(First published in The Dominion Post and
on Stuff.co.nz., December 13.)
Call me the paper’s resident Grinch. While other people make lists
of cards to send and presents to buy, I’ve been compiling an inventory of
things that get on my nerves. Here are a few:
• I am not a kiwi. When I
look in the mirror, I don’t see a freakish-looking bird with nostrils at the
end of its beak. I do not scurry around in leaf litter at night probing the
soil for grubs and worms. I am of the species homo sapiens, not apteryx australis.
Accordingly, I cringe at the fashion across all the media for
referring to New Zealanders as “Kiwis”. It’s patronising, cloyingly sentimental
and just plain wrong. It promotes a comforting nationalistic myth that we are
all the same, with common characteristics, opinions and aspirations, rather
than representative of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the crooked
timber of humanity, in all its glorious complexity.
In any case, we managed
perfectly well with “New Zealanders” until someone decided to infantilise us.
It may be four syllables rather than two, but I think we can still get our
tongues around it.
• That Air New Zealand engineers’ strike threatened for the
week before Christmas. Déjà vu, anyone?
People over 50 will recall the
Cook Strait ferry strikes that just happened to coincide with school holidays,
or the walkouts by freezing workers that left yards full of sheep at the height
of the killing season – anything to maximise the pressure on the employers to
cave in.
A generation has grown up with no memory of the enormous economic
harm done by industrial disruption during the 1970s. Some would say the
subsequent labour law reforms which stripped unions of much of their power went
too far. But by cynically and heartlessly calling a strike at the busiest time
of the year for domestic air travel, the Aviation and Marine Engineers’
Association has obligingly reminded of us how things used to be.
The sense of nostalgia was sharpened by hearing the engineers’
spokesman interviewed on Morning Report.
He spoke with an English accent, recalling an era when New Zealand unions were
infected by British class warfare.
• What has Jacinda Ardern got against the letter T? On the TV
news the other night she referred to hospidalidy and modorists. I’ve previously
heard her speak of credibilidy, creadividy and inequalidy. And because the
prime minister is an influencer and role model, other people are already
imitating her pronunciation.
Nothing is more susceptible to
the whims of fashion than pronunciation and language. The letter L seems well
on its way to extinction in some usages – note how often you hear “vunnerable”
and “howth” in place of “vulnerable” and “health” – while other words have
inexplicably gained an extra syllable, so that we now have “befor-wah” and
“unknowen”.
Now the inoffensive letter T, which never harmed a soul, is being
usurped by a rampant, invasive D. Someone should mount a campaign to prodect
the integridy of spoken English.
• Someone from Otago
University watched 24 James Bond movies and read all the Bond books, carefully
noting every occasion on which he drank alcohol and the high-risk activities
that he engaged in afterwards. I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise
was, but I’m assuming the taxpayer paid for it.
Perhaps we’re supposed to assume it was a bit of a jape, but that
wasn’t obvious from the interviews given by the professor (an academic title
that once commanded respect) who led the project. He po-facedly pronounced that
Bond drank a potentially fatal quantity of alcohol on one occasion and was a
consistently heavy drinker over six decades.
But for heaven’s sake, Bond is
a fantasy character. So what did this exercise achieve? Are the Otago
researchers trying to persuade us that we shouldn’t try to emulate Bond’s
drinking?
That would be consistent with their obsessive taxpayer-funded
wowserism. But New Zealanders are no more likely to mimic Bond’s drinking
patterns than they are to tussle with komodo dragons or indulge in any of the
other absurd escapades that occur in his movies. What the research project
really reveals is that the Otago academics don’t trust us to distinguish real
life from Hollywood escapism – just as they don’t think we can be trusted to
drink responsibly.
• On a cheerful note more
appropriate to the festive season, it was a joy to hear the prickly Chris
Finlayson, former Minister of Treaty Negotiations, frankly unburden himself on
radio of his feelings about the iwi leaders who for years have frustrated
attempts to achieve a Treaty settlement in the Far North.
Finlayson, of course, is stepping down at the next election, so
could afford to be blunt. But what a shame that politicians should have to wait
for their impending retirement to tell us what they really think.
