I can imagine a world without John Minto. It is inevitable, of course. I can also imagine a world without me—also inevitable.
The difference is that, if given the time to dwell on such matters, I shall look back at my life with a mix of regret and thanks, while he shall look back at his in anger…and thanks.
Mr Minto has much to thank anger for. Anger found him, nurtured him and eventually made him a minor celebrity. He took a well-trodden path led by anger and following the footsteps of Tim Shadbolt and before him John A. Lee.
Like them Minto realised that in those pre-Shortland Street days the quickest way to become a New Zealand celebrity was to become an All Black or become a protestor/activist. Either could get your head knocked in—but the latter offered more causes and opportunities; you were more well rounded somehow.
So, that is the path Minto took. He knew what he was doing. It got him on television quickly. It allowed him to bask in the adulation of his acolytes and, because he was physically more aesthetic than the harder working Tom Newnham, Minto soon took the crown and mantle of New Zealand’s chief trouble-maker—aided by the 1981 Springbok Tour.
He never lost that status. Trouble was—and this is where Minto has cause for real rather than contrived anger—the Springboks had the discourtesy to leave and the effrontery not to return until after the demise of apartheid.
Minto was left in their wake a rebel with few causes. Pack ‘n’ Save causes. He became a scrounger, looking for anything that could keep him in his the self-appointed role as the social conscience of the nation… and on television. Inevitability, familiarity bred, if not quite contempt, well, familiarity… and boredom. Mr Minto became a bore, and, to use the grocery analogy one more time, a product now past its use-by-date.
Which is why there is something of an irony in the escalating fracas between Minto and property tycoon Bob Jones, fought in their respective columns in the Herald. Whilst it is entertaining enough, one is left with the unsettling thought that the deeply entrenched dogmas of both men—left and right—are of another time, a past time. They trade insults of a sort largely confined to that other relic of the past and equally irrelevant place Parliament’s debating chamber. They cannot now summon up credible anger; they even compliment each other on the quality of their writing.
In the old days, no such “give” would be given. Such public spats would have majesty—Kirk versus Muldoon, Muldoon V. Lange.
These days, it is just two old men slapping at each other with wet towels, trying to make traction, but failing and flailing against the might of Masterchef and Britain’s got Talent.
Anger is just not what it was.
