Vaccines and Vehemence

 

 

vehemence

/ˈviːɪm(ə)ns/

noun

noun: vehemence; plural noun: vehemences

Great forcefulness or intensity of feeling or expression. "the vehemence of his reaction".

 

Last year, the rupture of what I had considered a resilient friendship deeply upset me. There are three reasons for that:

 

1. The rupture was predicated on a misunderstanding that could have been “sorted”.
2. I had the, and I now think naïve, view that a friendship, particularly the length of this one, should be able to withstand misunderstandings, at least to the point of agreeing to disagree.
3. The rupture was so abrupt and complete that I questioned my judgement in forming the foundation of a friendship with this person.

 

I have calmed down now and moved on. But it got me thinking. Was that event symptomatic of a wider malaise infecting our society? 

Are we so stressed out even a minor and previously thought insignificant issue attains wider ramifications and consequences—without the possibility of atonement?

I hope that is not the case. I fervently do. But it appears to me that New Zealand is becoming increasingly polarised on a far broader range of issues and that polarisation is now exhibited with far greater exactitude and vehemence.

 

And nowhere in my world is that more obvious than the pro-vaccine v. anti-vaccine debate. 

Fryday won’t contribute to the debate; this post is not about vaccines. It is about the vehemence in which the argument is being waged and what it says of whom we may have become.

 

My starting point is that I have the elective right to make my own decisions, provided I am not breaking the law or intentionally harming someone. You—and I mean a collective you— have the right to arrive at your own decisions under the same adjuncts. You also have the right to persuade me to your opinion if you have a view contrary to mine.

 

No problem.

 

However, there is a problem in that some in this debate ignore the aspect of not intentionally harming someone.

I can cite three examples from my neighbourhood:

 

1. An elderly lady allegedly approached children in our town, telling them they would die if “Mommy and Daddy” forced them to have a jab. That lady has been reported to the police. I believe I know who she is.
2. People waiting in their cars at vaccination centres have been accosted by placard-wielding anti-vaxers so aggressively that they intimidated the occupants and frightened the children. Again, the matter has been referred to the police.
3. One woman in the small, gated community my wife and I live in sent a message to us claiming DHB staff and the military were going door-to-door asking residents whether they were vaccinated—and should we (the community) lock our gate to keep them out.

 

That last one, more naïve than harmful, recognises a factor present in all three examples. People are so intense about this issue that they cannot allow people to have an opinion opposing theirs. Why is that? Why the evangelical zeal? Why has one side in this argument turned into a Latter-Day Saints visit? And why, in extreme examples, is it necessary to target kids?

 

I have no answers to those questions. But the questions themselves worry me. I have never seen the likes of this venom in New Zealand—at least not on this scale. I am uncomfortable with it; I don’t like it and, whilst there is room for passion and zeal, there is no room for this crap.[1]

 

To use a well-worn phrase: this is not who we are or, for most of us, want to be.

 

PostScript:

I was naïve last year in thinking a friendship could withstand a disagreement, particularly one based on a misunderstanding; I am perhaps being equally naïve this year in hoping we can all pull back and show a little common sense—and courtesy.

 

 

[1] It can be argued that the 1981 Springbok tour forged the same intensity and did divide the country. But that was for the most part attacking an issue (apartheid)—not targeting individuals and certainly not children.

 

 

 

Doing No.2s

 

The best print advertisement headline I wrote while working in advertising owed its appeal to logic rather than imagination or creativity, so its subsequent success in winning an award was largely undeserved.

It was for Budget Car Rentals who were at the time having trouble with one of its competitors, and the No.1 in the market, Hertz allegedly spreading misinformation about Budget’s vehicle availability in Australia.

The headline I wrote for my ad. was:

The Truth, Hertz.

As I said, not particularly imaginative, but it captured the public’s attention, made Hertz angry (I believe) and garnered me an advertising award.

It wasn’t the best headline written for the car rental industry. That accolade goes to the famous slogan created for Avis by DDB in the 1960s:

When you’re only No.2, you try harder.

So successful was that headline, that Avis’s market share and profits quickly grew to the point that there was a very real risk of it becoming No.1!

There is merit in being No.2; it leaves something for you to aspire to and the motivation to achieve it. I would be quite happy if anything I achieved thus far got me to the position.

But for me, it comes down to something else. Two is my lucky number and 2022 is replete with them (only 2222 is better, and I am unlikely to see that in) so I am looking forward to 2022 with optimism.

I hope you can do the same.

To that end, Fryday wishes you, your family, those you love and all those you simply want the best for, a year in which you attain your dreams, and which leaves you happier moments experiences and memories.

After all, we’ve all worked bloody hard for that over the last two years.

We deserve it.

 

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!”

 

 

The Deep Dark Mire of the National Party

 

I remember sitting in Jack Elder’s West Auckland home on the 14^thof June 1984, watching Rob Muldoon announce live on television that there would be a general election the following month. Muldoon was visibly drunk and his judgement severely impaired, but everybody from Elder’s campaign team in Elder’s house that night was initially stunned by the announcement and then openly ecstatic. There was no way Muldoon, then in his third term as prime minister and up against the eloquent and popular David Lange, would win a general election.

Nor did he. He and the National Party lost in a landslide. The fourth Labour Government was ushed in. David Lange became Prime Minister, and Jack Elder was appointed Minister of Police.

That night, June 14, Muldoon committed political suicide. Did he know then? I think he did. I have watched footage of the announcement. There is resignation in his eyes and exhaustion about his demeanour that suggests he wanted out, and Marilyn Waring was a convenient scapegoat and diversion. 

Of course, the comparison with last Wednesday is obvious. Did Judith Collins know what she was doing? Or know the likely (some will say inevitable) ramifications of demoting her chief rival over an innocuous issue that occurred five years ago? I think she did. She is too astute and too experienced not to. And unlike Muldoon, she was not, as far as I know, drunk.

So, why did she do it?

I don’t think we will ever know that. Collins’ appalling lack of judgement (if that indeed was what it was) defies logic. And any proffered explanation by others is, to this point, speculation. We may get an answer from the inevitable autobiography, but that I think will be tarnished by varnish. I don’t think Collins then as now will be in any mood to share the true or whole motivation for what she did. Why should she? She owes us nothing.

Why she did what she did will remain a mystery, like so much within the deep dark mire of the current National Party.

Political leaders come and go, but the National Party is haemorrhaging them—five of them since the 2017 election if we count Bill English and Shane Reti.

Why is that?

Because the party lacks vision and back-room leadership.

The National Party has long considered itself the rightful party of power, and that any loss of power is both temporary and an aberration. On the rare occasions they have been out of power, they always assumed there was a way back, and it was just a matter of time and patience.

The party would pull through.

But none of that exists now. And hasn’t since the party lost for a second time and in a landslide in 2020.

Lacking imagination and leadership, the best they have managed to come up with is cycling through a group of parliamentary leaders in the vain hope that one of them will capture the public’s imagination and combat the charismatic Jacinda Ardern. 

None has, despite in my view Ardern leading the most incompetent government in New Zealand history.

Now the party has run out of time and options. Looking at the group of potential front-runners for the leadership, none stands out, and there are two who, in my view, would be worse than Collins (deputy leader is a different story, there are a couple of women there who would be magic but not yet ready to take the helm).

So, how did the party get to this parlous state?

If changing leaders doesn’t work and the party is directionless, we are left only to consider the common elements that have prevailed through this decay in the party’s persona and progress.

Peter Goodfellow.

Peter Goodfellow is the President of the National Party and hugely influential in its management and machinations.

I know him. I have had lunch with him. He seems to be a—well—a good fellow.

But in my view, he is a disaster for the party. He had his day in the sun when he was basking in the supernova of John Key. But since then he has presided over the sharpest decline in the party’s history.

And it is not only him. Much of the management team he leads have struck me, and I have met many of them, as arrogant, authoritarian and deeply out of touch with the electorate and even the party membership.

It is a mystery to me why they have lasted as long as they have.

I have heard that Goodfellow’s saving graces are he is a good fundraiser and well connected in Remuera. But given where the party he leads is now, are those “graces” enough? And as for the rest of them—their time has come and well and truly gone.

They oversee a time when the party nearly destroyed itself and may still do.

The National Party can change all the leaders it wants (at its peril), but nothing will change until it changes its failed back-room.

The country needs that to happen.

 

The Weird and wonderful place names of England

 

Oscar Wilde famously said Britain and America have everything in common except language.

He may well have been right. When I was in England a few years back, I struggled to find anybody, at least in the hospitality sector, who spoke English with anything other than a broad East-European accent. 

When I arrived in America, I found everyone spoke English with clarity and control. There was, however,  a propensity, widely used, to call me “Bud”. I can forgive that, coming as I do, from a nation where everybody is called “Mate”.

Anyway, I love English and the English. A great mate of mine, and a frequent Fryday correspondent, hails from England and the days when we would gladly and derisively call him a Pom died with the unions.

We love them out here.

Inspired by my friend, I decided that this week Fryday would explore the English use of English, particularly when it came to naming their towns and hamlets. I have done this before, but I have found some new ones. The English are wonderfully creative about this.

Here are the weirdly wonderful names the English have given their towns and places:

Towards Newcastle in the North, we find “Pity me” and “Wide Open”. Heading down through Teeside to Yorkshire, we have “Crackpot”, “Giggleswick”, and “Wetwang”.

Not too far from Southport, we have ”Blubberhouses”, “Jump”, “Bunny” and “Barton in the Beans”. Near Norwich is a particular favourite of mine, “Great snoring”, which is almost level with “Wig wig” and Chemistry” near the border of Wales. Near Gloucester, there is “Catbrain” and who could forget “Matching Tie” near Cambridge?

The far south of England, though, is the easy winner as far as odd names are concerned. “Curry Mallet” isn’t too far from Bath, “Donkey Town” is south of London, and in the far south, aptly at the bottom of England, we have the delights of “Brown Willy”, “Droop”, “Loose Bottom” and “Crapstone”.

Elsewhere we find ourselves in:

Badgers Cross, Balls Cross, Bell End, Bitchfield, Bishop Spit. Boggy Bottom, Cockermouth, Cockfosters, Crudwell,  Greedy Gut, Greensplat, Ha-Ha Road, Moofield, Mudchute, Mudford Sock, No Place,  Once Brewed/Twice Brewed, Penistone, Pratt’s Bottom, Pucklechurch, Queen Camel, Rotten End, Sandy Balls, Scratchy Bottom, Spanker Lane,  Tiddlywink, Upperthong, Ugley, Westward Ho!, Windy Nook and the one I get really high on…

Tokers Green.

Presumably the last of those hosts a music festival…or should.

 

It's not Cricket

 

I once heard an American question how a game of test cricket could last five days and not necessarily produce a winner.

Of course, the nuances of cricket are incomprehensible to someone not steeped in the game, but the question is rich coming from America, the country that inflicted on the world the most complex and unfathomable of all games—American Football.

The American has a point, however. There are many aspects of cricket lore that defy explanation and whose origins we lost to antiquity. Take player positions on the field, for example. What sense can we make of silly mid-on and silly point, slips, gully, backward short leg, square leg and, surely the loneliest position on the field, third man?

What appears to be even more incomprehensive to Americans is the phraseology used to describe the juxtaposition and status of the two teams playing the game. 
To simplify that aspect of the game, someone went onto the World of Cricket Forum and came up with:

 

The Rules of Cricket:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. 

Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. 

When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. 

There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. 

When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game! 

 

There is a juxtaposition here with our prime minister that is not immediately apparent. Let’s unlock that:

We have a prime minister who is in, but an increasing number wants out.

We have a prime minister who, when she got in, most people voted to keep out.

We have a prime minister who is in, but many consider out of her mind when it comes running the country.

We have a prime minister who was in Auckland this week, but not out and about.

We have a prime minister who is in with the media, but out of touch with everybody else.

 

What Ardern is doing to this country is not cricket, but it is just as confusing. Let’s call “over.”

Cushion...a blow

 

What is it about women and cushions?

Cushions are about as useful to humanity as eyebrows are to the body—something I learnt lately when I “lost” an eyebrow and gained the character of a more macho and sensible scar.

Yet women seem to throw cushions around with gay abandon. They litter couches, clutter chairs and are useless impediments in bed. And the cushions are even worse!

Cushions on the bed are particularly galling. What purpose are they serving? Most beds in my experience have pillows, sometimes quite a few of them. To bury them beneath cushions is surely a redundancy.
If you are a woman, you will undoubtedly counter that by saying cushions are decorative. The far more pragmatic male of the species will bring some common sense to the argument: yes, decorative, and dangerous.

What happens to all those cushions when you get into bed? You immediately discard them on to the floor where they lay in wait, an unseen hazard on your stumbling route to the toilet.
Cushions in the bedroom are insidious and gender specific. You don’t see them in a man’s bedroom. It is only when said male enters a partnership with a woman that those cushions magically appear. There should be a standard clause in pre-nuptial agreements banning cushions from bedrooms and, indeed, anywhere in the house.

Men have rights too.

The only practical use I can see for a cushion is to provide a level of comfort for the woman who kneels at the feet of her man, ready to fetch him a beer, while he watches Supercars. Even then, a pillow would suffice.

I have researched this issue. The question I raise—what use are cushions---is common on the internet. The only answer given is that they are decorative. There is a nod to posture. But again, that is gender specific. Blokes don’t care about posture. That’s something that went out the door with Polaroid photos and taking nude photos of your wife.

So, as much as I would like to fashion an argument for cushions, the only argument I can fashion is fashion.

And that is simply not good enough for me.

The only good news is that fashion, by its nature, goes out of fashion and becomes nothing more than a useless object.

It’s happened to the Prime Minister; I hope it happens to cushions.