Language makes a difference

 It was as I remember it a late autumn morning in 1987.  We sat in the disfunctional executive work room of the student association.  Alastair looked at me.  ‘It’s gone.” 

I did whatever was so darn important, and then looked across at him, “what?” I said as if I might be interested.

“The word society”.

“What?” I wasn’t sure what his point was.

“The ministry of education has removed the word society and only talk about communities.” He indicated the pile of discussion documents, the Ministry Annual Report, and the infamous Treasury un requested huge volume which had come out like a Christmas Cracker toy with their volumes of incoming briefing material

. Briefing to incoming minister

Government Management: Brief to the Incoming Government 1987 Volume II Education Issues

“Oh”

“Communities or community may not be everyone.”  He grinned.

I parked this odd observation. 

It isn’t till 2024 when the full weight and danger of undermining the concept of Society is truly obvious.

Yes it wasn’t just education briefings, It was all Government documents. All speeches, all contributed content, in every book, magazine briefing note.

There is no collective society in modern neo classical, monetarist and libertarian thinking.  

We are all individuals.

And if anyone says the writing doesn’t matter, grammar is irrelevant, synonyms are fine:  just think about it.  

National and ACT need to remember they are human

The National Party should be ashamed of themselves.  Rather than out meeting people and shaking their hands when they know most of us won’t benefit from their Government, THEY SHOULD BE IN HIDING!  At Home in the dark they are ushering into NZ searching for their moral compasses and what harm their policies will do to real people.

How they can walk around unashamedly promoting screwing most of us to give tax cuts to the rich?  It’s incredible.  And ACT - do they have any self awareness or shame?

How they can bare faced promise anything but misery is outrageous,

They will reverse a lot of climate change things we’re doing while the planet burns.  Who says the country that puts in 1% like NZ won’t be the tipping point? they are heralding encouraging more huge gas guzzling trucks bigger than small houses.

They will sell houses, to probably China,  for $2mill plus. Every house worth over a mill will suddenly inflate to $2mill plus. Is this to raise money or to open us up for foreign economic pressure? Once eg Chinese residents, of which some will be spies, they won’t want the values of their investment to decline.  We can never have cheap houses is we open our homes to international trading.

Nationals extolling tax cuts by cutting the disabled traffic cards, punishing all beneficiaries for existing and take more of them to court.

We are all going to die, does National / Act really want us to live out our lives screwing the poor or being screwed if you aren’t rich?  Do we really want foreign investors playing in our property market? I mean really WTF are you thinking? Are your lives so empty and vacuous this is what you’re aspiring to?  Are you finding meaning in your lives by getting more money at the expense of those who are worse off?

Two elections in a Row National has presented budgets with fiscal holes.  How on earth can you claim to be better with finances?   You can get policies right.

This is a COWARDLY attack on your citizens to give the richest MORE.

And ACT goes on about CHANGE,  what change?  What are you talking about. Your change is the tyranny the scared and fearful anti science goons are worried about.

HOW you can honestly proclaim your recipes for higher inflation, lower wages, lower taxes for the rich, reversals in carbon reduction and also social services, more housing crisis victims, and making thousands of NZ government workers redundant as any solution is something I want you to go to explain.  Preferably in kindergartens schools pubs and community groups.  Tell us why Rich greedies are better people and entitled to more than everyone else.

Mr Luxon, where is your faith?  Ms Willis and Mr Seyless,  Where is your shame? 

Murder Most Foul- our civilisation’s most recent Mona Lisa

 

I’ve been grappling with where we are all going.  By that I mean humanity, the English or European Civilisation, us.  Where is our soul and what is going on. And what is the collapse of Enlightenment science going to leave us? Is this a new Dark ages?  Or is it environmental destruction, or both? Are we about to enter Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, a world with circa 500 AD inhabitants struggling with survival from plague and intellectual appreciation of the world, with a portal or door to civilisation today? https://g.co/kgs/fgSE9f

If our civilisation, circa now or immediate future, is analysed will we be characterised by our Barbarians, warlords or dictatorial masters?  

Or just extinct?

I see the English speaking Civilisation in decline,  it is really the European civilisation, AS China / Asia rises before India or South America take hegemony before Africa. As long as climate change and collapse don’t wipe us out. The Easter Islanders’ future. 

Part of my thinking lately has been the issuing of Murder Most Foul by Bob Dylan.

https://youtu.be/kfP5Es07vik

To me it is our most recent Cultural Mona Lisa, or Odyessy.  Bob Dylan being the Magician who has captured Zeigeist for 50 years. The Fool, the poet.

I see him as talking about the death of the American Dream and the American hope, dying with the assassination of JFK. Alongside Capitalism as we know it is declining, Our civilisation is running out of answers.  I’ve discussed this with any one and everyone who will engage. While This is ostensibly about America, not England or anywhere else, THIS is about the lead hero in the decline and end of a civilisation.

Today I found this by Timothy Hampton of UCBerkley, published by MIT. Link below.  I want to highly recommend it.  As I recommend listening to the song.  Hampton provides connection to contextualise Dylan’s work, and highlight the traditions and genesis of the work.

To synthesis some of my views with what I took from Hampton - Dylan has grabbed this significant moment as a marker as our world translates, communicates and assimilates the loss of hope, the struggles of capitalism, the confidence and certainty of the western world, and our existential souls.I’m being dramatic, but I can’t see anything as dramatic. When I looked back at history I think, What was it like to live in the Roman Empire as it collapsed? If you asked people of the time, would many see it’s the end of Rome?  And does the end of an Empire or civilisation look like Trump, Boris, climate crises, Anti science, viruses, violent enemies with different world views like China and Russia? 

That is where I came to Murder Most Foul, the USA who only 20 years ago could credibly declare themselves the leaders of the free world, but now won’t get many takers for that view.

Hampton has found many of the cultural connections and contextualised them, brilliantly. 

Please listen to the song, read Hampton’s article.  Then let me know, where we are.

Timothy Hampton teaches literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also directs the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. He is the author of, among other books, “Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work,” published by Zone Books.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/murder-most-foul-and-the-haunting-of-america/

MS.

 The thing that is hardest is that sometimes, even usually, there isn't an issue.  Or maybe something's not quite right, or it's just being tired, or a strain, or a cold, or maybe age.  Or is it coming on? When it hits though, after the body audit and the checking, then I know he's back.  There are names for it: episode; incident; attack; but I think of him as Marcel.  When Marcel has called it's both annoying and frightening, is the visit coming on, in progress, or over?  How long will this one take to leave? What will I do?  What work-arounds, excuses, changes might be needed?  Dr Deb, the neurological specialist, one of New Zealand's experts, told me there may be no reason for Marcel to make a serious visit ever again, and he hasn't in well over 4 years, she didn't exactly say that, what she said was eat well, sleep well, get some exercise, manage your stress and there may never be another attack ever. Others have lived their lives with only minor episodes.

But Marcel is still around, in the shadows even if he doesn't come out. He has talked to the insurance companies and told them he might get me, so they don't like me and don't want my money.  Occasionally I get a pins and needles feeling on my head, or in my arm, always on the right, and I get worried, worst case; I feel a little numb for a few days, or weak on the right, or I drop things or I limp.  But it's not been serious for a very long time.

Oftentimes I need to sleep more.  But that and eating well and walking a bit is all right.  It hasn't affected my work since the first visit.  I do get tired, but that may not be his fault.

Most people never see Marcel, I've always been clumsy and I've only known him for 5 years.  And really I'm very lucky, I'm not progressing with Marcel, I'm something called relapsing remitting.  Marcel has visited and left.   Many people think he's not real as they've never met him and never seen him with anyone.  The first time I was paralysed all down my right side.  I couldn't walk properly or stand, or shower, or write.  Marcel or MarSel (closer to his real name) hit me for three weeks very hard.  Then I met Dr Deb, and we took blood from my spine and I had an MRI and she said, "There's no doubt in my mind, this is MS".  Maybe he came because of the stress of the quakes, as no one in my family has met him, so physical and emotional stress may have been his first beacon. That's how I met Marcel, but I think sometimes he's there somewhere in the background, wanting to hit me, but has kept his distance for 4 plus years.   I am lucky, he's like an earthquake or a robber, or a plague who comes like a curse in the night. And he's not a tumour or cancer so I've always felt blessed that it wasn't worse. 

He mainly visits women, well 75% of his friends are female.  He loves people from the south, so if you live in Kerikeri you're very unlikely to meet him, but Invercargill or Dunedin you will know one of the people he stalks. 

I wish insurance people would understand  Marcel isn't a death nell, for me and for many others he knows, but like a sometimes reoccurring cold.  And although I know him, my mind is quick, and according to Dr Deb I am possibly unlikely to be affected again.  Well 'maybe' minor things.  Those affected when they are younger are the classic cases. And some people are progressing and they need our love, our understanding and donations to the neurological researchers (who really are world leading in NZ).

The Chinese say (Tao Te Ching chapter 71) that no disease equals a short life, one disease a long life, and that is about if you know you have something you can watch it and yourself, but if you don't know you could just be struck down.

I watch what I eat, I sleep more, I walk a lot and I listen to my body now.

Poetry leaves me cold - Rev JS Fisher 1933 - 2007

 Poetry leaves me cold.  

It doesn’t touch my soul. 

It bores me beyond my interest.

I read and go cold trying to milk meaning from the crafted text.  

And I think of my father who loved TS Eliot, and ee cummings and would delight in reading and sometimes recording his favourite lines….. so his ordained voice made the sounds break away and fly from the stuffy pages, 

and resonate as observations and truth lit his world with ideas and themes and bold words that made him feel that he had known and connected with the writer  and his comrades who shared a reaction to the artefacts …. That now just sit on a page or screen and leaves me cold and bored.

I wonder what ever happened to the sparks and insights he breathed life into.  Did they die with him, or do they still resonate in the holy spaces where he first found them….. 

Touching other unsuspecting inhabitants of his discoveries.

Or are the words all cold.

Lost discoveries, embers that no longer smoke but lie in my memory.

Times and moments of discovery again covered up to be unearthed and shared by others who cannot read the poems as he did, and now convey sadness and absence of the voice and mind that made them dance and sing.

Or is the fire out. Did they go out with him?  

Poetry leaves me cold.

Through another looking glass- another new normal.

This is living in the science fiction novels and stories. We’re akin to Blade Runner and in a similar feel to Soilent Green, the village of the Damned and War of the Worlds.  We’re there.  We’re in that fabled point where things have changed forever.  #ClimateBreakdown
-@SamNZed 5 January 2020

When you’ve had one new Normal, you don’t expect a second.

Earthquakes. 13,000 of them and then we found the emergence of an overgrown rural town where grudges were served cold through the city, and the predominant new money/ Two lounges /SUV/huge heat pump set held the line against any change to how they think things were done in a mythical history-less past.

Many worked from home.  It saved money and for most it was healthier. There were many agencies which just tried to work harder so they felt important.

But with the old city gone, and even though polls showed Don&Doreen Chch wanted parks and leisure spaces the Council developers and the Govt wanted to take things as close to 1980 as they could and replace the failed deserted central city that no one local wanted to visit, with a tilt slab concrete 2010 central city.  That is retail spaces, offices, council SuperTeam drop in kiosks and other economic suicide measures.

As a sort of Eastern Euro Communist tribute-city  - Christchurch is punching above its weight.

So part of the ‘resilience’ weirdness the idea was to create things that while they didn’t work then they will now if they’re in concrete caves with big bits of glass at the front.

So we build offices and make all public servants work in them. We cajole and annoy lawyers and other office dwellers back into the central white elephant ignoring the growing pungent smells of stale misplaced smugness.

The most exciting things after the quakes started was working from home, finding new shops, and the gap filler art work installations. And the locally produced You Tube videos!  You can’t forget The pallet pavilion of stacked wood like a castle where you could buy food, read, sometimes see a performance or art exhibition.

And the food in caravans popping up!  Coffee, different types of food.
Container shops!

There were some exciting things in Christchurch.

But here’s the thing-  much of the new Exciting stuff was totally destroyed in an unseemly push back to the past.  Christchurch - You loved the gap filler but it’s over, you liked the exiting food proliferating but we’d rather capture any money here and close this down.

And that silly idea of flexible work styles.....

And now pandemic.

Most of the digital gains as our economy shifts, the leg ups we can get from our earthquake and now our lockdown days revealed are being reversed as fast as possible.

We learnt a lot over the COVID lockdown about office work.  Working at home was, for many efficient. It was cheaper.  It was safer.

We’re already pretty much back where we were.  We’re in Wellington central to feed the already probably doomed retailers. They are great people doing their best, but I think it’s terminal.

As an aside -  Who’d have thought sending people to town to spend their money would be believed to be strong enough to counter the fourth industrial revolution, recently hastened by COVID lockdown? We can wait and see if the Canute strategy has enough No8 wire to succeed.

The only way to have the nirvana central city the Wellington and Auckland councils want is to start converting Central retail into accommodation, and assisting businesses into a comfortable back paddock to die. Auckland has already been doing a great job here.

We’ll click our heels and wake up in 2019.

But we’re on our own.

And here’s the thing.

Two years.

The time taken to test and commercialise a vaccine, the inability of the USA to govern themselves and the poverty of the large, emerging economies, peppered with border chaos in Africa mean this may go on till EITHER NZ is bullied into bursting our bubble and sacrificing 20% of our population before we have a cure, OR it will take two years.  Of course there may be another pandemic on the shoulders of the other.
Snow is a fantastic opportunity to not run to the past.  To say ... do we all need to work in shops or offices? Full time?  8 till 6?

Say goodbye to Wellington

Goodbye and yeah nah to you Wellington. 

Now away across a friendly northern shore, I don’t miss the wind, the self importance we co-possessed, the noise and the queues to be noticed. 

Or your smug, rank manufactured smell of relevance. 

The odour that always blows out to sea, 

And is lost forever, except in anecdotes, and replaced instead by still bigger egos and new currency, for now and trading upward.

But then there were the smells of the coffee and arty boho corners, the favourite spots for lunch or Java …. the theatre opportunities, the possibilities of strangers…. The young hospo staff: our smart future, educated with potential and hope and minimum wages.

Wellington you promised so much, but delivered only fleeting notes of the soundtrack I chased.

Were you just a young triers’ waiting room, where we struggled earnestly until we were sorted and spat out?  

Were a few of us, was I, really not in synch, not the right grade, or was never really able to play the game?

Is your Capital - which longs for imagined good days which allow you not to be beaten, they say, - just a place where your dreams can realise themselves grotesquely on the CV, and smear your ever so important personal brand? 

Or is it really the true heart of what was Godzone - noble, fair, conquering, governing, misplaced, and where locals are strangers?

But Goodbye and seeya - Wellington you’ve shown me all your warm balmy scripts, from politics oozing through the slate, cruising in Cuba, pinball 3 am, parties where we strove and tried hard to have fun, no matter how apart we felt.  ….and then, later parties where no one even cared anymore, just being there and seen, the liaisons, rumours, personal disasters, the wins.  

The ache of irrelevance.

We’d need all the editing in China, the splicing of transcendent moments where it did all come together spectacularly and beautifully, and we did touch the stars and a few people saw me touch the light briefly. But then I fell, my light unwanted.

 

It’s over.  And there were Too few moments in a town where the artistically gifted, watch the children play.  

And however warm, windy, tantilising, I wasn’t for you, not you for me, fun but not my sickly breakfast condiment, but an ex home which is pining for the fjords, as the poets said.

Yeah nah.