One for the Road

For the last four years it has been my good fortune to be linked to the commissioning and then construction of a new motorway extension just north of Auckland. Last week that road was opened to the public two months ahead of anticipated and a little under its forecast cost. The road opened to much acclaim for its beauty, engineering excellence and convenience. The criticism that surrounded the tolling mechanism and the long sight-seeing queues were not of the road itself nor, understandably, those who built it.There is to be satisfaction and relief about that. I was among the builders when the road was officially opened by the usual gaggle of dignitaries who will be forgotten long before the road is. But a nice touch was the surrender of the floor, or the pavement in this case, to one of the workers on the project, a digger driver. In halting voice and with some emotion he spoke simply of the pride he and his fellow workers had in being involved with the road and the special pride of ownership they now took at its opening. He spoke of bringing his young children to the road, to drive it, to point to the parts he produced. He spoke of new generations, his grandchildren, who would be informed proudly by his sons that "your grandfather build that." And whilst he didn't say as such we as such knew that man would live on in that road.
We all would.
Yes, it is essentially just an amalgam of bitumen, metal and steel. Yes, it is only 7.5 kilometres long and, yes, it costs $2.00 to drive along it. But in this world, with what is happening to and in it today, with the world the way it is and for some time will be, it's refreshing to reflect that this patch of bitumen metal and steel can be proudly proclaimed as having a life of its own and a meaning for so long for so many.

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Dear God: The Last Post

Prairie Chapel Ranch
Crawford
Texas

01/23/2009

Dear God

I find myself with a little time on my hands. I’m back home amongst my people, with Laura at my side. I know what you are going to say God. You are going to say two things: will I miss being all-powerful, how will I like to be remembered and what do I plan to do now?

Well, I have been thinking about these things to God. I have asked myself these same questions, and I got answers for all of them

Will I miss the power? Well, I got some nice letters from some pretty powerful people—prime ministers, presidents, industry leaders and that guy who runs Macdonalds and they all say the same thing, that my leaving the White House will leave the world a better place. That’s what they said. So, you see, I have some powerful friends (can you say the same?), so I don’t miss power, I still have it!

What do I want to be remembered for? Again, the answer is already there. You don’t know how many letters I have got from people just like you and me (well more like me than you) saying they will never forget me. They want to, they say, but they can’t. So, you see, I have left an inedible impression in peoples’ hearts.

What will I do now? Well, first I plan to just have a little R&R around the ranch. I might hog-tie a few cattle and Laura to. And some nice folk down there in Crawford asked me to donate my papers and books I read during my presidency to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I told them I didn’t keep no newspapers (didn’t read them either) but Laura would look out the book.

Do I have any regrets, and how do I think the new guy will go? Yes, I have regrets. I would have liked a bigger Dick. Dick Chaney never quite measured up as a Vice-President. I could have done with a lot more help (people kept on saying to me, you need help) but he did bring in the money, so I guess he was useful. I regret going into Iraq. It was so hot and I got that rash between my legs and it stayed around for ages.

The new guy? A Black Democrat from Illinois? I think he proved his own point when he said that if he could become President anybody could become President. They said the same thing about me. So, nothing new there.

So, thank you God. Thank you for being there when I needed you. You know I’m here to return the favor. Watch over these United States, watch over the world and, if you get time, you might like to check us out as Laura and I do a little hog-tieing. We’ll be thinking of you.

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Me and Jesus have something in common—we both have daddies who are proud of us and what we done.

One day at a time,
G.


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He had it right

Barack Obama got it right: George W Bush should have concentrated on the biscuit factory.

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Show Me The Body Bags

In four days, George W. Bush will leave office. I predict his leaving will be a quiet affair with few laudatory comments and, somewhat paradoxically, little celebration. The reasons it will garner little attention are manifest: all attention will be on Barack Obama and his dawning of a new era. There are also more powerful personal issues today than the American presidency to tax our thoughts, and, put simply, many of us just want to see the back of George W. Bush. We want him gone—gone and forgotten.
He won’t be though. He won’t be forgotten. George W. Bush will likely remain in our minds and in history as the most reviled President of all time, while his election and re-election will remain as two of the few occasions that the world said they knew better than America. We told ya so.
I cannot bring myself to be forgiving and gracious about President George W. Bush or his presidency. Both were disasters for the world and will stay so, particularly in Afghanistan and on Wall Street. But these to me are not his greatest sins. Nor are his many examples of idiocy, so wonderfully exposed by Letterman and everybody else outside the Fox Network. Nor is his shameless evoking of God and the way in which the religious zeal, fervour and influence of his born-again Christianity governed his decisions. I will forget his reading books upside down and his (lack of) response to Katrina. I will consign to memory the cronyism and shameless exploitation, by vested interests, of the American people, the American system and, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of young Americans. These are all matters that, whilst some are tragic, will be best left in the past.
But what I will never forget or forgive is the question of the body bags. Soon after the Iraq War began, George W. Bush decided and dictated that the world’s media would not be allowed to film the arrival in America of body bags from Iraq. He cited the effect the broadcast of such footage would have on grieving families. That comment, more than any other to my mind, was the most fatuous, the most mendacious and most despicable of any during his presidency.
My reason for that is this. George W. Bush knew, or had at least been told, that footage of body bags from Vietnam and Somalia was among the most powerful factors in galvanising public opinion against American military involvement in those areas.* With Vietnam, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all could and did ignore the plaintive cries of “peaceniks.” But when American television started showing body bags coming back from Vietnam, Middle America also turned against the war. And the war ended. It smaller scale, in Somalia.
So why did George W. Bush, for the first time ever in the television age, dictate that body bags would not be filmed? Simple. He wanted and needed the war to continue. And if that meant the full effect, the poignancy and the tragic personal cost to families of his dirty war were hidden from the American public so be it. He would do it.
To me the true obscenity of the Bush presidency is not the upside down books, the idiocy, the stupidity, the posturing, the bravado. It was his cowardly reaction to and treatment of the one enemy he knew he could never combat--the boys in the bags.

Bush will be back. For one more Fryday, next week. Then that’s it.

* Citation: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p70237_index.html

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Christmas Frights

Barely 50 metres from where I write this there sits primly a house that nightly draws from the National Grid an amount of power many will consider morally and pragmatically reprehensible. It’s drawing power from the National Grid is exceeded only by its drawing power for a bored local populace (this is Christchurch, after all) attracted to this latest evocation of imported American tradition—the external electrification and decoration of the residential home. Rhinestone Cowboy meets Liberace meets Universal Homes. The people who perpetrate this upon us are undoubtedly good people. Not only do they enter into the Christmas spirit with gay abandon (and some may well be), they generously share it with the rest of us. But there is a dark side to this light display. I am told that it is getting an increasingly competitive art form with homes on streets and even entire streets vying aggressively with each other for the most ornate—read facile—displays. There are dark mutterings of huge expenditures, and even competing displays being damaged or stolen. Jealousy and envy are making their insidious ways up these light-saturated paths. I personally cannot attest to any of this: my refusal to enter this arena, either as a competitor or as a spectator, is abject. My sole contribution to Christmas display I intend to be my traditional display of pique that my wife won’t let me play Snoopy’s Christmas. My sole foray into Christmas spirit will be copious quantities of single-malt scotch. I am singularly ill equipped therefore to provide a balanced viewpoint on this issue. But that hasn’t stopped Fryday before. So let me say that whilst these homes undoubtedly provide much pleasure to entire families who ooh and arr over them to the extent that there is a mess next morning on the footpaths, and the intent of the people who pay and display them is commendable, we nevertheless have here an example of something just a little bit silly. Something else imported from the country that also gave us Halloween and George W. Bush. It’s here to stay. I’m just not sure it's our way. Merry Christmas.

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A Virtuous Woman

I have had the virtue (for virtue it is) over the last week of looking at life from a female perspective, I have learned some great truths, previously denied me as a man. I have learned that bras chaff and pantyhose is superior to stockings. I have resisted the temptation to step out in public unless my make-up is just right, and even then I check it in the mirror at every opportunity. I find myself hunting for idle chit-chat and, when I find it, entirely forgetting that I should be somewhere else. Men surprise me in that the things they feel are important--the economy, the global crisis, Black Caps coaching and Pamela Anderson--are far from important, though Pamela Anderson has a certain latent appeal still. In fact, I find men quite laughable in their self-generated and self-promoted superiority and pomposity. However, I do find John Key curiously attractive. Being a woman is nothing like I thought it would be. It's better. I am given to the thought that I can do anything. I am woman! I could be prime minister. I could be New Zealand's first feminine prime minister. The world is my oyster. Governed by my oyster. And to the world I say suck on that.

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Dear God XI: The Son & the father

Dear God,

Y’know God, the best and earliest advice I ever heard was from my Daddy not long after my blessed birth when I heard him say to my Mamma, “Well, y’know Babs, ain’t nobody that’s perfect.”

I have long lived by that, my hole presidency has lived by that. There ain’t nobody that’s perfect—not Condolezza, not Dick, not Don, not even Laura (though if Laura would just do that other little thing she probably would be) and, I have to say, because nobody else I know will, not even I am perfect.

But you? What was it? When was it.? Was it after that 550th bottle of Jack that something or someone came to me and said, “Bud, you is going nowhere in life, and you has got to come to God ‘cause He is going to take you to a better life and to the presidency, and so shall it be good and perfect. And so it was that the Man did come to the presidency…

And then to Iraq.

Now, I am not accusing you or anything, you understand. I don’t know whether it was you God or my Daddy that told me to go into Iraq. Frankly, I often got you two mixed up when I was listening and not paying too much attention. I know this, it wasn’t Homer Simpson, ‘cause I asked him. And it wasn’t in the Bible, ‘cause nowhere in there does it say that I should go forth and kick the shit out of Saddam.

But someone told me, and then left me to take the blame. Let’s this be our little secret—I blame you. But I’m not going to go out there and say our boys in Iraq are dieing because they are doing God’s work. No sirree. That would be cowardly, that would be indecisive, that would be sacrilege, that could be a problem when we eventually meet. Besides, it is incumbent on me as the incumbent to be strong in the face of adversity, show leadership, accept the accountability and…find someone else to blame.

Now I want you to give some thought to that God. I want you to then come to me tonight after the Simpsons and before Laura and tell me whose to blame for us being in Iraq. I don’t want no God-given solutions on how to get out of there—‘cause I am going to leave that to the new guy coming in. But I do want you to tell me who is going to take the fall on this, so that when History looks back at me and my presidency he will say, “it wasn’t perfect, but he was a good man a righteous man, a man of vision, a man of the people, a man insightful, intelligence, who strode the world like Homer and changed it for the better. That’s what I want. So you need to come up with someone else to blame for Iraq. I don’t care who: Don, Colin, Laura, anybody.

Have you got it God? Give me a legacy. Find someone else to blame. But not Dick. Not the vice president. Never Dick.

Never let it ever be said, oh God, that, I George W. Bush was ruled by my Dick.

I’ll leave it to you.

G.

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Fairy Tale

Apparently, nobody loves a fairy when she's forty. Equally apparently, this now appears to be a generally held belief, despite the fact that there is no significant scientific evidence to support the conclusion. Indeed the initial conclusion was reached and then imperviously engraved by something as insubstantive as a music hall staple of the 30s written by Arthur Le Clerq and sung lustily by Tessie O'Shea. Fairies since of advanced age have suffered for it.
As indeed am I. For such am I.
I am in rehearsals for the year-end pantomime. I have never done a pantomime before but I have to say that I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. In this production, Cinderella, I play no fewer than three female roles, among them the fairy godmother, in which capacity I sing that song. I am instructed to mince, to fawn, to exhibit my feminine side and to leave at the stage door any vestige of self-respect I may still have. The last is no problem: I have none.
A more experienced practitioner in such matters tells me that the way to play such roles is to do so with confidence and not worry about how big a fool you are making of yourself as you skip gaily around the stage in a tutu bemoaning the fact that your wand has suddenly developed a droop. He is right of course. But my riposte, offered as a true method actor, was "But what is the essence of the character here. What is the inner-self? What of me do I bring to this character?" His answer was:
"You play three female characters, right?"
"Yes."
"Don't even go there."
Nevertheless, playing three female characters, particularly the fairy, is making a subtle change in me. Whether it is drawing out my feminine side I don't know. But last night, through circumstances way beyond her control, my wife was stranded in town. As a consequence, I spent a night alone: alone, restless and missing her.
Oh shit!
I think I'll go out and kick a rugby ball.

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The Key Factor

Last week's Fryday commenting on the election and performance of New Zealand's new Prime Minister John Key generated more response than any Fryday of recent times. Those of you who rushed to Key's defence, and there were many of you, may be interested and chastened to know that you were equalled in number by those who agreed with Fryday that Key's election-night performance left a lot to be desired. So, I have to say, did your argument in his favour. Most who defended Key did so on the somewhat superficial basis that he (Key) was at least better than Clark. So? Whilst I agree with you in the Clark comparison, by putting that forward you missed entirely the point Fryday was making. And that was that by his waffling, clichés and goofy grin on election night and his flip-flops on issues such as the Maori seats during the election John Key has exhibited none of the decisiveness that we would expect and now need in a new leader. Yes, change is all to the good, but how good? Certainly not to the scale nor scope of the American election night result. We could have done better. But there is only one Obama and America (and the world) needs him more than we do. We'll settle for Key. After all, we have no choice.

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McCain, you've done it again (not!)

Senator John McCain
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500 NOT!!!

Dear John,

Well, you did it. Or you didn't do it, that is. Here you had a great opportunity to retain the Presidency for the Republicans and retain all the great work I have done for these United Sates of America and other places and you failed. You let the black guy win.

I new he would. I new the moment I came to you and said, John, let me help you. Let me help you by offering the great love the American people have for me and for their God. Let me endorse you and your campaign. I new you would loose when you replied "P**s off, I rather spend another six years in a Hanoi Jail."

You passed up a great opportunity there John--my help, not the Hanoi thing, I mean. So the black guy is in. You're out. I'm out. God is out. And you know what, and may I be Frank here John? None of that matters. What matters is that Sarah didn't get in. Sarah Palin was the best move you made John, all though I think it probably had more to do with God than you. She was what this country needs. She, by rites, was something this country wanted and needed. Someone just like me to carry on.

But you failed her John. You failed her. You failed me. You failed God and you failed the world. You are a looser John and take that from someone who nose.

I wont write to you again.

Sincerely
George W. Bush
President of these United States of America.

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In The Last Shower

So the ill-considered proposal to restrict shower pressure to six litres per minute has been put to bed. Somewhat apt and familiar ground for this government, considering that our beds--and the activities therein--have been somewhere this government has had a propensity to gambol before. But the full flush of public ridicule has forced our present--read omnipresent--leaders to retract what was I understand a Greens-enforced policy. They are embarrassed by it I am sure but saved I think by the all-too-common foot and mouth disease of John Key. The Labour Party is astute at this: the ability to ferret out minutiae such as Peter Sharples said that, John Key said this. Key, on the other hand, seems powerless to prevent it and presents an evidential demeanour that gives credence to Clark's claims that Key is inexperienced and not up to the task. As is often said, this is not Clark's election to win; it is Key's to lose. No pressure John.