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Terra Firma | Dec 13, 2007 15:40

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Over dinner on Monday, Jon and I got into a rather sombre conversation about the last days of Hemingway, which he spent in Ketchum, Idaho. When the similarly doomed Hunter S Thompson retraced Hemingway's footsteps – right to the very last – he came to the conclusion that he was, like Hemingway, no longer connected to the zeitgeist. His life as a writer had, therefore, finished.

I hadn't really made this connection before, but whether it's "news sense", "nose for a story" or a "sense of the people", the connection to the zeitgeist is at the core of this, whatever it is that I'm doing to lead you to read this. It was an articulation of my fear about coming back to New Zealand – to be so disconnected from the underlying currents of the times, that I could no longer do this.

It's a bit like land. You wouldn't think twice about it when you're standing on it, but once you go beyond the horizon, it becomes abstract – and you wouldn't know where to start looking for it.

I had really dreaded wading into the EFB debate. I felt completely clueless. Not so much about the facts or the arguments. I walked into a conversation between Graeme and a National researcher at their Christmas party last week; the legal arguments were amusingly byzantine, but manageably incomprehensible.

No, the real mystery was the ferocity and shrillness of the debate. I'd witnessed the continual escalation of the debate from afar, and fuck, it was scary. It got louder and louder, became painful and completely incoherent. The strands of arguments made sense in their own right, but they were escorted by increasingly thuggish rhetoric, and threaded together by a narrative that I just plain didn't get.

And, like the equally painful noise around the TSA, it wasn't just a narrative. It was a worldview. The arguments came out of a meta-narrative about what's going on in this country, and it wasn't the New Zealand I knew.

My reintegration into Wellington has been a relief. It hasn't taken me long to remember what the Wellington machine is – a giant, noisy smoke machine. The nation is not ablaze; they just left the smoke machine on for too long.

I chalk it up to a concept that I would like to coin rhetorical hyperinflation. It's the effect of continual oneupmanship, where each outraged hyperbole and bitchy namecalling has to be more outraged and bitchy than the last.

But it's not a frivolous metaphor – with each upward spiral of vitriol, the value of the words decreases.

Contrary to appearances, the debate hasn't been getting more heated. It's been dying a slow, desperate death. Even as the voices grow more shrill and the words more angry, people are becoming more cynical about the debate itself and the institutions responsible for it.

People are losing faith in the currency of politics.

But Labour's "people don't care so shut up" position is cynical, too. Sure, the debate has gone way out of proportion, and the shrillest of the bill's opponents have done their cause a great disservice, but now Labour is trying to get a free ride out of this just because the opposition have overplayed their hand.

There are genuine issues there, and today's Herald editorial show precisely how the debate has been fucked up.

The debate can boil down to two basic interpretations. One, which is the view of this paper, is that the Bill makes democracy in New Zealand less free. The other is that, yes, it does do that, but it is a necessary evil to rid the country of covert manipulation from the likes of the Exclusive Brethren. National should be seizing its chances to hammer home that first point and ensure that the public realises that from January 1 political discourse will be restricted. A simple message needs simple communication"

The first "interpretation" is an argument in the second. It's not an argument in its own right. Why? Because all electoral laws, by definition, make democracy in New Zealand less free. 3 month campaigning period? Less freedom. No electioneering on polling day? Less freedom. No buying votes? Less freedom.

Laws are restrictions on freedoms. Electoral laws are restrictions on democratic freedoms. The point is not whether the EFB restricts democratic freedoms – it's an electoral law, of course it does – the point is whether, on balance, the restrictions promote a healthier democracy, and whether those restrictions unfairly favour or disfavour specific groups in society.

The "simple communication", as the Herald puts it, doesn't even get people started on the real debate. Of course, if the Herald was actually concerned with debate, then it wouldn't have criticised John Key for making arguments that were "too low-brow, too detailed and too open to argument". By low-brow, I assume they mean that he didn't ratchet up the rhetoric to the Herald's mighty standards, and by too open to argument, I guess that meant he wasn't restating meaningless truisms.

It may be imprudent of me to think that I have a better grasp of the zeitgeist than that grand dame of New Zealand, the organ that Paul Holmes would look like if he was fed through a printing press, the New Zealand Herald. Perhaps. But they've really pissed in the pool on this one, soiling the debate, and that will remain, even if people are still willing to swim in it.

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Back! (And on the Crusading Herald) | Nov 13, 2007 03:23

Changing countries is always a disorientating experience. You have to think in a new currency, speak in a new language, adapt to new cultural rules – and all before you get out of the airport, preferably.

I knew about three words in Japanese, but fortunately, much of Japanese is written in Kanji, which is more or less the same as written Chinese. That meant that I could read a third of everything. It's also the third which is hardest for Westerners to learn, which was a happy coincidence. Traveling with my Kiwi friends in Japan, they could read everything *but* the Kanji, and so with our powers combined, we had the literacy of 9-year-old.

I couldn't say anything in Japanese, though. Except for "hai", which is accompanied by a slight bow and means "yes". They're big on agreeing in Japan, and 80% of the time, "hai" is the appropriate response to whatever the other person is saying.

My one word Japanese impersonation was so good, in fact, that people genuinely thought I was Japanese. Though that presumably meant that they also thought I was... um, differently-abled. Conversely, when I cracked out my spectacularly awful Mandarin in China, everyone thought I was speaking quite well... for a Korean.

The experience made me far more understanding of the touts in India who kept yelling "hello Japan!" at me.

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Traveling down south, I passed through Kokura, an uneventful city with a surplus of spicy cod roe (the mysterious fish-egg sausage I had in Kyoto), as well as a lovely monorail.

It's little more than a footnote in the annals of history, but I suppose it's happy to be there – it was the original target for the second atomic bomb. Cloudy skies meant that Kokura became synonymous with cod roe, rather than nuclear annihilation.

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"Democracy Under Attack from Government", eh? Jebus – big call from the Granny.

The editorial makes a sound argument (and one that's been bouncing around on blogs for a long bloody while) though it neglects the other side of the debate. i.e. How to stop elections from being bought.

Still, they're putting themselves in an awfully vulnerable position. Much of the spending covered by the Electoral Finance Bill would be spent on advertising, and plenty of that would be spent on advertising in the Herald and its sister publications – or not, if the bill is passed.

It's not that I don't trust the integrity of their reporting. I have a great deal of respect for John Armstrong, and Audrey Young's work on this has been particularly incisive and meaty. But for the Herald to take a strong editorial stance on an issue where they have a big financial stake, it is, even with the best intentions, a bit iffy.

And while it may be rich for this to come from a blogger, a campaigning paper looks really ugly, too. Asking loaded questions like: "Is the bill restricting political campaigning an attack on democracy?" is bad enough. (Consider how "Is secret campaigning by private lobby groups an attack on democracy?" would have gone down.)

Then using a comments page to justify a report of a public landslide? Newspapers still seem to engage with readers on a "excite, incite, sum up outrage in 20 words or less" formula. These kinds of stories are always frustrating, but with the Herald on crusader-mode, it's taken on an extra element of pompousness:

Public opinion has swung behind the Herald's call for the Electoral Finance Bill to be scrapped."

Readers ... have also been almost unanimously in support of a front page editorial today which said: 'democracy is not a device to keep the Labour Party in power'."

The campaign has also won the support today of National leader John Key"

... as if John Key didn't give much thought to the issue until the Herald brought it to his attention.

For all its flaws, this bill – and the debate surrounding it – is about the role of money in elections, not free speech. The role of public funding, private donations, anonymous contributions are all, quite legitimately, up for debate. Trying to vilify anyone who supports public funding as trying to hijack the machinery of the state, and anyone who supports more private funding as trying to buy elections really doesn't help.

It does, however, go to show why this debate is so difficult and so damn ugly.

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Throughout my year away, the only New Zealanders I saw on TV were the Flight of the Conchords. They always make New Zealand seem so small, so accessible and so funny. So I get back into the country, and immediately see Jemaine walking down the street.

I guess what they say about NZ is true, after all. Good on ya, Jemaine.

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