Public Address - Club Politique (Home)

Momentum | Aug 28, 2006 20:57

It's one of the strange things about being a Kiwi, that feeling that there's something desirable hiding just beyond the horizon. If you're like me you probably moved around a fair bit when you were a child, even if it's only within the the same town or city, and it imparts something to a child that you never really appreciate if your parents were more sedentary.

I've sometimes thought of it as a restlessness, but I think the word doesn't really do justice to the feeling that any one place can never afford you all the things you need. I always think of restlessness as that feeling you get waiting for the ads to finish. What I'm thinking of runs deeper than that though. It's almost like an anxiety bridging where you are, and where you think you should be, or where you should belong. Maybe the Germans have a word for it.

Anyway, the feeling is something that drove me for many years, as I'm sure it does others.

Waitaminute, could I just pause this blog for a sec to say that Tapes and Tapes, 'The Loon' might be the best new album I've heard in ages? I've been playing it all week and can't stop listening to it. I'm kind of addicted to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but this...

OK, carry on.

The kind of restlessness I'm talking about is almost like a hunger. A hunger for change, one that spurns continuity and fosters feelings of boredom when the lustre of something, anything begins to fade.

In my own case I know that I began to experience ennui (is that the right word?) in my teens. I was too big for the Mount and I knew it. I had travelled with my parents when I was young, and the bigness of the world was only reinforced by reading and TV. I committed myself to never being the one who settles and breeds immediately after school.

Maybe the word is ennui, but without any undertone of sadness? Rather with undertone of curiosity? Or ambition? Whatever. The fact is I know that a great many Kiwi's feel the same thing. Why else would we constantly pack up and roam the world?

It drove me to hitch across much of New Zealand, even when it meant I had to sleep in ditches, under trees, in flax bushes. It drew me to deep deserts and exotic beaches. And truth be told, were my circumstance a little different I'd still wander. Or maybe it's just the gradually ripening age talking. There comes a time when sleeping in bed-bug ridden dives just gets a little too much. That and the bald fact that there is nothing sadder than an old dude still hanging out with and trying to pull backpacking 21 year olds.

While the fever had me though, there was little ball of energy within me that could only be satisfied by what I can now call with only the slightest hint of cheesiness, 'the open road'. I never fancied myself a Kerouac, but the guy kind of had the right idea with that 'pack up and piss off' attitude. It's a feverish momentum of sorts. You become driven by the satisfaction of finding yourself in new places and among new people. Obsessed with wandering across open spaces, the world unfolding itself beneath your feet. All the time driven by that little engine of energy.

Sure it's never easy. Sometimes you find yourself sleeping on a couch for weeks at a time eating only microwave burritos while you look for work. Sometimes you end up working as a gardener or dishwasher. Sometimes you don't work at all and have to stow away on the Overlander, moving every half hour to avoid some grumpy conductor who doesn't like pesky hippies smoking pot on his train and not stopping some bogan stealing clothes out of people luggage. Not that I ever did that though.

It's a beautiful thing though that restlessness. You can end up 35 with virtually no flashy assets but not give a shit. And why? Because there's all those things in you that sit atop that ball of energy and soothe it daily. They drape themselves about it and muffle it's demands. They provide you with endless bullshit stories to share with workmates, family and strangers.

So I salute you all you restless bastards. Let's hear it for all those Kiwi's out there dragging there sorry carcasses into every watering hole from here to Aberdeen. All those Kiwi's making brash statements to brash people and wry jokes about dickheads.

So to you, "Wicked".

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Clod Stompers | Aug 22, 2006 05:43

I saw that Graham was trying to sell his car recently. I dunno how he went with that, but I'm thinking that for anyone wanting to sell in future that you should adopt my approach. I recently sold a clapped out old Honda Civic for $250, and couldn't believe that some guy of 'Middle-Eastern Appearance' wanted to pay for it. Note to self, always advertise car as an 'old bomb'.

[.....pin drops......]

Hey, look, if you can't make racist jokes in the age of terrorism, the bastards have already won.

On a more serious note though, I have been thinking a bit about why people are placing so much emphasis on this epic cultural divide between 'Islam' and everyone else. The obvious source of the difference is the misperception of how Islam differs from Christianity, or Judaism for that matter, and the rapidly accumulating assumption that this difference is somehow divinely manifest. You know, 'we have to fight them because it's what God wants'.

There's a bunch of books out there on this subject already, and I'm not sure I can add anything in 800-odd words of blog, except to say that there's more to this than just a mythic 'clash of civilisations'. In car terms, blaming current events on this clash is equal to having a mechanic tell you, "she's stuffed mate". At which point your question should always be a 'please explain', because the devil is in the detail, and you'll be paying out the nose.

A favourite justification for why we can't get along with Islam is the tag line, "medieval culture". Usually it goes, "they'll never really embrace democracy or understand how we're trying to help them because of their medieval culture". And there's an exact point to issue that please explain.

I've discovered that what that usually means is, "I've seen some Araby looking guys on TV, and they were living in mud huts somewhere and yelling a lot so they must be backwards and shit in buckets or something". That or, "I've heard they cut the hands of people for stealing, I saw that on some Tony Curtis movie about Ali Baba from the 1950s and their women all wear turbans and aren't allowed to drive cars. Except for that one I saw on the news driving a car. That must have been a Westernised one. Yeah. Westernised."

I wish that I knew enough about the Kingitanga to fully explain to you the significance of what we have seen opening up to us over the last week. I wish that because these are the exact same people declared to be 'rebels' by settlers envying the most important resource of the day, land. The exact same people labelled 'stone age' by detractors, and treated brutally with that epithet as a justification. The exact same people who thought public executions and floggings were the act of savages. My how times have changed.

Muslims are undergoing the exact same type of demonisation. The deriding of their nations based on extremely superficial, TV-based perceptions. Except we didn't have TV in the 1860s. But you get the idea.

The rights of women or the persecution of minorities like gay men are another example. Commentators in 'the West' make a brief comparison between any Western city and the entire Muslim world and conclude that "we're better because of [insert irrelevant variable here]". This is then used as a justification for some tragedy. It is an old, old pattern.

To highlight why this is such a travesty I'd like to use the example of 'material' and 'social' technology. What material technology is should be be obvious. Phones, modern cars, any number of objects. They're easy to adapt to any culture. They're portable, and a commodity. Material technology also carries cultural components, but generally it's modular in the sense that it can fit just about any language, race, religion.

'Social' technology differs though. It's the kind of stuff that you have to buy into to accept. I think you could also call them 'social norms', in the sense that they're an agreed way of doing or acting in a society. Traffic lights. Who says you have to stop at traffic lights? You stop at lights because there is an agreement that you do so (and it's backed up in a law somewhere). There is no other reason to stop at lights.

But some social technology is so new that not everyone in our society agrees with it yet. Gay rights for example. Highly contentious. The place of women in our society is still being debated. I'm starting to get sick of dragging this one out every few months, but only 30 years ago it was largely socially acceptable to slap the missus around. Our society has moved on though and while it happens, no one with any credibly thinks it's OK to do that any more.

So if these social technologies are so new to our society, why are we assuming that every Muslim nation in the world should automatically adopt them? That's a bit rich isn't it? Demonising entire peoples with thousand-year histories, the people who built street lighting and discussed the Greek philosophers while Westerners shit in the street in villages like London, just because we need to justify our own assumed superiority? To justify our own strategic objectives?

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