George, George, what were you thinking?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, October 8.)

I’ve always rather liked George Clooney. I particularly enjoyed the films he made with the directors Joel and Ethan Coen, namely O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty.

Both movies bore the Coen brothers’ trademark storyline of greedy, evil or stupid people (sometimes all three) getting caught up in grotesquely complex events that spiral out of control, usually with disastrous and outrageously funny consequences.

Clooney seemed a natural fit with the Coen brothers’ darkly whimsical view of the world. What especially impressed me was that even with his matinee-idol looks, he was happy to play roles that required a degree of self-mockery. He didn’t seem to take himself too seriously – a quality he shares with a similarly suave heart-throb from an earlier era, Cary Grant.

I was less impressed with the over-rated Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney’s directorial debut, in which he starred as a colleague of the legendary American broadcaster Edward R Murrow, and I probably should resent him for his involvement as producer of Argo, which wilfully misrepresented New Zealand’s role in a plot to spirit six American diplomats out of hostile Iran. 

But his best films have been brilliant and even his poorer ones are better than most, so he remained one of the few Hollywood stars I admired.

His efforts on behalf of war victims in Sudan seemed to mark him as a decent man, too – a genuine humanitarian, and blessedly free of the irritating sanctimony and self-promotion that has made U2’s Bono a figure of ridicule.

On top of all this, Clooney seemed endearingly immune to the hype, humbug and glitz customarily associated with big box-office names. Still more reason to like him.

That is, until last week. Then he blew it.

Clooney could have got married quietly and discreetly. Instead, his wedding was the centre of a media event that was extravagant even by Hollywood standards.

We can only conclude this was deliberate. Why else choose Venice as the venue?

It’s hard to imagine any city in the world where there would be less prospect of privacy. In Venice, people get around in open boats. This meant that virtually every move by Clooney and his bride, the Lebanese-born civil rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, would be witnessed and recorded by paparazzi and TV cameras.

Again, we can only assume it was orchestrated with this intent. The media seemed to have been advised in advance of the wedding party’s movements so that they could be on hand to capture every moment.

Certainly Clooney seemed to revel in the attention, beaming and waving like a monarch acknowledging the adoration of his subjects. Not for him the raised hand to fend off prying lenses or the phalanx of bodyguards to keep the press at bay, as we’ve come to expect of celebrity weddings.

On the contrary, there seemed an inordinate amount of very public cruising back and forth on the canals in the company of his illustrious guests, the purpose of which was presumably to ensure maximum exposure.

George, George, what were you thinking?

Journalists, clearly so mesmerised by the glamour of the occasion that they momentarily took leave of their professional scepticism, wittered on about the prospect of Clooney’s female fans worldwide being plunged into despair at the sight of the man they called the world’s most desirable bachelor giving his heart to someone else.

In fact a more probable consequence was that many people who had previously respected Clooney as an intelligent and sensible man, with an admirable disregard for the usual excesses of Hollywood stardom, would be wondering how he could have let them down so badly. Or perhaps, like me, they were quietly rebuking themselves for having so naively misread him.

Several questions arise from the extravaganza in Venice. The first and most obvious is why so many stars feel an apparent compulsion to live their lives so publicly. Is it because they depend on the constant affirmation of the crowd? Does stardom get inside their heads to the point where public adulation eventually becomes the only way they can measure their worth?

Another is why celebrities appear to crave the company of other celebrities. Is this another form of validation for insecure egos? (Matt Damon, Bono, Cindy Crawford and Bill Murray are at my wedding – ergo, I must be up there in the celebrity stratosphere.) Did they have a life, friends, before they became stars?

But perhaps the most perplexing question of all relates to our own fascination with the cult of stardom, without which the Clooney-Alamuddin wedding would have been ignored.

After all, what are actors? They are people who are famous for pretending to be someone else.

We wrongly attribute to them the characteristics of the fictional characters they play. The extent to which we worship them hinges on how convincingly they pull off this feat. Our interest in them is as illogical as our fascination with royalty, whose mass appeal is derived from accidents of birth.

So we’re the suckers, and Clooney is simply taking advantage of our gullibility. But I can’t help liking him less as a result.

Tragic radio stunt: who's not to blame?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 19.)

We become almost impervious to bad news. We have to be, otherwise we would go through life in a permanent state of crippling despondency.

Yet even as blasé as we are, every now and again something happens that has the capacity to shock.  Two such items on early morning radio news bulletins have penetrated my semi-conscious state in the past two weekends.

The more recent, and by any measurement the more appalling by far, was the news of the Connecticut school shooting. But this column concerns the earlier item, in which the newsreader announced that a nurse who had put through a hoax call at the London hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated for morning sickness had been found dead. It was clear she had taken her own life, presumably out of shame.

I wondered, in my half-awake state, whether I’d heard correctly. Could a silly radio stunt really have had such tragic consequences?

Well, yes – it could, and it did.

My first reaction, like that of many people, was anger that a pair of infantile radio hosts, eager to make names for themselves, should have perpetrated a hoax that led a mother and wife to kill herself.

Mine was a natural response, but not entirely rational. The young radio hosts had no malicious intent. Their motive was another M word: mischief. But it was mischief of an essentially innocent kind. They could have had no premonition that their amateurish, juvenile prank would result in such misery.

Now they too are going through their own private hell. Even if their radio careers survive, they will have to carry this misconceived act on their consciences for the rest of their lives.

And human nature being what it is, they have become victims themselves. They are now experiencing the cowardly rage that always surfaces when someone is the butt of wholesale condemnation and is therefore deemed an easy target. 

The people reportedly making anonymous death threats against the radio hosts belong to the same wretched sub-group of lowlifes who turn out to shout obscene threats and curses whenever a much-vilified criminal – usually a sex offender – appears in court. These people get very few opportunities in life to feel morally superior to anyone else and they always make the most of them, even if in doing so they expose their own pathetic inadequacies.

The best that can come out of this ghastly business is that ratings-obsessed radio stations and so-called shock jocks (another contemptible life form) will think very carefully in future before perpetrating their puerile stunts.

These pranks may be ostensibly harmless in their intent, but I’m inclined to agree with my fellow columnist Rosemary McLeod that practical joking is often a form of bullying. How else can you explain a form of humour that usually relies on humiliation and embarrassment for its impact?

In any case, the two radio hosts are not the only people who should be ashamed of what happened at King Edward VII Hospital.

They would never have made the phone call if such pranks weren’t condoned, and possibly encouraged, by their bosses. We now know that the radio station management approved of the stunt. It was run past the station’s lawyers before being put to air. They too could have had no idea of the consequences, but they must share culpability.

The station’s claim that it tried to alert the hospital before broadcasting the hoax call is not convincing. For one thing, the hospital insists there was no attempt to warn it; but more to the point, it would be highly unusual for a media outlet to provide advance notice that such a stunt was to be broadcast.

So the station has been badly bruised too. If, as a result, radio station owners are motivated in future to curb the excesses of their attention-seeking personalities, that will be no bad thing.

But the net of blame can be spread more widely still. What about the hospital management, for example?

They had a royal patient who was the subject of intense worldwide media interest. Previous experience (the hospital is no stranger to royalty) should have alerted them to the probability of media incursions.

Fleet Street photographers were camped outside. You can be sure that elaborate precautions were taken to ensure Princess Kate’s safety and privacy. The place would have been swarming with police and security officers intent on protecting the patient not just from prying photographers and reporters, but from terrorist attack.

In the circumstances, how could the hospital management be so naïve and careless as to leave it to an unprepared nurse, the hapless Jacintha Saldanha, to intercept outside phone calls?

The hospital owners have done a great deal of indignant harrumphing over the radio station’s behaviour, but their own handling of the situation appears to have been at best sloppy and complacent, at worst incompetent.

There are other possible factors that we can only speculate on.

Most nurses in Mrs Saldanha’s position would have felt embarrassed and ashamed, but not to the point of taking their own life. The nurse who gave the radio station details of Princess Kate’s condition – arguably a far worse misjudgement – obviously didn’t feel so guilty as to hang herself. Was there something in Mrs Saldanha’s cultural background that gave her a heightened sense of shame and disgrace – a feeling that she had brought dishonour on her family? That might help explain why she thought her action could be redeemed only by killing herself and leaving two children without a mother.

Another possible explanation is emotional or mental fragility, but I have seen nothing to suggest Mrs Saldanha suffered from any such condition.

Was she harassed by the notorious London tabloids? Again, there has been no such suggestion. That would very likely have been her fate had she lived, but the tabloids scarcely had time to identify her before they were reporting her death.

One aspect of this sad affair not widely commented on is the shadow it has cast over what should be a happy event: the birth of the royal couple’s first baby in a few months’ time. That will now forever be tarnished by association with tragedy. But establishing who is to blame is far from straightforward.

 

The current system works - end of story

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 8.) 

I can think of few things that excite me less than a royal romance, so I was unmoved by the announcement that Prince William was to wed his long-term girlfriend, Kate Middleton. 

Of course the engagement triggered a feeding frenzy among the trashy women’s magazines and the hypocritical British tabloids. There’s only one story that thrills them more than the announcement of an impending royal marriage, and that’s the breakup of a royal marriage. The very same publications that gushed over the royal engagement would feast gratefully on any rumours that the relationship was coming unstuck. 

In New Zealand, the announcement brought a predictably low-key, phlegmatic response. We no longer display the demonstrative enthusiasm for royalty that characterised previous generations. 

My guess is that most New Zealanders would quietly approve of the match between William and Kate, because both seem basically likeable people without any black marks against their names, but that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t think the talkback lines were running hot with excitement when the marriage was confirmed, and I certainly didn’t see any joyous outbursts of flag-waving patriotism. 

Does this apparently lukewarm response imply that support for the monarchy in New Zealand is flagging? I certainly wouldn’t make that assumption. 

New Zealanders are perfectly capable of making a clear differentiation between a purely sentimental attachment to the royal family and a pragmatic appreciation of the monarchy’s constitutional role. They are two quite distinct things. 

The sentimental attachment has certainly waned over the years. There is still a lot of respect and admiration for the Queen, but the highly publicised antics of her immediate offspring have shattered any public delusions about royalty. 

These days only the most naïve, diehard royalist places the House of Windsor on a pedestal. They have been exposed as flawed human beings like the rest of us – and none more so than Prince Charles, who seems increasingly likely to be bypassed in favour of his son as the next king. 

Yet the place of the monarchy in our constitutional arrangements appears to remain secure, despite a tireless campaign by a noisy (if small) republican movement. This is because most New Zealanders are smart enough to recognise that the monarchy as an institution is much bigger than, and separate from, the personalities of the royal family. 

Former Australian prime minister John Howard had a perfect rejoinder when Kim Hill, in an interview on Radio New Zealand recently, imperiously demanded to know why Australia hadn’t become a republic. Howard could have pointed out that Australians had voted against republicanism in a 1999 referendum (something you’d expect Hill to know), but he had an even better answer. 

The current system works. End of story. It works well for us, too, and for Canada. We all retain the British monarch as head of state not because of some anachronistic sentimental attachment, but because it’s an arrangement that suits us. 

Whatever its origins, it is now a pragmatic arrangement rather than an emotional one. It gives us a head of state who is above politics and it leaves us free to determine our own policies and directions in accordance with whatever our elected government determines to be in the national interest. 

To me, that’s the beauty of the monarchy: it gives us an apolitical head of state who has what are called reserve constitutional powers that are only vaguely defined and that everyone expects will rarely, if ever, be used. In some ways it’s a constitutionally fragile setup, based on conventions and understandings - nods and winks, almost - rather than a formal, prescriptive document; yet it’s remarkably robust at the same time. 

It has served us well, and most people are rightly wary of any republican alternative that could place yet more power in the hands of the political elite by way of an elected president. No matter how that president was to be elected, it would be a political position; there’s no getting around it. And we should have learned from bitter experience that, given the chance, the politicians will shaft us every time. 

I have to laugh when republicans portray their opponents as swooning royalists held captive by sentiment and by grovelling loyalty to the “Mother Country”. Because invariably, the arguments the republicans themselves fall back on are sentimental rather than rational. Most often, they make an emotional appeal to our desire to “govern ourselves” rather than be ruled by a distant head of state who may deign to visit us once every few years. 

But in every respect we do govern ourselves. Can the republicans point out any occasion in recent decades when our autonomy was compromised, or when the Queen interfered in matters of state? Australians can cite the Governor-General’s sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975, but even with that experience – and with their convict heritage, which gives them far more reason than us to resist any hint of subjugation by the British – our Aussie cousins still choose to have the Queen as head of state in preference to someone put forward by the political class. 

As for New Zealand, I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of any time when we were forced into any decision inimical to our interests simply because the Queen was our head of state. 

It’s true than until the 1980s the government frequently deferred to the Brits in matters of trade and foreign relations, most notably when Sir Robert Muldoon gave indirect support to Britain during the Falklands War; but that had nothing do with influence or pressure from Buckingham Palace. Those were judgments made by our elected leaders in accordance with their perception of where our political interests lay at the time, in the same way as a more recent government made a contentious decision to send troops to Afghanistan. 

The truth is that in most respects we function as a republic already, with the obvious difference that we have no president. Political rhetoric about having an elected New Zealander as head of state may have a shallow emotional appeal, but a republican New Zealand wouldn’t be any more independent or autonomous than it is now – and to suggest otherwise is dishonest.

Harry may be a Charlie, but the tabloids are worse

(Published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, January 20.)

THERE ARE few spectacles more nauseating than the holier-than-thou tut-tutting of the British tabloid press at the supposed indiscretions of the rich and famous. The recent storm of condemnation brought down on Prince Harry by the News of the World is a case in point.

Prince Harry may be a twerp like his father. I don’t know. What I do know is that the incident in which he referred to one of his army colleagues as a Paki and said another looked like a raghead happened in 2006, when he would have been only 20 or 21. I certainly wouldn’t like to be held accountable for some of the things I said at that age.

“Paki” is clearly capable of being an offensive term to Pakistanis but on this occasion it may have been used in harmless jest. The same applies to “raghead”, a derogatory term for Arabs.

Surely some slack should be cut for an exuberant (and possibly not very bright) young man clowning around with his army mates while waiting to board a plane. But no; we are all primed to take offence at the slightest provocation. The well-oiled wheels of the condemnation machine whir into motion and even the Conservative Party leader feels compelled to rebuke Harry for his “unacceptable” language.

And what of the News of the World? The news media have a vital role in reporting bad behaviour by public figures, but was it a matter of vital of public interest that this trivial business be exposed?

That question becomes even more pertinent when you consider that the people who run the London tabloids have the ethics of cockroaches, as anyone who has read British journalist Nick Davies’ newspaper exposé Flat Earth News will know. The British gutter press is in no position to moralise on anything.

* * *

IN A PROGRAMME recently replayed on Radio New Zealand as part of the “best of” Kim Hill from 2008, Hill interviewed Mani Bruce Mitchell about the challenges of being an intersex person – one born with genetic and physical variations that mean they are neither wholly male nor female.

One point in particular struck me. Mani Mitchell told how she was born to parents in a small country community and at first was treated as a boy. But she had a uterus and at the age of one she had an operation and became Margaret.

The community held a meeting in the local hall to discuss how it should deal with this unusual situation. Mani Mitchell described this as an example of a rural community functioning as it its absolute best.

Hill seemed momentarily taken aback by this and asked if her guest was being sarcastic, to which Mani Mitchell assured her she wasn’t. The community agreed at that meeting to close the door on her past life as a boy and from that time on she was accepted as Margaret.

What was interesting was Hill’s initial reaction. It seemed that, for a moment at least, she had difficulty accepting that a community in rural New Zealand in the conservative 1950s could have reacted to this predicament in a compassionate, positive way, rather than demanding that this freakish child be cast out.

It’s common among sophisticated urban types to equate rural communities with bigotry and ignorance, but history shows country people are a lot more liberal and tolerant than urban stereotypes give them credit for.

It was a supposedly conservative rural electorate that elected feminist MP Marilyn Waring and kept returning her to Parliament even after Truth newspaper outed her as a lesbian. And it was a supposedly conservative rural electorate that voted for the world’s first transsexual MP, Georgina Beyer.

The liberal farmer politician – of whom Tom Shand, Minister of Labour in the Holyoake government of the 1960s, is often held up as an example – is a recurring figure in New Zealand politics. Holyoake himself was from that mould and so too was Jim Bolger, who threw his weight behind the Treaty settlements of the 1990s.

Sure, you find rednecks and Philistines in the country, just as you do in the cities, but not all country people have hair on the palms of their hands and eyes in the middle of the their foreheads.

* * *

WHY AM I sceptical about the inflated claims made on behalf of local government amalgamations? Perhaps because the noisiest advocates of council mergers tend to be those who see themselves acquiring greater power (hello, John Banks). The other side of the coin is that the people who resist amalgamation most vehemently are invariably those whose municipal empires are threatened (the name of Lower Hutt mayor David Ogden comes to mind).

The only way to deal with these issues, as has been done in Auckland, is to put the deliberations in the hands of detached outsiders and hope they’ll see past all the parochial politics and turf wars. But whatever decisions are made, one immutable truth will hold true: the bureaucrats always win in the end.