Letters From Wogistan: Dear Jacinda

The Democratic Republic of Wogistan (Inc.)

Office of the Foreign Secretary

123 Bruce Springsteen Boulevard (third door on right). Telephone: 125.

Prime Minister Jacinda Adern

Prime Minister of New Zealand, where sheeps are

Parliament House

New Zealand

Dear Prime Minister Jacinda

Our Presidente for life Yoseph Flagrantie send you fragrant greetings from the Peoples of Democratic Republic of Wogistan.

Our Presidente make apologys. He wanted to write before but we need buy new tipe-writer ribbon. We have one now.

Presidente says he sees you every time on general store television, but worrys that something is wrong. You go everywhere but not seen in own country where the sheeps are. Are you not wanted in your country?

You are wanted in Wogistan. Presidente likes your looks. Wants to offer you job as secretary now that we have tipe-writer. Job not hard. You tipe two letters a day. But you must know how to spel. Not have to sleep with Presidente. That is sheeps job.

You say yes and we send Presidential Skoda to picks you up. You have use of Skoda on Thurdays. I, Wednesdays. And Preseidente and sheeps all other days.

Sincerely

Yoseph xxx

Yoseph Wankerstan

Foreign Secretary The Democratic Republic of Wogistan (Inc.)

Proprietor Spartacus Male Gym and Bathhouse.

If walls could talk

In all my years assiduously watching The West Wing (and its repeats) I have singularly failed to see a single fly on the walls of the Oval Office.

Yes, I know that the Oval Office doesn’t have walls; being oval, it has one wall. But you get the point and if you don’t, allow me to remind you that life for a pedant can be harrowing and best left to masochists.

Of course, there is a lot of foliage on top of the Oval Office fireplace before which visiting leaders are usually photographed with the President. Perhaps a fly could hide there, though I hear that the Oval Office is continually swept for bugs, so perhaps not.

Anyway, if there is to be a fly on the wall of the Oval Office I would like to be that fly when President Donald J. Trump meets Prime Minister Jacinda K.L. Ardern. It will either be a highly stimulating meeting or the shortest on record.

Ms Ardern has said, “I'm looking forward to discussing a wide range of international and regional issues with President Trump, including our cooperation in the Pacific and the trade relationship between our countries.”

If anything is designed to send the President to sleep or to Twitter, that is it.

So, what else? I cannot think of anybody with less in common in terms of policy positions than these two.

In fact, they only have two options for discussing global issues: either argue about them or ignore them...and each other.

I mean, what they going to discuss? Climate Change? Gun control? Immigration? Trade sanctions against Iraq? Jacinda Ardern will afterwards say she raised all those issues with the President; he will smile benignly knowing that she did not. He will say, however, that he praised the Prime Minister on her handling of the “very very terrible” mosque shootings in her country and that he received an invitation by the Prime Minister to visit “Noo Zealand.”

Left unsaid, is Donald Trump would first have to ring this week’s secretary of state to find out where New Zealand is and that he is hosted by a prime minister who isn’t strong on geography either, having earlier thought she was in China when in fact she was in Japan.

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My last opinion piece

This is my last opinion piece, I promise.

In my previous two Frydays I wrote about the blurring, sometimes deliberate, of opinion and fact and how each can be skewed to support an argument. In this Fryday I want to examine the juxtaposition of two other words that can be similarly blurred at least in interpretation but never after deliberation: arrogance and ignorance.

They are two interesting characteristics of human nature. They appear to be polar opposites, yet one can stem from the other and either can be the nurturing source. Exempla: ignorance can be masked by arrogance and arrogance can be fostered by ignorance.

They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are far from rare among those who hold extreme views (opinions are facts) but it is rare to find them among people running our country.

However, dear readers, we found one—Kelvin Davis.

Kelvin Davis is both ignorant and arrogant. The only question is, which comes first.

This week Kelvin Davis is our acting prime minister. I don’t know why. I know that our deputy prime minister is justifiably on health leave, but I don’t know why Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is absent from Parliament at a time when she should be answering questions about what she knew, and when, of alleged sexual assaults within her party.

Instead, we are left with  (Labour Party deputy) Kelvin Davis answering questions in the House. This is a man who previously called the allegations (of sexual assault) rumours (long after they were patently not), but Davis has been a disaster before.

How did Davis choose to answer questions on this important issue when asked in Questions for Oral Answer?

In Te Reo.

Did he or anybody else give an English interpretation? No. Thus depriving 90 percent of New Zealanders who don’t speak Maori of an answer. Okay, let me deal here with the inevitable arguments that some will use to support this obfuscating by Davis: 

1. Te Reo Maori is one of our three official languages. Yes, it is, but English is the only one universally understood and an English translation should have been provided. If it had been delivered in the third language—sign language—it would have been. But, not Maori.
2. It was Maori Language Week. Yes, it was, but bullshit; common courtesy says that if you are going to make a public statement, make it in a manner that the public can understand. 
3. We should all learn Te Reo Maori. Really? I am not going even to answer that.

 No, Kelvin Davis, who has displayed his idiocy in the past, acted in a deplorable  manner displaying  both his ignorance and arrogance that no amount of argument in his favour can justify. He may think in giving those answers solely in Te Reo he is clever (arrogant) but he nothing more than a twat (ignorant).

Footnote: Fryday has written to the House Speaker asking that in the interest of parliamentary transparency all Te Reo speakers in the House provide an English translation.
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Trumpeting Trump

Last week’s “opinion piece” drew a mostly positive response. I was a little surprised, though pleased, that we didn’t get into the debate about whether or not climate change is real. I was pleased because that wasn’t the purpose of the piece. Last Fryday was about people’s propensity to present opinions as facts—and, in the example I used, a media organisation’s totally irresponsible endorsement of that.
But, this week I want to turn to another type of opinion. In fact, I don’t know if it is an opinion. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that President Donald Trump has perfected it and the nagging question I have is does he believe it?
Let me explain. The man who coined the phrase “fake news” is the world’s greatest exponent of it. But when he expresses it, what is it? When he says that his inauguration attracted a bigger crowd than Obama’s is he expressing his opinion, is he saying he believes it to be a fact, or is it a deliberate distortion?  I hope, ironically, it is the latter; if it was either of the former it would be absolute confirmation that we have a president who is delusional.
Not that I am saying he isn’t.
Of course, Trump is no stranger to hype and to self-promotion. Everything in his world is the “greatest ever” or “the best ever”. An example is his golf courses.
I am reading a book at the moment called Commander in Cheat in which the author, a Sports Digest journalist, recounts the way in which President Trump cheats at golf. It is a long book. An early example of Trump cheating the writer gives is Trump proclaiming that he (Trump) has “won” 18 club championships. Apparently, even a seasoned professional would find it hard to claim that, let alone substantiate it. Yet Trump does. How?
Well, one of the ways is that every time he opens a new course, he tries to be the first player on it, thus scoring the course’s lowest score and therefore the championship even if it is only for a matter of minutes. On at least two occasions he has claimed a course championship without even playing on the course; on one occasion he was playing on a course 80 miles away in another state, but because he achieved a lower score on the day than the championship winner on the first course, Trump claimed the championship and was given it!
On the second occasion, Trump claimed a championship without playing in the tournament because he said he had previously beaten the tournament winner three times and was “a better player". Again, he was given it.
And then he often describes his Trump courses as “the best in the world” or “the best ever”. Notwithstanding they can’t all be the best in the world, Augusta, Pebble Beach and St Andrews are not among them, and only one Trump course hosts a regular PGA event and only two are in Golf Magazine's Top 100.
And then there are the well-documented cases of the Secret Service going ahead and not so secretly improving the lie of Trump's balls; therefore giving a lie to the lie of Trump's lies.
The book goes on, but I will not. Suffice to say that the central premise of the book is that you can tell a lot about the man by the way he plays golf.
As I said, this book about how Trump cheats at golf is a big book
In Trump’s perverse world he would probably want to capitalise on that, trumpeting:
“I am the world’s greatest ever golf cheat. The best ever. It’s true. Yes, it is.”