Le Grice without Grace

 

Is this a joke?

Ridiculing the NZ Police is very close to being the fashionable norm these days.

Those who do it point to, among other things, the perceived lack of action against the illegal gathering of gangs during covid, support for the iwi roadblocks in Northland, and their failure to arrest an escalating rise in all forms of crime.

None of which is the fault of frontline police officers, and I can imagine they are just as frustrated as we are, and perhaps even embarrassed, over the diffidence of those in power who seemingly won’t—at this woke time— allow them to do the job they signed up for.

Personally, I have nothing but respect for those frontline officers. They have a difficult and sometimes dangerous job. Let’s show a bit of appreciation.

And I mean you, Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice.

Here is the story:

On Tuesday, police arrested two young offenders at the Britomart train station. Those offenders were among a group of 12 who allegedly assaulted a security officer outside the station. The two arrested were charged on suspicion of fighting in one case and suspicion of obstruction and assaulting a police officer in the other.

The arrests weren’t made without difficulty, and of course, as is the case these days, they were filmed by a bystander and uploaded to social media.

This brought out the predictable claims of police brutality.

But as predictable as those claims are, Dr Le Grice’s tilt for 15 minutes of fame has left me wondering where academics such as her come from and whether they have the realistic expectation that I will treat them as anything but a joke.

Dr Jade Le Grice, a senior lecturer at Auckland University, tweeted, saying the arrest video showed “vectors of colonial racism [and sexism] ... again brought to bear”.

Really? “Colonial Racism”? Sexism”?

Sorry, but those are, to me, trite terms trotted out when somebody feels the need to be provocative and claim undeserved importance.

They are also dreadfully old-fashioned. And, by the way, at least one of those arrested appears to be pakeha.

And who is Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice? Well, she is a deep thinker. Either that or she makes it up as she goes along. I think the latter. But I’ll leave the following for you to judge for yourself. This is what she says about herself on her University of Auckland page.

 

“My research approach situates mātauranga Māori, the diversity of Māori culture and identity, and the lived experiences of Māori people as legitimate within our local psychology context. It also involves interfacing with key stakeholders and agents of change to maximise opportunities for praxis, social and institutional change.

“One branch of my research programme applies this approach to the context of reproductive decision making, reproductive justice and inter-related domains of abortion, sexuality education, contraception, reproductive health, and maternity. Through this work I have also explored the importance of developing feminism that is historically congruent, and locally derived, to produce decolonizing psychological knowledge.

“A second branch attends to the social and cultural conditions within which rangatahi Māori develop identities, navigate a colonial context, and create agentic pathways. This extends to decolonising sociocultural contexts of meaning making, understanding supportive relational contexts of whanaungatanga, attending to the development of Māori gendered sexual subjectivities, and Māori identities in the context of state care.”

Greetings from the Red Zone.

 

This morning the Stuff website published what is to me is an extraordinary article regarding the rationale for not imposing checkpoints at Auckland’s southern border.

It quoted stark modelling by the New Zealand Transport Agency forecasting that if checkpoints were imposed during the holiday period, traffic queues could stretch 25 kilometres back into the city and the time waiting in traffic may be as much as 9.5 hours.

Those figures are horrific, and I commend the agency for stating that they create “significant” concerns for the welfare and safety of people and pets stuck in a hot car for anything over two hours.

The agency also said [the delays] would lead to irrational behaviour because of frustration.

Rightly, in my view, the agency recommended against checkpoints.

But that is not why I think the article is extraordinary. On the contrary, I believe the views of the agency and the reporting of them by Stuff is logical, responsible, and mercifully free of the politicisation that governs so much of our lives these days.

So, it is not what the article says; it is what the article doesn’t say—the checkpoints at the northern border.

Surely the same arguments apply to the north. What are the differences? The Stuff article doesn’t supply an answer. There is no mention of the northern checkpoints other than a short statement from an unnamed source that the northern checkpoints are not stopping every car.

Really. So, what are they doing? Why are they there?  If every car is not being checked, why not simply have the random checks administered by police (and only by police) that are now in place to the south of Auckland?

Again, what is the difference?

The defenders of the checkpoints point to Northland’s low vaccination rate and the need to protect a “vulnerable” population.

That, of course, is just obfuscation. If that was the only reason, I could make the argument that Aucklanders need protection from us. There are, I submit, other reasons, to some unpalatable and therefore not to be mentioned, why there are checkpoints in the north and not in the south. I alluded to some of them back in May last year—and I’ll leave it at that.

But getting back to the article. Good on Stuff for publishing it. Stuff and the Transport Agency present compelling reasons against the continued use of checkpoints. Public safety is paramount amongst them.

Why is no such concern expressed for those, my family included, travelling north?

The Last Word in Last Words

 

Last words.

Most of them litter History’s floor often bruised and buried beneath boots of victors. 

That is perhaps God’s gift to the soon to be departed. I imagine that when in the throes of dying, you do not do your best work. God understands that and spares you embarrassment.

Other last words are lost in the myriad of commonalities of surrounding words, particularly during war or natural disasters. For example, I am reminded of Napoleon’s Old Guard, his elite soldiers, when toward the end of the Battle of Waterloo and led by an ancestor of mine, they refused to surrender despite being the target of countless cannon surrounding them.  I can imagine the last words of those brave men as the canon ripped them apart: Oh merde!                       

 I don’t know what my last words will be. I want to think they will be something like “What are we doing tomorrow?” which would suggest that my death comes quickly and unheralded, in the company of someone I love, rather than suffering the slow degradation I deserve.

Some of the famous last words may or may not have been uttered by those to whom they are attributed. For example, who said “Et tu Brute”? Caesar or William Shakespeare?  

We can only imagine the last words of some others. It’s pure conjecture, but could they not have been for George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn: “Bloody hell! Where did they come from?”

My favourite actor is Jimmy Cagney. I don’t know what he said on his deathbed, but given the exasperation he had experienced during his life about what he did and didn’t say, he could be forgiven for saying, “Okay. For Fucksake!: You dirty rat. Satisfied?” You dirty rat was never said in any film in his lifetime.

We know the (almost) last words Oscar Wilde said on his deathbed in the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris. Looking toward the grotesque wallpaper in his room, he turned to a companion and said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death - one or the other of us has to go.”  It was Oscar who went, dying a few hours later; the wallpaper is still there.^⁠1

There are great last words everywhere. Let’s look at a few:

“Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French fries.'”— James French, convicted murderer (before his execution on an electric chair).

Similarly: “Bring me a bullet-proof vest.”— James W. Rodgers, convicted murderer (when asked if he had a last request before dying by firing squad).

“I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys… I think that’s the record.”— Dylan Thomas, poet.

“I should have never switched from scotch to martinis.”— Humphrey Bogart, actor.

“Gun’s not loaded… see?”— Johnny Ace, singer (while playing with a gun backstage during a concert).

“I’m bored with it all.”— Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister.

“This is no way to live.”— Groucho Marx, comedian.

“Turn me over — I’m done on this side.”— Lawrence of Rome, deacon (while being burned alive as punishment).

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something important.”— Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary.

 “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”— General John Sedgwick during the American Civil War just before he was shot dead by a Confederate sniper:

Though not “last words” as such, it is typical of Spike Milligan that the epitaph written on his headstone is, “I told you I was ill.”

And the last word in last words for me was that of Joseph Henry Green: A surgeon, Green was checking his own pulse as he lay dying. His last word? 

“Stopped.”

¹ Incidentally, Oscar Wilde is buried within 500 metres of my aforementioned Waterloo ancestor, Marshal Ney. Ney’s final words were “Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you.” He was then ripped apart by a firing squad. Technically, therefore, his last word was “Fire!”