Hard Questions - Hard Answers.

Bodies On The Line: Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

NATIONAL’S PAUL GOLDSMITH has become the target of considerable criticism for his stance on the impact of colonisation on Maori. Most particularly, he has been attacked for expressing the view that “on balance” the legacy of colonisation must be adjudged positive. Goldsmith’s explicitly historical perspective is, necessarily, a broad one. Politically-speaking, however, his opinions are downright incendiary. If he didn’t anticipate the fierce reaction his words were bound to provoke, then much of the National Party’s tone-deafness on Maori-Pakeha relations is explained.

Certainly, it is hard to fathom how National could have been part of the general political discourse in Aotearoa-New Zealand without grasping the centrality of colonisation to the current debate about the future shape of this country’s institutions. How could the party have missed the way in which the colonisation of Aotearoa-New Zealand has come to play the same role here as slavery plays in the race-driven ideological conflicts currently convulsing the United States?

Is National genuinely unaware of just how many of the ills currently afflicting Maori are attributed to the impact of colonisation? Every set of negative statistics: from consistently low levels of educational attainment, to the grossly disproportionate number of Maori in Aotearoa-New Zealand’s prisons; the whole sad saga of a people’s on-going under-performance has been laid unhesitatingly – and with undeniable justification – at the door of colonisation. How can the country’s largest political party not know this?

Part of the answer, perhaps, lies in the common misconception that “colonisation” is a word to be conjugated exclusively in the past tense. That it relates only to long-dead statesmen wearing wing-collars and staring out at us stiffly from the black-and-white plates reproduced in history books. Something that happened long ago. Something done and dusted. Something about which it is possible (and permissible) for Opposition National MPs to offer considered historical judgements.

Well, it’s not – and it really is astonishing that Paul Goldsmith and his colleagues could possibly believe that it is. The clearing of Bastion Point didn’t happen in the Nineteenth Century, it happened just 43 years ago, in 1978. That’s well within the lifetime of the Baby Boomers – and even of some Generation Xers. Paul Goldsmith, for example, would have been a 7-year-old the last time a pugnacious National Party prime minister staged a full-scale demonstration of the political, legal and military power of the New Zealand colonial state – for the benefit of tangata whenua.

It was that same prime minister, Rob Muldoon, who, just three years later, communicated an equally unmistakeable message to his core supporters – i.e. that the rights of people of colour counted for much less than the rights of White Rugby supporters living in Aotearoa-New Zealand and Apartheid-era South Africa. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

Could it be, they wondered, that fighting for South African Blacks cost them nothing, except a few bruises and a few nights in jail (for which they could claim bragging rights for the next 40 years!) while fighting for the lost lands, language and dignity of the original Maori inhabitants of Aotearoa could end up costing them everything that 140 years of colonisation had bequeathed Pakeha?

That was a hard question – and only a few of the Springbok Tour protesters were willing to give Maori an honest answer.

Forty years later, exactly the same question is being put to all Pakeha – with even greater force. More importantly, it is not just Maori doing the asking. Two generations after the Tour, the same challenges that were once laid at the feet of a relatively small group of left-wing activists are being laid down for the whole nation of Aotearoa-New Zealand to pick up. The children and grandchildren of those Springbok Tour protesters are looking at their elders with a steadfast gaze. As if to say: “It’s time.”

And still, apparently, Paul Goldsmith and his National Party colleagues, do not get it.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery in North America, can help them. These words are from his second inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1865:

Fondly do we hope ─ fervently do we pray ─ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.

Paul Goldsmith appears to believe Maori are in some way indebted to Pakeha. In truth, it’s the other way ‘round.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 June 2021.

Redefining Democracy.

The Dead Hand Of Privilege: To be white, male, heterosexual, well-educated, and – of course – wealthy, is to enjoy a high degree of “privilege” in a culture where such distinctions are generally esteemed. Formal democratic equality, it is asserted, actually serves to mask this privilege and, by doing so, permits the disproportionate power conferred upon its possessors’ to be wielded with, if not impunity, then without serious challenge.

DEMOCRACY – WHO NEEDS IT? Fewer and fewer people, both at home and abroad, seem as willing as previous generations to “defend democracy”. The term itself: once generally understood as a system of government dedicated to personal liberty, the inviolability of private property, equality before the law, and majority rule; has acquired a bewildering complexity. What you were born, and where, now pose a serious challenge to democracy’s universalist claims. To be a human-being is no longer enough.

There is an irony here. The rise of democracy – to the point of becoming the ultimate constitutional goal and the accepted measure of civilised government – has for the past three centuries been driven by the steady expansion of what it means to be a human-being. If a human-being may be defined, politically, as a person whose expressed opinion is accorded a determinative influence, then their numbers have indeed been growing steadily.

Males in possession of land and/or demonstrable martial prowess were the original political humans, to whose numbers were soon added males conspicuously successful in trade and commerce. For centuries, these barons and burghers had the game pretty much to themselves. It required an epochal shift: from feudalism to capitalism; to open the ranks of political humanity to middle-class males.

Democracy was the lever by which these middle-class males gained entry to the places where decisions are made. The problem with the core principles of liberty, equality and solidarity, however, is that they are dangerously extendable. The same arguments that secured political rights for the middle classes could be mounted on behalf of the working classes. Even more worryingly, they could be extended from males to females; from the old to the young; from persons of your colour, to persons of all colours.

When Abraham Lincoln so magisterially distilled the essence of democracy to: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”; the “people” he had in mind were white (and just possibly black) American males. Not included were American women of any colour, Native Americans or “Orientals”. For the next 160 years, American history would be driven by the efforts of those excluded from the definition of “the people” to be recognised as fully human beings.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the moral transgression required to drive people out of the human definition once it has been claimed and/or bestowed. The terrifying history of the Jim Crow South not only bears testimony to the level of harm that must be inflicted to enforce exclusion from the political community, but also to the disfiguring spiritual violence those responsible for such exclusion are required to inflict upon themselves. The “strange fruit” of the South describes not just the dangling bodies of lynched African Americans, but the dead eyes of the White killers who watched them die.

Recall, too, the extraordinary violence inflicted upon the Suffragettes by the Liberal Government of Herbert Asquith in the years immediately preceding World War I. The forced feeding of female hunger-strikers was widely condemned as a form of politically-inspired torture. And all because an insufficient number of British parliamentarians were willing to include women within the definition of the politically human.

No such blots appear on New Zealand’s democratic escutcheon. Indeed, this country boasts one of the longest continuously operating democratic political systems on earth. Since 1867 New Zealand’s parliament has reserved seats for the country’s indigenous population. In 1879, it granted full “manhood suffrage”. In 1893 the franchise was extended to include women. In 1969, the “voting age” was lowered from 21 to 20 years-of-age. Eighteen-year-olds were enfranchised in 1974. There is even a reasonable chance that at some point in the next decade the voting age will be lowered to 16 years. New Zealand is the only self-governing country that can boast an uninterrupted period of democratic government, based on universal suffrage, lasting 128 years. Certainly, none of our “Five Eyes Partners” can say as much!

With this history, one could be forgiven for assuming that faith in democracy would be stronger in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. There are, however, worrying signs that New Zealand’s long democratic history has produced a sense of complacency among its citizens.

For decades, New Zealanders were famed for turning out to vote in record numbers. In the 1984 snap general election, for example, a record-breaking 93.7 percent of those registered to vote cast a ballot. In the intervening three decades, however, turnout has declined, falling to just 74.2 percent in 2011. Interestingly, the extraordinary “Covid Election” of 2020 registered a sharp improvement in turnout. At 82.5 percent, it was the highest since 1999.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Maori New Zealanders evince considerably less faith in democracy than their Pakeha compatriots. Certainly it is understandable why an indigenous people comprising only 16 percent of the total population might find reasons for looking at the principle of majority rule through narrowed eyes. The so-called “tyranny of the majority” has long been cited as one of the downsides of the democratic system of government. For an indigenous culture locked into permanent minority status, the dangers of uncompromising majoritarianism loom large.

Joining these Maori sceptics of democracy are those who are simply unwilling to accept formal political equality as the be-all and end-all of human rights. These are the people who enjoy quoting the Nineteenth Century French writer, Anatole France, who famously declared that: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Or, as George Orwell slyly puts it in his political fable, Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

To be white, male, heterosexual, well-educated, and – of course – wealthy, is to enjoy a high degree of “privilege” in a culture where such distinctions are generally esteemed. Formal democratic equality, it is asserted, actually serves to mask this privilege and, by doing so, permits the disproportionate power conferred upon its possessors’ to be wielded with, if not impunity, then without serious challenge.

In its essence, this argument rejects the proposition that in a country like New Zealand all human-beings possess equal determinative influence. In effect, the possessors of privilege are said to enjoy super-human status. In short, they have the power to put their thumb on the scales of social justice, and secure for themselves an unfair share of society’s goods and services.

Democracy, as it is generally understood, is dismissed as a sham. Only when the privileges of these “supermen” are stripped from them can those who suffer from the deficiencies such inequity imposes: women, Maori, LGBTQI, the disabled; hope to enjoy the equal determinative influence they are entitled to as fully human beings.

By this reckoning, simply being human is no longer enough. True democracy cannot exist where privilege goes unchallenged and unchecked. It can only flourish where no one has to sleep under a bridge, beg in the streets, or steal bread. Where rape is unthinkable, and racism no more than an evil memory from a bitter past.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 3 May 2021.

Leaders Without Power

The Illusions Of Power: Does Jacinda Ardern, like Abraham Lincoln, wake in the dark watches of the night still enveloped in the terrors of life-and-death decision-making? Maybe – maybe not. She’s a twenty-first century prime minister, not so susceptible, perhaps, to the deep religious feeling and romanticism that was such a feature of nineteenth century life. But she is also human and therefore prey to what dreams may come, unbidden, to the sleeping mind.

THE PRESIDENT’S DREAM was always the same. It was dark, barely enough light for him to see that he was in the middle of a mighty river. The boat he was standing in had no oars, no sail and no rudder. It was borne forward by the power of the river’s fearsome currents. The President had no means of determining his craft’s course. The banks on either side were dim shapes in the darkness. He was alone – at the river’s mercy.

Abraham Lincoln related this recurring dream to his closest confidants on more than one occasion. It would come to him at those moments in his presidency (1860-1865) when events were driving the United States inexorably towards a crucial moment of decision. Since he was president during the blood-soaked years of the American Civil War, these usually took the form of great and decisive battles. The dream, he said, came to him in the summer of 1863 – just days before the tide-turning Battle of Gettysburg.

Lincoln’s recurring dream is a powerful evocation of the political leader’s lonely and at times terrifying responsibility. Those of us who are spared the agonies of life-and-death decision-making all-too-easily assume that the people in charge are just that – in charge. We imagine them issuing their commands and reality dutifully complying. How else could we think it right and proper to blame our politicians when things go wrong? They told us they would fix the problems by which our world is beset, and yet the problems remain. Who else should we blame?

The true experience of leadership, however, as Lincoln’s dream makes clear, could not be further from the average voter’s fanciful notions of command and control. So many things are happening at once that forming a clear picture of where you are and what you should be doing is impossible. If you ever possessed the means of driving and steering the situation you are in they have long since been lost. All you can feel beneath you is the sheer, ungovernable power of the events carrying you forward. All you can do is peer blindly into the failing light and do your best to remain upright.

The Coalition Government’s “document dump” of two Fridays ago bears out the metaphorical truth of Lincoln’s recurring dream. Contained within its more than 2,000 pages is the story of how New Zealand’s Prime Minister, her senior Cabinet colleagues and the country’s leading civil servants grappled with the smoke and fog of the unfolding Covid-19 Pandemic.

The picture that emerges is one of confusion bordering on panic; decision-making undertaken in extreme haste and with nothing like enough reliable information. It depicts a system that barely coped and institutions that came perilously close to failing.

But it is also a story of unflagging human dedication and prodigious energy. A case-study of the curious magic that emerges from sustained collective effort on others’ behalf. Most of all, however, it’s the story of a handful of people who absolutely had to keep their footing and who did not fall. Almost as if the impersonal currents propelling them forward sensed their courage and kept the boat steady.

Does Jacinda Ardern, like Abraham Lincoln, wake in the dark watches of the night still enveloped in the terrors of life-and-death decision-making? Maybe – maybe not. She’s a twenty-first century prime minister, not so susceptible, perhaps, to the deep religious feeling and romanticism that was such a feature of nineteenth century life. But she is also human and therefore prey to what dreams may come, unbidden, to the sleeping mind.

Like Lincoln’s last dream. To his wife, Mary, he described being alone in a White House grown uncharacteristically still and quiet. He moved through the mansion’s brightly-lit but empty rooms towards the sound of distant sobbing. Finally, in the East Room, he came upon a corpse, lying upon a catafalque and guarded by Union soldiers. Lincoln heard himself asking: “Who is dead in the White House?” One of soldiers made reply: “The President – killed by an assassin!” A heart-wrenching wail of sorrow rose from the gathered mourners.

In the days that remained before his visit to Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln would be killed by an assassin, the President was haunted by this grim presentiment of his death. He could not, however, avoid his fate. Leaders never can.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 May 2020.

Still Waiting For American Democracy.

Unfinished Republic: Though the United States' crimes against democracy are legion, most Americans are blissfully unaware of them. The brutal realities of American life: the officially sanctioned violence; the refusal to hold racists accountable for their actions; the seemingly endless tragedy of African-American suffering; of which White America is the ever-resourceful author; are routinely disremembered. While the democratic ambitions of Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson remain the stuff of school-children’s class projects to this day. (Image by Filip Bunkens.)

“IT’S COMING TO America first, the cradle of the best and the worst.” Writes Leonard Cohen in his classic 1992 anthem Democracy. As is so often the case with Cohen’s lyrics, Democracy is jam-packed with meaning. That he writes about democracy as something that has yet to happen is only the first of the song’s many challenges. The second – and certainly the most contentious – is that when (or should that be “if”?) the people do finally seize power, it will be on American soil.

Most Americans would, of course, take strong exception to the claim that the United States has been anything other than a democracy since 4 July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence avowed that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those who, not unreasonably, object that the Declaration’s “all men” excluded women, slaves, and the continent’s indigenous peoples, will be invited to consider another great document of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”. Especially its concluding pledge that “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

So enamoured were enfranchised Americans with their “government of the people” that just 53 years after Lincoln’s famous speech, his successor in the White House, President Woodrow Wilson, was urging his fellow citizens to enter the First World War to “make the world safe for democracy”.

It is one of History’s many ironies that the same president who proclaimed America’s determination to establish democracy abroad, unleashed an unrelenting assault on American citizen’s civil liberties at home. Reducing the Bill of Rights to confetti, the Sedition and Espionage Acts made it a crime to oppose – or even question – the USA’s participation in the War.

The job of “selling” that war to the American people fell to a young “progressive” journalist, George Creel. His formidable “Committee on Public Information” pioneered propaganda and public relations techniques that would become increasingly familiar to humanity as the Twentieth Century unfolded. To the delight of America’s ruling elites, the CPI demonstrated just how easily “the people’s” consent could be manufactured.

The most glaring and tragic discrepancy between America’s loftily proclaimed ideals and the actual beliefs and behaviour of her citizens was revealed in the dreadful “Red Summer” of 1919.

Hoping that their commitment to the cause of establishing democracy abroad would finally secure for them the long-promised blessings of democracy at home, African-Americans signed-up in their thousands for military service in France. Returning home after the Armistice, however, in the winter and spring of 1918-19, these Black soldiers became instant targets for angry mobs of White Americans, outraged and terrified in equal measure by the very thought of Black Americans in arms. Between June and August 1919, murderous race riots flared in 25 American cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead and many thousands homeless.

Of the awful deeds of his fellow citizens: the beatings, shootings, lynchings, and destruction by fire of unprotected Black neighbourhoods, churches and businesses; the eloquent and visionary President Wilson, hailed by millions as the world’s saviour when he arrived in Paris for the peace talks, said not one word.

Though these horrors occurred barely 100 years ago in the United States, most Americans are blissfully unaware of them. The brutal realities of American life: the officially sanctioned violence; the refusal to hold racists accountable for their actions; the seemingly endless tragedy of African-American suffering; of which White America is the ever-resourceful author; are routinely disremembered. While the democratic ambitions of Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson remain the stuff of school-children’s class projects to this day.

Small wonder, then, that Cohen celebrates America’s contradictions by admitting that “I love the country, but can’t stand the scene”. In Democracy’s final lines, Cohen – ever the prophet – even anticipates the emergence of those disillusioned working-class Americans who, no longer identifying with either the Left or the Right, immure themselves in an increasingly decrepit domesticity, desperate for a saviour to emerge from “that hopeless little screen”.

Never quitting, because “like those garbage bags that time cannot decay” they’re stubborn. Choked with tears, but refusing to let go of the hope that, one day:

“Democracy is coming to the U. S. A.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 January 2020.

Drawing Together, Not Breaking Away.

The Birth Of A Nation: On 6 February, New Zealanders celebrate not a severance of political ties, but their creation. The Treaty of Waitangi binds together two distinct entities: the indigenous people of New Zealand and the British Crown. It is a statement of undertakings and obligations: a drawing together, not a breaking away.

 

THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, in 1787, was roughly the size of Whanganui. Its muddy streets, ill-lit and reeking of horse dung, had for five months been thronged by representatives of the thirteen former colonies of King George III. Bewigged gentlemen in swallow-tail coats and silk stockings had laboured through a sweltering summer and on into the milder airs of Autumn to crown their successful war against the British with a constitution to unite the fractious states of America.

 

There is story, probably apocryphal, but beloved by Americans nonetheless, that one of the principal framers of the American constitution, Benjamin Franklin, upon emerging from the final session of the Convention on 27 September 1787, was accosted by a cluster of his fellow citizens demanding to know whether, after all that talking, Americans had been given a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s reply was typically terse – and telling. Pausing amidst the jostling spectators, he answered: “A republic – if you can keep it.”

 

That day marks the true birth of the United States of America. It is not, however, the day upon which Americans celebrate their nationhood. America’s national day is the fourth of July – the day when, in 1776, the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain.

 

It is the promises of that declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson: his ringing sentences about all men being created equal; possessing “certain unalienable rights”; specifically, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; that they remember and celebrate. The complicated machinery of their own self-government, the document which begins: “We the People” is honoured, but not with marching bands and fireworks.

 

How different America’s Independence Day is from our own Waitangi Day.

 

On 6 February, New Zealanders celebrate not a severance of political ties, but their creation. The Treaty of Waitangi binds together two distinct entities: the indigenous people of New Zealand and the British Crown. It is a statement of undertakings and obligations: a drawing together, not a breaking away.

 

The Treaty offered the descendants of its signatories’ only the roughest sketch of what a future New Zealand constitution might look like. A document more at odds with the universal pretentions of the American Declaration of Independence could hardly be imagined.

 

It is the contractual nature of the Treaty: the multiple opportunities for conjecture and dispute that it offers each successive generation; which has determined the manner in which New Zealanders mark the birth of their nation. It is the reason why, year after year, our political leaders are drawn back to the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.

 

Those who argue that New Zealanders, like Americans, should celebrate their national day with marching bands, fireworks and other noisy displays of chauvinistic self-congratulation, misunderstand Waitangi Day fundamentally. In moral terms, New Zealand is not an accomplished fact, but an evolving proposition. A proposition concerning which the two parties which came together on 6 February 1840 – the Crown and tangata whenua – still have a lot to say. That’s why Waitangi Day continues to be an argument-in-progress – rather than a celebration.

 

It is also why the Prime Minister’s absence from this year’s celebrations at Waitangi is so regrettable. Certainly, communications from Te Tii Marae were confused and disrespectful, but Bill English did not need to draw attention to their authors’ foolishness. He could, instead, have made a virtue of the Marae authority’s expectations of silence.

 

By characterising Waitangi Day as an occasion for the Crown to listen rather than speak, he could have affirmed the unique historical experiment which the Treaty represents. The moot that commenced at Waitangi 177 years ago: Can tangata whenua and the Crown construct a nation in which the claims of the former are not obliterated by the greed of the latter?

 

"A republic, if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin on the US Constitution.

 

It is a question that America’s founding fathers did not trouble themselves to either ask or answer. The only reference to the indigenous inhabitants of North America in Jefferson’s declaration describes them as “merciless Indian savages”. The United States Constitution, itself, in defiance of the egalitarian promises of 1776, took care to stipulate that, for the purposes of determining the states’ population, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person.

 

In 1863, as the argument over the Treaty’s meaning turned bloody in New Zealand, President Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.

 

“Now we are engaged”, he continued, “in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

 

The United States endured – just. But, in the century-and-a-half since the Civil War, Lincoln’s proposition has been tested repeatedly.

 

Waitangi Day reminds us that our own proposition of nationhood is still to be resolved.

 

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

 

The Treaty, if we’re prepared to honour it.

 

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday 7 February 2017.

Interview With A President

"That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 

MIDNIGHT IN WASHINGTON. A chill autumn wind, laced with rain, sweeps across the reflecting pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. The water is agitated: the reflection of the Washington Monument’s towering obelisk fluid and fragmentary. The National Mall has wrapped the darkness of this bleak November night tightly around itself like a comforter.

 

Two figures – a young man and a young woman – emerge from the shadows and begin to climb the steps leading up to the temple of the Republic’s tutelary deity. As they mount the memorial’s broad staircase the great seated statue of Abraham Lincoln is gradually revealed behind its screen the towering Doric columns.

 

The figure is artfully lit. The Colorado marble blazes like white fire, transforming the giant sculpture’s gaunt countenance into a chiselled battlefield of darkness and light. The rail-splitter-turned-president’s gnarled hands grasp the arms of his mighty seat as if straining to pull the lanky body to its feet. As if, above the wailing of the wind, it hears again the distant rumble of enemy guns, the staccato drumbeat of civil strife.

 

The young couple stare up at the silent statuary. Hugging each other for warmth. Silent in the presence of the author of the Gettysburg Address, the Great Emancipator, the Union’s martyred saviour. Together, they recite the words incised into the rear wall of the temple:

 

IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

 

“I wonder what he would say, if he was here”, whispers the young woman. “I wonder how he’d react to President Trump.”

 

A brittle sound, like uncrumpling cellophane, sends the couple reeling back in fright. Impossibly, the massive, frock-coated figure has become mobile. It bends forward, head lowered, eyes alive, a faint smile playing about its lips.

 

“Well, Miss, I reckon I’d ask him what in the name of the Good Lord he believes himself to be doing to my Republican Party.”

 

“What would you say to the people who voted for him?” The young man struggled to maintain eye contact with the giant stone president.

 

“I would tell them that those who attempt to deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

 

“And those of us who voted against him, Mr President, what should we do.”

 

The giant leaned back in his chair and stroked his marble chin.

 

“I seem to recall saying once that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. If I were in your shoes, Miss, I reckon I’d allow Friend Trump a few more yards of rope.”

 

“But the man’s such a fool and his followers are so loathsome!” The young woman objected.

 

“Maybe so, Miss, maybe so. But they are also you’re fellow Americans. If they are disposed, as you say, to follow a fool, then it is surely pertinent to ask what made them so ill-disposed to follow those who delight in calling themselves wise? And if they are loathsome, who made them so?”

 

“Those are fair questions, Mr President, but we are fearful of what this man may do to the United States, to its people, it’s institutions.”

 

The great face settled into something like its usual contours. The eyes once again hooded, the mouth grimly set.

 

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it. Or, at least, that, in my grimmer moments, was what I used to say. But through four long years of the most awful slaughter, I came to realise how ruinous the fall of a divided house can be. My belief, now, is that those who cry ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!’, should be required to take up residence in the ruins. Democracy is a fragile thing, my young friends, do not be too quick to condemn its fruits. Those produced by just about every other form of human government are much, much, worse.”

 

“But is this truly democracy, Mr President?”

 

The great figure seemed to stiffen.

 

“You know I sat on a train once, pen in hand, mulling over how best to sum up what so many young men were dying to preserve. At the time I didn’t think that much of my conclusions, but it has pleased me to see how kindly the passing years have received the final words of my address.”

 

The wind outside the temple roared and bellowed. Autumn leaves whirled between the columns. The young couple shivered – even as the statue froze into its accustomed pose. A gravelly whisper, mingled with the wind, ran around the stone walls of the Lincoln Memorial. The young couple, recognising the long dead president’s words, added their own living voices to his fading peroration.

 

“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

 

This short story was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 13 November 2016.

Judging Our Leaders By What They Mean To Say.

Right Place, Right Time, Right People: Andrew Little earned a standing ovation from Green Party members for his speech to their AGM, held in Lincoln over Queens's Birthday Weekend. (4-6/6/16) He was followed by the Greens' Co-Leader, James Shaw, who delivered the best speech of his career. Wouldn't it be nice if our political leaders were judged by these considered and deliberate statements of their political intent, rather than by the "Gotcha!" journalism of today's news media?

 

HOW DIFFERENT politics would be if our political leaders were judged solely by the force of their public speeches. Fanciful though it may sound to twenty-first century ears, a good or bad speech could make or break the politicians of yesteryear. It’s why such political giants as Winston Churchill devoted so many hours to perfecting the wording and delivery of their public utterances. It’s why Abraham Lincoln will forever be associated with the 266 words he penned on the train to Gettysburg. Likewise, but in darker hues, can anyone imagine a successful Adolf Hitler without the extraordinary power of his public oratory?

 

Had these giants of yesteryear been subject to the unending and intimate scrutiny of today’s political leaders would they have succeeded? Would Churchill be remembered for his inspiring wartime speeches, or for the screaming newspaper headline: “Lazy Winston’s silk undies!” Would the fledgling Republican Party have pinned their hopes on such a peculiar-looking candidate as Abe Lincoln? Or would their media advisors have ruled out broadcasting so odd a face into the living-rooms of America? Could Hitler have survived the Twitter flash: “Adolf and Geli! Keeping it all in the family?”

 

These were the questions that occurred to me as I watched first Andrew Little, and then James Shaw, address the Annual General Meeting of the Greens last Saturday afternoon. What if these two speeches were all that we, the voters, had with which to assess Labour and the Greens?

 

Both addresses were well constructed, well written, and surprisingly well delivered.

 

James Shaw, in particular, was visibly buoyed by the audience’s reception. Having heard him speak on a number of occasions, I was not expecting much more than an adequate presentation. Even with an excellent text to read from, Shaw’s past performances have typically involved considerably more wood than fire.  Not so on Saturday. As the audience – already heated by Little’s rousing address – stamped their feet and cheered, Shaw braced himself against their warm gusts of positivity and, digging deep, found that magic vocal register which at once reassures and inspires a political audience.

 

“I want to give New Zealand a better vision of the future”, Shaw effused. “It’s a future where, on your weekends away, you’ll go to sleep at night safely knowing that the same beach that you’re enjoying will be there for future generations, unthreatened by rising seas. In the morning, you’ll be woken by a dawn chorus from flocks of birds that once bordered on extinction. After lunch you’ll pack the family into your electric car and head safely home on uncongested roads while your kids count the containers on the freight trains running on the tracks alongside you. If you’ve got time, you might even stop by a river on your way home – and actually swim in it!”

 

So vociferous was the audience’s response that the static camera through which the event was being streamed live across the Internet actually began to shake on its tripod. It was only when I glanced at the meter displaying the number of people logged-on that I realised how very few we were. While I watched, it never registered more than 172 viewers.

 

Five hundred people, tops, would have absorbed the messages that Little and Shaw delivered live on Saturday afternoon. (Although, it must be admitted, tens-of-thousands more may have tuned-in to watch the one-to-two minute clips of the event broadcast on the six o’clock news.) What is undeniable, however, is that how the event should be framed, and which tiny fraction of the two speeches should be broadcast, were decisions over which neither Little nor Shaw exercised the slightest control.

 

Eighty years ago, Labour’s first Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, got over this problem by legislating for the live broadcasting of Parliament. Notwithstanding the near universal media hostility, Labour’s leaders were soon able to communicate directly with their supporters. Tens-of-thousands tuned-in to hear the parliamentary debates that changed a nation. Speeches were more important than ever.

 

The opening of Labour’s 1984 election campaign is the last time I can recall a party leader’s speech being broadcast live to the nation. David Lange’s minders were biting their nails, but the moment the big man opened his mouth it was clear their fears were groundless. Lange’s rhetoric, to paraphrase Labour’s campaign anthem, soon lifted them up where they belonged.

 

So, the next time you see Andrew Little rear like a startled draughthorse as the camera lights are switched on, and the microphones, like snakes’ heads, are thrust under his chin, ask yourself whether this is the sort of test which the great leaders of the past (or, indeed, any ordinary person) could have taken in their stride?

 

If our leaders are no longer judged by their speeches: but by their gaffes; in what way is our democracy improved?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 June 2016.

Raging Against The Dying American Light

E Pluribus Unum: Out of the four leading contenders for the Presidency, the American electorate and/or the Republican and Democratic Party "grandees" must contrive to winnow down the choice to just two (or three, if they fail) and then to just one. Not since the 1850s has the American Republic been confronted with an electorate less disposed to swing in behind the last man - or woman - standing.

 

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL election campaign is entering a critical stage. The results of the forthcoming primary elections in the big, delegate-rich, north-eastern states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania will go a long way towards determining which of the Republican and Democratic candidates square-off against each other in November.

 

For the Democratic challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, it’s make-or-break time. If he cannot inflict a series of decisive defeats upon front-runner Hillary Clinton in these three great Democratic Party redoubts, then his candidacy will be dead in the water and the Democratic Party Convention in late July will be the Clinton coronation her supporters have always predicted.

 

On the Republican Party side, the race could get a whole lot more complicated. A failure by Trump to come storming back in his home state, New York, may well end his hopes of winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination. If neither Trump, nor his principal rival, Texas senator Ted Cruz, has the numbers to win on the first ballot, then the world will be treated to a spectacle unwitnessed in twenty-first century American politics – a brokered convention.

 

Will the assembled Republican delegates, no longer pledged to dance with the candidate they came with, install Trump or Cruz anyway? Or, will they swing their support behind the allegedly “moderate” Governor of Ohio, John Kasich? The possibility that the candidate may turn out to be someone entirely unlooked for: someone “drafted” by the convention delegates themselves; cannot be discounted.

 

What is it that has produced these high levels of political volatility and uncertainty in American society? How has the usually elite-driven process of selecting a presidential candidate been transformed into this rowdy festival of unguided democracy?

 

Before answering that question, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the implications of the previous sentence.

 

Because whatever its critics may say about the American system, this year’s presidential race is proof that the great republic is still very much the creature of “We, the People of the United States.” Trump is selling populism; Cruz conservatism; Sanders idealism; and Clinton is retailing pragmatism. “Step right up!” their respective barkers shout: “You’ve paid your money – now make your choice!” And, in the lengthy and complex process of choosing, millions of Americans are demonstrating not only their ideological diversity, but also their unifying faith in the ongoing utility of the ballot-box.

 

Whether that ballot-box can any longer deliver a President equal to the challenge of representing the burgeoning diversity of the American electorate is the core question being posed by the 2016 campaign. Somehow, the populism, conservatism, idealism and pragmatism which have whipped the contest into its present state of inchoate frothiness must be settled and distilled: firstly into two candidates; and then, on 8 November, into a single individual.

 

The number of times this seemingly impossible task has actually been accomplished by the American electorate is impressive. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt managed to keep all four balls in the air, and so did Dwight Eisenhower. Lyndon Johnson did it in 1964, as did Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, and then again, even more emphatically, in 1984.

 

For all their eloquence and glamour, neither John F. Kennedy nor Barack Obama succeeded in triggering the sort of landslides granted to Johnson and Reagan. Bringing together the clamouring tribes of the American polity proved to be beyond both presidents. Although Kennedy’s assassination did engender a kind of unity – if only of shock and grief.

 

The current roilings of American politics: its vicious and uncompromising partisanship; the disquieting thought that many of the issues at stake may not be susceptible to resolution by simple majorities; have recalled for US historians the deadly politics of the decade immediately preceding the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.

 

The historic outcome of the presidential election of 1860, which saw Abraham Lincoln elected with just 39.8 percent of the popular vote, was made possible by a fatal split in the ranks of the Democratic Party. That such a split – this time in the ranks of the Republican Party – is being openly canvassed only adds to the sense of historical déjà vu. Should Trump’s clear plurality of the Republican primary vote be discounted by the machinations of party grandees, his supporters may not go quietly into that good night of political impotence.

 

A third party challenge by Trump could throw the 2016 Presidential Election to the Democratic Party in circumstances that call into question the legitimacy of its mandate. As in 1860, it will be race and the threat it poses to the status of White Americans, that threatens not only the coherence, but also the very survival of the American republic.

 

Tomorrow’s New York Primary is worth keeping an eye on.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 19 April 2016.

Expressions Of Hatred.

Bad Boy, R&B Entertainer, Chris Brown. While Brown’s lyrics continue to ooze sadistic violence and hate-filled contempt for women, any expressions of contrition and remorse (especially as the price of entry to this country) should not be taken seriously.

 

HATE, NO LESS THAN LOVE, seeks outward expression. The observation is neither new nor profound, but it’s true. Just consider how much happier and more productive the world would be if only love could be expressed. If hatred’s dreadful energy could be sealed-up completely within the haters themselves – transforming them into tiny black holes of negativity from which nothing hurtful or destructive could ever again escape.

 

Unfortunately, hatred is seldom satisfied with just one victim. Indeed, it is the corrosive effect on the individual human personality that makes hatred’s outward social expression so devastating. One has only to look at the photograph of Adam Lanza, the 20 year-old perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, to see how completely self-hatred can hollow a person out. Behind Lanza’s unnervingly wide eyes there is a terrifying absence. Hatred has created the perfect mechanism for killing 20 children and 7 adults, at point-blank range, with a Bushmaster .223 calibre XM15-E2S rifle.

 

Adam Lanza - A terrifying absence.

 

The expression on the face of Chris Mercer, the 26 year-old responsible for the deaths of 9 students at Umpqua Community College, in the US state of Oregon, just last week, is similarly blank. As if all that was worthwhile in this young man has been utterly consumed, leaving only an all-consuming rage against the god he blamed for his increasing isolation and despair. Neighbours describe Mercer “sitting alone in his room, in the dark, with this little light.” On 1 October 2015 even that little light went out. “Are you a Christian?” Mercer is alleged to have asked his victims – before pulling the trigger of his Taurus .40 calibre pistol.

 

What is it about the United States that generates these mass shootings? Is hatred hollowing-out a whole nation? Will the world soon be faced with an American gaze as blank and pitiless as Lanza’s and Mercer’s. Or, has the United States already reached that point? And, if it has, when did it happen – and why?

 

In her powerful historical anthem, My Country Tis Of Thy People You’re Dying, the Native American songwriter, Buffy Sainte-Marie, refers to “the genocide basic to this country’s birth” – boldly rendering the whole of US history as an exercise in externalised hatred. In similar vein, President Abraham Lincoln, in his second (1865) inaugural address, speculated that the still-raging civil war might represent God’s judgement on the morally flawed American republic:

 

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

 

Not that the massive death-toll of the American Civil War was enough to slake the thirst of American hatred. As the African-American chanteuse, Billie Holiday, revealed in her haunting 1939 recording of Abel Meeropol’s poem, Strange Fruit, that cup was far from empty:

 

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

 

Tragically, all the violence inflicted on African-American men has not prevented them from projecting their anger, hurt and self-loathing onto African-American women. Hatred has a way of sucking-up and kicking-down: celebrating the perpetrators’ violence by encouraging its victims to become victimisers themselves. Usually by unleashing pain and suffering on those even lower-down on the social pecking-order.

 

Chris Maurice Brown was born in Virginia, and raised in a household where this sort of male-on-female domestic violence was commonplace. Sadly, the 26 year-old R&B entertainer has gone on to replicate the dysfunctional behaviour he experienced as a child in his own adult relationships. Even more problematically, he routinely validates the objectification of women, along with the violence it both inspires and excuses, in his music. Brown’s critics have characterised many of the lyrics of his recordings as hate speech against women.

 

Convicted of assaulting his partner, Rihanna, in February 2009, Brown has found it increasingly difficult to perform overseas. His planned 2015 Australasian tour will proceed only if the Australian and New Zealand authorities grant him a special entry visa. New Zealand Campaigners against domestic violence are urging the National Government to keep him out.

 

It is difficult to fault their argument. While Brown’s lyrics continue to ooze sadistic violence and hate-filled contempt for women, any expressions of contrition and remorse (especially as the price of entry to this country) should not be taken seriously.

 

Love expresses itself in forgiveness. Hatred, by contrast, just doubles-down.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press Of Tuesday, 6 October 2015.

Government By (Some) Of The People.

Unanimity Not Required: Democracy, properly defined, is that system of government which allows those issues which perennially divide a people to be resolved by the will of (at best) a majority, or (at worst) a simple plurality of the responsible adult population.

 

“GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, by the people, for the people”. Abraham Lincoln’s supremely succinct definition of democracy has been repeated so often it has become a political cliché. And yet, even as he spoke it, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, 19 November 1863, his formulation was political humbug.

 

The American “people”, in whose name the battlefield at Gettysburg was being consecrated, was then engaged in a titanic civil war over what it meant to be an American. The democratic system of government enshrined in the US Constitution had grappled with this question for 87 years and it had failed. The “people” had been unable to agree, and so now the future of the American Republic was being decided by blood and iron.

 

Most nations are only held together by sentiment. A unifying national mythology; a common language and history; familiar and beloved institutions; the reflected glory of an all-conquering sports team: these are the things that bind a people together.

 

But there are many forces that tear a people apart. Class prejudice; religious bigotry; the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources; racism; overbearing courts and tribunals; brutal law enforcement; exactly who should, and who shouldn’t, be defined as the “peoples’” friends and enemies. Nations have gone to war with themselves over such matters.

 

Democracy, properly defined, is that system of government which allows those issues which perennially divide a people to be resolved by the will of (at best) a majority, or (at worst) a simple plurality of the responsible adult population. Obviously, the stronger the sentimental glue which binds a people together, the more willing those who find themselves in the minority will be to abide by the decisions of the majority. Equally obvious, however, is the need for democratic governments to honour the minority’s forbearance. No democracy can survive an elected government’s attempt to transform its transitory political dominance into a system of permanent rule. The composition of the majority must be permitted to change – or democracy has no meaning.

 

These musings upon the nature of democracy are inspired by a week of quite alarming revelations. New Zealanders have learned that, at the highest levels of their government,  there is evidence of an abiding scorn for the traditions and institutions that make for a cohesive society and functioning democracy.

 

The Report of the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security into the release of SIS information to Cameron Slater; Justice Chisholm’s Report into the conduct of the Minister of Justice, Judith Collins; the introduction, under urgency, of the Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill; taken together, all of these developments suggest a potentially dangerous loosening of the struts and ties that prevent our democracy from flying apart.

 

The impression conveyed is of a political class that sets little, if any, stock by the whole notion of democratic restraint. In some very high places, the idea that the minority’s forbearance should be honoured, or that linking the minority’s interests with the majority’s remains a crucial objective of democratic government, elicits only derisive guffaws. In its place has arisen an attitude towards the Government’s opponents which borders on the sociopathic. They are no longer regarded as fellow citizens with rights and opinions to be respected, but as enemies who must be destroyed.

 

That such short-sighted conduct leads only to destruction, both morally and practically, should be obvious to the meanest political intelligence. One need not be a biblical scholar to grasp the meaning of the verse: “For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The democratic politician understands that he, his party, and all those his party represents, will not be in power forever; and that it is, therefore, prudent to use only those political tactics that one’s own side could tolerate being used against itself.

 

But what if this tradition of democratic self-limitation were abandoned? What if a politician and/or a political party, refusing to accept that what comes around goes around, adopted a morally reckless, winning-is-everything strategy? Wouldn’t that mean that, very soon, political defeat entailed such monumental personal and institutional risk that it had to be prevented at any cost – including democracy itself?

 



Abraham Lincoln: His Gettysburg Address offered Americans "a new birth of freedom".

 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was not, in the end, about defining democracy, but about redefining the purpose of the United States in a way that gave the conflict’s appalling losses meaning and prevented another civil war from breaking out. It was about giving Americans a sense of citizenship so vast and inspiring it could dissolve the lure of self-interest and drown out the rancour of partisanship. A “new birth of freedom” is what Lincoln promised the American people – North and South.

 

Perhaps it is time that we New Zealanders “highly resolve” that our own nation should have the same.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 November 2014.

Wearing Racism

What's Wrong With This Picture? In this cartoon from the Presidential Election Campaign of 1860, Black Americans in Victorian finery are depicted as a warning of what will happen to America if the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, becomes President. Clothing as a status marker carries with it a powerful political charge when the person wearing it is assumed to occupy an inferior social position.

THERE WAS A VICIOUSNESS about the United States presidential campaign of 1860 that, with hindsight, seems horribly portentous. No matter how many times the South’s politicians did the political math the result was always the same. The newly-formed Republican Party was going to win a majority in the Electoral College, and its anti-slavery candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was going to become the sixteenth President of the United States.

 

In desperation the slave-owning South and their Democratic Party allies in the northern states threw everything they could at “Honest Abe”. Given the hugely divisive issue at the heart of the campaign, racial slurs abounded. Plucking the most tightly-wound string of the American electorate’s fiddle, Lincoln’s opponents accused him of believing in racial equality, miscegenation and plotting secretly to turn America into a mongrel state.

 

Naturally, the pro-slavery parties’ cartoonists had a field day. One of their favourite visual taunts was to portray black men and women sashaying around beneath “Honest Abe’s” approving gaze in the clothing of the upper-classes.

 

To racially prejudiced Americans (which in 1860 constituted the overwhelming majority of US citizens) the image of a black person decked out in the lavish Victorian finery of the period was profoundly offensive. It implied that Blacks might one day disport themselves in exactly the same symbols of economic success and superior social status as Whites.

 

The anti-Republican cartoons were also intended to warn voters about the Abolitionists’ determination to not only free the slaves, but also to have them declared United States citizens with exactly the same civil and political rights as their White brothers.

 

It must also be noted, however, that in addition to making White Americans angry these images of “gussied-up niggers” also made them laugh. The whole idea was so preposterous, so outlandish – like an ape in evening dress – that it could not be taken seriously. Racial equality was thus revealed as a wild abolitionist fantasy – proof of just how far beyond the pale the Republicans and their candidate had positioned themselves.

 

One hundred and twenty years later, proof of American racism’s cultural tenacity was clearly evident in the presidential election campaign of 1980. The Republican Party’s candidate, Ronald Reagan (whose party had, in one of History’s most poignant ironies, become the preferred party of the old Confederacy) launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, an annual event held on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.

 

The White Man's Candidate: Resplendent in his white shirt-sleeves, Ronald Reagan launches his 1980 Presidential Campaign on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where, just 16 years earlier, three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. American racism has a remarkable cultural tenacity.

 

America’s racists grasped the dark symbolism of Reagan’s choice immediately. He was identifying himself proudly and unmistakably as the White voters’ candidate. Not that they needed much convincing. Four years earlier, in his first run at the Republican presidential nomination, Reagan had introduced America to the person he dubbed the “Welfare Queen” – a Black American woman living on the South Side of Chicago:

 

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

 

Reagan’s words served a purpose identical to those 1860 cartoons’ depicting Black Americans dressed in upper-class attire. His Welfare Queen, with her “tax-free cash income” of over $150,000, played to exactly the same prejudices. The notion of a Black woman earning $150,000 was clearly preposterous: only the most egregious defrauding of the welfare system could possibly produce such a creature.

 

Reagan’s message was clear: Liberal America, by promoting racial equality and demanding that the equal rights of citizenship, won at such cost under Lincoln’s presidency, be enforced in every state of the union had created (at the ever-escalating expense of the long-suffering taxpayer) a feckless underclass of welfare cheats, drug addicts and gang-bangers. Reagan didn’t have to say that the people he was talking about were Black. The people who cheered him on knew that already.

 

Disreputable politics? Undoubtedly. But also highly effective – which is why so many politicians throughout the English-speaking world have tried so hard to emulate Reagan’s success.

 

Including some New Zealand politicians?

 

I would certainly like to think not. The idea that there might be some Pakeha politicians who, without resorting to the derogatory terms of our not-too-distant racist past, and almost certainly without reflecting on how their words were likely to be misinterpreted, might nevertheless call attention to the way a non-Pakeha person was dressed, and to how much money they might have spent on their ensemble – is a very troubling one.

 

To the minds of some undoubtedly oversensitive wee sausages those 1860 cartoons might be recalled, along with Ronald Reagan’s quip about welfare queens.

 

Just how would a racist politician say “gussied-up nigger” in 2014?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, February 04, 2014.

A Hero For The Ages?

Property Of The Ages? President Obama borrowed Abraham Lincoln's famous epitaph to honour the passing of Nelson Mandela. But was Prisoner 46664's ultimate contribution to the fate of Black South Africa entirely benign? Who benefited the most from the bargain he struck with South Africa's last White President, F.W. de Klerk? Will the Ages judge Mandela as kindly as they received Lincoln?

 

AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN breathed his last in a fetid boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, his friend, the Secretary of War, Edward Stanton, declared: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

 

President Barack Obama borrowed Stanton’s magnificent epitaph to honour the passing of Nelson Mandela – the man who, throughout Obama’s political career, had served as the living exemplar of political heroism.

 

The American President is merely the mightiest of world leaders to pay tribute to this remarkable man. The fortitude he demonstrated through 27 long years of imprisonment, and the readiness with which he forgave his former enemies, greatly eased South Africa’s transition from racial oppression to multi-racial democracy, and made Nelson Mandela a statesman for all seasons.

 

But how will the ages, to which President Obama has now dispatched him, judge Nelson Mandela?

 

The Apartheid-era judges who sentenced Mandela to life imprisonment on that tiny speck of offshore rock called Robben Island knew what they were doing. Martyrs are politically useful only to their own side, but an imprisoned leader may one day be of service to both. This is especially true when, as the duration of his captivity lengthens, that leader’s reputation, unblemished by the inevitable compromises and crimes of politics and war, is permitted to grow to almost mythic proportions.

 

Hundreds of anti-Apartheid fighters (most infamously Steve Biko) were murdered in police custody. Why Nelson Mandela did not share their fate is one of those important political questions that contemporaries consistently deemed it better not to ask.

 

But we may be sure that, alone in his cell on Robben Island, Prisoner 46664 asked himself: “Why am I still alive? Why haven’t they killed me? What role do the Whites expect me to play in South Africa’s future?”

 

The answer, of course, and if you’ll pardon the rather cruel pun, is that Nelson Mandela was the Apartheid regime’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card. If repression failed; if the opportunity to preserve the property of White South Africans – even at the expense of surrendering their political dominance – presented itself; then Prisoner 46664, beloved by his people, the world’s most celebrated political prisoner, would be there to avert the fire and the blood that a Just Providence held in store for the architects and beneficiaries of the hated Apartheid system.

 

But Mandela was not White South Africa’s only saviour.

 

In the early 1980s the prospect of a Soviet-backed African National Congress replicating the triumphant national liberation struggles of Angola, Mozambique and Namibia seemed entirely plausible. With a continent-wide front of socialist enemies to the north and their backs to the sea, White South Africa’s future looked bleak.

 

By the end of the 1980s, however, Soviet power was collapsing. In 1991, its European empire gone, and its world-wide network of national liberation regimes scrabbling for more reliable sponsors, the Soviet Union, itself, simply blipped-off History’s screen. And with it went any chance of securing Black majority-rule in South Africa by outside force. Democracy would arrive there in one of only two possible ways: either blood-soaked and fatally compromised by a racial holocaust of historic proportions; or peacefully, via the ballot-box.

 

The White leaders of South Africa, understandably, opted for the latter. In February 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the last White President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, authorised the release of Prisoner 46664. Nelson Mandela got out of jail.

 

But he was not free. Like Abraham Lincoln, to whom he is so often compared, Mandela found himself caught up in political and economic currents beyond his control and in whose grip he struggled to keep the frail craft of South Africa’s hopes afloat. If he was not to bequeath his people an economy stripped of all essential expertise, materiel and capital, then the socialist elements of the ANC programme would have to be abandoned.

 

It was no accident that Mandela’s new offices were located in Shell House. Without the endorsement of transnational capital, South African democracy would be a poor and ragged thing. But Mandela’s parallel guarantee to protect the farms and businesses of the hated Afrikaners also meant that the poor and the ragged of South Africa would remain black.

 

Will the Ages welcome Nelson Mandela with the same solemnity that they received Abraham Lincoln? Surely the avoidance of a racial bloodbath and the likely fracturing of South Africa along tribal lines – not to mention the introduction of a working multiracial democracy – is a legacy worthy of posterity’s approbation? It has certainly merited the applause of the Present Day.

 

And yet, in the story of Nelson Mandela there remains a nagging sense of saintliness too readily and too easily bestowed. Great victories are not won except at great price. Abraham Lincoln paid for his at Ford’s Theatre. Nelson Mandela died in his bed.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 December 2013.