Bored With Bush

I feel fully justified in calling this a shit of a day. It has rained incessantly and with dyke-hardness for most of the night. Rain has been the predominant show-pony in this inclement weather but wind has striven manfully to match it. In the middle of the meteoric metrological battle has been me—unable to sleep, wrought with civil defence guilt (though in practice it is nothing like a civil defence emergency) and musing on…life without George Bush. I am not concerned for Fryday; there plenty of other targets and to be honest I am bored with Bush. The world is bored with Bush. The danger of the depraved which gave certain edginess to his presidency is long gone. To call President Bush’s run-down (literally) to the next election as a lame-duck presidency is to do an injustice to both the disabled and the ducks—he is less than both. There is nothing left, or is there? I remember thinking at the height of the Watergate scandal, when we had all long-since ceased to take a prurient interest and all hoped it would end, that President Nixon might go out in a blaze of inglory in a vain desire to leave us more of a legacy than a scandal-wracked presidency. He didn’t, though the shot of him about to board the helicopter, with two arms outstretched, was probably the biggest “finger” to the world we have yet seen. I know another politician who will likely do the same soon, but with subtlety and characteristic servitude. President Bush is not that politician, but will he make a grand statement, as I feared Nixon would? No. President Bush hasn’t got it within him. In my opinion and based on his recent disappearance he is a shell without power. His cabinet is gone, his senate is gone, his congress has gone, his credibility—well, that was never there. He is still Commander in Chief but the heart has I think been taken out the military—they will no longer fight the President’s and, obliquely, God’s crusades. So, fear not: there is nothing to fear from Bush in these last years—he is no Muldoon or Clark—he is man without legacy other than to be the most forgotten President since Cleveland. And like Cleveland and Nixon and all other unassisinated presidents before him, Bush will quietly retire and found his presidential library. The difference with Bush is that for all its power and status a Bible makes for a very small library indeed.

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Let's Do A Little Smack

Helen Clark made an interesting observation (honest) the other day in relation to Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill. She said that those whom police were already arresting for assaults on children would continue to be arrested. Given that, why then do we need a law that seemingly embraces everybody else? Furthermore, when we have a plethora of laws covering assaults on any person, regardless of age, where is the gap that needs to be filled by the Bradford bill? Where is the problem this bill is meant to solve? Where is the evidence that suggests smacking of children has a lasting traumatic effect on those children? Or that society is somehow indicted and diminished because a child is smacked in the home or class-room? Where is the evidence to suggest that outlawing spanking will deliver a better society with more stable contributory young people—indeed, there appears to a body of anecdotal evidence that the reverse is true. And finally, where is the police force or other body with the resources and the zeal to enforce such a law?

I ask these questions because if one takes this anti-smacking bill at face value it becomes very unsettling. The bill is not aimed at those who do great mental and physical harm to children (they according to the Prime Minister are already being arrested under existing laws), nor is it aimed at curbing acts of great or even minor brutality—again, those are covered by existing laws. Technically, even a mild-smacking is covered by those same laws.

So, I am driven to the conclusion that this proposed and already redundant law has no purpose other than to issue a series of statements. They are:

• Sue Bradford has little else to do.
• A bill such as this taxes, but just squeaks into, the limits of the Greens’ collective IQ.
• The Kahui twins unfairly focussed on Maori.
• The white middle-class hasn’t been picked on for awhile.
• Regardless of how often it is humiliated, Political Correctness refuses to give up the ghost.
• Somebody somewhere always knows what’s best for us.
  
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Dressed to Kill

Have you seen Helen Clark lately? Nobody else has either. The face that once launched a thousand shits among the National Party and its supporters has been mysteriously absent these days. When she does pop up it is in a much muted fashion indeed, without fire, ideas, or venom. The other half of the erstwhile dynamic duo, Dr Michael Cullen, is also absent without leave. In fact, he has become the Paul Holmes of politics: yesterday’s man and largely irrelevant.

Why the change? Can it be put down entirely to John Key and his emergence as a credible alternative? Many may think so. I do not. I believe it is that Fryday is finally having an effect. After successfully reshaping Hamilton and sending Christchurch into hiding. After earning George W. Bush an admonishment from God. And after years of unremitting due diligence on our present Prime Minister and her alternate, Fryday has successfully brought the Clark of the House to her knees, though I hasten to add in no unseemly way.

Was it the “Dear Michelle” letters to her therapist that did it? Again, many may think so. Again, I do not. Hardman and I know it was Fryday’s attacks on Clark’s fashion sense that drove her to ground. They were unrelenting, unremitting and entirely justified. She once dressed, as we remember from a very famous photo and a subsequent Fryday, like an aluminium can. There were other horrors, and the more she wore them and the more Fryday commented on them, the more Fryday wore her down. The woman who was never into fashion went out of fashion. Fryday killed her political career.

Sad, really: not for the country but for Clark. And for Fryday. Fryday is running out of targets.

Still, there are local body elections this year.

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Career Openings

Last night I dreamt I attended an opening. I cannot now recall what was being opened, but I do remember the Prime minister being there and remonstrating with me about the Dear Michelle series; she wanted to know who was “leaking” the information.

That I should have such a dream is not unusual. As a council functionary I am inclined as they say to attend the opening of an envelope, and earlier last night I had in reality attended the successful opening of the Estuary Arts Centre in Orewa. My role on such occasions is minor; usually it is to look after the press corp., which in Orewa consists of one reporter. Last night, without even that reporter to look after and seeking solace because Maggie was in Sydney and I would be returning to an empty house I made it my mission to look after the mayor and the sole attending cabinet minister Judith Tizard.

And what does that entail? Not a lot. Both are highly capable politicians (yes, I know, an oxymoron) highly capable of looking after themselves. Apart from an odd drink—a very odd drink: Rodney’s own avocado juice or some such—delivered to the minister, I did nothing for her. The mayor was a little more challenging: he too had drinks (more practically and I am sure enjoyably, red wine), but I had on top of that to look after the mayoral chains.

You’ll of course remember the embarrassment caused Waitakere City when its then mayor, Tim Shadbolt, lost the mayoral chains? Well, “my mayor” has a habit of giving ours away. At occasions such as last night he usually finds some kid to be pictured wearing the chains—the mayor says the chains are not the symbol of office, they are the symbol of the future, as is the kid, and it is right and proper that he, the mayor, passes the chains to the next generation. Well and good: the chosen kid is invariably and inevitably thrilled, but let’s consider this—I am the one charged with looking after those chains, and when, as last night, said kid goes for a wander among a throng of some three hundred people I get sincerely worried.

My job is not dissimilar to the American Secret Service protecting the president. I may not speak into my cufflinks but I do wear dark sunglasses. And when something goes wrong I can go into a mild panic (though giving of course the facade of calm) and activate a full security alert, which last night consisted of my asking everybody there I know: “have you seen that bloody Kid.”

I found the kid; I could see him across the crowded room. What I couldn’t see was the chains; he no longer had them! The mayor was in the middle of a television interview. The press was there, how had I missed that? I interrupted.

“Have you got the chains back?” I asked

“No. I thought you had,” replied the mayor.

“Shit!”

What?”

“Nothing. I’ll fix it.”

And fix it I fully intended to do but right at the moment I felt like a Secret Service agents who has just taken a bullet for the President.

Now, let me tell you something about Mayor John Law: last night without a plaque to unveil or a ribbon to cut he opened Orewa’s Estuary Arts Centre with “a cuddle with the Minister (Tizard).” The guy has style and substance. He also has a wicked, if somewhat malicious sense of humour, which last night manifested itself by waiting fully five minutes before pulling the chains out of his pocket and yelling across the room, “I've found them Mike.”

I took the chains. I looked at him. He saw the look. Fortunately for him he was spared the thought. The thought was: “Well, at least you’re not George Bush, but right now you come close.”

Last night I returned to my empty home. But now I was at least not on my own—I had my thoughts to accompany me. And, unlike my absent wife, they were not pretty.