Compartmental

And in breaking news, I’m starting to wonder about the
distinction between ‘the economy’ and ‘the environment.’
As acting Director of Information Resources and Lists of
Stuff at Thumbcorp, I find myself more and more
inclined to file all matters relating to both topics under
the one heading—Economy. Ever since it came into
vogue in the 1970s the use of the word ‘environment’ has
irritated me; like many words with a once-specific and
limited meaning it has come to cover a multitude of sins.
The worst consequence of using it is the mental
compartmentalization thereby abetted, especially in the
minds of people who wish to maintain and indeed glorify
the capitalist status quo. So long as ‘the environment’ can
be contained as something discrete and negotiable, like
the balance of payments or a departmental budget, it
cannot disturb orthodox thinking; nature may be red in
tooth and claw but, this way, it’s declawed.

In fact, the economy is the environment is the economy.
I may have said this before. Whenever you see the word
‘environmental’ try replacing it with ‘economic’ and see
what happens. You might be surprised how little difference
there is between the two. For instance, the New Zealand
Herald’s editorial of 3 September on the emissions trading
scheme concludes: ‘New Zealand should be in the vanguard
of environmental improvement.’ See what I mean?

Ejaculated William

Steve Braunias had some fun watching the 1947 Hollywood
film Green Dolphin Street on a Sky movie channel recently,
and wrote about it for Sunday magazine. I haven’t seen the
film but I happen to have on loan from the public library a
copy of the Elizabeth Goudge novel on which it was based,
and it’s a shocker—as overripe as a rotten peach. Published
in 1944, a daunting 500 pages of romantic fiction in small
type, it revels in the variations on he said/she said so loved
of novelists in the first half of the 2oth century. For
instance, opening the book at random I find (my italics):

‘Let’s leave it for tonight and decide tomorrow,’ hedged William.

‘I am a great sinner,’ stated Samuel with grief.

‘South Island?’ ejaculated William.

Much of it is set in New Zealand during the land wars,
though Goudge cheerfully admits in a note at the start
that ‘To all lovers of New Zealand it will be immediately
obvious that the writer has never been there, and she
most humbly asks their pardon for the many mistakes she
must have made.’ The film-makers never came near these
shores either: as Steve says, Mexicans, Hawaiians and
American Indians do duty for the Maori characters, star
Lana Turner is nearly burned at the stake by Maori, and the
key role of the New Zealand bush is played by redwood
forests in Oregon.

The Listener’s film critic at the time, John Maconie, was
distinctly unimpressed. His review, headlined THAT WILL BE
ALL, HINEMOA! (a line delivered by Turner to her maid),
found the film ‘phony from beginning to end.’ The ludicrous
depiction of an earthquake (Braunias: 'Geysers bubble and
spurt, kauri topple like redwood') apparently got the
loudest laughs from the Wellington audience Maconie saw
it with. However, he wrote,

the money will have been well spent so far as the
New Zealand filmgoer is concerned if it helps him
to realize that when the critics damn Hollywood
for the insincerity of its productions, for its
sacrifice of truth to spectacle...and in general for
its refusal to face up to the facts of life, they have
some justification for their criticisms.

Ah, Hollywood. Even today, the IMDb website billing for
Green Dolphin Street begins ‘A Fiery Girl Who Dares The
Dangers Of The Sea And A Savage Land.’ Readers will also
recall the equally implausible 1961 movie Two Loves,
based on Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel Spinster, filmed
entirely in a Hollywood studio and starring Shirley
Maclaine and, yes, Juan Fernandez as 'Chief Rauhuia.'
Bring on the enchiladas and puha.

Trivia note: Sebastian Faulks's novel On Green Dolphin
Street was inspired by music written for the 1947 film but
otherwise there is, mercifully, no connection.

Name and claim

Over at Tumeke! the redoubtable Tim Selwyn has taken
issue with my theory about the colonial use of ‘the’ to
prefix Maori placenames. From his observations, he says,
the prefix usually denotes a significant geographical
feature after which an area is named. He cites the Gambia,
the Congo and the Waikato as names representing areas
along a river and also its basin/catchment. Perhaps, Tim
selwynizes, ‘a unique, singular, geographical identifying
feature is what is being said of a place needing a "the".’

Unlike the catchments referred to, this argument doesn’t
hold water. Since independence from Euro-imperialism,
both ‘the’ Gambia and ‘the’ Congo have become, simply,
Gambia and Congo, just as we here in New Zealand are
now more likely to say ‘Manawatu’ and ‘Waikato’ without
the prefix. Sure, there are English exceptions, as I
acknowledged ('the' Coromandel) and as another
commentator on my blog points out, but Tim himself
admits to some uncertainty about the way it works and I
have yet to hear a convincing case against the idea that
even grammar can be a colonizing force. Next question:
who put the colon in colonialism?

Trying on

How much we need to work through, how many forms of
living we try on, like suits of clothes, before finding the
right one, or at least the one that is least uncomfortable.
And death, no doubt, follows shortly afterwards. In this
sense, all life is indeed a preparing for death: the flesh
must be burned through, layer by layer, in order to purify
the soul for the next stage of its journey. With what relief
it must, at last, lose that weight, rising in wonderful
lightness, like an astronaut on the moon.

Life as a surgical boot on the leg of the soul.

‘I’ve never got my act together,’ said Anthony Hopkins,
wonderfully, in an interview once. ‘There is no act to get
together. My life is none of my business.’ This calls to
mind the character in The Bell by Iris Murdoch who says
that the chief requirement of the good life is to live
without any image of oneself. Impossible, of course; but it
should be possible to be less preoccupied with how one
appears to other people.

Undercut

We know that the current Chinese regime has been making
strenuous, even shrill efforts around the world to stop the
pro-Uighur documentary The 10 Conditions of Love from
being shown, apparently on the grounds that any officially
unsanctioned view of the political situation in Xinjiang—or
East Turkestan, as the Uighur people know it—is by
definition not fair and accurate. Watching the doco on
Maori Television last night I had the feeling it was probably
neither, but as an attempt to put the Uighur side of the
argument it was entirely valid and well worth screening. So
big ups to Maori Television for that. A great shame, then,
that the channel felt it had to follow the doco with an
official Chinese government one purporting to show the
'truth' about the riots in Xinjiang, which, like Tibet, has
been colonized and exploited by Han Chinese in recent
years. The 10 Conditions might have been biased but at
least it held together as the work of people with hearts and
minds capable of independent thinking; the government
film was so patently a piece of state propaganda that I
turned it off after a few minutes. Whether Maori Television
thought it was striking that mysterious thing called
'balance' I don’t know, but whatever the reason, it didn’t
work. The channel undercut its original brave decision with
what seems to have been a craven one, bowing to pressure
from Beijing.

Crime time

Last night, 31 August, both major television channels in
New Zealand led their flagship 6pm news bulletins with
a fatal shooting in Hawke’s Bay. Tonight, 1 September,
they both led with reaction to the banning of gang
insignia in Wanganui. And this is not uncommon: any
homicide, anything crime-related, anything calculated to
promote fear and loathing, can always be assured of high
placement in the news. For myself, I am trying to imagine
what goes through the heads of news chiefs and bulletin
editors when they make the decision not only to cover
these stories—with all the associated expense, in these
supposedly cash-strapped times, of sending out reporters
and camera crews—but to assign them the greatest
prominence. Whichever way I turn it, I invariably come
up with the same conclusion: that whatever it is that’s
going on here, it’s not news; it’s a form of entertainment
packaged no less formulaically and titillatingly than, say,
CSI or Criminal Minds. In which case I respectfully ask
TV1 and TV3 to stop calling these programs news bulletins.
By all means broadcast what you will, but drop the false
labelling and the pompous pretence that endlessly
covering crime and misbehaviour is real gritty journalism.

The really sad part is that some genuine journalistic work
of merit is done for these bulletins but it usually gets
shunted down the list. Tonight, for instance, 3 News picked
up on a blog by John Minto in which he raised the idea of a
a maximum income cap of $250,000. There was actually
no reason in the world why that story couldn't have led the
bulletin—no reason except, apparently, the sheer terror of
addressing serious issues seriously. Sure, I get it: 'serious'
doesn't cut it for advertisers and ratings; but, in the case of
the past two nights anyway, it's depressing to see news
chiefs settling for the predictable, the prejudice-feeding and
the formulaic as the six o'clock fanfares rise and fall.

The new ETS

Prime Minister John Key expressed optimism today that
with hard work and co-operation by all concerned parties,
an Evasions Trading Scheme could be in place by the end
of the year.

Though much remains to be negotiated, the Government
is promising that under the proposed scheme, all major
sectors of industry and agriculture will be able to evade
their responsibilities in a responsible fashion.

The long-term aim is to keep New Zealand not only a few
steps behind its trading partners but backing away at the
same time.

‘This government didn’t get where it is today by facing up
to things,’ Mr Key told a media conference. ‘I don’t think
we could look ourselves in the eye if we, um, did.’

Evasions will be allowed up to a cap, beyond which even
bigger evasions can be traded for credits, according to the
evader-evades principle by means of which evaders can
evade in proportion to their evasion-generating capacity.

‘It’s our job as parliamentarianians to uphold the core
principle of evadability,” said Mr Key. ‘New Zealanderses
would expect no less.’