Unjust leadership?

The following column appeared on the 14th July, 1993. Considering our current Labour Government, strong on promises and weak on action, we don't seem to be much better off. And the hints of socialism are everywhere amongst their policies.

Unjust leadership? 

After a friend asked me if I knew the opposite phrase to ‘distaff side’ (‘spear side,’ we discovered), she took up my last column’s complaints about Mr Bolger, and said, ‘But who would you put in his place?’ I had no answer.

In spite of the possibilities of electoral reform, we’re still left with the problem of being unable to vote in a party’s leader.

We want leadership in this country, there’s no doubt; but not at all costs. Arrogant leadership of the Muldoon-Lange-Bolger style we can do without.

With the choices we face at present, perhaps it is time (given that it is suffrage year) to have someone on the distaff side: a Prime Ministress.  But the present field is pretty narrow: would we really want the Obsessive Housekeeper, or She Whose EconomicPolicies Must Be Obeyed?

Metropolitan Anthony

I’ve been reading a little book I picked up in the Regent book sale, Man and God, by Metropolitan Anthony (his name has nothing to do with a railway station: Metropolitan is an Orthodox church title, similar to archbishop).

This man clearly identifies one of the problems New Zealand is facing at present, though stating it in a different context.

He says when society defines man (including setting up an Ideal Abstract Man as ‘the pattern for the future’), we always meet – whatever the case, whatever the kind of dictatorship or pressure group – with something which the Russian writer, Solzhenitsyn, in his book Cancer Ward, defined in the following way.

One of the central characters has this said about him: ‘He had the greatest possible love and consideration of mankind, and this is why he hated so fiercely every human being – because they disfigured this ideal so horribly.

There is an echo here of Jenny Shipley, or Roger Douglas. Leaders who appear to have more love for their ideal State, where properly managed finances will supposedly bring proper social order, than for the individuals within it.

As M. Anthony points out, such leaders’ ideals are always focused on the future. Consequently the real people they are dealing with here and now have to be ‘transformed, changed and remoulded.’ Unfortunately, past experience ‘shows that many bones crack and many things have to be changed by force and even violence.’ (The communist revolution is one example.)

Individual people are disregarded in this kind of social change; people are only seen collectively.

Here in New Zealand it is easy to see those who commit benefit fraud as one group who blaspheme the great god Economy. It is also easy to lump the Poor together as one large unpalatable porridge.

Within our leaders’ world view, the poor eventually disappear not because of Recovery but because they have no means of surviving. Crime becomes their only hope and they are committed to prison. The prisons become totally overloaded, and finally something more permanent is done..?

Not in New Zealand?

We need a distaff side to our spear side policies: humanity as well as economy. We need policies that see people not as abstractions, but as unique wondrous creatures, each one called by name ‘out of (the) nothingness from which we were drawn by the will of God.’ (Anthony again.)

Arrogant and unjust rulership tends to arise when we leave God out, and though many of my readers won’t agree, New Zealand still needs God.

And New Zealand leaders need to see people as God sees them: perhaps not going so far as counting the hairs on their heads, but at least knowing that individuals make up the crowd.

After All

Back in the days when I wrote a weekly column, I produced this one, called 'After All'. It came out in 1993, so the references are to a former Government. However, the issues it discusses (with tongue mostly in cheek) have barely changed a jot.

After All 
7.7.93

Mr Bolger’s condescending response to the report on child poverty should have been expected.

His dulcet tones in the subsequent radio interviews were intended to melt the heart of the hardest cynic. His assurances that he knew what the poor were suffering should have convinced us all of our ignorance on the subject.

Jim Bolger

Mr Bolger is Prime Minister, after all. If the Prime Minister doesn’t know what’s going on, who does? The ministresses of social welfare, or of finance?

After all, if the Government is going to pay attention to what people say, especially church people (who are really pretty much on the periphery of society, aren’t they?), then what sort of wimpy Government would they be?

The purpose of a Government is to Govern, after all, to lead, to pass more laws than the Pharisees, to make enormous changes and expect everybody to follow, to fill the newspapers and television with ads that nobody understands let alone cares about, to spend millions of dollars on changing vast structure so that businessmen can run the country like one big business.

Of course, when the Opposition finally gains power – as it probably will because we’re all so sick of this lot – it will change it all back again.

After all, an Opposition’s purpose is to Oppose. In Opposition they really don’t have anything to do all day except come up with mischievous schemes to upset the Government, such as telling us that most of the National Members are millionaires.

Well, they are, after all, aren’t they? I mean if you add the figures up the right way, you can make anybody look like a millionaire; you can even make the poor look well off.

Isn’t that what the Government is attempting to do, by reminding us over and over of the wonderful recovery we’re all part of? How can we refuse to believe the evidence?

Not that it matters what you believe, anyway. What’s a Government for, after all? It’s not there to be nice to us, it’s not there to pay attention to petitions, submissions or reports. It’s not there to listen to the ‘groundswell of current opinion’ (it considers the swell as swill and treats it accordingly). It’s not there to talk Truth but Governspeak. It’s not there to find ways to balance the books that will please everybody – in fact the fewer people this Government pleases the better a Government it believes itself to be.

It is there, however, to say that it’s ‘responsible in seeking to target very large sums of money to those New Zealanders most in need’: $2 a week extra family support, for example, according to the Guinness Book of Records New Zealand All-time Boring Budget.

And even more, the Government hates to think that someone might be getting more than their share, especially if they have the nerve to be on a benefit. That’s why they’ve given themselves the right to investigate our bank accounts, and take money directly out of them if need be.

It isn’t our money, after all, or the bank’s (who now charge us not only for taking our money out, but also when we don’t put enough in); it’s the Government’s money. They gave it out in the first place, and they printed it.

After all, if they give money to us when we aren’t working, we’ll only go and spend it on irrelevant things like rent, and possibly, if there’s anything left over, on frivolities like food and (good grief!) clothing.

We’re only scum after all – the Government knows that if six o’clock closing was reintroduced we’d be back in there like pigs at a trough. We’ve never learnt anything.

Worst of all, we’ve never learnt that if we give our prime public servants plenty of power, law by law they’ll gradually turn the lot of us into slaves.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She [Elizabeth Barrett Browning] had decide that poetry, whatever language it was written in, was most certainly work. To write poetry was the most worthwhile work in the world because poetry was truth and there could be nothing more noble than trying to express universal truths. She did not feel shy about calling herself a poet - even when she recognised that she had only managed to produce 'sickly poetry,' She had absolute confidence that with time she would do better and that the struggle to do so was worthy in itself. A good poet was always 'one of God's singers.' Trying to become one of this select band was an ambition she was proud of and did not conceal. It had nothing to do with what she called 'versifying,' that scribbling in commonplace books so beloved of young ladies at this time. This she found contemptible and not to be confused with real poetry which was dignified, serious, sacred and pure. Her family accepted her interpretation of her vocation reverentially. Only her father was tempted to make the occasional facetious comment and he quickly came to appreciate that his daughter's poetry was no laughing matter.

Nobody at Hope End [the family home] sneered at or ridiculed the role of poet itself - in the first quarter of the nineteenth century poets were the most admired of all creative writers. The end of the eighteenth century had seen the beginnings of the Romantic Revival, marked by the publication, in 1798, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. In the decade of Elizabeth's birth Byron published his first collection of poems (Hours of Idleness,1807) and when as a nine-year-old she was starting to write poetry herself, Queen Mab. Playwrights no longer dominated the literary scene though Drury Lane and Covent Garden were still enormously popular theatres, and novelists, in spite of Jane Austen, Richardson and Fielding, had not yet begun to do so. To be a 'real' poet was judged a most suitable occupation by Elizabeth's parents who had no objections just so long as this did not tax Elizabeth's health.
Shelley had just finished

...public acknowledgement was important: she was honest enough to admit that it was not sufficient to write poetry but that having it read was part of the process. It was more than that. Seeing her work in print excited her and she did not underestimate the significance.  Her excitement had nothing to do with feeling she was successful - she rated popular success as shallow - but was more a feeling of intense joy here was tangible proof that she was communicating through her poetry.

Pages 34/5 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Margaret Foster. 

Made in Dagenham

We watched Made in Dagenham last night (thankfully, they didn't go all clever and call it Maid in Dagenham, which must have been a temptation, I'm sure.)   Even though it's based on a real-life event, a strike by the women workers at Ford's car factory in Dagenham, the story arc is as traditional as a thousand other movies that involve someone who doesn't think they've got much going for them deciding to stand up for their rights (Mr Deeds Goes to Washington, to name just one famous example).   So you know that once Sally Hawkins (playing Rita O'Grady - the real O'Grady appears in the film clips during the credits) gets her mettle up, it'll be click/click/click and all the nasty blokes holding the women back will go toppling like ninepins.  You know that there'll be a scene where her husband finally breaks down from being tolerant and gets mad, and then has to be told he has no reason to get mad, and that he's not a saint, and that a few scenes later he'll be apologising for being a twat and will be backing her to the hilt.  You know that one of the women will try to use the situation for her own ends, and will be brought back into the fold.  And you know that it'll all end happily ever after (this isn't Italian neo-realist moviemaking, after all).

If I sound cynical, it's only because there is a degree of predictability in the movie, and there were times when you wish the filmmakers had given the thing a bit more edge.   Seeing the real-life participants in those final clips, you wonder what they thought of what had been done to their story, which is treated fairly light-heartedly throughout (even given the situation, and a suicide late in the piece).   Having to strip down to your underwear in the factory because it was so hot in the summertime, or putting up umbrellas in the winter because of the leaking roof has a certain humour, but the reality would have been much less pleasant.  And that horrible moment (it happens two or three times) when there's a loud switching-on noise, and all the sewing machines suddenly come to life and expect the women to get on, like it or not, is something that's just accepted.  The feeling of being chained to those sewing-machines is never explored.  Perhaps there's a different movie - a neo-realist one - waiting to be made.  In the meantime, we have The Full Monty version (which also had a suicide, as I recall, but still managed to remain a comedy) and on its own merits this is an enjoyable movie.  After all, every one of us likes to see the underdog biting the heels of the bullies and overlords (including, here, Richard Schiff as Ford's American pit bull terrier - sans his usual beard, and with a wig covering his normal baldness).  The fact that those nasty overlords can be really vicious is only hinted at.  The winners here - we know it all along - are the 187 women who went on strike.  (The only time they don't win - at least initially - is in relation to a bullying school teacher played by Andrew Lincoln; he has one scene and leaves the otherwise garrulous Sally Hawkins speechless.)

Hawkins isn't my favourite actress.  There's no doubt she has bundles of talent, and uses her oddly-shaped face to considerable advantage.   However, when I twigged where I'd seen her before, as Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky, and remembered how we nearly went mad watching the manic performance she gave there, it was hard to see her objectively in this movie.  Some of Poppy's endless twitches, giggles and wriggles appear in this role too, though they're toned down considerably.  This is a problem when an actor appears in a role that you dislike; it can be hard to see them clearly in any other part.  Danny de Vito is a case in point, for me; I don't know what film it was that I first saw him in, but it put me off him almost completely - plus the fact that he does tend to play obnoxious little men.  And yet when he appeared briefly in an interview recently (he'd been voicing the Spanish version of The Lorax), he came across as a genuine, humble man, one who's been married happily to his wife of many years.  A complete opposite to the (often venal) characters he usually plays.   When I think about what I've just said, my comments are further undercut by the part Bob Hoskins plays in Made in Dagenham: he's another actor who's played some roles that have set my teeth on edge; here he's just wonderful.  Redeems himself!  LOL.

There's a wonderful moment towards the end of the movie, when Miranda Richardson, playing the inimitable Barbara Castle (no mean promoter of women's rights herself) comments to Hawkins about the dress she's wearing, which the latter admits she has to return from on loan when she gets back.   Richardson mentions the 'label' - it's been commented on a couple of times before in the movie - and Hawkins says about Richardson's dress: Isn't that a C&A? C&A is the equivalent of Marks and Spencer's: good, solid workaday clothing, but hardly fashionable.  Richardson says it is: she gets all her clothes from there.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to DC shoes.  The only connection here is that they're an item of clothing.  I wondered when I first saw the name whether they were shoes that you wore if you were travelling to Washington DC, or were the kind of thing politicians would favour when trotting through the Capitol Building.  In fact the DC stands for Droors Clothing, a label that's no longer in existence, I'm told.

As you can see from the picture, you'd have to be a fairly unconventional US politician to wear these around the Senate, though they might be comfortable enough.