Sometimes I wonder if I’m one of those tragic individuals who’s fated always to be the last cab off the rank. I had one of those occasions last week when I bought a DVD called Black&White Night – a recording of a 1987 concert by Roy Orbison and a select group of friends.
I learned of this film only recently from hearing Kim Hill interview Stephanie Bennett, the Englishwoman who produced Black&White Night and now lives on Waiheke Island. But when I started mentioning the DVD to friends, it seemed I was the only person still alive who hadn’t already enjoyed it.
No matter. I decided to write this anyway, in the unlikely event there are other benighted individuals out there like me.
Black&White Night was originally made as a TV special. It was filmed at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles and features a stellar lineup of backing musicians and singers: guitarist James Burton, Bruce Springsteen, T-Bone Burnett, Jackson Browne, J D Souther, Tom Waits, k d lang, Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Warnes. The bass player is Jerry Scheff and the drummer is Ronnie Tutt – both, like James Burton, former members of Elvis Presley’s TCB band and veteran LA session musicians. (A slight annoyance, for me, was the presence of the ubiquitous Elvis Costello, who since the early 1980s seems to have made a career out of hanging around in the shadow of much greater performers and not bringing anything to the table. But that’s a personal thing.)
There are several factors that make Black&White Night (and yes, it’s entirely shot in monochrome) a fantastic concert. The first is Orbison himself, who at 51 was still in exceptionally good voice and still hitting the high notes as if the previous 25 years hadn’t happened. The second, of course, is the songs – and they’re all here: Running Scared, Only the Lonely, Crying, Oh, Pretty Woman, Blue Bayou (perhaps my favourite), In Dreams and It’s Over, among others. Orbison himself was so charisma-free that he became, paradoxically, almost charismatic. The impassive way he sings these songs – songs of great emotional intensity and almost operatic scale – is part of his appeal. His expressionless delivery also means the songs have to stand on their own, unembellished by any histrionics. Which, of course, they are well able to do.
But what gives this performance a special magic is the guest stars – not because they take over the show, but for quite the reverse reason. At no point does anyone look remotely interested in trying to upstage Orbison. It’s his night, and they’re there strictly in a supporting role. Their great respect for him, and their pleasure at helping him present his songs, is obvious in every frame. Raitt, Warnes and Lang sing like angels and there are moments when they look positively rapturous. Even Springsteen is caught several times looking at Orbison with unabashed admiration.
It’s quite moving, and all the more so when you consider Orbison’s history. He was a giant in the early to mid-sixties (I recall Crying, a Christmas present from my brother, as the first LP I ever owned), but from the late 60s onwards he vanished from the radar, displaced by the pop revolution that followed the so-called British invasion led by the Beatles. There seemed no place for Orbison in the musical tumult that followed, and his career went into a long decline. He suffered terrible personal tragedies too: first the death of his wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident in 1966, followed two years later by a house fire that killed his two sons.
The hits stopped coming after 1967; it was to be another 13 years before he had another song in the Billboard Top 100 (1980’s That Lovin’ You Feelin’ Again, a duet with Emmylou Harris). For much of that period Orbison was reduced to playing second-rate venues on the has-been circuit. His career must have been close to its nadir when I interviewed him for an Australian Sunday paper in 1974: he had just performed for the inmates of Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison. But in one of the great redemption stories of pop music, he began to emerge into the light again when other stars – among them Harris, Springsteen, Lang and Don McLean (who had a big hit with Crying in 1980) – rediscovered his songs. The formation of the Travelling Wilburys with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne in 1987 marked the completion of Orbison’s journey back from obscurity.
You need to know this story to fully appreciate Black&White Night. On one level it’s simply a great concert; on another it’s a poignant tribute to a man who went from hero to zero and back again. And it seems somehow consistent with the rest of Orbison’s life story that within months of making this film, he was dead from a heart attack, aged only 52. His last top 10 hit – You’ve Got It, with the Travelling Wilburys – was issued posthumously.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Make alcohol harder to get, and you make it even more alluring
People directly caught up in awful events, or even on their periphery, are not likely to make the most rational judgments about them. We respectfully hear them out, but their arguments are often clouded - understandably - by intense emotion.
Take the Auckland doctor whose son attends the same school as James Webster, the 16-year-old who tragically drank himself to death at the weekend. Dr Margaret Abercrombie dashed off a letter to the prime minister urging the government to take action over teenage drinking. On Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme on Radio New Zealand today, Dr Abercrombie said Parliament should make it more difficult to get access to alcohol. She mentioned price increases as one tool for reducing availability.
The immediate and obvious problem with this approach is that there is nothing Parliament could have done to prevent James getting hold of the bottle of vodka that killed him. It belonged to his grandmother and he obtained it from a cupboard at her home. Besides, at 16, James was two years below the legal purchasing age even now, demonstrating that age controls are of limited effectiveness in curtailing teenage drinking.
To be fair, Dr Abercrombie wasn’t talking only about James’ death, but about the wider problem of teenage binge drinking. But even here we are left with a problem that I believe defies simplistic legislative solutions.
New Zealand teenagers, in common with those of the same age group in other predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, regard getting pissed as a rite of passage. It has always seemed to me that there is a large element of defiance involved in this.
They see their elders as hypocritically consuming alcohol but wanting to deny it to them. Teenagers being teenagers, their instinct is to defy authority. Alcohol thus takes on the aura of forbidden fruit; it becomes even more desirable.
I wouldn’t argue that this alone explains New Zealand’s teenage binge-drinking culture, but it’s an important factor. It follows that the more you try to keep teenagers from getting access to alcohol, the more determined they will become to acquire it by one means or another. If they can’t buy it legally, they’ll raid the liquor cupboard at home.
This is nothing new. I remember the frisson of excitement when, as a primary school pupil, I aided and abetted a friend in pillaging his parents’ cocktail cabinet. Granted, there was a degree of curiosity about what alcohol tasted like; but far more important was the thrill of defying and outfoxing our parents.
Later, in my teenage years, my friends and I would go to great lengths to procure illicit alcohol – not because we particularly liked the stuff (it took me years to acquire a taste for beer) but because drinking it made us feel like real men. Whoever in our group had a driver’s licence would be delegated to take us to whatever pub was known to have a clandestine after-hours trade and to ask no questions about age. This often meant a round trip of 80 miles, which was a measure of our determination.
But there’s a potent factor affecting teenage drinking today that wasn’t around even in my time. It was identified in an article in the New Zealand Herald earlier this year by Michael Duncan, a sociology lecturer at Carey Baptist College in Auckland.
Duncan noted that radio host Murray Deaker had recently interviewed Sir Geoffrey Palmer about binge-drinking by young women and both had concurred that the message must be got to these young women that drinking to get drunk was quite simply dangerous.
Duncan then went on:
“I agree with Deaker’s and Palmer’s views but not with their recommended action. To tell these young middle-class women today that drinking to get drunk is dangerous is to only exacerbate the problem.
“The very reason why many young women drink to get drunk is because it is dangerous. They drink to get drunk so as to be in danger. Let me explain.
“Many of these young women come from middle-class homes where they were brought up on a diet of safety. Their well-meaning parents worked hard to keep them from harm's way. Schools, play yards, swimming pools, outings, malls, you name it; all had to be safe for their children. It is this generation of children that has become known as the ‘cotton-wool kids’.”
In this culture of fear, Duncan wrote, risk was stigmatised and an excessive preoccupation with precaution and safety became the new bottom line. “These girls were brought up to be risk- averse. But then the inevitable happened and these girls morphed into young women. Not surprisingly, they began to individuate themselves from their parents, principals and inherited principles; they rebelled against safety and looked for danger. For cotton-wool kids recklessness has become the new form of rebellion.”
For many of these young women, he concluded, binge-drinking was not about alcohol or simply getting “pissed”. Rather, it was about creating dangerous situations where they didn’t know what would happen next. Drinking sessions, for them, were a high-wire act, full of exhilarating fear and unanswered questions. Having been brought up on safety, they hungered for risk.
That’s a very perceptive analysis, my only criticism being that Duncan confined it to young women. I believe it applies at least equally to young men who cut loose the moment they escape parental control and are able to make up for all the risky behaviour they weren’t allowed to indulge in earlier. Binge-drinking is just one manifestation of that; the boy-racer culture is another, arguably more lethal, one.
Hence my misgivings about the restrictive approach advocated by the Law Commission in its recent report on the liquor laws, and even more vociferously espoused by the New Wowser lobby in the health agencies and universities. By making alcohol harder to get, they risk making it seem even more dangerous and hence more alluring.
Sure, we have a serious and worrying teenage binge-drinking problem. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. And it has been greatly exacerbated by some liquor companies that have aggressively targeted the youth market – none more so than Independent Liquor, which pioneered alco-pops, and was rightly fingered by Dominion Post columnist Linley Boniface yesterday. It becomes that much harder to defend responsible liquor consumption when a segment of the industry seems determined to promote irresponsible consumption. (The Liquorland chain is culpable too, as Linley demonstrated when she revealed a slogan from the company’s website: “We’ll get the stuff to your car – because why only buy as much as you can carry?”. Small wonder the New Wowsers have gained so much political traction when these morons play into their hands.)
My concern, as explained before in this blog, is that turning the clock back on liberalisation of the liquor laws will serve at best to prolong, and at worst set back, an already difficult struggle (and it has gone on for decades) to get to a point where teenagers will no longer regard alcohol purely as means of writing themselves off.
I don’t know what the solution is, beyond suggesting that it lies in a much more complex social and cultural change than is likely to be achieved through simplistic legislative and regulatory changes (though they may have a role to play). But I do know the solution doesn’t lie in telling teenagers they can’t drink – the prohibition approach. Whatever barriers are placed in their way, they’ll find a way around them; they will delight in outwitting the law, because that’s how teenagers behave. And the risk is that stricter laws will drive them into the hands of black marketers and we’ll end up with even less control than we have now.
Take the Auckland doctor whose son attends the same school as James Webster, the 16-year-old who tragically drank himself to death at the weekend. Dr Margaret Abercrombie dashed off a letter to the prime minister urging the government to take action over teenage drinking. On Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme on Radio New Zealand today, Dr Abercrombie said Parliament should make it more difficult to get access to alcohol. She mentioned price increases as one tool for reducing availability.
The immediate and obvious problem with this approach is that there is nothing Parliament could have done to prevent James getting hold of the bottle of vodka that killed him. It belonged to his grandmother and he obtained it from a cupboard at her home. Besides, at 16, James was two years below the legal purchasing age even now, demonstrating that age controls are of limited effectiveness in curtailing teenage drinking.
To be fair, Dr Abercrombie wasn’t talking only about James’ death, but about the wider problem of teenage binge drinking. But even here we are left with a problem that I believe defies simplistic legislative solutions.
New Zealand teenagers, in common with those of the same age group in other predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, regard getting pissed as a rite of passage. It has always seemed to me that there is a large element of defiance involved in this.
They see their elders as hypocritically consuming alcohol but wanting to deny it to them. Teenagers being teenagers, their instinct is to defy authority. Alcohol thus takes on the aura of forbidden fruit; it becomes even more desirable.
I wouldn’t argue that this alone explains New Zealand’s teenage binge-drinking culture, but it’s an important factor. It follows that the more you try to keep teenagers from getting access to alcohol, the more determined they will become to acquire it by one means or another. If they can’t buy it legally, they’ll raid the liquor cupboard at home.
This is nothing new. I remember the frisson of excitement when, as a primary school pupil, I aided and abetted a friend in pillaging his parents’ cocktail cabinet. Granted, there was a degree of curiosity about what alcohol tasted like; but far more important was the thrill of defying and outfoxing our parents.
Later, in my teenage years, my friends and I would go to great lengths to procure illicit alcohol – not because we particularly liked the stuff (it took me years to acquire a taste for beer) but because drinking it made us feel like real men. Whoever in our group had a driver’s licence would be delegated to take us to whatever pub was known to have a clandestine after-hours trade and to ask no questions about age. This often meant a round trip of 80 miles, which was a measure of our determination.
But there’s a potent factor affecting teenage drinking today that wasn’t around even in my time. It was identified in an article in the New Zealand Herald earlier this year by Michael Duncan, a sociology lecturer at Carey Baptist College in Auckland.
Duncan noted that radio host Murray Deaker had recently interviewed Sir Geoffrey Palmer about binge-drinking by young women and both had concurred that the message must be got to these young women that drinking to get drunk was quite simply dangerous.
Duncan then went on:
“I agree with Deaker’s and Palmer’s views but not with their recommended action. To tell these young middle-class women today that drinking to get drunk is dangerous is to only exacerbate the problem.
“The very reason why many young women drink to get drunk is because it is dangerous. They drink to get drunk so as to be in danger. Let me explain.
“Many of these young women come from middle-class homes where they were brought up on a diet of safety. Their well-meaning parents worked hard to keep them from harm's way. Schools, play yards, swimming pools, outings, malls, you name it; all had to be safe for their children. It is this generation of children that has become known as the ‘cotton-wool kids’.”
In this culture of fear, Duncan wrote, risk was stigmatised and an excessive preoccupation with precaution and safety became the new bottom line. “These girls were brought up to be risk- averse. But then the inevitable happened and these girls morphed into young women. Not surprisingly, they began to individuate themselves from their parents, principals and inherited principles; they rebelled against safety and looked for danger. For cotton-wool kids recklessness has become the new form of rebellion.”
For many of these young women, he concluded, binge-drinking was not about alcohol or simply getting “pissed”. Rather, it was about creating dangerous situations where they didn’t know what would happen next. Drinking sessions, for them, were a high-wire act, full of exhilarating fear and unanswered questions. Having been brought up on safety, they hungered for risk.
That’s a very perceptive analysis, my only criticism being that Duncan confined it to young women. I believe it applies at least equally to young men who cut loose the moment they escape parental control and are able to make up for all the risky behaviour they weren’t allowed to indulge in earlier. Binge-drinking is just one manifestation of that; the boy-racer culture is another, arguably more lethal, one.
Hence my misgivings about the restrictive approach advocated by the Law Commission in its recent report on the liquor laws, and even more vociferously espoused by the New Wowser lobby in the health agencies and universities. By making alcohol harder to get, they risk making it seem even more dangerous and hence more alluring.
Sure, we have a serious and worrying teenage binge-drinking problem. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. And it has been greatly exacerbated by some liquor companies that have aggressively targeted the youth market – none more so than Independent Liquor, which pioneered alco-pops, and was rightly fingered by Dominion Post columnist Linley Boniface yesterday. It becomes that much harder to defend responsible liquor consumption when a segment of the industry seems determined to promote irresponsible consumption. (The Liquorland chain is culpable too, as Linley demonstrated when she revealed a slogan from the company’s website: “We’ll get the stuff to your car – because why only buy as much as you can carry?”. Small wonder the New Wowsers have gained so much political traction when these morons play into their hands.)
My concern, as explained before in this blog, is that turning the clock back on liberalisation of the liquor laws will serve at best to prolong, and at worst set back, an already difficult struggle (and it has gone on for decades) to get to a point where teenagers will no longer regard alcohol purely as means of writing themselves off.
I don’t know what the solution is, beyond suggesting that it lies in a much more complex social and cultural change than is likely to be achieved through simplistic legislative and regulatory changes (though they may have a role to play). But I do know the solution doesn’t lie in telling teenagers they can’t drink – the prohibition approach. Whatever barriers are placed in their way, they’ll find a way around them; they will delight in outwitting the law, because that’s how teenagers behave. And the risk is that stricter laws will drive them into the hands of black marketers and we’ll end up with even less control than we have now.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Amen to that, Ringo
(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail.)
Six years ago, I wrote about the disgraced New Zealand Catholic priest Alan Woodcock, who had just pleaded guilty to charges of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s. Woodcock was a teacher at my old school, though not in my time.
At that time the Catholic Church internationally was reeling under a wave of sex abuse allegations. These started to surface during the 1980s and steadily gathered momentum, notably in the United States and Ireland.
Woodcock’s court appearance followed revelations of a long history of sexual abuse by St John of God brothers in Christchurch. In the US, an investigation commissioned by the Church substantiated claims of abuse against more than 4000 priests.
Catholics were shocked not only by revelations of appalling behaviour by men they trusted and respected, but equally by the efforts of high-ranking people in the Catholic hierarchy to hush up the crimes and protect their perpetrators from legal repercussions.
Some of the offenders had been carrying on their depredations for decades. When they were uncovered, the standard solution was simply to move them to a new location where, as often as not, they took up where they had left off. This became known, with bitter wit, as the “geographical cure”.
I wrote in that 2004 column that as a child I never heard of, still less experienced, sexual impropriety by priests, although I was brought up in a Catholic household and attended Catholic schools. As far as I could tell, the priests I knew were men of probity who honoured their vows. In fact one of the many sad aspects of the crisis engulfing the Church was that a shadow of doubt and suspicion now hung over many good men.
At the time of the Woodcock and St John of God scandals, Catholics must have been tempted to dismiss such cases as isolated aberrations. But no; six years on, the allegations just keep rolling in. Like a tsunami that strikes once, then retreats and gathers even greater force before sweeping in again, the sexual abuse scandal continues to batter Catholicism.
Virtually no country with a substantial Catholic population remains untouched. Only this week, a highly influential Mexican priest – founder of an order apparently much admired in the Vatican – was exposed as a serial abuser of the most contemptible kind.
The ripples have reached the very top, with evidence that Pope Benedict, while a cardinal, was personally complicit in the covering-up of abuse.
Even setting aside publicity stunts such as the atheist Richard Dawkins’ threat to have the pope arrested when he visits Britain, and allowing for the likelihood that the ever-swelling ranks of complainants will include a few unscrupulous chancers jumping on the bandwagon with an eye to a payout, the sex abuse imbroglio is a shocking indictment of a look-the-other-way mentality within the Church.
It is also a betrayal of the millions of devout Catholics who try hard to lead good lives and who expect the heads of the Church to lead by example. I am no longer a Catholic but many of my friends and extended family are. They deserve better.
It would be understandable if the revelations against the clergy had shaken the faith of these Catholics. In some of the countries caught up in the escalating scandal, such as Germany, people are abandoning the Church in disgust. Those who choose to remain faithful to Catholicism are doubtless clinging to a belief in something higher and more transcendent than the deeply flawed men who lead the Church.
The sight of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome flailing about in panic, at times giving the impression of trying to defend the indefensible, has not been edifying. What this crisis has demonstrated is the inability of the Vatican to deal with external scrutiny, still less with demands for accountability.
The Church is a deeply insular institution governed by arcane ritual and a rigid hierarchy. That insularity not only provides a closed environment where abusers were clearly able to prey with virtual impunity; it also leaves the Church ill-equipped to deal with the sort of pressure it now faces, particularly from an aggressive secular news media that has the scent of blood in its nostrils.
The Catholic hierarchy is skilled at exerting tight internal control but has been almost comically clumsy and inept in its attempts to fend off outside criticism. It has managed to antagonise everyone from gays to Jews – two lobbies notoriously quick to take offence. And it does itself no favours by couching its official statements in a peculiarly opaque language as impenetrable as that used by totalitarian regimes in places like North Korea and the former Soviet Union.
At least here in New Zealand, far from the ossified bureaucracy in the Vatican, the Church seems to have learned something. In 2004, after Woodcock was exposed, Church leaders turned to a prominent Catholic, a retired judge, for advice. That was a mistake. He was a former pupil of the school where Woodcock had taught and I wrote then that his main concern seemed to have been to minimise harm to the school’s reputation.
Now the Church has employed former police commissioner John Jamieson, a non-Catholic, to investigate alleged cases of abuse. That’s far more likely to encourage public confidence in the Church’s procedures.
Where and when all this will end is open to speculation, but it could theoretically result in the unthinkable: the forced resignation of a pope, for the first time in hundreds of years.
This wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It would be like shock therapy, which may be exactly what the Catholic Church needs. At the very least the doors and windows of the Vatican need to be thrown open so that light and fresh air can penetrate. A re-examination of the sacred cow of priestly celibacy might be a good place to start.
Oddly enough, one of the most apposite comments on the Catholic Church’s other-worldly response to the crisis enveloping it came from former Beatle Ringo Starr. Apparently intrigued by the fact that the Vatican, amidst all the uproar over clerical abuse, found time to absolve the Beatles of sins supposedly committed 40 years ago, Starr observed: “I think the Vatican, they’ve got more to talk about than the Beatles.”
Amen to that, to coin a phrase.
Six years ago, I wrote about the disgraced New Zealand Catholic priest Alan Woodcock, who had just pleaded guilty to charges of sexual abuse dating back to the 1970s. Woodcock was a teacher at my old school, though not in my time.
At that time the Catholic Church internationally was reeling under a wave of sex abuse allegations. These started to surface during the 1980s and steadily gathered momentum, notably in the United States and Ireland.
Woodcock’s court appearance followed revelations of a long history of sexual abuse by St John of God brothers in Christchurch. In the US, an investigation commissioned by the Church substantiated claims of abuse against more than 4000 priests.
Catholics were shocked not only by revelations of appalling behaviour by men they trusted and respected, but equally by the efforts of high-ranking people in the Catholic hierarchy to hush up the crimes and protect their perpetrators from legal repercussions.
Some of the offenders had been carrying on their depredations for decades. When they were uncovered, the standard solution was simply to move them to a new location where, as often as not, they took up where they had left off. This became known, with bitter wit, as the “geographical cure”.
I wrote in that 2004 column that as a child I never heard of, still less experienced, sexual impropriety by priests, although I was brought up in a Catholic household and attended Catholic schools. As far as I could tell, the priests I knew were men of probity who honoured their vows. In fact one of the many sad aspects of the crisis engulfing the Church was that a shadow of doubt and suspicion now hung over many good men.
At the time of the Woodcock and St John of God scandals, Catholics must have been tempted to dismiss such cases as isolated aberrations. But no; six years on, the allegations just keep rolling in. Like a tsunami that strikes once, then retreats and gathers even greater force before sweeping in again, the sexual abuse scandal continues to batter Catholicism.
Virtually no country with a substantial Catholic population remains untouched. Only this week, a highly influential Mexican priest – founder of an order apparently much admired in the Vatican – was exposed as a serial abuser of the most contemptible kind.
The ripples have reached the very top, with evidence that Pope Benedict, while a cardinal, was personally complicit in the covering-up of abuse.
Even setting aside publicity stunts such as the atheist Richard Dawkins’ threat to have the pope arrested when he visits Britain, and allowing for the likelihood that the ever-swelling ranks of complainants will include a few unscrupulous chancers jumping on the bandwagon with an eye to a payout, the sex abuse imbroglio is a shocking indictment of a look-the-other-way mentality within the Church.
It is also a betrayal of the millions of devout Catholics who try hard to lead good lives and who expect the heads of the Church to lead by example. I am no longer a Catholic but many of my friends and extended family are. They deserve better.
It would be understandable if the revelations against the clergy had shaken the faith of these Catholics. In some of the countries caught up in the escalating scandal, such as Germany, people are abandoning the Church in disgust. Those who choose to remain faithful to Catholicism are doubtless clinging to a belief in something higher and more transcendent than the deeply flawed men who lead the Church.
The sight of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome flailing about in panic, at times giving the impression of trying to defend the indefensible, has not been edifying. What this crisis has demonstrated is the inability of the Vatican to deal with external scrutiny, still less with demands for accountability.
The Church is a deeply insular institution governed by arcane ritual and a rigid hierarchy. That insularity not only provides a closed environment where abusers were clearly able to prey with virtual impunity; it also leaves the Church ill-equipped to deal with the sort of pressure it now faces, particularly from an aggressive secular news media that has the scent of blood in its nostrils.
The Catholic hierarchy is skilled at exerting tight internal control but has been almost comically clumsy and inept in its attempts to fend off outside criticism. It has managed to antagonise everyone from gays to Jews – two lobbies notoriously quick to take offence. And it does itself no favours by couching its official statements in a peculiarly opaque language as impenetrable as that used by totalitarian regimes in places like North Korea and the former Soviet Union.
At least here in New Zealand, far from the ossified bureaucracy in the Vatican, the Church seems to have learned something. In 2004, after Woodcock was exposed, Church leaders turned to a prominent Catholic, a retired judge, for advice. That was a mistake. He was a former pupil of the school where Woodcock had taught and I wrote then that his main concern seemed to have been to minimise harm to the school’s reputation.
Now the Church has employed former police commissioner John Jamieson, a non-Catholic, to investigate alleged cases of abuse. That’s far more likely to encourage public confidence in the Church’s procedures.
Where and when all this will end is open to speculation, but it could theoretically result in the unthinkable: the forced resignation of a pope, for the first time in hundreds of years.
This wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It would be like shock therapy, which may be exactly what the Catholic Church needs. At the very least the doors and windows of the Vatican need to be thrown open so that light and fresh air can penetrate. A re-examination of the sacred cow of priestly celibacy might be a good place to start.
Oddly enough, one of the most apposite comments on the Catholic Church’s other-worldly response to the crisis enveloping it came from former Beatle Ringo Starr. Apparently intrigued by the fact that the Vatican, amidst all the uproar over clerical abuse, found time to absolve the Beatles of sins supposedly committed 40 years ago, Starr observed: “I think the Vatican, they’ve got more to talk about than the Beatles.”
Amen to that, to coin a phrase.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Politics at its most cynical
(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, April 27.)
SAY the word “sneaky”. Now try drawing it out, like this: sneak-key.
There, you’ve got it.
Sneak-key is a freshly coined term for a prime minister who secretly dispatches the Minister of Maori Affairs to New York so that he can commit New Zealand to a declaration that the previous government refused to sign and that New Zealanders have never been given an opportunity to debate.
Then, when word gets out, the PM pretends it didn’t really matter much because the declaration was only symbolic anyway.
If that was the case – if signing the declaration was only a gesture – why did it have to be done so furtively? Why couldn’t Mr Key do what good leaders do in liberal democracies and clearly announce in advance what the government intended to do, so that the country was at least informed even if it hadn’t had a chance to make up its mind?
The answer is obvious. Mr Key knew people would rightly object to New Zealand signing a declaration without first having an informed discussion about the implications, but he gambled on getting away with it because of his personal popularity.
This is politics at its most cynical. It demonstrates contempt for the electorate.
So now New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and while Mr Key was airily dismissing it as a matter of no great significance, Maori expectations were being ramped up to unprecedented levels.
There’s a yawning credibility gap here. Either Mr Key is right, and the declaration is just a feel-good, “aspirational” statement of no practical consequence, or High Court judge Sir Eddie Durie, the Labour Party, public law expert Mai Chen and ACT leader Rodney Hide are right, and the declaration could have profound and far-reaching consequences.
If Mr Key had been open and up-front, I might have been inclined to accept his word. But he wasn’t, so I don’t.
That acrid smell in the air is the National Government’s political capital burning up.
* * *
THE CRESCENDO of anti-liquor propaganda has risen to deafening proportions as Parliament prepares to receive the Law Commission’s final report, due today, on suggested changes to the alcohol laws.
Over the past few weeks, New Zealanders have been bombarded with dire and sometimes near-hysterical claims about the damage being done by alcohol abuse.
If this issue is to be decided by the sheer volume of propaganda, then the wowser lobby – largely funded by our taxes – has it in the bag. They have run a sustained and cleverly orchestrated campaign designed to panic New Zealanders into thinking we’re a nation of helpless drunks. There can be no doubt that their objective was to put pressure on the commission to recommend law changes that will sharply diminish individual responsibility and punish moderate drinkers.
Polls indicate the wowsers have largely been successful in convincing New Zealanders that we all need time in the detox unit. The liquor industry, for all its supposed political influence, is trailing well behind in the war of public opinion.
Personally I won’t lose any sleep over whatever happens to the liquor industry barons. By greedily continuing to promote the Kiwi pisshead culture and pushing alco-pops to young women, they have played into the hands of the neo-puritan propagandists in the universities and the health bureaucracy.
What bothers me is that those who will pay the price, literally and figuratively, for harsher liquor laws will include the vast majority of people who drink responsibly and have benefited enormously from the gradual liberalisation of the past 30-odd years.
We’ve been here before, of course. Just as dog attacks were used to justify a crackdown on law-abiding dog owners, and just as good parents were potentially criminalised because of the actions of child abusers, so responsible drinkers risk being penalised for the misbehaviour of the relatively small number who drink to excess.
* * *
ONE OF the significant achievements of the Internet, for which it isn’t really given due credit, is that it gives courage to cowards.
Letters to newspaper editors require a name and address; have done for decades. Even on radio talkback shows, anonymity isn’t complete because there’s always the chance someone might recognise the caller’s voice. Besides, the host can dump anyone who gets too offensive. These checks tend to filter out people with extreme views who don’t have the guts to reveal themselves.
Online forums, on the other hand, confer total anonymity. People can be as toxic, defamatory, abusive and splenetic as they like, cowering all the while behind pseudonyms. The blogosphere is God’s gift to people whose cowardice previously served to keep their rage in check.
It’s a form of free speech, I suppose, but a very inferior one. If an opinion is worth expressing, it’s surely worth putting your name to.
SAY the word “sneaky”. Now try drawing it out, like this: sneak-key.
There, you’ve got it.
Sneak-key is a freshly coined term for a prime minister who secretly dispatches the Minister of Maori Affairs to New York so that he can commit New Zealand to a declaration that the previous government refused to sign and that New Zealanders have never been given an opportunity to debate.
Then, when word gets out, the PM pretends it didn’t really matter much because the declaration was only symbolic anyway.
If that was the case – if signing the declaration was only a gesture – why did it have to be done so furtively? Why couldn’t Mr Key do what good leaders do in liberal democracies and clearly announce in advance what the government intended to do, so that the country was at least informed even if it hadn’t had a chance to make up its mind?
The answer is obvious. Mr Key knew people would rightly object to New Zealand signing a declaration without first having an informed discussion about the implications, but he gambled on getting away with it because of his personal popularity.
This is politics at its most cynical. It demonstrates contempt for the electorate.
So now New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and while Mr Key was airily dismissing it as a matter of no great significance, Maori expectations were being ramped up to unprecedented levels.
There’s a yawning credibility gap here. Either Mr Key is right, and the declaration is just a feel-good, “aspirational” statement of no practical consequence, or High Court judge Sir Eddie Durie, the Labour Party, public law expert Mai Chen and ACT leader Rodney Hide are right, and the declaration could have profound and far-reaching consequences.
If Mr Key had been open and up-front, I might have been inclined to accept his word. But he wasn’t, so I don’t.
That acrid smell in the air is the National Government’s political capital burning up.
* * *
THE CRESCENDO of anti-liquor propaganda has risen to deafening proportions as Parliament prepares to receive the Law Commission’s final report, due today, on suggested changes to the alcohol laws.
Over the past few weeks, New Zealanders have been bombarded with dire and sometimes near-hysterical claims about the damage being done by alcohol abuse.
If this issue is to be decided by the sheer volume of propaganda, then the wowser lobby – largely funded by our taxes – has it in the bag. They have run a sustained and cleverly orchestrated campaign designed to panic New Zealanders into thinking we’re a nation of helpless drunks. There can be no doubt that their objective was to put pressure on the commission to recommend law changes that will sharply diminish individual responsibility and punish moderate drinkers.
Polls indicate the wowsers have largely been successful in convincing New Zealanders that we all need time in the detox unit. The liquor industry, for all its supposed political influence, is trailing well behind in the war of public opinion.
Personally I won’t lose any sleep over whatever happens to the liquor industry barons. By greedily continuing to promote the Kiwi pisshead culture and pushing alco-pops to young women, they have played into the hands of the neo-puritan propagandists in the universities and the health bureaucracy.
What bothers me is that those who will pay the price, literally and figuratively, for harsher liquor laws will include the vast majority of people who drink responsibly and have benefited enormously from the gradual liberalisation of the past 30-odd years.
We’ve been here before, of course. Just as dog attacks were used to justify a crackdown on law-abiding dog owners, and just as good parents were potentially criminalised because of the actions of child abusers, so responsible drinkers risk being penalised for the misbehaviour of the relatively small number who drink to excess.
* * *
ONE OF the significant achievements of the Internet, for which it isn’t really given due credit, is that it gives courage to cowards.
Letters to newspaper editors require a name and address; have done for decades. Even on radio talkback shows, anonymity isn’t complete because there’s always the chance someone might recognise the caller’s voice. Besides, the host can dump anyone who gets too offensive. These checks tend to filter out people with extreme views who don’t have the guts to reveal themselves.
Online forums, on the other hand, confer total anonymity. People can be as toxic, defamatory, abusive and splenetic as they like, cowering all the while behind pseudonyms. The blogosphere is God’s gift to people whose cowardice previously served to keep their rage in check.
It’s a form of free speech, I suppose, but a very inferior one. If an opinion is worth expressing, it’s surely worth putting your name to.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Captured by the New Wowsers
I don’t believe Sir Geoffrey Palmer is a wowser. I imagine he would bristle at the suggestion. Neither do I believe he’s a compulsive controller who knows what’s best for everyone. However I do believe that the Law Commission, in preparing its report Alcohol In Our Lives: Curbing the Harm, has allowed itself to be well and truly captured by neo-wowsers who don’t think New Zealanders can be trusted to make the right decisions about alcohol consumption. The wowsers’ fingerprints are all over the document.
Reading the report summary and an accompanying breakdown of the 2900-plus submissions, it’s clear that the commission’s report is an almost unqualified victory for those who want to see the liberalisation of the past few decades wound back. They have convinced Palmer and the commission that only a drastic retreat from past reforms can save us from our inability to control our alcohol intake.
The tone of the report is alarmist. Large chunks of it are written in the language of the anti-alcohol propagandists who have been blitzing the media in the weeks leading up to the report’s release. Their objective was to create a moral panic over alcohol abuse, and so far they have succeeded.
The commission has listened to the social scientists, health providers and medical researchers who urged a lifting of the minimum age of purchase, an increase in excise tax and a crackdown on liquor advertising and promotion, among other measures. Liquor industry interests didn’t get a look in. In fact the commission explicitly rejects the industry position that the majority of New Zealanders drink responsibly and shouldn’t be penalised because of the minority who don’t.
On this crucial point, the commission has adopted the alarmist contention that “excess drinking is not confined to an aberrant minority”. Exactly what constitutes “excess drinking” is not satisfactorily explained. Rather, the commission seems to accept without question the anti-alcohol lobby’s claims that 20 percent of us drink in a “potentially hazardous manner” and that 25 percent of us consume too much alcohol every time we drink – statements that hinge on the anti-alcohol propagandists’ arbitrary perception of what is “hazardous” or amounts to “too much”. Where there is a choice between an alarmist conclusion and a more cautious, conservative one, the commission seems unerringly to opt for the former. (I should note here that judged by the criteria of Professor Doug Sellman, one of the more shrill anti-alcohol propagandists, I am one of New Zealand’s 700,000 “heavy drinkers”. Perhaps you are too.)
What bothers me is not so much that the liquor industry position – which essentially favours the status quo – has been disregarded in favour of the restrictive regime favoured by the anti-alcohol lobby. The industry is big enough and ugly enough to look after itself (and you can bet it will be doing exactly that behind the scenes). No, what concerns me is that this whole elaborate process is dominated by organised and well-resourced pressure groups: the industry on one side, the control lobby (largely taxpayer funded, incidentally) on the other. Ironically, the people on whose behalf this review exercise is supposedly being undertaken – ordinary New Zealanders – are largely excluded. There is, as far as I know, no lobby group representing moderate drinkers. By its very nature, the commission’s review gives weight to the views of interest groups but largely fails to capture the views of the ordinary citizens who will have to bear whatever consequences flow from it, but who don’t have the time, the resources, the know-how or the motivation to prepare and make submissions. (This isn’t the fault of the commission, of course; it’s just the nature of the system.)
I haven’t tackled the full report – all 500 pages of it – but the 32-page summary condenses the commission’s recommendations and gives an idea of the report’s tone. One key point, already mentioned, is the commission’s dodgy assertion – based on the anti-alcohol lobbyists’ loaded statistics – that liquor abuse is not confined to a problematical minority.
Another is that alcohol should not be treated as a “normal” commodity – again, a central tenet of the New Wowser Manifesto. “The trend towards regarding alcohol as a normal food or beverage product needs to be reversed,” the commission pontificates. “In truth, alcohol is no ordinary commodity. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that easily becomes addictive and that can produce dangerous behaviours in those who drink too much. New Zealanders are reluctant as a nation to face up to the facts.” (See what I mean about the language used? It’s straight from the New Wowsers’ Handbook.)
A counter-argument to this is that by treating alcohol as a dangerous drug that must be carefully controlled, as New Zealand governments did for decades, you produce bizarre and contradictory outcomes like the six o’clock swill (wherein, I suspect, lie the origins of our binge drinking culture). I believe we’re still suffering the legacy of that prohibitionist tradition, which treated New Zealanders as helpless drunks unable to control their intake without the help of the state. The danger in turning the clock back on the liberal reforms of the last two decades, as the commission wants to do, is that alcohol will again attain the lure of forbidden fruit, attracting people (especially young people) because of its aura as something slightly risky and dangerous, rather than being treated as something to be enjoyed, like food, as part of everyday life. It strikes me as highly significant that countries where alcohol is treated as “normal”, and where children are introduced to it as an integral and unremarkable part of their culture, don’t generally share our binge-drinking problem.
It was inevitable that New Zealand would take time to adapt to the more liberal alcohol regime ushered in (albeit in a piecemeal and illogical manner) from the late 1960s onwards, but we were getting there. What the commission and the wowser lobby constantly overlook, because it doesn’t fit their agenda, is the many ways in which our drinking behaviour has improved. Not only is our per capita consumption down slightly on the late 1970s (it dipped very sharply in the 1990s, then crept back up), but we’re drinking differently. We’re doing it in more civilised surroundings, we’re doing it in mixed company rather than in the men-only domain of the old-style public bar, and we’re doing it more often over a meal rather than standing at the bar. We’re also more discerning about what we drink, choosing wine and “craft” beers over the mass-produced draught beer once dispensed through plastic hoses.
The commission notes with disapproval that the number of on-licences has more than trebled since the Sale of Liquor Act 1989, but doesn’t acknowledge that the size of the average bar has decreased enormously. The horrendous suburban booze barn of the 1960s and 70s, surrounded by acres of car parks, is extinct. The bars that have replaced them are much smaller, more intimate and more congenial. But apart from one brief token acknowledgment in the summary, the commission seems steadfastly to ignore these gains. It would rather dwell on binge drinking – a very real and ugly phenomenon, to be sure, but hardly “pervasive”, as the commission asserts, which suggests it has permeated every level of society when in fact it’s confined to a relatively small demographic group.
Not all the commission’s recommendations are extreme. There’s a good case to be made for reducing the proliferation of off-licence outlets and I personally wouldn’t argue too vigorously against the proposed reduction of opening hours. But the proposal to put the age of purchase back to 20, with no exceptions, is barmy and regressive. How humiliating for a 19-year-old to go to a bar or licensed restaurant with his or her parents and not be allowed to have a drink. How can we expect people to behave like adults when we treat them as children? This is precisely how our dysfunctional attitude toward alcohol developed in the first place.
So now it’s in the hands of the politicians. Given the fraught history of legislation relating to alcohol, we shouldn’t expect Parliament to make logical or consistent decisions – least of all if it’s down to a conscience vote (and I have some sympathy with Sir Geoffrey Palmer on that point). But at least the politicians, unlike the Law Commission, have constituents’ views to consider, which might lead to a more balanced position being struck than that taken by the commission. We should certainly hope so.
Reading the report summary and an accompanying breakdown of the 2900-plus submissions, it’s clear that the commission’s report is an almost unqualified victory for those who want to see the liberalisation of the past few decades wound back. They have convinced Palmer and the commission that only a drastic retreat from past reforms can save us from our inability to control our alcohol intake.
The tone of the report is alarmist. Large chunks of it are written in the language of the anti-alcohol propagandists who have been blitzing the media in the weeks leading up to the report’s release. Their objective was to create a moral panic over alcohol abuse, and so far they have succeeded.
The commission has listened to the social scientists, health providers and medical researchers who urged a lifting of the minimum age of purchase, an increase in excise tax and a crackdown on liquor advertising and promotion, among other measures. Liquor industry interests didn’t get a look in. In fact the commission explicitly rejects the industry position that the majority of New Zealanders drink responsibly and shouldn’t be penalised because of the minority who don’t.
On this crucial point, the commission has adopted the alarmist contention that “excess drinking is not confined to an aberrant minority”. Exactly what constitutes “excess drinking” is not satisfactorily explained. Rather, the commission seems to accept without question the anti-alcohol lobby’s claims that 20 percent of us drink in a “potentially hazardous manner” and that 25 percent of us consume too much alcohol every time we drink – statements that hinge on the anti-alcohol propagandists’ arbitrary perception of what is “hazardous” or amounts to “too much”. Where there is a choice between an alarmist conclusion and a more cautious, conservative one, the commission seems unerringly to opt for the former. (I should note here that judged by the criteria of Professor Doug Sellman, one of the more shrill anti-alcohol propagandists, I am one of New Zealand’s 700,000 “heavy drinkers”. Perhaps you are too.)
What bothers me is not so much that the liquor industry position – which essentially favours the status quo – has been disregarded in favour of the restrictive regime favoured by the anti-alcohol lobby. The industry is big enough and ugly enough to look after itself (and you can bet it will be doing exactly that behind the scenes). No, what concerns me is that this whole elaborate process is dominated by organised and well-resourced pressure groups: the industry on one side, the control lobby (largely taxpayer funded, incidentally) on the other. Ironically, the people on whose behalf this review exercise is supposedly being undertaken – ordinary New Zealanders – are largely excluded. There is, as far as I know, no lobby group representing moderate drinkers. By its very nature, the commission’s review gives weight to the views of interest groups but largely fails to capture the views of the ordinary citizens who will have to bear whatever consequences flow from it, but who don’t have the time, the resources, the know-how or the motivation to prepare and make submissions. (This isn’t the fault of the commission, of course; it’s just the nature of the system.)
I haven’t tackled the full report – all 500 pages of it – but the 32-page summary condenses the commission’s recommendations and gives an idea of the report’s tone. One key point, already mentioned, is the commission’s dodgy assertion – based on the anti-alcohol lobbyists’ loaded statistics – that liquor abuse is not confined to a problematical minority.
Another is that alcohol should not be treated as a “normal” commodity – again, a central tenet of the New Wowser Manifesto. “The trend towards regarding alcohol as a normal food or beverage product needs to be reversed,” the commission pontificates. “In truth, alcohol is no ordinary commodity. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that easily becomes addictive and that can produce dangerous behaviours in those who drink too much. New Zealanders are reluctant as a nation to face up to the facts.” (See what I mean about the language used? It’s straight from the New Wowsers’ Handbook.)
A counter-argument to this is that by treating alcohol as a dangerous drug that must be carefully controlled, as New Zealand governments did for decades, you produce bizarre and contradictory outcomes like the six o’clock swill (wherein, I suspect, lie the origins of our binge drinking culture). I believe we’re still suffering the legacy of that prohibitionist tradition, which treated New Zealanders as helpless drunks unable to control their intake without the help of the state. The danger in turning the clock back on the liberal reforms of the last two decades, as the commission wants to do, is that alcohol will again attain the lure of forbidden fruit, attracting people (especially young people) because of its aura as something slightly risky and dangerous, rather than being treated as something to be enjoyed, like food, as part of everyday life. It strikes me as highly significant that countries where alcohol is treated as “normal”, and where children are introduced to it as an integral and unremarkable part of their culture, don’t generally share our binge-drinking problem.
It was inevitable that New Zealand would take time to adapt to the more liberal alcohol regime ushered in (albeit in a piecemeal and illogical manner) from the late 1960s onwards, but we were getting there. What the commission and the wowser lobby constantly overlook, because it doesn’t fit their agenda, is the many ways in which our drinking behaviour has improved. Not only is our per capita consumption down slightly on the late 1970s (it dipped very sharply in the 1990s, then crept back up), but we’re drinking differently. We’re doing it in more civilised surroundings, we’re doing it in mixed company rather than in the men-only domain of the old-style public bar, and we’re doing it more often over a meal rather than standing at the bar. We’re also more discerning about what we drink, choosing wine and “craft” beers over the mass-produced draught beer once dispensed through plastic hoses.
The commission notes with disapproval that the number of on-licences has more than trebled since the Sale of Liquor Act 1989, but doesn’t acknowledge that the size of the average bar has decreased enormously. The horrendous suburban booze barn of the 1960s and 70s, surrounded by acres of car parks, is extinct. The bars that have replaced them are much smaller, more intimate and more congenial. But apart from one brief token acknowledgment in the summary, the commission seems steadfastly to ignore these gains. It would rather dwell on binge drinking – a very real and ugly phenomenon, to be sure, but hardly “pervasive”, as the commission asserts, which suggests it has permeated every level of society when in fact it’s confined to a relatively small demographic group.
Not all the commission’s recommendations are extreme. There’s a good case to be made for reducing the proliferation of off-licence outlets and I personally wouldn’t argue too vigorously against the proposed reduction of opening hours. But the proposal to put the age of purchase back to 20, with no exceptions, is barmy and regressive. How humiliating for a 19-year-old to go to a bar or licensed restaurant with his or her parents and not be allowed to have a drink. How can we expect people to behave like adults when we treat them as children? This is precisely how our dysfunctional attitude toward alcohol developed in the first place.
So now it’s in the hands of the politicians. Given the fraught history of legislation relating to alcohol, we shouldn’t expect Parliament to make logical or consistent decisions – least of all if it’s down to a conscience vote (and I have some sympathy with Sir Geoffrey Palmer on that point). But at least the politicians, unlike the Law Commission, have constituents’ views to consider, which might lead to a more balanced position being struck than that taken by the commission. We should certainly hope so.
Monday, April 19, 2010
A concert in the Wairarapa
Last night I was privileged to attend, along with about 40 others, a concert by the luminously talented Wellington singer and songwriter Jess Chambers. Of course 40 people would normally be a pitiful turnout, but this was a concert with a difference. It was held in the Wairarapa home of Simon Burt and Philippa Steele and the audience consisted of invited (paying) guests, all known to the hosts and mostly members of the rapidly growing Wairarapa community of refugees from Wellington.
It was the first such concert I’d attended, but the concept isn’t new. Some of us can recall an era when people frequently arranged concerts in their own homes, though usually the performers were family and friends rather than professional entertainers. Most homes seemed to have a piano then, husbands and wives often sang together (my parents did), and even if you couldn’t sing or play an instrument, well, reciting a poem was fine.
Television killed off that charming tradition, but attempts have been made to revive it. In Greytown, Ed and Juliet Cooke frequently host classical recitals in their home – though again, by paid performers rather than amateurs. Simon and Philippa simply extended the concept to a different musical genre.
Which brings me to Jess Chambers and her talented accompanist, Peter Hill. This was an act perfectly suited to the intimacy of the venue, a big old home that would almost certainly have hosted similar entertainments in its long distant past.
Chambers plays guitar and sings. Hill backed her with great subtlety and empathy on electric guitar and mandolin, filling out the sound with layers of texture. Several in the audience drew comparisons with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and the analogy was apt. Not only was the lineup similar but the repertoire too; in fact some of the warmest applause was for Chambers’ rendition of the Gillian Welch song Elvis Presley Blues. Like Welch and Rawlings these two had the ability, with just two instruments, to keep their audience engaged – entranced is not too strong a word – for the better part of two hours; long enough to just about exhaust their repertoire.
Chambers came to prominence as member of the Woolshed Sessions, a loose coalition of musicians whose name is taken from the album they recorded last year in a woolshed near Takaka. But no one should doubt her ability to carry off a solo performance. Her repertoire includes some very appealing songs of her own – songs that are alternately wistful, quirky and witty – along with a slew of cover versions. Besides the aforementioned Elvis Presley Blues these included Neil Young’s Harvest Moon – Young would surely approve – and Chrissie Hynde’s Don’t Get Me Wrong. To each of these she brings a fresh interpretation, effectively making them her own. Chambers has an immensely appealing voice – gutsy and assertive one moment, full of poignant yearning the next. I was constantly reminded of Jonatha Brooke, whose 1997 album 10 Cent Wings is still one of my favourites. But Chambers is doubly blessed because as well as being indecently talented, she’s also very pretty. In the unlikely event that you tired of her music, you could just look at her.
Between songs, she indulged in engaging, slightly shy banter in a hybrid accent – part Kiwi, part American – that was explained when she said she had a New Zealand father and an American mother and spent some of her formative years in California, where she acquired her taste for country music.
Ah, there’s that loaded term again: country music. I would guess there were people at last night’s concert who wouldn’t describe themselves as country music fans, because the term has acquired such negative connotations. But Chambers demonstrated just how broad and all-encompassing the genre really is.
My thanks to our hosts for a terrific night. I hope there will be more.
It was the first such concert I’d attended, but the concept isn’t new. Some of us can recall an era when people frequently arranged concerts in their own homes, though usually the performers were family and friends rather than professional entertainers. Most homes seemed to have a piano then, husbands and wives often sang together (my parents did), and even if you couldn’t sing or play an instrument, well, reciting a poem was fine.
Television killed off that charming tradition, but attempts have been made to revive it. In Greytown, Ed and Juliet Cooke frequently host classical recitals in their home – though again, by paid performers rather than amateurs. Simon and Philippa simply extended the concept to a different musical genre.
Which brings me to Jess Chambers and her talented accompanist, Peter Hill. This was an act perfectly suited to the intimacy of the venue, a big old home that would almost certainly have hosted similar entertainments in its long distant past.
Chambers plays guitar and sings. Hill backed her with great subtlety and empathy on electric guitar and mandolin, filling out the sound with layers of texture. Several in the audience drew comparisons with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and the analogy was apt. Not only was the lineup similar but the repertoire too; in fact some of the warmest applause was for Chambers’ rendition of the Gillian Welch song Elvis Presley Blues. Like Welch and Rawlings these two had the ability, with just two instruments, to keep their audience engaged – entranced is not too strong a word – for the better part of two hours; long enough to just about exhaust their repertoire.
Chambers came to prominence as member of the Woolshed Sessions, a loose coalition of musicians whose name is taken from the album they recorded last year in a woolshed near Takaka. But no one should doubt her ability to carry off a solo performance. Her repertoire includes some very appealing songs of her own – songs that are alternately wistful, quirky and witty – along with a slew of cover versions. Besides the aforementioned Elvis Presley Blues these included Neil Young’s Harvest Moon – Young would surely approve – and Chrissie Hynde’s Don’t Get Me Wrong. To each of these she brings a fresh interpretation, effectively making them her own. Chambers has an immensely appealing voice – gutsy and assertive one moment, full of poignant yearning the next. I was constantly reminded of Jonatha Brooke, whose 1997 album 10 Cent Wings is still one of my favourites. But Chambers is doubly blessed because as well as being indecently talented, she’s also very pretty. In the unlikely event that you tired of her music, you could just look at her.
Between songs, she indulged in engaging, slightly shy banter in a hybrid accent – part Kiwi, part American – that was explained when she said she had a New Zealand father and an American mother and spent some of her formative years in California, where she acquired her taste for country music.
Ah, there’s that loaded term again: country music. I would guess there were people at last night’s concert who wouldn’t describe themselves as country music fans, because the term has acquired such negative connotations. But Chambers demonstrated just how broad and all-encompassing the genre really is.
My thanks to our hosts for a terrific night. I hope there will be more.
Friday, April 16, 2010
A pink government clad in Tory blue
(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, April 14.)
Contrary to popular belief, it was Labour that won the 2008 election.
Yes, I know the official results show we elected a National government and banished Helen Clark. But in terms of practical consequences, what we now have is, in many respects, a pink government wearing National Party blue.
Labour and its allies in government succeeding in shifting the political centre to the left. They redefined the political game by making an unprecedented number of people dependent on government largesse in one form or another, whether it was Working for Families, interest-free student loans or even the Winston Peters SuperGold card.
National knows it tampers with these electoral bribes at its peril. In politics, it’s much easier to say no in the first place than to try to take something back once people have become accustomed to it.
In effect National finds itself having to play the game on Labour’s terms. During three terms under Labour the public became so conditioned to social democratic-style government that National, even with its handsome election margin, didn’t dare interfere too radically with Labour’s legacy. In fact John Key, as leader of the Opposition, spent much of his time clearing the decks of potentially divisive points of difference with his opponents – reassuring the public, in effect, that things wouldn’t change too much under a new government.
Notwithstanding proposed welfare changes, the introduction of national standards in schools and vague talk about opening up the conservation estate to mining, Mr Key’s party is too timid to attempt the radical change needed to transform a chronically under-performing economy. National has sent out a clear signal that the moment any special interest group squeals at its taxpayer-funded privileges being curtailed, the government will back down – just as it promptly did when superannuitants jumped up and down over threatened cuts to SuperGold Card travel discounts.
It has been left to ACT – now ghetto-ised in the media as a party of the far right – to champion the cause of small government and the free market. The political ground once occupied by National stands largely vacant as the government jostles with Labour for the so-called political centre, which has moved steadily to the left.
Many traditional National supporters are deeply unhappy with this but don’t speak out because a National government is still better than a Labour one, even if it isn’t quite the National government they expected.
In this respect, Labour and its former allies are the winners even if they are no longer in power.
Thus continues a long-standing paradox of New Zealand politics whereby parties of the right behave like parties of the left, and vice-versa.
Think about it. Rob Muldoon, though nominally a National prime minister, was a controlling socialist at heart. State control of the economy – indeed, of virtually every facet of life – was rarely more strongly asserted than under his leadership.
It was in areas of social policy that Muldoon was archly conservative. It was this potent combination that won him the support of blue-collar conservatives, traditionally Labour voters, and helped keep Labour out of power for three terms.
In the 1980s, a reformist Labour government, faced with an economy in a state of collapse, ushered in an era of economic neo-liberalism that was as far removed from traditional socialist principles as it was possible to get. Roger Douglas drove through policy changes that were closer in spirit to those pursued by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the pinup girl of laissez-faire capitalism.
The topsy-turvy politics continued in the 1990s when Jim Bolger’s National government, running counter to type, negotiated the first big Treaty settlements – something Maori voters might have expected from Labour, given its traditional command of Maori loyalty.
Then came the 1999 election, and more chameleon politics. While never missing an opportunity to condemn the “failed reforms” of the 1980s and 1990s, Helen Clark left virtually all of them in place, pragmatically recognising that the socialist economic experiment had been a worldwide failure.
Instead, Labour – much like the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown government in Britain – turned its attention to a new agenda which cleverly harnessed the capitalist economy to the left’s social policy objectives. Under this approach, as the conservative British commentator Gerald Warner has shrewdly observed, left-wing governments allow markets to create wealth so that the state can then appropriate it in taxes and use it to enforce social control.
So now here we are with National again in power – ostensibly the party of individual freedom, private enterprise and small government – and it appears every bit as dedicated to big government, and every bit as eager to appease every hand-wringing claimant for taxpayer help (other than those actually contributing to the economy, such as farmers and small businesses), as Labour was.
Mr Key doesn’t seem to accept that being an effective leader means sometimes having to upset people. He seems to have a pathological desire to be liked. But at some point, unpopular decisions will have to be made or the government’s stated intention of catching up with Australia will remain a fantasy.
Perversely, the policy on which the government has shown its boldest leadership – the misconceived emissions trading scheme – is one that will burden rather than stimulate the economy, and which has been vigorously opposed by business and farmers – sector groups that could normally be expected to support a National government.
As it is in New Zealand, so it is in Britain. The political parallels between the two countries are striking. In both countries, Labour politicians assiduously promoted what has been called the Third Way – supposedly a benign compromise between capitalism and socialism, but in reality a creeping expansion of government control with a corresponding erosion of individual autonomy. And in both countries, the mainstream parties of the centre-right, as it’s now lamely called, seem either powerless or unwilling to roll it back.
David Cameron, the British Conservative Party leader, is an appeaser who hopes to win power in the forthcoming election by not frightening the horses. Politically, he could be Mr Key’s doppelganger.
Contrary to popular belief, it was Labour that won the 2008 election.
Yes, I know the official results show we elected a National government and banished Helen Clark. But in terms of practical consequences, what we now have is, in many respects, a pink government wearing National Party blue.
Labour and its allies in government succeeding in shifting the political centre to the left. They redefined the political game by making an unprecedented number of people dependent on government largesse in one form or another, whether it was Working for Families, interest-free student loans or even the Winston Peters SuperGold card.
National knows it tampers with these electoral bribes at its peril. In politics, it’s much easier to say no in the first place than to try to take something back once people have become accustomed to it.
In effect National finds itself having to play the game on Labour’s terms. During three terms under Labour the public became so conditioned to social democratic-style government that National, even with its handsome election margin, didn’t dare interfere too radically with Labour’s legacy. In fact John Key, as leader of the Opposition, spent much of his time clearing the decks of potentially divisive points of difference with his opponents – reassuring the public, in effect, that things wouldn’t change too much under a new government.
Notwithstanding proposed welfare changes, the introduction of national standards in schools and vague talk about opening up the conservation estate to mining, Mr Key’s party is too timid to attempt the radical change needed to transform a chronically under-performing economy. National has sent out a clear signal that the moment any special interest group squeals at its taxpayer-funded privileges being curtailed, the government will back down – just as it promptly did when superannuitants jumped up and down over threatened cuts to SuperGold Card travel discounts.
It has been left to ACT – now ghetto-ised in the media as a party of the far right – to champion the cause of small government and the free market. The political ground once occupied by National stands largely vacant as the government jostles with Labour for the so-called political centre, which has moved steadily to the left.
Many traditional National supporters are deeply unhappy with this but don’t speak out because a National government is still better than a Labour one, even if it isn’t quite the National government they expected.
In this respect, Labour and its former allies are the winners even if they are no longer in power.
Thus continues a long-standing paradox of New Zealand politics whereby parties of the right behave like parties of the left, and vice-versa.
Think about it. Rob Muldoon, though nominally a National prime minister, was a controlling socialist at heart. State control of the economy – indeed, of virtually every facet of life – was rarely more strongly asserted than under his leadership.
It was in areas of social policy that Muldoon was archly conservative. It was this potent combination that won him the support of blue-collar conservatives, traditionally Labour voters, and helped keep Labour out of power for three terms.
In the 1980s, a reformist Labour government, faced with an economy in a state of collapse, ushered in an era of economic neo-liberalism that was as far removed from traditional socialist principles as it was possible to get. Roger Douglas drove through policy changes that were closer in spirit to those pursued by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the pinup girl of laissez-faire capitalism.
The topsy-turvy politics continued in the 1990s when Jim Bolger’s National government, running counter to type, negotiated the first big Treaty settlements – something Maori voters might have expected from Labour, given its traditional command of Maori loyalty.
Then came the 1999 election, and more chameleon politics. While never missing an opportunity to condemn the “failed reforms” of the 1980s and 1990s, Helen Clark left virtually all of them in place, pragmatically recognising that the socialist economic experiment had been a worldwide failure.
Instead, Labour – much like the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown government in Britain – turned its attention to a new agenda which cleverly harnessed the capitalist economy to the left’s social policy objectives. Under this approach, as the conservative British commentator Gerald Warner has shrewdly observed, left-wing governments allow markets to create wealth so that the state can then appropriate it in taxes and use it to enforce social control.
So now here we are with National again in power – ostensibly the party of individual freedom, private enterprise and small government – and it appears every bit as dedicated to big government, and every bit as eager to appease every hand-wringing claimant for taxpayer help (other than those actually contributing to the economy, such as farmers and small businesses), as Labour was.
Mr Key doesn’t seem to accept that being an effective leader means sometimes having to upset people. He seems to have a pathological desire to be liked. But at some point, unpopular decisions will have to be made or the government’s stated intention of catching up with Australia will remain a fantasy.
Perversely, the policy on which the government has shown its boldest leadership – the misconceived emissions trading scheme – is one that will burden rather than stimulate the economy, and which has been vigorously opposed by business and farmers – sector groups that could normally be expected to support a National government.
As it is in New Zealand, so it is in Britain. The political parallels between the two countries are striking. In both countries, Labour politicians assiduously promoted what has been called the Third Way – supposedly a benign compromise between capitalism and socialism, but in reality a creeping expansion of government control with a corresponding erosion of individual autonomy. And in both countries, the mainstream parties of the centre-right, as it’s now lamely called, seem either powerless or unwilling to roll it back.
David Cameron, the British Conservative Party leader, is an appeaser who hopes to win power in the forthcoming election by not frightening the horses. Politically, he could be Mr Key’s doppelganger.
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