Thinking outside the square

Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma is a kind of Chinese War and
Peace for modern times. It’s hugely overwritten, and I
struggled to consistently distinguish between all of the
characters, but what a canvas he paints on. This is an only
thinly fictionalized history of what, by way of geopolitical
shorthand, we call the ‘Tienanmen Square massacre.’ You
want to know what really happened, go here: not to some
non-fictional account. It was the most serious challenge the
ruling Communists have faced in their 60 years in power,
which is why they crushed it with such brutality. In Ma’s
novel, the story is told by the narrator who, having taken a
bullet in the head near the square on 4 June 1989, now lies
in a vegetative coma, able to think and reflect but not to
speak or move a muscle. The narration alternates between
the historical action in the square and the current inaction
on the comatose man’s bed. His condition is all too plainly
a metaphor for the Chinese state’s inability to function fully
and humanly. Read this, and you will weep for China; or, if
tears are not your thing, read it as an antidote to the
juvenile outpourings of publicity about China's 'growth' and
allow yourself to believe that economic development alone
makes no nation great and no people sane and whole.

Cars

Don’t get me wrong about cars. Cars have been great
friends to us human beings. I co-own one; I drive one.
I once owned an Armstrong-Siddeley, God save me. I
respond deeply to lines in songs like ‘I’m driving a big
lazy car, I’m rushing up the highway in the dark, I’ve got
one hand steady on the wheel, the other hand trembling
over my heart’ (Bruce Springsteen, of course). It’s just
that, well, cars have become too much—you know? We
have passed the tipping point with them. We used to
contain them; more and more, they contain us. I look at
them now, whizzing around city streets, crowding out
those of us on foot, bullying us with their speed and
power, and I see them with new eyes; I see how much we
are sacrificing to them. And I say it must stop. It will have
to stop anyway, because with the decline of easily-got oil
they will become too expensive to run; but in any case the
tide has turned: cars are so, like, 2oth-century? They have
had their day. They will always be with us, in one form or
another, but from now on they have to take a lesser place
in the scheme of things. Take a fresh look at cars, fellow
citizens, and see them with new eyes. The same way you
look at black-and-white silent movies.

Pun and names

Newspaper subeditors and headline writers are generally
discouraged from making puns on people’s names. It’s a
hard habit to break, though, as the numerous Tiger Woods
headlines along the lines of ‘Not out of the woods yet’ have
shown. Bill Birch, George Bush and Rodney Hide are just
three political luminaries of recent times whose names
have attracted paronomastic activity, and John Key's a
sitter, of course; few media outlets in New Zealand have
been immune from plays on his name. I did it myself in a
headline two blogs ago. Come to think of it, I williefully
misused another name to head up my last blog too. Must
curb this bad habit. For a stunningly clever personal name
pun, however, you'd go a long way to beat the title of
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman's forthcoming book on Pakeha
ethnologist Elsdon Best (1856–1931) and his relationship
with Tuhoe, among whom he spent many years. It's called
Best of Both Worlds.

Api ever ata

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a little bit too much
being made by the media over the exploits of New
Zealand soldiers and SAS troops in Afghanistan? The
television news bulletins in particular seem to be in a
state of almost permanent arousal over Willie Apiata
and the boys. It takes just one so-called ‘firefight’ for
them to start spouting words like ‘heroic.' Simon
Dallow on One News tonight was brimming with pride
about a Kiwi soldier who’d performed a brave action,
and Europe correspondent Paul Hobbs was virtually
weeping with joy. Not to take anything away from
these frontline troops but I’m sure that they themselves
would be highly embarrassed by such a carry-on. I trace
it to a desperate need on the part of the New Zealand
media for a bit of biffo that doesn’t, for once, involve
just American or British troops and packs a visual
punch not usually found in your average prime-
ministerial press conference. The truth is that New
Zealand's involvement in Afghanistan is negligible to
the point of invisible, and whether or not you agree
with it, it's only soldiers doing what soldiers anywhere
do. Seizing on every little military engagement as if it
were the equivalent of Stalingrad does them no favours,
does the rest of us a disservice and—worst of all—
reduces the complex conflict in Afghanistan to a sort of
sporting tournament in which we only take an interest
if our team is playing.

Key words

By virtue of a kind of political naivety, coupled with
a little difficulty in finding the right words at times,
John Key can say some remarkably revealing things.
Here's one, from a feature in yesterday's Weekend
Herald about the idea of mining on conservation
land—an excellent feature, by the reliable Geoff
Cumming, who quotes Key's assertion earlier in the
week that the Government could achieve a balance
between protecting 'our clean, green image' and
extracting valuable minerals from the conservation
estate. Said Key: 'We are reflecting on what we think
is right and what is achievable. I think we've got that
balance about right.'

The balance between what is right and what is
achievable? I invite readers in their turn to reflect on
the meaning of that statement. Personally, I just about
fell off my chair.

Lose the looting

Despite my remonstrations against it on Nine to Noon two
days ago, the news media are inexplicably continuing to
use the words ‘looting’ and ‘looters’ indiscriminately in
connexion with the aftermath of the Chile earthquake.
Foreign reporters and correspondents keep deploying the
words and our media parrot them unthinkingly. I have
every sympathy with this tendency, having spent a great
deal of my life unthinkingly parroting other people’s words
and ideas, but there is a limit. As Rebecca Solnit has so
persuasively argued, what journalists and those convenient
characters called ‘the authorities’ like to call looting is more
often a desperate attempt to get food and basic supplies by
those stripped of all normal means of survival by disaster.
What would you do, asks Solnit, if your home had been
destroyed by an earthquake and there was no food for your
children? Sit and wait for ‘the authorities’—who, by their
own admission, in Chile’s case, have been slow to react to
the quake and subsequent tsunami—to come and look after
you, or take matters into your own hands? This is not to
deny that some people will take advantage of disaster
disruption to steal and plunder, but to lump criminals in
with the great mass of ordinary people is a kind of crime in
itself. These are people like you and me who would
normally never shoplift a stick of chewing gum but who, in
exceptional circumstances, do exceptional things.

All too often, alas, as Solnit very forcefully points out, the
immediate concern on the part of ‘the authorities’ (cheerled
by international media) is the preservation of normal
property relations. So any attempts to get hold of what you
need just to feed and clothe and heal and shelter yourself
and your family is easily labelled ‘chaos’ or ‘panic,’
justifying the claims of ‘deteriorating security’ and the
imperative need for a ‘crackdown’ by armed forces. Today’s
report in the Dominion Post, reprinted from the Los
Angeles Times (one of the targets of Solnit’s criticism
following the Haiti quake), is a classic case of the media
faithfully following the usual narrative arc. How does it
begin? With the heroic triumph of the forces of law and
order: ‘The Chilean army marched yesterday into the ruins
of Concepción…rounding up looters and receiving the
applause of besieged survivors.’ The report goes on to quote
people praising the police and army presence on the streets,
but one is left with the uneasy feeling that the people being
quoted are those who were better off to start with (and thus
more readily accessible to Western media hungry for a
soundbite when deadlines are pressing), and that the voice
of the truly poor and most disadvantaged is not being heard,
at least not as loudly. Even the accompanying photo—a
helmeted soldier pointing a gun at a young man lying face
down on the pavement—bespeaks the same old script. What
a sad, tired choice of picture at such a terrible time. This is
journalism asleep at the wheel. ARMY MOVES IN TO QUELL
CHAOS, crows the headline. For God’s sake, editors, get a life
—someone else’s life, the life of someone truly suffering, not
the life of the comfortable middle and upper classes
worldwide. Make a start by banning the word 'loot' and
asking yourself, every time you automatically start to type
it, what would I have done in that situation?

Lost tribes

According to a new survey, somewhere out there in our
society there’s a ‘lost tribe’ of long-term school truants. The
Education Minister, God bless her, has vowed to put ‘more
manpower’ into searching known hangouts of these truants
—places such as shopping malls. Good luck with that. It may
not be easy to distinguish them from the biggest lost tribe
of all, the ordinary consumers who throng the malls and
megacentres in their thousands, trailing soullessly from
shop to shop, milling around the Muffin Breaks and making
obeisance at the altars of Mastercard and Visa. If ever there
was a lost tribe it’s us—we Westerners trained from birth to
know no higher aim than material consumption, and
condemned to spend even when it makes no sense to do so,
other than serve the grotesque requirements of rampant
capitalism. This was brought home with some force to me
when I read recently that the problem with the Chinese
economy, and by extension the global economy, is that the
Chinese are not spending and consuming enough. That is a
kind of madness; it's like telling people on foot that the best
thing they can do is jump aboard a runaway train.