Axe cuts

“The triumph of Christianity was accompanied by the
sound of the axe on age-old arboreta.”—Robin Lane
Fox, Pagans and Christians

The sacred groves, where pagan gods were worshipped,
were seen as dark primitive places resisting the dazzle
of Christian light; hence, during the next two millennia,
the enthusiasm for chopping down trees. The motive
was missionary as much as economic. Keen to smash
the ancient religions, God explicitly instructs the people
of Israel (Exodus 34:13) to “destroy their altars, break
their images, and cut down their groves.”

And the colonists coming to New Zealand did just that.

Fuel for sport

Can motorsport survive in the age of peak oil? Fast
machines, I guess, will always give some people a
thrill, but surely the day will come when Super V8
cars and the like are regarded not just as boys'
toys or luxuries but ecological outrages. One could
imagine protesters lining the racetracks objecting
to the waste of petrol—fuel that could be used for
more urgent purposes. Perceived as barbaric,
motorsport might well go the way of gladiatorial
combat, consigned to the history of a more primitive
age. As for boy racers, like it or not they’ll have to
become more environmentally sensitive. Coming
soon to a neighbourhood near you: boy walkers.

Accidentally

The great moments of art occur by accident; the rest
is packaging. The best poem is the one overheard in
the street—and you didn’t even write it.

“Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.” (E M Forster)

Big deal

The fuss over Winston Peters taking a different view of the
free-trade agreement with China is just that—a fuss,
whipped up by the Government’s enemies in order to make
trouble where there really is none. For goodness’ sake,
Peters’s party is in an informal coalition with Labour; he
may be Foreign Minister but he is also the leader of
another party that is not Labour, and is therefore entitled
to disagree with Labour if he wishes. He was definitely out
of line to say that, if asked overseas in his capacity as
Foreign Minister what he thought of the agreement, he'd
reply that it could have been better; but he seems to have
fallen into step now. To say, however, as Fran O’Sullivan
does in today’s New Zealand Herald, that this difference
of opinion makes New Zealand look ridiculous in the
world’s eyes is hyperbolic to the point of hysterical.
Frankly, it’s unlikely anyone outside New Zealand has
noticed; and if they have, they wouldn’t care. A major
trade deal has been signed—that’s a concrete fact; the
Foreign Minister thought a better deal could have been
got—that’s a valid opinion. Let’s all move right along here.

May might

I hope I never become one of those people who write
letters to the editor about missing apostrophes and the
misuse of the English language by teenage txters.
Language evolves all the time and we should let it do
so without getting too picky. I am no pedant but.

We all have our bêtes, however—some more noirish
than others—and mine is the vanishing might. In
certain contexts might and may mean two clearly
different things, but in the past 20 years, for reasons
I can’t establish, other than sheer carelessness, may
has been steadily shoving might off the stage, to the
detriment of meaning and the confusion of the reader.

A headline in yesterday's New Zealand Herald illustrates
the point perfectly. It said "Detox centres may have
saved two men." In times past you would automatically
have taken this to mean that two men had been saved
and that possibly they could thank detox centres for that.
In fact, as the news report showed, the men had died
without ever going near a detox centre. The headline
was obviously supposed to convey the meaning that, had
they been sent to such places, they possibly would not
have died; in which case the correct way to say it was
"Detox centres might have saved two men."

But the distinction between may and might now seems
lost on many people; and the language in turn is losing a
useful shade of meaning.

Off-key

I do wish they wouldn’t sing at Labour Party conferences.
Not in public, anyway. One glimpse on the television
news of Ruth Dyson, Maryan Street and friends singing
an anti-John-Key parody of “The Gambler” onstage at the
latest conference was enough to have me hiding my head
under the sofa cushions. Not only was it embarrassingly
in-house, it exposed Labour as caring just a bit too much
about Key. Boy, they must be scared of him. If they are so
scared, they should find subtler ways of demonizing him.

Broken windows

Every age believes at one and the same time that no other
age before it has been in a worse mess, and that no other
age has been quite so wonderful to live in. In our time, we
particularly like to fancy that technological change has
never been so fast, the pace of life never so frantic. But as
early as 1853 Matthew Arnold identified “this strange
disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided
aims.” In a story published in 1900 Henry James referred
to people of his generation as “victims of the modern
madness, more maniacal extension and motion.”

Every time you feel superior to the funny old ways of the
past, remember that the future will find you old-fashioned
too. In 2108 they will undoubtedly chuckle over the quaint
way people in 2008 got paper money (paper money!) out
of slot machines set into walls. Cellphones will seem as
clunkily antiquated to them as, say, wind-up phonographs
do to us.

Look back harder. What we call history is noise; is the
signature on the piece of paper as opposed to the paper; is
not the window but the stone smashing through it.

History is broken windows.