Just wondering

Anyone still carrying a torch for the Chinese Government?

Smoke screen

Even after the "free trade agreement" between New
Zealand and China had been signed, news bulletins on
both TV1 and TV3 continued to lead with the fatal fire
at the coolstore outside Hamilton. The fire occurred on
Saturday night, and by Monday night there remained
only smouldering ruins, but still this item of news took
precedence over the Beijing signing. The latter will
have an incalculable effect on the lives of every New
Zealander for many years to come—but of course the
pictures weren’t so interesting, were they? Nowhere
near as dramatic as smoking ruins and grief-stricken
firemen. Thus the impact of the visual (the physical
images we see) dictates news priorities, diminishing
the power of the abstract (the invisible meaning
of an event). Which also explains why stories about
crime and violence dominate television news bulletins
out of all proportion to their importance. Strictly
speaking, TV news is not news at all but a kind of action
movie with narrative interludes.

Ask a tree

The idea of progress is necessary to capitalism—or rather,
to capitalism's illusion about itself—but is not strictly
necessary for the well-being of people. Pre-capitalist
humanity had no concept of earthly progress such as we
cherish today. Their idea of progress was to get to heaven.

Progress was all right for a while. It just went on for too
long.—Ogden Nash

The “growth” of which economists and politicians speak is
strictly finite. All that grows will ungrow. Ask a tree.

If there were no calendars, we would have only a limited
sense of linear time. The sun rises each day, but only to
set again and begin the whole business over again the
next day. Similarly, the seasons repeat. Only the aging of
physical bodies suggests a linear progress from one point
to another. But perhaps we age inwards, not onwards.
Our individual sense of going somewhere—albeit only to
death—is projected onto the human race as a whole to
create the illusion of progress.

Throughout the whole medieval period the cyclic and
linear concepts of time were in conflict. Scientists and
scholars, influenced by astronomy and astrology, tended
to emphasize the cyclic concept. The linear concept was
fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money
economy...time was now regarded as something valuable
that was felt to be slipping away continually.
—G J Whitrow, What Is Time?

In 1602 Francis Bacon, promoting the linear concept,
wrote a work called The Masculine Birth of Time.
Welcome to our world.

Oath

The medieval Catalonian oath of allegiance to
their monarch:

We, who are as good as you, swear to you,
who are no better than us,
to accept you as our king and sovereign lord,
provided you observe all our liberties
and laws—but if not, not.

40 years on

Writing a biography of Helen Clark, as I am, is in some
ways to write the political history of New Zealand over
the past 40 years. Clark was politicized by student
activism over issues like the Vietnam war in 1968; the
story of her rise to power is the story of the long march
through the institutions by that generation of activists.
Now, of course, they have wound up managing and
maintaining the paradigm of economic policy laid down
by Roger Douglas and his right-wing friends in the
1980s. It would be wrong, however, to see Clark, Phil
Goff & co as “radical left-wingers” who, over the
decades, morphed into respectable custodians of
capitalism. Capitalism was never under threat from
what the French modestly call les événements of 1968
and after; the left in New Zealand, such as it was, had
no viable critique of economics, being far more
concerned with social issues, identity politics and
international relations. That is precisely why Douglas
was able to do what he did when he got power in 1984.
He had an economic plan; the left didn’t. This is not to
negate the profound effect of left-wing issue and
identity politics, which have changed New Zealand
much for the better. But it might help us—it’s helping me,
anyway—to understand why even the Clark Labour
government, enlightened and progressive in many
respects, is unable to seriously contest the power of
capital, both global and domestic.

Sucking it up

Sometimes if you stop and look around you in a city street,
you might be struck by the remarkable number of people
who at any given moment are sucking on something.
Cigarettes, water bottles, juice drinks, cans of alcohol, soft
foods of many kinds from ice-cream to doughy buns—we
seem to need to have something in our mouths to get us
through the day. Thus consumerism keeps us ever-needy,
infantilized, taking it in and sucking it up.

Atman returns

Our true high self: the part of us that was never born
and will never die. The Hindus call it atman—the
eternal deity within each soul. In wise love, says
Yeats, you divine that higher self in your lover and
try to reflect it back to them. That in fact is probably
the greatest gift you can give anyone: a glimpse of
their own atman.

When, though, was love ever wise? We need dates,
names, precise locations.