Goodness

"Goodness is something so simple: always to live for
others—never to one’s own advantage." Someone
once pinned this thought of Dag Hammarskjold’s to
a noticeboard in Nelson Cathedral. Why does one’s
heart sink at the prospect? At any rate, it would be
impossible. Simply to exist is to live for one’s own
advantage.

How beautiful the river flows
and the birds they sing;
but you and I are messier things.
—Bruce Springsteen

O happy day

This just in: Opposition leader John Key has unreservedly
welcomed the Finance Minister’s announcements of tax
cuts taking effect from October.

“We’ve been calling for tax cuts for some time,” exclaimed
the National Party leader excitedly, “so you can imagine
how delighted we are. It’s pretty much what the doctor
ordered.”

Asked whether the Government hadn’t stolen National’s
thunder, Key crisply replied: “You mean we should
begrudge the people of this country more money in their
pockets? Don’t be foolish. We’re not in politics for petty
partisan gain but to ensure New Zealanders have better,
healthier, more prosperous lives.”

As for other Budget announcements, Key said he and his
colleagues were “over the moon” about the big funding
boost for faster rollout of broadband and “positively
ecstatic” about money being poured into workplace
training and skills development.

“Cullen’s really nailed it,” said Key. “We couldn’t have
done better ourselves. Now let’s all roll up our sleeves and
get on with doing the best we can for New Zealand.”

The media conference was interrupted at this point when
journalists spotted a fleet of flying pigs in the sky and
crowded to the window for a better look.

Atmospherics

Ewen Alison, in an obscure old book called A New
Zealander Looks Back, makes the unusual claim that
New Zealand has a particularly heavy atmosphere—
about 15lb to the square inch—that tends to make
people, especially in the north of the country, sluggish
and slow-moving. Robin Hyde seemed to reinforce
this notion in her comment on the sickness of New
Zealand soil: she said that it was more obvious in the
north, where it was "bled white and has never been fed
up again, and is a sort of beautiful skeleton." Discuss.

Even cleaner

Further to my blog of May 15 about book and film titles
doubling up, especially in the case of The Cleaner, the
wonderfully named Brett Battles, author of just such a
book, emails to say there's also a show in development
at an American cable network called The Cleaner. It's
good to know hygiene plays such a significant part in
our culture. That must be why we call them soaps.

Bombs away

A television news item about the 65th anniversary of
the "Dam Busters" raid during the Second World War
showed Richard Todd laying a wreath on the
Derwent dam in England's Lake District, where in
1943 the Royal Air Force's 617 Squadron tested the
special bombs they were later to drop on the dams of
Germany's Ruhr Valley. Todd didn't take part in the
raid; he was actually an actor who played squadron
leader Guy Gibson in the 1955 film The Dam Busters.
Yet it seemed right. Todd had a distinguished war
record of his own, and he was one of those leading
men who stamped the idea of British pluck on the war
and adventure movies of the 1950s (he also played
Robin Hood and Rob Roy). Kenneth More was
another: sturdy chaps with hearty no-nonsense
attitudes, capable of felling you with a pat on the back.
Todd, I must say, still looks in good shape at 88. On
my ninth birthday, October 8, 1955, I was taken to see
The Dam Busters as a treat and for years thereafter,
growing up in small-town New Zealand, still deeply
under British cultural influence, I remained stirred by
the imagery of that film, and indeed other war films,
through which we early post-war baby-boomers
vicariously experienced the great conflict from which
our fathers had returned, not least for the purpose of
having us. We were the last offshoots of the British
Empire; the last generation to stand for "God Save the
Queen" in the cavernous picture-houses of the day.
Our colonial cultural fortifications, such as they were,
were bombarded mercilessly by the imperious Brits,
who kept dropping the Queen Mother and the Duke of
Edinburgh on us. It has taken years to fix the damage.

The jig's up

Ronald Wright’s 2004 book A Short History of Progress
ought to be read by everyone. Read it and teach it in
schools. Distribute copies at Chamber of Commerce
meetings. Hand it out on street corners, whatever. It is
indeed short (just 132 pages of main text, though the
notes at the end are compendious) and it’s highly
readable. Picking up on themes first comprehensively
articulated by Alfred Crosby in the less accessible
Ecological Imperialism (1988), Wright argues that, like
many a civilization before us, we in the “West” today are
in a progress trap, slaves to runaway consumption,
waste and pollution that will bring us to ruin—unless we
act now to avert it. Which, one has to say, does not look
very likely, notwithstanding various hand-flapping
gestures by politicians. We may think, says Wright, that
somehow we’ll muddle through, but the difference
between us and the Roman Empire, say, is that we are
consuming not just the past (fossil fuels) and the present
(air, water etc) but our future (the resources that our
descendants—not just regionally but globally—might
have hoped to sustain themselves by). It's no accident,
I might add, that the global financial markets are based
more and more not on production and work in the real
economy but on tradeable futures; in that respect, too,
we are becoming, in the words of Tim Flannery's
memorable book title, future eaters.

Wright is particularly good in showing how the
Industrial Revolution that raised the West to such
prosperity and political dominance was funded by
the looting of North and South America.
Consequently, he writes,

We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our
two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal
and inevitable… Yet this new order is an anomaly: the
opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow.
Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half a planet,
extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and
has been sustained by spending down new forms of
natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World,
the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there
won’t be another like it…

So. The jig’s up. The party’s over. There will now be
a period of, at the very least, adjustment. Hang onto
your hats.

Title fight

When book titles have commonplace words in them, it's
hardly surprising that they get used more than once. For
instance, Christchurch author Paul Cleave called his first
novel The Cleaner; almost simultaneously an American
writer with the wonderful name of Brett Battles came out
with his own first novel—The Cleaner. There's also a new
Samuel L Jackson movie called Cleaner, which may
explain why another new movie has been clumsily called
Code Name: The Cleaner. Slightly less predictably, the
film title Blindsight rips off Maurice Gee's clever book title
Blindsight (there's no connection between the two).

You'd have thought, however, that there would only ever
be one Foreskin’s Lament in the world. Not so. After
nearly 30 years of having the field to itself, Greg McGee's
seemingly uniquely titled New Zealand play is now
outgoogled by Foreskin's Lament, a new book by Shalom
Auslander about growing up Jewish in New Jersey. Still,
I guess it's no skin off McGee's, um, nose; it could even be
a backhanded tribute to him for having coined such a
memorable title that it warranted a revival.