The Masculine Mystique: The True Nature Of Aaron Smith’s Transgression

The Masculinist Nightmare: In Homer's Odyssey the amorous enchantress, Circe, transforms Odysseus's lustful crew into swine. Mastery being the essence of masculinity, men are expected to demonstrate at all times that they are in control of both themselves and their lives. Aaron Smith's sin was his failure to control of his desires. As an All Black, the epitome of Kiwi masculinity, such a display of weakness was a kind of betrayal. He let the side down.

 

MASCULINITY – can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Well, that’s half true. A world in which masculinity no longer dominated human affairs would probably be much improved. What went on in airport toilets between consenting adults would count for much less. And the ideas espoused by female candidates for high political office – rather than what they were wearing and how often they smiled – would count for much more.

 

New Zealand’s problems with masculinity are deeply embedded in its social and cultural history. New Zealand men are notorious for being overly repressed and emotionally unavailable: tightly-wound machines with an aversion to mechanics. Trained from birth to value self-reliance above all other virtues, their responses to vulnerability and complexity range from dismissive impatience to outright hostility. Their most prized quality is mastery. Mastery of what? Well, just about anything: the world’s highest mountain; the British Lions; women.

 

It’s why so many Kiwi males are furious with Aaron Smith. Not because he had sex in an airport toilet with someone who wasn’t his partner, but because he was willing to risk everything to do it. As an All Black, he was expected to master his lustful urges. Succumbing to temptation in the way he did marked him down as a man not in control of himself. Weak.

 

As something constructed and in need of constant maintenance, masculinity is forever being scrutinised and assessed by those who feel in need of its protection. For most Kiwi men, achieving All Black status represents something pretty close to perfection in the masculinity stakes. That Aaron Smith was willing to risk it all for a quick shag wasn’t just reckless and stupid, it devalued the currency of masculinity itself.

 

That the woman involved in the incident is accorded no real agency or consequence shows just how peripheral living, breathing, autonomous human females are to the construction of masculine identity. For so many men a woman is just one more thing to master, and all-too-often her presence at a man’s side is valued only for the indisputable proof it offers of his competitiveness in the masculinity stakes.

 

It’s why so many men turn nasty when “their” woman decides she no longer wishes to remain in the relationship. By walking away she is stripping him of one of the key proofs of his status as a “real” man – the ability to attract and “keep” a woman. Very little is more threatening to masculinity than a woman who refuses to devote her life to shoring-up her man’s identity. By forcing him to acknowledge her as something more than a mere adjunct to his ego, she is challenging him to move beyond the self-imposed limitations of masculinity and become fully human.

 

Many men accept their partner’s challenge to break out of the character armour in which they have encased themselves – and are better people for it. But, many men do not. The price of their failure is revealed in New Zealand’s shocking levels of domestic violence.

 

What happens in the domestic environment finds its reflection in the public domain – most particularly in men’s reaction to women who seek and attain political office. The ideology of masculinity is fundamentally hostile to the very notion of women exercising power over men. Such women are perceived as having abandoned their “natural” social role in much the same way as the woman who deserts her husband. Instantly, she becomes a “bitch” – someone who, by asserting her humanity has forfeited her right to be treated with the “courtesy” and “respect” reserved for women who accept the masculine code.

 

This masculinist viciousness was fully on display in the latter years of Helen Clark’s prime-ministership. No epithet was too vile to hurl at this woman who had crushed three National Party leaders in a row. Even more telling was the way in which Clark’s opponents sought to paint her as being both criminal and sinful – as if, by stepping away from her assigned role in the masculine universe, she had broken not only the laws of men, but of God.

 

Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House has elicited an equally overheated response from the white, working-class defenders of American masculinity. Writing in the October issue of The Atlantic, Peter Beinart, records of his astonishment at the unrestrained misogyny he encountered at the Republican National Convention in Ohio:

 

“Inside the hall, delegates repeatedly broke into chants of ‘Lock her up.’ Outside the hall, vendors sold campaign paraphernalia. As I walked around, I recorded the merchandise on display. Here’s a sampling: Black pin reading DON’T BE A PUSSY. VOTE FOR TRUMP IN 2016. Black-and-red pin reading TRUMP 2016: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS. White T-shirt reading TRUMP THAT BITCH. White T-shirt reading HILLARY SUCKS BUT NOT LIKE MONICA. Red pin reading LIFE’S A BITCH: DON’T VOTE FOR ONE … White pin advertising KFC HILLARY SPECIAL. 2 FAT THIGHS. 2 SMALL BREASTS … LEFT WING.”

 

If this is what American men were saying about Hillary before she so comprehensively trounced their masculinist avatar, Donald Trump, in the first debate, one can only imagine what they’re saying now. And God alone knows how they’ll cope if (or should that be ‘when’) she wins!

 

What a world of torment men consign themselves to in this hopeless quest to attain perfect masculinity. Their desire for women is matched only by their fear of becoming its slave. They are allowed to be tempted, but must never surrender to temptation on anything other than their own terms. And those terms must never include anything which undermines their standing in the eyes of other men. That was Aaron Smith’s true sin: not only to have allowed his desire for a woman to master him, but to have made the whole world privy to his weakness. He let the side down. Not just the All Black side, but the side to which every worshipper of masculinity belongs – and can only leave in disgrace.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 9 October 2016.

Of “Safe Areas”, “SJWs”, And No One Caring About The Chiefs.

SJW? The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are strident.

 

YOU CAN LEARN A LOT from blog comments. A recent posting on the Rugby Union’s report into the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident attracted this terse response:

 

“I thought you would have heard the news, Chris. No one cares about people who take offence anymore. Maybe you could go to a safe corner till you feel less offended. Take an SJW with you.”

 

There’s a lot packed into these four short sentences, so bear with me while I attempt to unpack them.

 

Let’s begin with the commentator’s central assertion: “No one cares about people who take offence anymore.”

 

Taken at face value, this is obviously false. Just consider the Rugby Union’s swift response to the avalanche of criticism that came crashing down on its report. Given sponsorship’s vital role in the funding of professional rugby, the game’s administrators’ acute sensitivity to such sustained public criticism – especially in relation to the vexed issue of gender relations – is readily understood. That the Union felt obliged to announce that it’s seeking the help of anti-sexual-violence campaigner, Louise Nicholas, shows how much they needed to be seen to “care”.

 

At a deeper level, however, the commenter is more accurate than many New Zealanders might care to admit.

 

It is one of the proudest claims of the Baby Boom Generation: that it confronted the racism, sexism and homophobia of its parents’ generation; defeated it; and ushered in a new era of tolerance and social equality. The Boomers point to the Black Civil Rights struggle in the United States; the onrush of so-called “Second Wave” Feminism; and the Gay Rights Revolution of the 1970s and 80s. Without these “new social movements”, they claim, neither the dramatic and permanent shifts in social attitudes, nor the legislative reforms they inspired, would have been possible.

 

But the question seldom asked of the Baby Boomers is whether their much-vaunted changes were the product of an entire generation – or just a fraction of it. Just how deeply did the ideas of the new social movements penetrate? All the way down to the public bars and rugby club changing-rooms? Or only as far as the common-rooms of the universities; the editorial offices of the more respectable media outlets; and the screenwriting teams of movie and television studios?

 

Politically-speaking, it has long been the contention of the Right that the social changes of the 60s, 70s and 80s were only ever the project of a wafer-thin layer of left-wing activists. As proof they point to such contrary historical indicators as the white riots against Dr Martin Luther King’s attempt to racially integrate Chicago’s public housing in 1966; the defeat of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment in 1982; and, to use a New Zealand example, the 800,000-signature petition (the largest in the country’s history) against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986.

 

It is this conspiratorial version of the West’s recent social history (in defence of which, rightists love to quote the 1960s student radical, Rudi Dutschke’s, advice for comrades to undertake “the long march through the institutions”) that spawned the notion of “political correctness”. According to the Right, political correctness is the method by which left-wing elites impose their ideas about what is, and isn’t, acceptable political discourse on the rest of society.

 

The references in the comment quoted above to a “safe corner” and an “SJW” trace their origins to this Left-Right struggle over political correctness.

 

“Safe Areas” are spaces to which university students in the US are able to retreat when the language and behaviour of the politically incorrect on campus is deemed to have grown too confronting and/or dangerous. Derided by the Right for pandering to the alleged preciousness of the students making use of them, safe areas are also assailed for implicitly curtailing the rights of those from whom their users are seeking refuge.

 

The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are strident.

 

Unpacked like this, our commenter’s observations offer us a clear insight into the Right’s estimation of the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident, and the Rugby Union’s response. The key suggestion on offer is that any and all offence taken as a result of the interaction between the stripper “Scarlette” and the Chiefs at Ōkoroire is, or should be, a matter of indifference to those mainstream New Zealanders who remain unconvinced by political correctness, safe areas, SJW’s – and left-wing writers. He further assumes that these unoffended Kiwis constitute a clear majority.

 

The scary thing is – I’m not so sure he’s wrong.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.

Support Your Local Chiefs.

Support Your Local Sheriff: It is easy to imagine a host of witnesses lining up to perjure themselves in the name of White Supremacy. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine a host of “independent” witnesses hurrying forward to defend the honour of their macho code by denying that anything untoward happened to Scarlette at that infamous Matamata spa?

 

PAUL REED’S ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH, often subtitled “Support Your Local Sheriff”, appeared in Life magazine in 1967. Lawrence A. Rainey, oozing the in-your-face belligerence of a crooked southern sheriff, was on trial for violating the civil rights of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, three young civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964.

 

Rainey’s easy confidence was not misplaced. In Mississippi, in the early 1960s, the chances of an all-white jury convicting a white law enforcement officer for the murder of an African American were practically nil. Men like Rainey were elected by their white neighbours (the sort of men captured grinning at the camera in Life’s famous photograph) and adhered to exactly the same viciously racist beliefs.

 

Since the 1880s, virtually the entire law enforcement and judicial infrastructure of the South had been dedicated to the preservation and enforcement of white privilege. If the Klan was there to terrorise and murder southern blacks, the role of sheriffs and judges was to make sure that the persons responsible were never brought to justice.

 

In this endeavour law enforcement and the judiciary could rely upon the willing co-operation of white juries. In the rare event that a district attorney brought a white person to trial, jury members could be relied upon to ignore the prosecution’s evidence. By contrast, the testimony of defence witnesses – no matter how outlandish – was taken as gospel. For an accused Klansman, acquittal was practically certain.

 

That the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and 60s was a hotbed of white racism and violence is hardly news. In 2016 we have no difficulty whatsoever in understanding how the racist communities of the southern states banded together to protect their racial privileges. We certainly know better than to believe them capable of delivering justice to their black neighbours.

 

Why then are we surprised and offended when the NZ Rugby Union produces a report which utterly fails to deliver even the most rudimentary justice to the young woman whose experiences called it forth? If we can understand how the deeply racist culture of the American South consistently failed to deliver justice to its black victims; why couldn’t we anticipate how the viciously misogynistic attitudes pervading New Zealand’s Rugby culture would similarly fail to deliver justice to Scarlette?

 

It is easy to imagine a host of witnesses lining up to perjure themselves in the name of White Supremacy. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine a host of “independent” witnesses hurrying forward to defend the honour of their macho code by denying that anything untoward happened to Scarlette at that Matamata spa?

 

It’s a pity there was no Life photographer present when these good ole boys were giving their “evidence” to the Rugby Union’s lawyer. What are the odds that their faces all wore expressions very similar to Sheriff Rainey’s?

 



 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 10 September 2016.

Playing The Game

Citius. Altius. Fortius: The idealised portrait of the ancient Olympic Games, which inspired the modern Olympic movement, depicts a pure, quasi-religious celebration dedicated to the joys of athletic exertion and achievement. The reality was quite the opposite. The ancient Olympic Games were brutally competitive events. Athletes cheated; people were bribed; and the Greek City States erected gaudy tributes to their successful champions. Not to win at Olympia all-too-often ended in civic humiliation and personal disgrace. How little has changed.

 

CRITICISING SPORT in contemporary New Zealand is a bit like criticising God. Actually, it’s worse. Because, when it comes to religious devotion, God ranks a poor second.

 

So much of New Zealanders’ national identity is bound up with their country’s sporting prowess that they recoil from the slightest suggestion that it is not an unquestionable good.

 

Even when the conduct of New Zealand sportsmen (the gender specificity is deliberate) can only be described as profoundly shocking and anti-social, the behaviour is presented publicly as a purely individual betrayal of sporting ideals. Most significantly, they are pilloried for their failure to uphold the values expected of public “role models” for young New Zealanders. That sport itself might be the culprit is never permitted to cross the collective New Zealand mind.

 

Officially, sport is about the pursuit of excellence.

 

At the individual level it embraces the pursuit and attainment of specific physical goals. More generally, it seeks to advance the boundaries of human capacity and achievement. In the words of the Olympic motto: Citius—Altius—Fortius  Faster— Higher—Stronger.

 

Team sport folds this quest for individual excellence into the creation of a competitive whole greater than the sum of its parts. The successful sports team is something organic: a collective expression of human purpose and human will that at once transforms and transcends its individual components.

 

Unofficially – that is to say what everybody acknowledges to be true, but will not publicly confirm – sport is about winning.

 

The idealised portrait of the ancient Olympic Games, which inspired the modern Olympic movement, depicts a pure, quasi-religious celebration dedicated to the joys of athletic exertion and achievement. The reality was quite the opposite. The ancient Olympic Games were brutally competitive events. Athletes cheated; people were bribed; and the Greek City States erected gaudy tributes to their successful champions. Not to win at Olympia all-too-often ended in civic humiliation and personal disgrace.

 

Nothing has changed. Who among our Olympic losers are feted and rewarded? The lucrative sponsorships; the ubiquitous television and newspaper advertisements in which Olympic athletes lend their lustre to every sort of commercial endeavour; these are not offered to the individuals and teams who fail to bring home the gold, silver and bronze medals New Zealanders covet. To the victors – and only the victors – go the spoils.

 

But if sport is about success, then it must also be about failure. Unfortunately, a society that only celebrates winners will find it increasingly difficult to treat its losers with anything but contempt. Even worse, the inculcation of the win-at-all-costs ethos into team sport risks elevating the key elements of collective success: loyalty, obedience and orthodoxy; over the more socially valuable qualities of altruism, tolerance and innovation.

 

The elevation of sporting prowess also risks privileging the physical over the cerebral; the fit over the unfit; the instinctive over the deliberative. It leads, inexorably, towards a society in which “hard” counts for much more than “soft”; the strong for much more than the weak; the wealthy for much more than the poor; the masculine for much more than the feminine; and the straight for much more than the gay.

 

If this sounds like a description of our own neoliberal society it’s because neoliberalism has learned a great deal from the political economy of sport. It is certainly no coincidence that modern management theory borrows heavily from the theory and practice of building and coaching successful sporting teams.

 

Businesspeople, bureaucrats, even academic administrators, display a growing fascination with the techniques employed by sports coaches to foster and develop “leadership” within their teams. In more and more of our large institutions employees find themselves grouped into workplace “teams” presided over by management-appointed “team-leaders”. These latter individuals combine the roles of monitor and exhorter. Inevitably, the team values of loyalty, obedience and orthodoxy become the indicators by which employees are assessed. Ironically, they are also the values which lead directly to organisational stagnation and decline.

 

The incidents arising out of the Chiefs rugby team’s “Mad Monday” celebrations in the Waikato town of Matamata have been presented to the public as the deeply regretted failure of a number of young sportsmen to live up to the ideals of their code.

 

Alternatively, the behaviour in question, far from being aberrant, could be seen as entirely consistent with the values of twenty-first century professional sport. These young men are paid to live in a “hard” culture where the slightest indication of “softness” will be taken as proof of either femininity, or queerness, or both. In such a context, the hiring of a stripper would not be seen as a disaster-in-the-making, but as a perfectly acceptable opportunity for group gratification and solace. They had failed to win the championship: this was how they dealt with being losers.

 

It wasn’t an aberration – it was the norm.

 

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 August 2016.

Whaddarya? David Slack talks Rugby at the Ika Seafood Bar and Grill.

Whaddarya? David Slack epitomises the thinking, egalitarian, inclusive and creative half of New Zealand society that has always been so feared and despised by the hyper-masculine, woman-hating, anti-intellectual, Rugby-worshipping half. How we Kiwis have made one nation out of two such mutually hostile traditions was the subject of David's "Salon" spot at Ika Seafood Bar & Grill on Tuesday night.
 

ALL NEW ZEALANDERS must live with Rugby. There is no possibility of escaping, and absolutely no chance of ignoring it. Rugby, love it or hate it, has exerted, and continues to exert, a tremendous influence on the way New Zealand presents itself to the world. It has certainly left its mark on David Slack. In the “Salon” spotlight at the Ika Seafood Bar & Grill on Tuesday night (25/8/15) the professional speech-writer, author and broadcaster proved how impossible it is to discuss New Zealand’s brutal national game without, at the same time, discussing the nature of the society which supports it – and oneself.

 

Slack was born in Feilding, a small town in the Manawatu, that could easily have been the setting for Greg McGee’s extraordinary play about Rugby, Foreskin’s Lament. The sort of town about which these lines from the play could have been written:

 

“This is a team game, son, and the town is the team. It’s the town’s honour at stake when the team plays, god knows there’s not much else around here.”

 

The frankly fascist implications of the statement “the town is the team” need little elucidation. It was Mussolini, after all, who came up with the slogan: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

 

Slack’s description of his Fielding contemporaries as “knuckle-dragging sons of the soil” speaks eloquently of a young boy made to feel like an “exile” from his own country. Growing up in Fielding, Slack’s subversively divergent personal priorities (he read books!) would elicit from his peers, over and over again, the single, brute interrogatory: “Whaddarya!”

 

“Whaddarya!” is, literally, the last word of Foreskin’s Lament. Its electrifying effect produced by McGee’s inspired inversion of the word’s usual purpose. Instead of drawing attention to the “other’s” difference – and so confirming his or her exclusion from the team/town/nation – the word was hurled back in the audience’s face. “Whaddarya!” was McGee’s defiant challenge to a country that was already, in 1980, gearing up to welcome the Springbok ambassadors of apartheid.

 

1981 – and all that. The Springbok Tour cannot be avoided in any honest discussion of New Zealand Rugby (unless, of course, you are the Prime Minister). It was as if both sides, Pro- and Anti-Tour, had contrived to line up and scream “Whaddarya!” at each other for 56 days of utterly uncharacteristic political passion. For Slack, and the tens-of-thousands of others who opposed the Tour, the issue was whether or not the more open and diverse country that New Zealand was becoming would prevail, or, be smothered to death in the fascistic headlock of all those “knuckle-dragging sons of the soil” who wouldn’t have hesitated to affirm the slogan: “All within Rugby, nothing outside Rugby, nothing against Rugby.”

 

After 1981, it seemed that the two halves of New Zealand could never be brought back together. Rugby became a litmus test. If you were a fan, then you were morally reprehensible: a “Rugby thug” who was also, no doubt, a racist, sexist, homophobe. In the new New Zealand that was rapidly taking shape there could be no place for such people.

 

But, of course, there was a place for them. As the hero of Foreskin’s Lament reproves the liberal feminist character, Moira, following one of her diatribes against the piggishness of New Zealand’s Rugby culture:

 

“This is the heart and bowels of this country, too strong and foul and vital for reduction to bouquets, or oils, or words. If you think they’re pigs, then you’d better look closer, and get used to the smell, because their smell is your smell.”

 

Remove Rugby from the New Zealand equation and we no longer add up.

 

Slack has written a delightful history of the childhood game of “Bullrush”. In it he celebrates the “teamlessness” of the game, and the way people remember it with smiles and laughter. This, he seems to be saying, is the true essence of the Kiwi character; the way we really are before the “town” turns us into emotionally-stunted sacrifices to the mud-splattered god, whose only gospel is “kick the shit out of everything that gets in the way of winning the game”.

 

But that just won’t do. And, in his gloriously meandering address, Slack more-or-less conceded as much. Yes, New Zealand is about the anarchic individualism of Bullrush, but it also about the fascism of the First Fifteen. We are, if I may borrow that most overused of Rugby phrases, a game of two halves. And at some point over the past 34 years, almost unnoticed, those two halves have become one again – at least when the All Blacks are playing.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 26 August 2015.

"Home Town Boy": What Jerry Collins’s Homecoming Can Teach The Left About Pasifika New Zealanders.

From Inspiration To Aspiration: Not everyone can feint and side-step like Jerry Collins, but in those moments of transcendent sporting artistry for which he will long be remembered, he has inscribed an irresistible invitation to every young Pasifika man and woman: “You, too, can be this good!”

 

IT LOOKED SPONTANEOUS, but it wasn’t. Crowds numbering in the thousands very seldom appear without a lot of behind the scenes preparation. And when Jerry Collin’s body returned to Porirua last Sunday, it seemed as if half the city had turned out to welcome their fallen rugby hero home.

 

It was the same today [17 June 2015]. Te Rauparaha Arena was filled to its 4,000-seat capacity for Collins’s funeral service. Rugby greats of both the past and the present; including Jonah Lomu and All Black Captain, Ritchie McCaw; were there to pay their respects. Porirua’s ambitious young Mayor, Nick Leggett, spoke too, but briefly. More than happy to let the huge crowd speak for itself, Leggett simply noted that Collins was “a home-town boy at heart”.

 

The rugby field was always the place where Collins spoke the loudest, but, in the extraordinary outpouring of love, grief and pride at his tragic death, he has bequeathed to those with sufficient wit to interpret it, an important message about what moves and inspires Pasifika people in New Zealand.

 

Because the thousands of Pasifika men and women, boys and girls, who have, in recent days, filled their city’s streets and stadia, are the same people European political scientists and commentators have in mind when they talk, glibly, about the “Missing Million” voters.

 

It’s not a kindly designation. Those who, though eligible to vote, decline to do so are, more often than not, dismissed as inferior citizens. Their political inertia is explained away by the deleterious effects of poverty and cultural marginalisation. They are deemed to be suitable cases for treatment; targets for education programmes; the problem children of a political system under pressure.

 

And yet, in the space of a few days, these same “inert” citizens, utilising the social institutions that still count for something in their lives: schools; church groups: rugby clubs; were able to organise a demonstration of love and pride that stunned the nation.

 

There were some who found it all vaguely de trop: the man was, after all, only a rugby player. “For God’s sake – it’s not as if he cured cancer!” For others, it was touching proof of the essential innocence of Pasifika culture. “Oh, how marvellous! Just look at those hand-made banners. He obviously meant so much to them!”

 

"Home Town Boy At Heart": Jerry Collins's homecoming was about so much more than rugby.

 

Such misjudgements only reinforce the need to more fully (and accurately!) decode the meaning of Porirua’s response to Jerry Collins’s death. Clearly, this was about so much more than rugby.

 

For all immigrant communities there are vectors of escape. For some, the primary route to participation and acceptance in the dominant culture is education. For others, it is service in the military. For a great many more, however, both here in New Zealand and around the world, sport is by far the most effective vector for escaping the constraints of subordinated immigrant societies.

 

But sport offers more than mere escape. Unlike education, which all-too-often removes the escapee from the cultural milieu in which he or she was raised, sport provides its success stories with multiple opportunities to “give something back”. This may be as simple as giving the fans superlative displays of sporting skill and flair. But it can also include mentoring up-and-coming players, coaching local or national teams, and providing that all-important “role model” for the young and aspirational.

 

Jerry Collins contributed at all these levels and was recognised as having done so by the community in which he grew up. This could only burnish his status as a local hero. Not only had he proved himself in the European world (including faraway France!) but, as he was doing so, he had remained, in Leggett’s words, “a home-town boy at heart”.

 

A son of Samoa, a son of Porirua, a son of New Zealand – living proof that to be born Pasifika is no obstacle to greatness.

 

It was for this that they turned out in their thousands to honour Jerry Collins’s homecoming. For the living proof he provided that ethnicity is not destiny; that it is a good thing to aspire to greatness; and that it is an even better thing to achieve it.

 

For left-wing European politicians this is the crucial message – though not all of them will recognize, and even fewer will welcome, it. That Pasifika people neither see themselves, nor are they happy to be treated as, victims. That, even more importantly, they do not see the exercise of the franchise as a primary, or even a particularly effective, vector of escape. The European working-class constructed a political party and used it to lever themselves out of poverty and into relative affluence. Pasifika people appear to be engaged in blazing a very different trail to the future.

 

Much of it is about community. More of it than is any longer the case with European New Zealand is about spirituality. But most of it seems to be about hope and the power of good examples. Not everyone can feint and side-step like Jerry Collins, but in those moments of transcendent sporting artistry for which he will long be remembered, he has inscribed an irresistible invitation to every young Pasifika man and woman:

 

“You, too, can be this good!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 18 June 2015.