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The long goodbye | Feb 28, 2006 08:31
So. Farewell
Then
David Benson-Pope
It looks
As though
You will be taking
An early shower.
Which is what
Alanis Morissette
Would call
Ironic.
You can quote me on that | Feb 24, 2006 09:16
Cameron Brewer appears to cleave to that hoary old PR creed: don't worry what the media might write about you, just make sure they spell your name right. On that basis, he should be happy enough with the results of his efforts this week on behalf of the Newmarket Business Association.
Sideswipe took some pleasure in telling Herald readers that he had generously supplied the paper - for its 'exclusive' use - "unsolicited pap quotes to insert into our coverage of Bill Clinton's visit, just in case the former President buys some socks in Newmarket".
Of course they were too good not to share:
1. "America has a special place in Newmarket's heart and unlike Winston Peters we would love the opportunity to show Bill Clinton our appreciation for his country's role in the Pacific," said Cameron Brewer, head of the Newmarket Business Association.
2. "We would love to get the stars and stripes back out on Broadway. Newmarket is the spiritual ground for any visiting American."
Some may sneer, or scoff, or chuckle, but I think this is admirable work. Don't the economists keep telling us we need to improve our productivity?
Just tell me this, Mr or Ms News Editor: isn't it a lot more efficient to have little quotes all filed away and ready to go at a moment's notice?
Newsrooms must strike a man of such tidy thought as Cameron Brewer as great sprawling empires of inefficiency. The only thing they write in advance are obituaries, and even those they tremble about because of the risk that the thing will inadvertently get run while the subject is still up and active and on the golf course, and tributes have not even begun to trickle, let alone flow. (Where, incidentally, do these tributes flow, precisely? Can a mourner gather with other admirers along a street or outside wrought iron gates in Princess Diana fashion and sob together as the tributes flow past?)
But back to productivity.
Our public figures are pretty predictable in their public utterances. Our Prime Minister's response to any scandal has two templates: I can't comment on that while the investigation is in progress and: the matter has been thoroughly investigated and I've moved on. Name a public figure, pick an issue and you can predict their script without very much difficulty.
So I offer this notion to an enterprising reporter fresh out of the 14 dozen or so tertiary institutions now preparing young New Zealanders for a fabulous career in journalism, or more precisely, the faint glimmer of hope of one day getting to wear one of Kate Hawkesby's frocks and read the late night news.
What I have to offer is guaranteed to make you stand out from the pack. First, you need to make a list of the all the likely big events of the next year or so: Bird Flu Mutates, US Invades Iraq, Democrats Win Midterms- Bush Impeachment Underway, Oil $125 A Barrel, that kind of thing.
Then all you have to do is work up a portfolio of predictable quotes by all the usual figures, and tuck them away ready to use the moment the story breaks.
Let's try an example. Let's say we want quotes from all the usual suspects on the second coming of Christ. You just need a couple of lines each.
Helen Clark: We will make Mr Christ very welcome on his visit to New Zealand, and if he is able to join me on a tour of our film and TV locations I am sure he will soon be telling the rest of the world: "Morningside forever!"
Don Brash: It is of course a not inconsiderable matter of pride that a celestial eminence as notable as Jesus Christ should be coming to New Zealand. But it would be quite wrong of me not to point out that he will be spending twice as long in Australia. What future can we possibly hope to offer our grandchildren when the gulf between our two countries continues to widen?
John Banks: That's not him.
Tim Shadbolt: I told you we'd get him to Invercargill. Do you want another picture of us shoveling the builders mix?
Phil O'Reilly: I simply remind people that if we had lower taxes he might actually feel like staying here.
Wendyl Nissen: Do you notice how he keeps changing the subject when you ask him about his mother?
Ian Johnstone: What a great shame we couldn't have seen him on Gallery. Brian Edwards would have asked him much better questions than Susan Wood did.
And so on. It couldn't be easier. Close your eyes, think of what they'd say, then write it. In just an hour or so, you'll have all the material you'll need. In conservative and unenlightened circles, this is otherwise known as making shit up. And the odd journalist has lately got himself in trouble for doing it. But the mistake those reporters made was in trying too hard. They made the quotes too colourful.
You need to follow the work of a master, and Cameron Brewer has shown you the way. If you make the phrases as bland and predictable and anodyne as possible, no-one will spot the difference. It will read as though it has been through the proper blood-draining channel of spin and polish, and you will be welcomed as a go-getter who can pull the quotes before anyone else has even hit the speed dial.
Must stop now. I'm late for an interview with Rupert Murdoch. Later, I'll be having lunch with Kerry Packer.
All you can eat, assuming you're not very hungry | Feb 23, 2006 09:09
Business New Zealand waded into the Broadband debate yesterday. Quoting from the release:
Business NZ has called for a more factually based argument over broadband access.
Chief Executive Phil O'Reilly says given the conflicting claims over broadband volume and price, Business NZ had decided to commission the same company* responsible for the Ministry of Economic Development's broadband reports to find out the current competitive situation on how well New Zealand consumers are being served.
He says the research shows that since Telecom's recent price changes, its broadband offerings are now among the best priced in the world.
Coverage, so far, of their contribution has been a little short on an actual comparison of the oranges, apples and lemons in question, which of course is what you want in a more factually based argument, so I asked Business NZ for a copy of the data. You can see the gory facts, details, apples and oranges in these three PDF tables.
A few observations:
The tables can tell you what you'll pay for a given speed, but they can't tell you whether you'll actually get the speed you're being sold. That's the point Russell was making yesterday about contention rates. You might think you're signing up for the superhighway, but you may well find that Telecom is letting so many cars onto the motorway in your area, that you're still going at a crawl.
Secondly, the tables make it pretty obvious that this is one of the few places where you have a monthly limit on how many miles you can do on the highway.
Run through the various tables and see how many of the entries end with the alluring letters "UL". I'm assuming it doesn't stand for "Usually Lousy". Unless I'm completely misinterpreting the context, it means "Unlimited", and dammit, at a speed of 250, you'd think Telecom could spring for more than a lousy 0.2 GB in the entry level deal described in Table 1.
What is clear is that the prices for these particular packages do indeed look competitive as far as the price goes. In the case of the Pro Ultra deal in Table 3, it's clearly a vast improvement on the various crap deals I put up with when I was a JetStream customer. 40 gig is a lot of monthly traffic, and at $142, not terribly onerous for your average business. But what guarantee do you have that you'll get the promised performance? My own experience with JetStream was that it could slow to a crawl. Given their recurring theme of squeezing the most from the least, it would surprise me to see Telecom really doing right by the long-suffering customer.
And working back down the scale from the Pro Ultra, the rest of it still looks a bit shabby. Phil O'Reilly is correct, up to a point: their prices are in the right place in the table. But compare the speeds and the cap limits in Tables 1 and 2 especially, and you find that the customer gets not a lot for their dollar.
Feedback:
Paul Brislen points out that these numbers only compare incumbents with incumbents.
In other un-spun words: amongst a group of not very competitive incumbent telcos, Telecom doesn't come off too badly ...
More:
Juha Saarinen has much more detail here. In brief:
- Outdated or inaccurate information in 21 of the 30 countries listed;
- 15 of the 30 countries now offer uncapped services;
- 512kbit/s plans are the typical minimum;
- Report only looks at incumbent telcos' plans, not new offerings;
- Report doesn't include ADSL 2+ plans, only first generation ADSL
Tomorrow Is Another Scarlett | Feb 20, 2006 20:58
There are very few things I've written here that have generated as energetic a response from the readers as a post that featured Uma Thurman, Scarlett Johannnsen and assorted other beauties. I like to flatter myself that it was the humour of the thing, but the excited tone of the replies told me it had more to do with purdy pictures of scantily-clad and attractive young women.
So it was no great surprise a month or two later to see a sharp trend-watcher like Rob O'Neill spotting the potential and choosing the smouldering Scarlett as the NZBC muse.They were already offering a banquet of magnificent diversions; once they added Scarlett, they had the perfect ice sculpture. I return to the table each Friday with anticipation.
My envy is not limited to ice sculptures. I also fancy working to the unscripted plot Rob has been following since the beginning of the year, nosing the bonnet of his small but perfectly formed sports car out onto the road every morning and driving wherever the mood and a full tank of 91 will take him. His last report had him in Picton, listening to a Neil Young cassette. Not to everyone's taste, to be sure, but I could enjoy great helpings of it.
Seeing he's so good at taking the germ of an idea and nurturing it to its full flowering, I offer him this: the rhythm of driving the length of State Highway One is occasionally punctuated by a set of traffic lights. I like to think it says something about the unevenness of the nature of life in New Zealand:
Welcome to our biggest highway! Wind down the windows, feel the breeze, open up the engine and enjoy the ride; oh, by the way: occasionally your exhilarating ride will come to a dead stop if the lights turn red.
It's quite startling. Just as you've comfortably settled into miles of momentum, you come to an entirely arbitrary halt. You feel surprisingly dislocated as the rhythm of an hour or more of fast open road-driving closes down in the blink of an eye to nothing.
You strike it in Huntly.
The last time I went though Waikanae and Paraparaumu it was still happening.
I would guess there are a few dozen other spots where the same thing happens. Perhaps there are more. I imagine Transit New Zealand have it all methodically collated, but all the same, I can see an entertaining diversion here for a man in a sports car tooling around the country without a deadline.
Why not get a photo of every set of traffic lights on State Highway One from top to bottom? Awanui to Bluff. Or Riverton. Or wherever SH1 runs out.
You could throw in a shot of the nearest tearooms and pub, if you want to broaden the cultural dimension. Perhaps Doddery Old Fart has a few pictures already.
It's your blog, Rob, but can I humbly suggest that in between the pictures of Scarlett, an evolving series of traffic light shots could offer just as exotic an allure to the nation's deskbound blog readers?
On a day like this I get especially wistful about the whole idea. This was the time of year - when we were students - when my brother and I would be out on our motorbikes finding an empty open road somewhere in the North Island and opening up the throttle. Leaning into the corners on the Napier-Taupo road in the late afternoon summer sun.
An office can't compete with that; all it has to offer is the call of the mild.
While you're settling into a 10.00am meeting in some air-conditioned boardroom, Rob may well be pulling into a West Coast town and deciding which pub he'll pick for lunch. As you clear away the dishes, he may be tucking into whitebait fritters on a remote beach, watching the sun set on the Tasman.
As you crawl home in the early evening Auckland traffic and fret, for all you know he may be coming down the red carpet aisle of a movie premiere in Invercargill. Scarlett will doubtless be on his arm.
In response to your as-yet-not-emailed question: no everything's fine here at my place. We have just had a lovely evening at Narrow Neck beach and I'm contentedly rubbing against my book deadline.
I just fancy the notion of doing what Rob's doing. It's the sheer sense of liberation of not having to be anywhere or do anything in the middle of a glorious summer that sounds enormously appealing. And I have a sneaking suspicion I'll never get around to photographing those traffic lights.
But thank you for calling | Feb 19, 2006 15:52
If you read Boing Boing, you'll know the story already, but if you've missed it, you should absolutely go see this.
Let's say you lose your camera. Let's say someone else finds it. Let's say the two of you make contact. Let's say that in the interim, the finder's nine year old child forms a strong attachment to the camera and does not feel able to give it back. What would you say happens next?
Truly astounding.
And now, because it's a very nice summer afternoon, I'm going back outside. I might even take the camera.
Some nice suggestions for the Howlybag Awards have been coming in. Please feel very welcome to add a contribution.
Stop your sobbing | Feb 17, 2006 09:55
If you ask Google to look for "howlybag", you get only an entry or two:
Technology Talk
Hmm, heres what Elephant, AKA Tony(the)Frew posted before his big howlybag tantram
Ask it for "howleybag" and you get:
Who Are The 5 Worst Band/solo Artists Ever?
These are in order for me- 1. Mariah Carey-I can't stand that howleybag.
If smart people like Llew can be frank about gaps in their knowledge, then so can I.
"Howlybag" was a word unknown to me until I read about it in an article about the New Zealand Oxford School Thesaurus.
Dr Dianne Bardsley, who sounds justifiably proud of her work, tells us that informal and slang words posed particular challenges.
"Wimp and wuss get a look in, but I decided that howlybag was too much of a 60s term to be included."
Well, there's proof that if you can remember the 60s you weren't actually there.
We called people spastic, we called them huckery molls (and because you never committed it to paper, you were never sure of the spelling). We called them pills, we called them drips, and if you were cruel you called them whatever it took to make them blub. But if they were the blubbing kind, I never saw them labelled a howlybag.
I wish I had. What a great handle! How did I miss it? Was I not paying attention at play and lunchtimes, or is Dr Bardsley a little out on her era?
If Gordon King were still blogging, it's precisely the kind of epithet I would expect to see him hurling about with gay abandon. We are, on the progressive left, whinging cry-babies to a man. Howlybags.
That's just his opinion. Or to be completely fair, it's my impression of his opinion of us. But that's the kind of word howlybag is: utterly subjective, and a great big, bright, shiny axe of a weapon. See the judgmental and the scornful wield it with glee!
I'm game. Who's the biggest howlybag around here? I invite readers' suggestions. I even have categories to suggest:
- Most howlybag blogger.
- Most howlybag celebrity.
- Most howlybag media personality.
- Most howlybag politician.
- Most howlybag person you've ever met.
No prizes. This is just for the fun of it. And if you think that's unfair: tough. You're old enough and ugly enough by now to know that life's not fair. Howlybag.
Send A Gorilla | Feb 15, 2006 09:53
Elsewhere in the western world, the Marlboro Man has lately been getting his back broken. But not here.
Here, testosterone is back. You can just feel it in the air.
We take our lead from our leaders, and for the longest time, the word has been: emasculation.
Call it the sisterhood. Call it the PC brigade. Call it dykescorp - and haven't a lot of men quietly muttered that in the barbecue huddle?
Whatever you've called it, and however darkly you've fumed about it, there's been sweet fuckall you could do about it. You could cast your vote, you could ring up Leighton, you could invent yourself a name so you could write something vaguely defamatory on your blog without anyone at church finding out, but you couldn't stop feeling oppressed.
But there's a light! And not just over at the Frankenstein place.
We will probably always be counter-cyclical here in New Zealand. The rest of the world has a boom, we have a bust. They have a slump, we have lift-off. They vote for Bush and Howard, we vote for socialistic moral relativists.
Once more the wheel turns. Once more the water gurgles down the hole in the contrary direction.
That great big hairy brute of an alpha male, Donald T Brash has found his chest. It would be premature to say that it's getting a Kong-like pounding, but there has clearly been some kind of transformation.
The signs are there if you know where to look.
Let's open the Herald. It's not a promising start. The headline reads: Brash takes blame for leadership speculation.
But look! Right there at the end!
I had swallowed the Government line that we had been doing relatively well relative to Australia, but that of course is crap.
This is what the Rt Hon Paul Keating or if you prefer, Mark Latham, would tell you is showing the voter a bidda mongrel.
Little acorns, mighty oaks, etc etc. This time last year, the strongest word he could bring himself to use in front of an audience was "baloney."
Now, just one week later, he sails into the house and all but rips the Labour Party a new ringpiece. "Pay the money back," he declares.
Dr Brash's speech was barely audible in the chamber, the Herald tells us, because of the din of Government members, but he adopted a crash-through style.
But in this context, the more noise they make, the more you know you're landing the blows. Don, you could be a contendah!
Do the right thing by the people of this country: pay the money back and apologise.
This is rhetoric that has what the advertising people like to call cut-through. "Pay the money back" can fit on a bill board, or a T-Shirt. You can bet that someone like that Bhatnagaar character is making a Flash animation of the thing right now.
It seems obvious really. What's Dr Brash got to lose? He might as well let rip.
Just consider how much further he may go if he can make himself comfortable with the politics of vituperation and the high art of hamming it up for the crowd.
Maybe there's a script.
Stage One: Roughen up the language.
Stage Two: Hand the government a regular and sustained thrashing. Abuse, them, goad them, torment them.
Stage Three: Put the heel on the throat. Belittle them, mock them. Turn it into high vaudeville.
Manage all this, and he'll be able to go on setting the agenda. He's managed to do it almost effortlessly (some might say unwittingly), all the way from Orewa to the billboards. What's been missing is the capacity to ram that advantage home.
Alpha males don't let that kind of chance go by. They compound it with all kinds of dominant testosterone-fuelled politics. Taunting and goading! Worked for Muldoon, worked for Lange.
Go on, Don, get in touch with your inner man. Go for broke. The beauty of this is that all the associated problems will probably fade away as well. Take your pretender, Mr Key.
It's been quite a media week or two for him. I'm sure you've seen him on the cover of North and South. Odd picture that. The facial musculature puts you in mind of Il Duce, but maybe that's just the light in the supermarket. And then there was the ever-reliable Frank O'Sullivan pitching in with that Liar's Poker lionisation of him as a big swinging dick.
It's always intrigued me how sexualised the money market sounds to be. I once had occasion to be in a meeting with David Richwhite, along with one of Auckland's more heavy-hitting PR women. I forget exactly what the purpose was, but it had broadly to do with the media strategy for some stoush his outfit was involved in. The meeting room was an internal one with no windows, soft low lighting, designer furniture, and a table of Viking dimensions. He came striding through the door and made some declaration about the smell of sex in the air. It was a kind of napalm-in-the-morning allusion, but for the life of me, I couldn't catch his point.
Anyway, Don: Reserve Bank, World Bank, you can swat this pretender away with an inordinately greater factor of bigness and swinging capability.
Maybe you buy that stuff about his Navman not working, but seriously, who ever got lost in Orewa?
Frankly, the rapidity with which you have found your feet and chest is an inspiration. A few more months of this Alpha Male assertiveness, and you'll be positively dangerous. I fully expect to see you holding 5000-strong rallies in Wiri wool stores by next summer. You should definitely bring those charts. That has all kinds of retro cred.
I'll come to the meetings, because I fully expect them to be the best show in town. But I think I'll keep out of your way when duck shooting season starts.
In the flesh | Feb 09, 2006 20:01
The first time I saw Robert Muldoon in the flesh, I was mildly shocked. He had the skin of no pallor I had seen before on any mortal. It was the start of my first year at University and we were in the Botanical Gardens watching the friendly cricket match the parliamentarians have each year.
The Prime Minister and an MP or two came ambling through the crowd with a collection basket. I couldn't tell you who the others were because I was transfixed by the unhealthy state of our leader. The man was yellow! And round! He had to be almost as broad as he was high. He was also, I have to say, disarmingly amiable to one and all, and it took me a good half an hour to get back to my default position of seething at the mere thought of him.
How long ago? With the celebrated exception of the occasional returning student, most of the students who will be starting university this month were neither born then nor would be for, Oh-Fuck-Me-That-Can't-Be-Right-But-Dear-God-It-Is another ten years.
No politician I've seen lately has had anything like Muldoon's colour. Quite a few of them are no strangers to the gym. But all the same, it's still not a regime that lends itself to keeping yourself in trim. So hats off to Mr Dover Samuels for looking in surprisingly good nick at home at his motel in Matauri Bay when we sauntered in there last Saturday morning to pick up a brochure. It was a perfect day in the Far North. Here's a picture so I don't have to draw on my modest powers of descriptive prose.
No picture of Dover though. He was in sunglasses, baseball cap and speedos. And if you're thinking I really don't want to draw that picture in my mind, well: at ease soldier. He was looking buff. It's a rare politician who can manage that.
We were on holiday in the Far North, because one of us would be giving a speech on Waitangi Day. We love it up there. Within half an hour of leaving Matauri Bay we would be at the Mangonui fish shop. More pictures.
This is, has always been, and will probably always be, the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. I could not live there. My heart and I would come to a bad end.
We body surfed at Coopers Beach. We went to the Farmers Market in Kerikeri and had crepes for lunch. We had dinner at the Jerusalem Restaurant. I took a run past the Stone Store. We took pictures of a development along the road from the property Mum and Dad once had there. Mary-Margaret swam up and down the swimming pool whenever she could.
And then on Sunday night I drove down to Whangarei on a road I've covered many nights before, to do something I'd never done before in the town, and that was: talk politics. When I lived there in the 80s my only concern was gaining market share for Dominion Breweries. You meet different people when you go there to talk about the place of the Treaty in any future constitutional arrangement.
You might imagine that few people would be inclined to come out to hear a group of speakers on that subject on a Sunday night in the middle of a long weekend, but you'd be wrong. It was a decent-sized room and it was standing room only. To be sure it was largely a gathering of the progressive faithful: Network Waitangi is a group of Whangarei citizens, mostly Pakeha, who have gathered in solidarity with the Tangata Whenua over Treaty issues. And more power to them I say.
They had been invited to bring some speakers - five of us - to Te Tii Marae on the morning of Waitangi Day. This would serve as something of a preview of those performances. It was a good natured affair, all civility and warm humour. Someone thought Muriel Newman might be joining us to give it a bit more pepper, but she didn't show.
I offered some thoughts on the proposition that we had a philosophical impasse to contend with, in terms Andrew Sharp has described that suggest our best option is to go on fudging policy development and agreeing to endlessly negotiate while we wait to see what might come of the impasse. Or to put it another way: let all the parties stay at the table and agree to keep talking. I'll put a copy up here if there's any interest.
Jane Kelsey gave a fairly lacerating performance in the style you'd expect with a few solid serves at the multinationals while Reverend Bob Scott, Dr Betsan Martin and David James offered more optimistic thoughts.
And the next morning we met at Te Tii Marae to do it all again.
All my life I have blithely worked on the principle that it's safe to agree to do anything, regardless of how little you know about it and then adapt as necessary. This would be one of those times. Protocol's fine: I've trailed in behind others before and relied on others to offer the necessary words, challenges and waiata, but I've never actually stood on a marae and spoken myself.
Oddly enough, when I got to my feet and made my way across the ground to the microphone, I realised it resembled nothing so much as the experience of presenting a trophy at the races. You're down in the birdcage, the crowd is hundreds of metres away from you in the stands. You can't hear them and you can barely make out their faces. If you're used to reading a crowd and taking your cues from their responses, the sense of separation can be a weird and disconnected sensation.
Here, the crowd was a little nearer, and more audible, but it was early: about 9am, and we were up first. The crowd was still relatively thin. The organisers had judged from the evening's speeches that I'd be contributing the ad-lib humour, so they slotted me in the middle to keep things bubbling along.
I knew I had one joke available because in the introduction of the speakers, the title "Bullshit Backlash and Bleeding Hearts" appearing in the midst of a stream of reo had got a good laugh. So I used that as an opener and got some chuckles. But I realised it was going to be very hard to do any more than that when it was hard to hear or see the response, and so I switched to Solemn, and truncated what I had to say, working on the basis that you'd be some poor orator to stand there clasping pages of notes.
I don't know; I'd say it was workmanlike. People said nice things, but you can tell when you've only connected rather than lit any kind of fire.
I realised as I sat then for the next few hours and watched some truly powerful oratory that I'd had an opportunity to be grateful for. I'd got to have the experience with trainer wheels on. I was just one of many. There were no great expectations. I'd had the chance to grasp the dynamic of the thing.
People come and go. Speakers can be brief, they can be long-winded. They can be incisive, they can be meandering. They can be pungent, they can be downright loopy.
It was a fascinating crowd to be amongst. I sat alongside Annette Sykes who was maybe a little intense, but cordial and cheerful all the same. But on her feet? All afire. None of the truly incendiary stuff that once got her in trouble, but some pretty bolshy stuff all the same. And likewise Jane Kelsey. The pair of them had no trouble reading the crowd, and did they ever get the responses.
"Don't expect miracles from having four Maori Party MPs", they said. "Don't assume this resolves everything".
Hone Harawira was the genial commander, getting about the crowd inviting people to "get up and have a blat", and interrupting the speeches at one point to let a young boy take the mic to ask his brother Gabriel to return to the family car "emergently".
Cheerful and courteous, Mike Smith was shooting it all for video. "I'll never live that chainsaw down," he says, "But you'd be amazed how many people tell me 'I wanted to do that too bro.'"
The crowd kept building. Politicians came and went, although the PM kept herself busy out on the water, and then on the other side of the fence walking around the stalls. Backpackers, visitors, white faces, brown faces, children, most people in hats, and all finding the shade as the heat came on. What they saw was civil debate. What they never saw was tension.
By lunchtime Hilda Harawira was at the mic asking "are we going to be doing a hikoi?" In due course, they did, but I was gone by then, off to find Karen and Mary-Margaret. I found the car in Paihia, then found them and we debated the relative merits of spending the rest of the day there, or beating the rush home. There's nothing nice about crawling in traffic all the way from Warkworth. We got the hell out of Dodge.
But we'll be back. You should see the tents. You should see the stalls. You should see the waka. You should wander through the crowd. You should see the sun coming up on the same bay they looked out to in 1840. It's a treat. 45,000 people got to share it this year. There's still room for more.
Lost For Words | Feb 02, 2006 11:11
Sometimes, what's most interesting about a speech is not what's in it, but what's been left out. Consider yesterday's contribution by His Illustrious High Lord of Harken and Leader of the Intelligently-Designed Free World, Not Including France, Bush The Younger.
You didn't have to be a genius to predict that he would play the all-purpose security card, and sure enough, there was plenty of that. Plenty of sunlit uplands to gaze towards longingly as well: the word "freedom" appears no fewer than seventeen times.
It turns out you could have predicted most of the content of the speech by reading the one he gave a year go, as Michael Scherer writes in Salon:
Almost every line was an echo. In his 2005 State of the Union, Bush called for "expanded Health Savings Accounts." On Tuesday, he announced he would "strengthen Health Savings Accounts." In 2005, he promised to fund green projects, "from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol." On Tuesday, he pledged to invest in "zero-emission coal-fired power plants ... pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen ... cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol." In 2005, he promised to "ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation." On Tuesday, he pledged to prohibit "creating or implanting embryos for experiments."
But how about the words that weren't there? In the wake of a not-especially inspiring year of Presidential endeavour, and I'm thinking here of such small matters as - say - Katrina or the wire tapping, would a little humility have been in order? Failing that, at least a little empathy?
Let's do a Word search shall we?
What do we get if we enter "Sorry"? Well, we get this, which you'll be able to read clearly if you click the thumbnail to see the full size version.
How about "mistake"? Any luck there?
Nope. We'll perhaps "wrong" then.Now we're on to something!
But…no, wrong is what other people are. When they're not being traitors, of course.
How odd and strangely stunting it must feel to work in the White House for a CEO-President who lacks both curiosity and humility.
Not that it may necessarily have been much more fun to collaborate in the scripting of this week's Orewa speech. The lasting impression I'm left with by that work is neither the dutiful recitation of the National party economic mantra (gut the RMA, gut the employment laws, gut the welfare system, cut the taxes and hope like hell the invisible hand doesn't just give itself a five finger discount) or even the none-too-veiled allusion to swarthy types who bow down to Mecca and who might somehow represent the same kind of threat that is presently vexing the Danes (which suggests a pretty fragile faith in the rule of law).
Instead the thing that really leaves me wondering about the capacity of the leader of the opposition to look out ahead and past his mid twentieth century perspective is simply this: in a speech of about 5000 words which talks about the prospects for New Zealand's economy and its comparative place in the world economy, there's one word that must surely come up, and yet we waited in vain. Dr Brash repeatedly reminds us that he has a marital connection to the place.Why didn't we hear the word "China"?
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