A week out

A week out from the election, the fact that we can even talk
talk about the possibility of a Labour-led government being
elected is a tribute to the nerve, desperation and sheer
ratlike cunning with which Helen Clark and her Labour
Party colleagues have fought to retain power. Though
distasteful at times, it has been quite refreshing to see them
having to go for it like this. In a perverse sort of way it
seems more honest. At least it has got Clark off her pedestal
and onto the pavements again. She is even acknowledging
now that up until recently it had been impossible to ignore
the fact that voters wanted a change of government; but in
her view the global credit crisis has got people thinking
again. Well, she would say that, wouldn't she; but the first
part of that (reported) statement is quite an admission for
the PM to make. In fact, I think it's a first.

By all odds National should still win this election and take
power, even if only propped up by Rodney Hide and Peter
Dunne; but you just can’t rule out Labour squeaking back,
along with some combination of the Greens, the Maori
Party and maybe New Zealand First. Suggestions that such
a result might somehow be undemocratic if Labour wins
fewer votes than National betray a misunderstanding of
how MMP works; they indicate, in fact, how persistent the
“two major parties” mentality still is, as if only Labour or
National had the God-given right to rule this nation till the
end of time. MMP is not about making it easier for a “major
party” to govern; it’s about authentically reflecting the will
of the people, as the first-past-the-post system hardly ever
did. A three-, four- or five-party coalition is just as valid an
expression of that will as any. One reason alone for not
voting National, actually, is their transparent willingness to
tamper with or even abolish MMP. We’ve got this baby this
far; let’s not deny it the chance to grow up and reach
maturity.

Who whom?

David Farrar on Kiwiblog has come up with a rather sad list
of 85 things he reckons the Greens would ban. This is his
attempt to paint the Greens as “the ultimate nanny state
party.” For instance, he says, they would ban smacking,
factory farming, coal-mining, nuclear power and fizzy
drinks from schools. Such rhetoric is useful for filling
blogspace because it requires no original thought, just the
closing of one eye and the shutting down of half the brain.
If you want to talk bans, it would be just as valid to say that
the political right, among whom Farrar is proud to count
himself, would ban the minimum wage from going up, ban
Kiwibank from being a true people’s bank, ban freedom of
choice for workers in favour of freedom of choice for
currency speculators, ban students from critical thinking,
ban whatever gets in the way of the sacred right to make
private gain at public expense. The list is endless. There’s
one ban I would like to see, though, and that’s a ban on the
inane phrase “nanny state.” Fact is, the “free market,” with
its insidious ideology and its economic power, puts far more
restraints on the way we live than any state or government
ever does.

Hand over fingers

It would be amusing if it weren’t so bloody serious to
observe the governments of the world faffing about
and flapping their hands over “solutions” to the
“global crisis.” One can only view with the deepest
cynicism the cloudy bluster of politicians who now
undertake to "fix" the problem with "strong" action.
(Barack Obama is no better than the others in this
respect; to make a real difference, once in the White
House, he would have to promote an economic
revolution.) The fact is that by a series of considered
decisions from the 1970s on, these same governments
deliberately fostered the conditions in which capital
markets could run free from virtually all restraint. The
borders of nation-states melted away as sharebrokers,
investment bankers and currency speculators pretty
much did what they liked, especially when
computerization lent wings to their transactions. Nor,
at the global level, was there ever a regulatory body
such as commodity trade has with the WTO, however
ineffectual it might be. You could say it was a licence to
print money but hey, not even a licence was required.
Now we (viz, the vast majority of the world’s population
who are not market players) must all bear the negative
consequences of a speculative bubble that we never
shared or even saw the benefits of.

New Zealand signed up to all this, of course, in the 1980s,
so can hardly complain now. Maybe we had no choice in
certain matters, eg, unpegging the dollar, given the way
the US and Britain were moving in those days; but we
could have done a lot more to protect our national
economy and the people who make it work. Imposing GST
on financial transactions above a certain limit, for instance.
But no, the “markets” were not to be trammelled in any
way; they were supposed to be our saviours, ensuring that
by means of “the invisible hand” everything would work out
fairly in the end. Well, we can see the invisible hand now:
and it turns out, all along, to have been giving us the fingers.

Remember, you are only form

Some figurative paintings by Toss Woollaston on a wall.
I like these. A self-portrait from 1976; Edith at the piano;
a young man called Jeremy Classen on a rocky slope.
The human figures are so blended with their environment
that you can’t tell where they end and it starts. This art
tells us the physical truth about ourselves, namely, that
the matter of which we are made varies only in form—and
even then by not much—from all other matter. The same
spirit animates all. There is in fact no such thing as "the
environment” supposedly existing apart from us human
beings. We are as much a part of it as the leaves on the
trees or the worms in the soil. Even to speak of “nature”
betrays a modern urban consciousness.

In Woollaston’s painting Edith and the piano are one; the
man is the mountainside is the man. The artist himself is
the world.

Still reasoning thing

“In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one
of the meanings of human existence—the source of
human freedom—is never to accept anything as
definitive, untouchable, obvious or immobile.”
—Michel Foucault, 1980

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.
But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted
deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing
puts forth the moulding of its features from behind the
unreasoning mask.”
—Ahab to Ishmael in Moby-Dick.

Thrush hour

At 5 o’clock this morning a bird somewhere nearby sends
out a single piping call over and over, like radio time pips.
The other day, from my car window I heard a musical
phrase, five evenly spaced notes, the fifth falling away.
What birds these are I don’t know. Frankly I can scarcely
tell one from the other. Sparrow, blackbird, thrush, tui,
fantail…sure; after that, however, my ornithological
awareness rating is low. But I seem to have grown more
sensitized to birdsong, because I hear it clearly and often
now, often above the roar of the traffic. (Then again, if you
train yourself, walking down a city shopping street like
Lambton Quay, you can isolate the clopping, clacking,
shuffling sound of thousands of human footfalls
ceaselessly hitting the pavement; and sometimes,
especially as dusk comes on in winter, the birds make a
tremendous noise in the trees on the Quay as they sort out
their roosts for the night.) Whatever the street, though, I’ll
be walking along and suddenly my attention will be caught
and held by some mighty outpouring of song and I’ll look
up and there’s one of the little fuckers chirping his tiny
heart out on the top of a lamp-post as if the continuance of
the universe depended on it.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

—“The Darkling Thrush,” Thomas Hardy, December 31, 1900

What Forster foresaw

I'm glad to see the New Zealand Book Council drawing
attention in its latest e-newsletter to E M Forster's short
story "The Machine Stops." Written in 1909, and unlike
anything else Forster ever wrote, it's a remarkably
prescient vision of the future as imagined by a great
writer 100 years ago. He got it far more right
than Wells or Verne ever did. "The Machine Stops" can
be found in Forster's Collected Short Stories and also in
its entirety here.