Prosperity is where the mouth is

A young part-Maori woman quit her job at the Whangarei branch of KiwiYo last week because the manager of the shop would not allow her to greet customers with “Kia Ora” insisting instead that she say “Hello” as prescribed in the company manual. The usual rent-a-protest crowd assembled outside the company store chanting and displaying placards and the KiwiYo’s franchise owner was forced to capitulate and apologise, suggesting his manager may have interpreted the rules too rigidly.

Uncharacteristically I have some sympathy with the 17-year-old shop assistant, Monet-Mei Clarke. When we go to English-speaking Hawaii we don’t have any difficulty with being greeted with “Aloha” particularly when it is expressed by a captivating young native-Hawaiian female at the airport as she seductively places a fresh flower lei around your craning neck.

We use Maori cultural ceremonies when and where it suits us to make us look attractively bi-cultural and we have a sense of great pride when the All Blacks do the Haka, particularly at overseas arenas.

But at other times we are a shade petulant.

Recently there was a call to make teaching Te Reo Maori compulsory in schools. However, perhaps sensibly, this suggestion was considered a step too far by both major political parties.

Sir Robert Jones, writing in the Wanganui Chronicle, had even stronger views. He was utterly opposed to the promotion of everyone learning to speak Maori which he said we are wrongly told is part of our cultural heritage. He reckoned that millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money had already been spent, with abysmal results.

“Even the Maori King can’t speak Maori,” claimed Sir Robert.

“The sole purpose of language is communication and romanticising obtuse virtues about it is pretentious nonsense. Artistic expression such as poetry and prose is not about individual words which in themselves have no special merit, but instead their placement. The Welsh endured this foolishness by their zealots and vast sums were spent promoting their redundant language, all pointlessly as the Welsh sensibly ignored these efforts,” Jones wrote.

In his 2006 book How the Language Works the noted Welsh linguistics Professor David Crystal observed that linguistic nationalism invariably promoted separatist political demands, causing resentment and an unnecessarily divided community. This sounds frighteningly familiar.

Whereas most languages can number their words at around 200,000 the Maori dictionary only contains somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words. Contrast this with the English language which has more than a million words and is still growing. English literature from Chaucer to Elliot, from Shakespeare to Hemingway is the richest and most extensive on earth.

So when you’re studying English, you’re studying one of the world’s greatest languages and the most interesting subjects.

There is no doubt that from the earliest times the favoured group of people has always been the educated class. They can make themselves recognised instantly, anywhere, by the simple expedient of speaking a few words. In can be argued that our language, more than anything else, determines which rung we position ourselves on life’s ladder of success.

Many years ago a graduating class of a large American university was given an examination in English vocabulary. The test scores were graded into groups of 5 per cent – the top 5 per cent and so on to the bottom. At regular intervals during the next 20 years, questionnaires were sent out to the surviving graduates asking them their occupations and their incomes. Without a single exception those who had the highest score on the vocabulary test were among the top income group, while those who had scored lowest were in the bottom income group.

A person may dress in the latest fashion and present a very attractive appearance. So far, so good, but the minute they open their mouths and begin to speak they proclaim to the world the level of their potential competency. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was later adapted into the musical comedy My Fair Lady is an extreme example of this.

Our use of our language is the one thing we can’t hide.

To learn a second language, be it Maori or Mandarin, will be a satisfying, mind-expanding experience. Ms Clarke says that Maori is spoken constantly at home.

If her family takes English just as seriously I have no doubt she will soon move on to a vocation more fulfilling that selling frozen yoghurt cones.

Haere ra.

“If one cannot discriminate between grammar and solecism, sequence and incoherency, sense and nonsense, one has no protection against falsehood, and believes all lies one is told.” - A. E. Housman

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Has democracy run its course?

I read that in the 1930s travellers returning from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany praised the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there. They tended to compare them with their own democracies that seemed weak, inefficient and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence.

In the 1930s Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. Just as in the 1930s, New Zealander’s now return from China wondering why autocracies’ can build high speed railroad lines seemingly overnight while in Auckland they’ve argued for over 40 years on how to build a commuter rail service and Wellington can’t get permission to build a flyover to skirt the Basin Reserve.

Russia and China are emerging as the world’s two great powers while America sets a dismaying example to its allies and friends. For 200 years its constitutional machinery was widely admired; now in the hands of polarising politicians in Washington it generates paralysis.

America’s democratic discrepancies were starkly demonstrated in a study by Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University in St. Paul.

In the last presidential elections Barack Obama, a community organiser from Chicago before becoming a senator and then president won 19 states against Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman and a devout Mormon who won 29.

The square miles won by Obama: 580,000, Romney: 2,247,000. Population of counties won by Obama: 127 million, Romney: 143 million. Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Obama: 13.2, Romney: 2.1.

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens housed in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.”

I thought of this when I saw what you might describe as canaille shouting obscenities at an alcohol-fuelled, Hitler-style rally, punctuated the devils hand-signals and led by a German fraudster with the curious name of Kim Dotcom and I couldn’t help but think: “And these people vote?”

An unfair observation I will concede. Democracy after all allows one vote per person and everyone should have an opportunity to express their views no matter how much they conflict with my own.

But democracy can only work if politics is conducted between respectful adversaries. Right now New Zealand is experiencing a lead-up to the elections that looks like a war between bitter enemies. To emphasise this, Nicky Hager’s book recounts democracies’ grubby underbelly.

Fringe factions who have nothing to lose and everything to gain under our flawed MMP system of governance have thrown up a gaggle of would-be aspirants who under the old first-past-the-post system wouldn’t have had a look in.

These left-leaning minor parties are likely to blur the thinking of many of Labour’s natural constituency and I suspect that if only National and Labour were contesting the forthcoming election Labour might have an odds-on chance of winning. To paraphrase Roger Millar: “New Zealand swings like a pendulum do.”

When conservatives win elections corporate interests often have undue influence. When the progressives win back power they only succeed in making the state more domineering. When the conservatives are restored to office, they cut back. And so it goes on; a continuing dynamic of political alternation, each trying to outdo each other in the popularity stakes and in the process creating a modern, overloaded state that is a real threat to democracy.

The more responsibilities the government assumes the worst it performs them and the angrier people get which only makes them demand more help. Far from reducing inequality you could argue that the modern democratic state is making the problem worse.

Meanwhile both Russia and China still dwell on the humiliations they have received at the hands of the West. Both refuse to accept liberal democracy as a model and both insist that their 20th-century experiences of revolution and civil war necessitates centralised rule with an iron fist. This isn’t communism as such; communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model, state domination is very much alive in The Peoples Republic of China and in Putin’s police state.

Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, reckoned the average age of the world’s greatest civilisations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years these nations always progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage.

I have therefore reached the inevitable conclusion that what this country needs is a benevolent dictator.

I’m ready and willing and could start next Monday.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.” - Alexander Tyler.

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Examining the birthday paradox

Last weekend I had a birthday. One of my granddaughters celebrates her birthday on the same day.

Eleanor was fourteen, and I was %#*. My word processor has a direct link to the privacy commission and never discloses information that should not be widely disseminated among the general public. Though to be fair if my father hadn’t been so shy and retiring I’d be two years older than I am now. I’ll give you clue though. About the time I was born Winston Churchill was heard to say: “This is our finest hour” and mum and dad thought he was talking about me!

I refuse to admit I’m as ancient as I am, even though it could tend to make my children appear illegitimate. It’s a sobering thought however that when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for nearly forty years. It is now getting to the stage where a fireman may have to be in attendance when I light my birthday candles.

Suffice it to say I still have most of my hair and none of it has yet turned grey so I may be younger than you think. Despite this, every morning I get up and read the obituary column in the Dominion-Post and if I’m not in it, I shave.

If only I’d known how old I was going to get I would have taken better care of myself.

Now you may think that the chances of my granddaughter having her birthday on the same day as me stretches the bounds of common concurrence, but apparently this is not necessarily so.

Assuming for a moment that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year, if you’re sitting in a room with 23 people in it, what are the chances do you think of two of those people having a birthday on the same day?

Ignoring leap years, a reasonably intelligent person might conclude that the odds probably wouldn’t reach a 100 percent unless there are 366 people in the room. Such a person might therefore conclude that the likelihood of two people having a birthday among the 23 would be less than say 5 per cent. In reality, due to the convoluted reasoning behind mathematics, the odds are about 50 per cent according to numerical expert Allan Bellows. This phenomenon is apparently known as the Birthday Paradox.

If the set of people is increased to 60 the odds climb to above 90 per cent. This inconsistency can be offset somewhat because birthdays are not distributed perfectly throughout the year. Most people are born in the springtime, and also, due to the way hospitals operate, more babies are born on Mondays and Tuesdays than on weekends.

So Eleanor and I having the same birthdate is not so paradoxical at all.

So since her coincidental birth I have had to celebrate my birthdays at her parties and I always tried to be one of the gang. I resisted joining them on the trampoline, they tended to ran around the house faster than I could, there were no places big enough for me to secrete myself when it came to playing hide and seek and I always seemed to end up being the donkey they wanted to pin that tail on.

Their music was not really to my taste and I could never fathom how The Wiggles had made such an impact on the young.

We’d sit down to cheerio’s, chippies, crust-less bread and butter adorned with hundreds and thousands, chocolate cake and finally jelly and ice cream. I’d gratefully wash all this down with raspberry cordial and then I’d be ready for bed; and it would only be about four o’clock in the afternoon.

I’d stagger home bloated and exhausted and be eternally grateful that the final care of my delightful grandchildren was in the capable hands of people much younger than me.

Now that Eleanor is a teenager of course she is looking for much more sophisticated fare, amusement and friends. I suspect - though she is far too generous to let on - that grandfathers are becoming a bit of an embarrassment.

Meanwhile I’m actually looking forward to jelly and ice cream.

Yet despite the age boldly emblazoned on the birthday cards that adorn our mantelpiece you don’t feel any older than you did twenty or even thirty years ago. Frustratingly you’re the same person in an aging outer casing; glasses and hearing aids notwithstanding.

I said to my wife, “I don’t look seventy do I?”

“No,” she said, “But you did when you were.”

I don’t know whether to ignore the remark or nominate her for a comedy spot at King Street Live.

“A geriatric is a German cricketer who captures three successive wickets.” - George Coote

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