hours a week.  Many of these meetings are utterly pointless, says the writer.  Certainly, the process consumes many man and woman hours pointlessly. 

It was meetings which finally did me in with the church.   The church loves meetings, much as the USA loves firearms.   The church has assemblies, synods, boards, presbyteries, councils, committees, commissions, task forces, work groups, study meetings.   Year after year I attended and helped service these things.  Looking back now in wonder, it’s hard to see what it was all for.  I could have been doing something useful and/or pleasurable. 

These meetings were regularly scheduled, monthly, quarterly, annual – and at least in the Presbyterian Church we had sophisticated provision for special meetings should the need arise.  In hunc effectum meant that the meeting could discuss only the issue for which it had been called.   Pro re nata meant that it was called to discuss some matter which was urgent and unforeseen.    We all felt quite important on these occasions. 

Of course the Reformation, in trying to get rid of prince bishops and all manner of autocrats, needed then to set up committees.  The church became meeting-ridden.    With the bishop you had only the risk that he might be a bad bishop and exercise his power oppressively.  (Well, it was a real danger…)  With the presbytery, committee, synod, whatever, you now risked an entire morass of competing power agendas, often decided by the loudest or most persistent mediocrities.   I have seen a presbytery or assembly make a heroic and visionary decision, but it tends to be rare.   The decision usually is the end result of desultory discussion, and is some anaemic compromise which most can live with for a while.  

Passionate discussion is a real danger in committees and synods – it means that the outcome will be a matter of counting heads, and some people will get very hurt.  Truth is not discovered down that road. 

Now…!  Of course, getting people together to discuss something important is clearly a good thing to do.  They feel included, and it opens the possibility of a good decision.   We call it democracy.   So what I am referring to here is the oppressive culture of meetings, compulsory governance by meetings, the building of plush boardrooms with cocktail cabinets – and all the meeting-politics that constitute this culture.  Power gets used and abused.  People get defeated.  It can be a terrifying culture when your reputation and your future are at the mercy of a bunch of people who have their own agendas and opinions, and may by no means be filled with goodwill.  It is hard to see how such a context can achieve anything other than perpetuate itself. 

What would I put in their place?  No idea.  But it would be instructive to decree, say, a week or a month even without any meetings.  None, for any reason whatever.  See the result.  Was there chaos?  Or did people with responsibility simply make responsible decisions when necessary?   Who knows?  Nobody knows, because we haven’t done it. 

Easter 2013

I had a minimalist Easter.  To an enthusiastic Christian that is possibly an oxymoron.  It pleased me well enough.  My Benedictine liturgies and offices remained shut.  I listened to none of the great music.  I would have been glad to read what Rowan Williams preached on Easter morning, but he is no longer at Canterbury and on the web.

On Sunday morning, early, on the Concert Programme, there was a sublime Bach cantata – but it had to yield to what my family expected to hear, the Sunday Easter hymns on the National Programme, sung by great choirs.  Switching over to that however, we found instead a sad relay from the Anglican cathedral at Waiapu, too embarrassing for words, totally disappointing.  So we switched it off. 

At 8 am I was at the Anglican church in Warkworth.  Oh dear… I had to rely on the fact that I was at the Eucharist, and that however mangled, all I sought was there, somewhere, in the ruins.  The elderly priest hashed his way through a perfectly simple liturgy.  The vicar preached about losing her keys and going from despair to joy when she found them. 

The woman who read the gospel lesson apparently believes she has a mission to show us all how it should be done.  She elocutes.  It is best described as former-times BBC English resuscitated and caricatured.  And she seemed to have arranged with the organist to bracket her reading with a screeching, painfully reverberating and totally inappropriate fanfare on the digital organ’s trumpets and cornopeans, before and after she performed the lesson. 

Chocolate easter bunnies were handed out at the door. 

Why is it that when I go to church I am obliged to sit there battling with myself?  For some reason, hanging on the altar rail on a long cord is a referee’s whistle.  I am not making this up.  Perhaps I should surreptitiously photograph  it.  I am informed that it is a fire precaution requirement.  On the altar rail…?  Is someone likely to be smoking there?  They do light candles, I guess.   Should I perhaps blow the whistle when I go up for communion?  Maybe everyone then would, by reflex, leave the building and gather at a designated point outside.  I might just resort to that next time I hear the liturgy read as though it is the report of a bad day at the Pukekohe stock sales. 

So Easter came and went, despite the church.  For me it was a time of peace and truth.  It is no longer a question of creeds and drama.  It is a presence, a matter of where you are living, in Easter or out of it.  For some reason I don’t understand, while others need to remember it and celebrate it and enact it, I don’t. 

Race Relations

Dame Susan Devoy has just been appointed the new Race Relations Conciliator.  She succeeds Joris de Bres, who has always known what it is like to be part of a minority – and who is known as a thinker, researcher and humanitarian.  Dame Susan is known as a brilliant former champion squash player and as having adopted some worthy charities.  I believe she is about to receive an honorary doctorate from Waikato University, but it’s difficult to know what that is actually for.  Waikato University will no doubt make a good job of the citation on the day.

I once heard Dame Susan give the main address at a university graduation ceremony.  She was egocentric and insightless.  She informed us at length how she got to where she is today.  In its setting it could scarcely have been more inappropriate.  I do not know why she was damed, except that we always have some odd decisions in the honours department. 

New Zealand’s Race Relations Conciliator has to be someone of wisdom, education, keen sensitivity and experience of ethnic issues.  Our population is increasingly mixed, with citizens and residents from all over the South Pacific, Asia, Africa and Europe.  The Maori-Pakeha interface does not get less challenging.  People whose origins are in the British Isles are fewer proportionately.

Today I learned that Christchurch is approaching its annual demonstration in the streets by the Right Wing Resistance, an event of which I had not previously heard.  The Right Wing Resistance has a website, with photos.  They turn out to be a sad, male, overweight, ignorant, utterly pathetic bunch of racist simpletons, all decked out in black tracksuits and heavy black boots and caps.  On stage they would be a great comedy item.  But parts of their website are sinister.  There is a video of Hitler amid much approval, and even clips of Jewish people being dragged around.  They claim to have branches all through the country, but Christchurch appears to be their centre at present.  That has to be an embarrassment. 

There is to be a counter demonstration by people outraged by this.  But what is the point of that?  A lot of shouting and abuse, placards, and the police having to be deployed to keep people apart.  The best counter, it seems to me, is utter ridicule.  Our best humorists and great names should be deployed to get everyone laughing at these ignorant clowns.  Otherwise, ignore them.

I am sad if I do Susan Devoy an injustice – and maybe she should be given a chance – but I don’t believe she is up to this stuff.  I find it hard to believe she would ever begin to understand the roots of all this in history, or the mental state of those who behave with racial hatred and Nazi salutes, and want to dress up in imitation of Hitler’s fascists.  Joris de Bres was one generation away from his family’s personal experience of all that in The Netherlands.  But will Dame Susan instinctively know where the seeds of racial hatred lie?  What makes people afraid of difference?  The thought of Dame Susan trying to conciliate in some of these conflicts… oh no. 

We could have had a properly trained Samoan, Chinese, Indian, or South African Race Relations Conciliator.  We could have had someone learned in history or sociology.  But our Minister of Justice, Judith Collins, who seems to have learned her public service in the Margaret Thatcher School of Charm and Management, appointed Dame Susan Devoy.  When this was questioned, she switched on her excruciating and ingratiating smile and said, “Dame Susan will do very well…”   OK, I guess it’s possible. 

 

Pretty crazy guns

I think that they ought to let people ... have guns if they use them to hunt. And people who need guns — who need guns for their job like policemen and army. But I don’t think that we should just let anybody have any kind of gun and any kind of bullets that they want. That’s pretty crazy.

Jim Wallis’s 9-year-old son said that to his Dad at bedtime.  Jim Wallis is editor and main inspiration of Sojourner magazine, which publishes great sense about Christian faith, belief and action.  Jim is a 21^st century prophet. 

Of course he has to address, yet again, the gun issue.  What is often termed the American love affair with guns is suddenly yet again the foremost issue in the USA because atrocities where American psychopaths have run amok with guns have killed yet more children and teachers.  The National Rifle Association, hideously powerful and blind, is defending all they can see, the “Second Amendment Rights” of all Americans.  They know this litany better than they know the Ten Commandments.  The president of the NRA, often on TV at the moment, seems a reasonable, gentle, cultured bloke – nothing like the posturing idiocy of Charlton Heston, “...from my cold dead hands” – and yet Heston, it seems, spoke for  tens of millions of Americans unable to imagine life without their guns.  A very decent chap we once knew when we were living in Fiji is long since back in the southern USA, and he runs a gun shop.  It seems perfectly acceptable to him.  He is a Christian and a Southern Baptist officebearer. 

 

Wonderful people I stayed with in the USA told me that some of their friends could not accept an invitation to come and eat in their home.  Reason?  They chose not to keep guns at home and so their friends said they would not feel safe.  I think the issue is fear.  Living in fear.  It’s largely a choice, it seems to me. 

Part of the work of maturity is to make the choice whether to live in fear.  The choice is between finding your own ways, ways of faith, to live without being dominated by fear and in the circumstances and environment you choose, as long as you can – or to retreat into some protected environment such as a gated or retirement village or something worse.  Living without fear, it seems to me, eventually entails coming to terms with one’s own death and powerlessness, facing it down – deciding what survives that is of any consequence.  Mortality is the big scary enemy of the privileged, powerful, wealthy, and well-armed. 

Martin Luther King wrote: People often hate each other because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, they don’t know each other because they cannot communicate, they cannot communicate because they are separated...   But the wisdom of the National Rifle Association says:

 

the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 

That statement, writes Jim Wallis, is at the heart of the problem of gun violence in America today — not just because it is factually flawed, which of course it is, but also because it is morally mistaken, theologically dangerous, and religiously repugnant.

The world is not full of good and bad people, he writes.  We are, as human beings, both good and bad.  This is not only true of humanity as a whole, but we as individuals have both good and bad in us.  When we are bad or isolated or angry or furious or vengeful or politically agitated or confused or lost or deranged or unhinged — and we have the ability to get and use weapons only designed to kill large numbers of people — our society is in great danger.

Long ago, somehow, I saw a gun for what it is.  It is a very efficient device for killing people or animals.  A gun is for killing, summarily ending life.  Working in the freezing works as a student I watched animals being killed in great numbers by special pistols, a bolt shot through their brains.  Large cattle beasts immediately crumpled and lay twitching.  I had to work out for myself the facts of getting and eating animal protein, and the facts of killing humanely – but I also noticed how the process took something from the humanity of those who did it.  I am not tempted to be a vegetarian, but I do grant the force of those who point out that most people who eat meat from the supermarket have not had to kill the animal. 

Guns are only for killing.  Some guns are hugely sophisticated and powerful.  In Switzerland where the male population is expected to keep guns, it is also a fact that all who have guns are required to have had military instruction in keeping, using and maintaining them.  They also have to keep their ammunition at the local police station or armoury.  Not so in the USA.  That would be an unconscionable restriction which would violate their Second Amendment and their God-given Right to Bear Arms. 

What is it for? Can it be stopped?

The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity, wrote George Bernard Shaw.  Indeed. 

One of my early tasks as a cadet reporter on the Auckland Star, long ago, was to spend Saturday at some apparently important cricket game and turn in a report for publication in the 8 O’Clock edition by 6 pm.  I had never played cricket or ever been remotely interested.  I had no idea what it was for, what the aim was, let alone what the finer points might be.  Older hands in the reporters’ room advised me to find the scorer who would know what was going on.  I phoned the office about halfway through the day, having discovered that this game was not over in 40-60 minutes but appeared endlessly self-sustaining – “How do I know when it’s finished...?”  The answer was that they would take the stumps up.  It was a day of terminal tedium and at the end of it I had not a clue what to write, so I went home. 

Another memory from those times however is what seemed to me a sudden Day of National Calamity.  Grown men groaned.  The New Zealand cricketers were playing England and were all out for 26.  It was 1955. 

And yesterday the Black Caps were all out to South Africa for 45. 

So now we have wall-to-wall post mortems and lamentations.  But it has seemed to me increasingly over the years that New Zealand, for all it has going for it, is embarrassingly incapable of cricket.  I have no idea why.  Does it matter?  The gestures, expostulations and wild excitements on the field when we manage to bowl someone out seem to me simply pathetic.  It was more impressive back in the stately days of “Oh, jolly good show...!”

We taught cricket to India, and presumably the West Indies, brought it to South Africa and Australia, and now look.  In New Zealand, however, the plant has been sickly from the start.  But I am trying still to find the intrinsic value.

Who needs it?  What is it for?  Can it be stopped? 

Wishing the couple well...?

Having led a very sheltered life and not got out much, I was unprepared for the wedding invitation that arrived.  It was two A4 pages held together by two lolly-pink ribbons top and bottom.  The pages were two shades of pink.  Clasped in the top ribbon was a little heart made of tiny white plastic pearls.  The announcement of the time and place of the wedding was accompanied by the instruction: Dress Semi-formal.  I never take kindly to being instructed on what or what not to wear.  Presumably this instruction was to rule out blokes in black singlets and dirty bare feet, sweating through their tattoos – in Australia or New Zealand, but more so in the former, this may be a wise precaution these days.

An inset which fluttered out of the envelope further advised us that this couple already possessed everything they need for the maintenance of home life, and so in lieu of gifts the guests were asked to give money.  To facilitate this there would be a Wishing Well helpfully and strategically placed at the reception.  You could write your cheque or take your crisp banknotes, put them in the little festive container supplied, and drop them in the Wishing Well.  As you do, you are at liberty to make a secret wish of your own which may be fulfilled.  My own secret wish is probably better left in pectore. 

Startled, I think at the brazenness of this, I began a little swift research on Wishing Wells at Weddings.  It is almost an industry.  Couples who have been living together for some time already and have a house-load of domestic gear, it seems, would rather have straight cash to pay for a more luxurious honeymoon than otherwise.  I am not making this up.  There is also a new genre of poetry to assist the Wishing Well cause, and so we may get:

Because at first we lived in sin
We've got the sheets and a rubbish bin
A gift from you would be swell
But we'd prefer a donation to our Wishing Well!!

I may say that the poets supplying this cause need to do a little more work yet on rhythm, metre and scansion, but perhaps that is quibbling when we get this gem:

Our home is quite complete now,
we've been together long,
so please consider our request and do not take us wrong.
A delicate request it is, we hope you understand.
Please play along as it will give our married life a hand.
The tradition of the wishing well is one that's known by all.
Go to the well, toss in a coin and as the coin does fall,
Make a wish upon that coin and careful as you do.
Cause as the well's tradition goes your wishes will come true.
So on this special day of ours, the day that we'll be wed.
Don't hunt for special gifts but give money in it's stead.
And as you drop the envelope with money great and small,
Remember, make your wish as you watch your money fall.

So come and enjoy the day all sunny
We really would appreciate a little money.

I detect echoes in this... distant sounds of battle with the apostrophe, for one.  I wanted to add, as one does in my circles, the Latin “sic” after it’s, but in this context it would have been open to misinterpretation. 

Moreover, scholars of the protestant reformation may be reminded of Luther’s bête noire, the Monk Tetzel, who went around selling indulgences by which you could procure the release of souls from purgatory:

                As soon as the coin in the coffer rings

                The soul from purgatory springs.

The available Wishing Well anthology includes:

More than just kisses so far we've shared,
Our home has been made with Love and Care,
Most things we need we've already got,
And in our home we can't fit a lot!
A wishing well we thought would be great,
(But only if you wish to participate),
A gift of money is placed in the well,
Then make a wish .... but shhh don't tell!
Once we've replaced the old with the new,
We can look back and say it was thanks to you!
And in return for your kindness, we're sure
That one day soon you will get what you wished for.

This is a little different.  The option not to cough up cash is a bit more explicit.  And it seems the money is not so much to finance a honeymoon at the Burj al Arab, Dubai, but much more prosaically for the replacement of obsolescent household articles.  I have to say, that’s not the kind of cause that stirs my imagination as a donor.  Is this a couple who have given up on life?  All that remains to them by way of inspiration is a Maintenance Mentality, kicked off by a hideous fake White Wishing Well interlaced with yellow roses, all set against a background of Revolting Pink.  (Come to think of it, I am aware of one person in my clan who would think that simply lovely.)

Although a gift from the heart
Is always a pleasant start
We’ve lived together for quite a while
We’ve everything needed to live in style
What we really need is a getaway
In the form of a romantic holiday
To the Cook Islands we’d love to go
But to do that we need a little doh
So if you should choose to donate cash
To the Kristy and Jon honeymoon stash
There will be a wishing well provided
For you to drop your gift in to
Don’t forget to make a wish and
sign your name so that we can thank you

The one felicitous word in that doggerel, it seems to me, is “doh”.  If I’m not mistaken it was coined for our edification by Homer in The Simpsons.  Yes, Kristy and Jon meant dough, but their silly error is wonderfully expressive of the mindless tasteless humbug of weddings in the prevailing culture. 

The date has been set, and we’d love you to come,
To our wedding down south, a long way for some,
All you must do, is decide what to wear,
Then polish your jewellery and cob your hair.
Don’t worry about gifts, don’t buy us a yacht,
The things that we need, we’ve already got.
Don’t go out shopping or get yourself stressed,
Don’t alter your plans for a pre-wedding rest.
If you want to be generous, to the soon to be wed
Then save yourself the hassle and do this instead.....
Contribute to our wishing well, we will be grateful,
We’ll go somewhere hot, where it will be blissful,
A honeymoon would be marvellous, to start off our life,
In our long winding journey, as new husband and wife!

I think of them on their long winding journey, at least initially financed by these guests who have come such a long way.  It occurs to me that anyone holidaying in the Cook Islands these days may well be surrounded by these domestic veterans at mounting risk of terminal boredom, who thought and hoped that a rather expensive wedding copiously sprinkled with pink, might revive things.  Now legally married, they are riding those Rarotongan motorbikes, hooning around on their long winding journey which began by scraping the bottom of the Wishing Well.  Ye gods.  =

On going to church at Christmas 2012

“My favorite season, actually, is Easter.”  These were the first words at Holy Communion, 8 am, Christmas Day, at the Anglican Church.  The celebrant was some elderly superannuated bloke.  The regular vicar preached.  So this celebrant thought it proper to kick off a major Christian liturgical feast by saying something banal and irrelevant about himself.  And of course it had to be something he thought mildly funny.  Otherwise in the service he stumbled through the liturgy, misquoting even the actual Consecration, and frequently fiddling with the radio transmitter he was supposed to keep in his pocket.  At the very end of the service he decided to tell us how, as a child, he had always thought the smoke from the extinguished candles was “the prayers going up to heaven”.

I was present as one of my rare materializations at church these days.  The 8 am at the Anglican seems best to me because it is supposed to be plain and simple, and the worshipper is likely to be left alone.  It seems proper to show up at the Anglican church because our weekly Friday morning Christian Meditation group meets there and a number of its members belong to Christ Church, Warkworth. 

But, oh my goodness…  Some worshippers behave as though they are at a national convocation of the chattering classes.  There are women who laugh uproariously at what they themselves have just said – in the middle of the service.  They turn the Pax in the liturgy into some extra general meeting of the Mothers’ Union.  Last Easter when I was there, one woman called to a friend two pews away, “How was your visit to the chiropodist, dear?”

The art of being reverent without being pompous, the intention to be humbly and attentively present, the courtesy of letting the great words speak for themselves, these things are now largely lost.  It seems compulsory now for lectors to elocute the words with dramatic effect, and even on occasion to tell us how we should be feeling when we hear them.  One woman however read the Lesson simply and clearly, and had made herself well acquainted beforehand with what she was going to read. 

God help us all when it comes to the churches that are currently booming.  Worship in these places starts from the presumption that no one must on any account be at risk of boredom, or left to their own devices and demons for a second.  Everyone must be relentlessly entertained at all times.  Ministers and priests become “pastors” – yet another example of a good word getting trivialized and violated by silly people.  Even prayer becomes an energetic, restless thing with everyone beseeching and making strange sounds.  There must be no perceived clericalism or dignity.  Everything must be loud, over-amplified and compulsorily joyous.  There must be songs, not hymns, of excruciating sentimentalism and banal nonsense, and soloists of the breathy, microphone-gripping variety, trained to scoop up to a note whose actual pitch is forever lost to them. 

I wonder how many people, and I am one, have been actually driven away by this stuff.  I am told the perpetrators “mean well”.  Well sorry… I should hope they do.  I still look for worship that has not become captive to the prevailing culture of excitement, idolatry and superstition.  Worship founded in humility and subjection to the word of God.  People who can preach and teach without placing themselves at centre stage, or trying to entertain.  Music worthy of its purpose rather than the mindless apeing of secular pop based on banging guitars and drums.  Worship open to mystery and reverence.  

Pray it's Romney

I write as the sunrise marches west across the USA, and voters are choosing between Obama and Romney.  Any Kiwi who has ever been on a flight east to west chasing the dawn gets the drama.  Poll booths are opening like dominoes falling across the States, and Americans are making their choice.

One writer in the NZ Herald commented that if it were up to New Zealanders, Obama would romp in.  What is it, with these Americans?  Romney might be a very nice guy, rich and hospitable, exemplary family man and kind to animals.  But he manifestly doesn’t know much and, worse, he is surrounded and guided by serious right wing fanatics, oil interests, and religious loonies.  We had all that with George W Bush.  This would be worse.  Whatever faults Obama might have, Romney is simply not up to it. 

But we are told that the polls are close.  It’s neck and neck, evidently.  I for one have cold chills about this.  The President of the United States, despite all the ambivalences, which are many, still exercises power which affects us all.  What they call Democracy, which they think they invented and exemplify, is horrifyingly negotiable.  They use torture.  They run concentration camps.  They think it is OK to circumvent the law and human rights if it is America that is doing it.  They think American lives are somehow worth more than other lives when they are lost. 

Most of the free world is heartily tired of America.  There is something called the American Dream, which makes most of us fall about laughing. 

But still, these people could have made Romney president by tomorrow.  It’s chilling.  We are driven to resort to prayer. 

Whineray

 

 

New Zealand now has a pretty well-oiled rite and litany for when some major, usually sporting, icon dies.  Our secular culture is confused and frightened about death, so we dive rapidly, by reflex, into memory and sentimentalism and hagiography.  The death of heroes is easily marked because we simply relive past glories. 

And so it was that over this holiday weekend we have had multiple references to the suddenly late Sir Wilson Whineray, former captain of the All Blacks and more recent captain of commerce.  I have yet to hear any serious critical assessment of his character, but we have been incessantly reminded of his leadership qualities, business successes, rugby abilities and things he said:  “I always told the team, you will do exactly what I say on the field, no matter what you think.  I am the captain, and if it’s wrong I will take the rap.  If you don’t do what I say, you will take the rap.”  Great.  That’s the way to talk to the blokes. 

The other quotations I have so far heard have been unmemorable and unoriginal.

He went to Auckland Grammar.  He was roughly contemporary there with me – and on reflection I do remember hearing the name Whineray, whenever Littlejohn the headmaster was moved to identify anyone he thought had brought credit on the school lately.  Whineray must, back then, have been already rugby proficient and therefore very much visible.  I doubt that he ever heard or noted the name Miller. 

It really matters in these things that we do get some perceptive and sensitive journalism, to stand against all the blandishment and idolatry.  Perhaps that comes later.  John Kirwan eventually went public about his times of serious clinical depression.  Barry Crump beat his wife, or wives.  Our square-jawed, thick-necked icons, in sport and in business, need honest and perceptive journalism.  Lance Armstrong, for years at the top of world professional cycling, is now seen as a druggie, a cheat and a humbug.  But for most of those years we were hearing mainly about successive Tour de Frances and his fight back from testicular cancer.

Now we have the cartoon in Granny Herald.  It epitomises for me all the inconsequence and utter shallowness of the sporting icon culture – and the way it suits so many now to mindlessly caricature religion and faith, about which never have so many known so little.  Deceased All Blacks seem to be all in heaven somehow – where else would they be? -- sitting around looking like tired and wounded heroes.  Well, actually they look like simpletons, village idiots.  They have wings, so I assume they have become angels, which must be bizarre and boring for them.  Their celestial captain informs them that Whineray is about to pass by, and they should rise and salute.  “Your captain and our colonel...” I don’t get that. 

It’s hideous.  Shallow sentimental claptrap.  Plain embarrassing is what it is.  The Herald once had a cartoonist called Minhinnick, as many of my generation will remember.  Gordon Minhinnick was genuinely talented.  He could draw.  He knew about subtle allusion.  He also knew what was important, and what was not, in human affairs.  That depth and quality of journalism is rare now, at least around New Zealand.    

Whineray was clearly an exceptional person, sportsman and leader.  I have lived long enough to know that he was also broken and fallible in places, and that he sometimes lay awake at nights. 

 

 

Inking

Why…? Oh Why…?  I mean, Why…? would anyone get tattooed?  It’s trendy.  How pathetic is that.  It’s cool.  Ye gods. 

It’s mutilation.  That’s what it is.  Samoan men tattooed from thigh to buttock to waist… Simply unnecessary, aggressive and silly.  Women with butterflies and other stuff everywhere – it’s like bad graffiti on toilet walls. 

Maori facial tattoos, Maori women with moko.  Well, I don’t know what effect they think it has on me, but I am unimpressed, and find it all somewhat distasteful and tedious.

There are all manner of professional surveys and reports on tattooing, by dermatologists, sociologists and others.  I have read some of them.  But none of it alters the fact that tattooing means hacking into human skin, which is a major and essential organ of our bodies, injecting ink, and leaving permanent damage. 

It may look pretty.  Mostly it doesn’t.  But it is very difficult and costly to remove.  The removal is at best partial. 

And the reports show that most of the more perceptive who have ever, for whatever reason at the time, had tattoos, later profoundly regret it. 

I guess some people live in families, clans, hapu, where everyone is already tattooed.  It has become a rite of passage… and a big joke at some drunken party.  The main streets of provincial towns have grubby looking tattoo shops along with liquor outlets, loan agencies and social welfare depots. 

You may have the impression from this entry that I am opposed to tattoos.  You bet I am.  It’s silly, entirely unnecessary bodily mutilation, and it adds nothing to life.