All White on the night

So. The whole world will be watching tonight when gallant
little New Zealand, the nuggety no-hopers from nowhere,
take on mighty Slovakia in the World Cup in South Africa.
Showing a shameless lack of national chauvinism, I must
admit to feeling somewhat dispirited about the All Whites’
chances till I read yesterday’s editorial in the New
Zealand Herald headed GOALIE’S GAFFE SHOWS THERE’S
HOPE FOR NZ. Yes. The Herald, in its magisterial way, has
seized on the English goalkeeper’s fumble in the game
against the United States—an error that, observers say, is
already up there with Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the
maiden voyage of the Titanic as one of history’s most
shocking blunders—as a beacon of hope for Kiwi fans. It
proves, according to the Herald, that ‘once a team make
it to the World Cup, they can upset predictions with grit,
teamwork and undeserved luck.’

This is the spirit, by God, that allows New Zealanders to
hold their heads high in the world: the unswerving belief
that Kiwi pluck, skill and ingenuity will prevail just so long
as someone else cocks up somewhere. Never doubt it. Did
Hillary get to the top of Everest on nothing more than
guts and determination? No: he got there first because
others had failed to do so before him. Why did Russell
Crowe become a Hollywood superstar? Because, in a
once-in-300-years phenomenon, several American
producers simultaneously had a brain explosion that
momentarily prevented them from detecting real talent.
Anything of note that any New Zealander ever achieved in
the world has been the result of accident, screw-up or
undeserved luck. I need hardly mention the famous case
of Ernest Rutherford, who only split the atom because he
accidentally dropped one on the lab floor while trying to
put it in a test-tube.

The All Whites, then, deserve all the undeserved luck they
can get. A 4-1 thrashing of Slovakia is perfectly possible,
given freakish atmospheric conditions, a mid-European
existential crisis 10 minutes from time and a sniper in
the top row of the stands. As the Herald, in its wisdom,
says: ‘Stranger things have happened.’

Prep talk

I’m not sure I agree with my old colleague Terry Snow,
who expostulates fulminatively in last week’s Listener
about the tendency to drop prepositions from news
reports, eg, ‘The high exchange rate has impinged their
profit’ and ‘British families are grieving loved ones lost
in Iraq.’ The English language didn’t get where it is today
without tightening, abbreviating, welding, fusing two
words into one, shedding wasteful words, getting ever
cleaner and crisper. ‘Grieving loved ones’ seems just as
good to me, if not better, than ‘Grieving for loved ones,’
and I also have no problem with ‘He appealed the verdict’
instead of ‘He appealed against the verdict’ and ‘They
protested the decision’ without the need for ‘against.’ If
the meaning is indisputably clear, as it is in all these
cases, then let’s not fret if the odd preposition misses the
cut. They still have a pretty good life, those preps, with at
least a walk-on role in just about every sentence ever
spoken or written.

By the same token, I've long been a fan of the American
custom of dropping superfluous letters from words, eg,
program for programme and traveler for traveller
(though, perversely, Americans cling to fulfill and willful).
I think also that the inventive abbreviations of txting
enrich, not impoverish, the language. A good acronym
gives me untold pleasure. The only form of abbreviation
that irks me is the growing media tendency to run the
initials of people's names together, so that C K Stead,
say, becomes CK Stead. Instead. As it were.

Bloody foreigners

‘Tonight is about democracy in Auckland where we are
presenting for the good people of Howick.’
—Botany MP Pansy Wong

‘This is a good day for Howick, Pakuranga and Botany.
They have a government that listens.’
—Local Government Minister Rodney Hide

HOWICK BE THY NAME
—front-page headline, Howick & Pakuranga Times

What was being trumpeted here last week was the success
of an amendment to the Auckland super-city legislation.
For the south-eastern ward of the new council, the Local
Government Commission had proposed the name Te
Irirangi, but local people (some of the non-Maori ones
anyway) rose up in wrath at what one of them called an
‘appalling name’ that was difficult to pronounce. The
Howick & Pakuranga Times ran a campaign against Te
Irirangi, promoted a petition that went to Parliament and
won the day: the ward will be known as Howick.

The name is that of a 19th-century English aristocrat, the
third Earl Grey, who before he succeeded to his father’s
title was known as Viscount Howick, that being the name
of the family’s stately home in Northumberland. Grey was
Colonial Secretary in the British government at the time
eastern Auckland was being occupied by white settlers.
He never came near New Zealand, let alone the part of it
that bears his name to this day.

Tara Te Irirangi was the paramount chief of Ngai Tai, the
tangata whenua at the time the settlers arrived. According
to Brian Rudman in the New Zealand Herald he was a
‘friend to the newcomers, learning their language and
supporting the new settler government.’ Nice of him. He
got a street named after him, and Otara’s name derives
from him too. But the Local Government Commision’s
proposal was clearly a suburb too far for some. ‘The name
has come from nowhere,’ thundered the editor of the
H & P Times. ‘It doesn’t mean anything to people who
have lived here for a long time.’

Go figure. Rudman wrote an excellent column about it here.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, the Invercargill
City Council has roundly rejected the idea of calling a new
street Ti Kouka Way, as suggested by a council officer, and
opted for Kakariki Way instead. Not so egregious, you
might think, but Ti Kouka (the cabbage tree common in the
area of the street) missed out because, according to the
Southland Times, ‘councillors agreed it might be difficult to
pronounce.’ One said it sounded like ‘coconut.’ Another said
it would be a hard one to explain to a call centre in Delhi.

That's the trouble with these pesky foreign languages, which
is what te reo still clearly is to many Pakeha: they're just
not English enough.

The good news

A state house in South Auckland. Fish and chips for
dinner. Again. The phone has been cut and the power has
gone out because the family can’t afford to pay the bills.
By candlelight a woman gasps for life: the end is near, as
a bronchial condition brought on by years of living in a
damp underheated house takes its toll. She was supposed
to be getting home help but the district health board
stopped funding that service. Suddenly the sound of a car
pulling up in the driveway. It’s young Malo, just home from
an (unsuccessful) job interview on the other side of town.
He rushes in. ‘Mother,’ he cries. ‘The news—it’s just come
through—the tax cuts in the Budget. People earning
$70,000 or more are going to do really well out of it! Many
of them will get hundreds of dollars more a week!’
Exhausted by the fight for every breath, the dying woman
somehow musters the strength to give a grateful smile.
‘Thank God,’ she murmurs. ‘Thank God for that. And the
business community, the corporate investors? Please tell
me they will suffer no more.” Malo’s grief-torn face is, for
a moment, lit up by a tremendous smile. ‘It’s all right,
mother,’ he says softly. ‘Company tax has been reduced to
28%.’ The sick woman struggles to rise from her bed.
She’s clearly excited beyond her ability to contain it. ‘But
that’s…but that’s—‘ ‘Yes, mother,’ replies Malo. He's
almost crying now. ‘Yes. That’s even lower than Australia’s
company tax rate.’ She sinks back into her pillows. Her
strength is almost gone. ‘And John Key? That nice Mr Key?
Tell me he’ll be all right.’ She feels her son’s hand on her
brow. ‘You need worry no more, mother,’ he says proudly.
‘Thanks to the tax cuts, John Key and people like him will
get $350 more a week.’ She gropes for his hand, squeezes
it with her last ounce of strength. She can die happy now.
There is peace, and justice, and goodness in the world. The
rasp of breath grows fainter. Malo weeps helplessly. The
candle flickers, and goes out.

Mean to say

The older I get (and I am now 63), the less art works its
its magic on me. Is this typical for a sixtysomething or
is it just me? The poets, the writers, the musicians I
once worshipped now seem more like people with
problematic personal lives, who, unable to cope with
reality, found solace in invented worlds. Gorgeous,
enchanting, brilliantly embroidered worlds, but
artificial nonetheless. Well, that’s what art is, isn’t it?
Artificial. And fair enough too. In the great cosmic
wash-up quadrillions of years from now, it may be that
art will be all that the universe remembers us by—that,
and certain inexplicable acts of kindness. I hope human
beings will go on getting as much out of art as I have in
my life—and still do, but with a growing jadedness.
Why, I find myself wondering as I try to embark on a
new novel, would anyone go to the trouble of creating
this fantastically elaborated fictional world? Have they
failed so soon, I muse out loud as I toss the book aside
halfway through page 10, to cope with reality? Even a
phrase in a non-fiction book can try my churlish
patience, such as this from Country Driving: Three
Journeys Across a Changing China by Peter Hessler.
In Beijing, he writes as early as page two, it was a ‘gray,
muggy morning, the sky draped over the city like a
shroud of wet silk.’ Once, I would probably have thought
this a fine turn of phrase, and, indeed, would have
written one just like it myself. Now, like Bertie Wooster
bewildered by Types of Ethical Theory, a book foisted on
him by a ghastly girl called Florence, I can only respond
helplessly, ‘Well—I mean to say—what?’

Bulldogs and berets

Memorable ad placements of our time: on page 75 of the
March issue of the American monthly magazine Harper’s,
politely and unobtrusively placed in a column of small ads
for, among other things, European berets, English
bulldogs and a CD of romantic piano music, we find this:

NEW ZEALAND WARNING:
Poisoned environment.
Toxic Landscape. Ecotourism Fraud.
www.stop1080poison.com

I’m impressed that they should care so much—even a four-
ad in Harper’s would appear to cost about $US100—but
also dismayed that 'they' (these anti-1080 campaigners)
should be so fanatical about their cause that they are
prepared to condemn the whole of New Zealand to the
rest of the world on the basis of it. Whether it will deter
well-heeled Harper’s readers from holidaying in New
Zealand is anyone’s guess. Probably, given the hazards of
modern travel, ranging from volcanic ash to passengers
strapped with explosives, a little possum poison isn't
going to be the No 1 disincentive for leaving home.

Confession of a tragic New Zealander

Even more baffling is why some tragic New Zealanders
are passionate followers of English teams despite
having no parochial connections to them, but that’s
another story.—Karl du Fresne blog

In early adolescence, probably when I was about 13 or 14,
and at my sexual and intellectual peak, I began taking a
keen interest in the English football league, and would
check the results weekly, as fascinated by the names of
the clubs, I fancy, as I was by racehorses’ names (about
which I have written elsewhere). Those were the days
when the results—all of them, all four divisions, as there
were then—were not just published in the papers but
read out on radio. Burnley 1, Huddersfield 2; Nottingham
Forest 0, Sheffield Wednesday 0—that sort of thing, on
and on for a good few minutes, chanted sonorously, like
a litany, by a newsreader just after the news at (if I
remember rightly) 8 or 9 o’clock on Sunday morning.
For reasons unfathomable to this day but possibly simply
because I liked the look of the word, I adopted Chelsea as
my favourite team and, alas, they have stayed that way in
my affections ever since, through decades of vicissitude
and disappointment, leavened only by the occasional
triumph, eg, the FA Cup in 1970. Unlike my old colleague
Steve Braunias I’m not a particularly enthusiastic fan of
soccer, much preferring to watch rugby—though I once
lived quite close to the Stamford Bridge ground in London
I never went to see a game there—but to this day my eye
still strays to the English football results to see how
Chelsea are doing. In recent years, of course, they have
become a super-club, always near the top of the league
and winning trophies regularly. The fact that they have
done so by spending squillions of pounds on buying star
footballers from other countries, to the extent that the
current team can scarcely contain a single player born in
London, let alone Chelsea, has not weakened my
kneejerk reaction to the word Chelsea, nor will it cloud
my satisfaction when, this coming weekend, Chelsea
wallop Wigan Athletic at Stamford Bridge to win the
premier league for 2009-10. Such is the enduring power
of words, certain of which can cast a lifelong spell on us.