Should we flag the flag debate?

Now that the Gallipoli landing centennial commemorations and the ANZAC remembrance services are over perhaps we can examine the flag issue without letting emotion cloud our conversation.

Flags have never held much interest for me; I’ve never quite understood their purpose. In the digital age with instant worldwide communications between nations at the touch of a computer key a printed piece cloth must surely be approaching its use-by date.

Flags can often imbue a form of nationalism that is quite unpalatable. I remember visiting Belfast in Northern Ireland some years ago and being dismayed at seeing the Union Jack being flown from the homes of the pro-British Protestants to rile the Irish Catholics.

The Americans hold their flag in a curiously high regard, referring to it as “Old Glory” and even naming their national anthem after their star spangled banner.

But I’m not sure I can buy the RSA claim that our men fought under the existing flag therefore it must be preserved. I don’t recall any of our soldiers marching as to war, with the flag of New Zealand going on before. To borrow a phrase.

I actually looked in Google Images for a photo of New Zealanders going to war under the flag. There were none. I seem to recall portraits of flag-bearing warriors in the American civil war and some dedicated soldier must have been carrying the stars and stripes when they took over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945.

There will have been many reasons why our young men went to fight a war on the other side of the world. Adventure, a trip out of New Zealand, conscription, or maybe even a genuine belief that democracy was worth preserving and fighting for. I doubt that a flag with a Union Jack in the top left-hand corner was ever part of their thought processes.

However a flag-draped coffin of a returned serviceman does remind us of the sacrifices made and I accept this is a tradition we would be loath to let go.

Recently we have seen the disturbing film clips of the dastardly Isis thugs marching behind a black flag bearing white Arabic writing. This put paid to John Key’s original thought of a potential new New Zealand flag having a silver fern on a black background.

The Maori separatists have their own distinctive flag and this was flown when their Hikoi marched on parliament to protest Helen Clark’s eminently sensible foreshore and seabed legislation in 2004. The marchers set out from Northland and I vividly recall the angry young Maori men marching through our main street many wearing balaclavas or bandannas that hid their faces carrying the flag before them.

The ten member committee the government has put in place to whittle down options for us to vote on makes good sense if you are open to change. If you want the status quo you would have wished that we had the referendum on whether you wanted a new flag or not to come first.

But putting together a cross section of highly-regarded New Zealanders to decide on a selection for us to vote on from the hundreds of designs so far submitted makes good sense. It’s no good voting on whether you want a flag change or not if you don’t know what your real options are.

The whole process is costly of course, but those who say we should be outlaying the money on hip-operations, stomach bypasses or child poverty would have to concede that this could equally apply to any government spending that is not categorised under health and welfare.

Republicanism is looking less and less appealing when you see the dynastic system that seems to have engulfed America. Despite having an eye-watering population of more than 300 million, if you’re not a Kennedy, a Clinton or a Bush your chances of occupying the oval office are remarkably slim.

And so I’ll stick with the monarchy; Harry showed us recently that they’re not a bad bunch. But we don’t depend on Great Britain any more for trade and our own ethnic make-up is looking more Asian by the day. We’ve done our penance to the old country, perhaps it’s time to assert our independence and get ourselves a brand spanking new twenty-first century flag.

Totally unwarranted though flags are.

“We are not a British colony, we are not mono-ethnic and we are not Australia; so why do we have a flag dangerously close to all three?” - Simon Gough

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Exploring the political paradox

I’m pretty certain that our political leanings are formed at an early age and are conditioned by the preferences of our parents. I was given two choices; my liberal mother voted Labour and my conservative father National. Back in those halcyon days there were only two choices. It was a source of constant amusement to my sister and me when our parents used to get dressed up on a polling Saturday afternoon to walk around to Lansdowne School to cast their votes. We would point out the futility of the exercise given that they were going to cancel out each other’s suffrage. They just shrugged and still made the pilgrimage.

In my early twenties and not long after I was married I was invited to join Haddon Donald’s campaign committee. Mr Donald was the aspiring National party candidate after the incumbent Wairarapa MP Bert Cooksley retired. The campaign committee was made up of men much older than me, many of them the captains of local industry and I was flattered to be asked. Apparently the committee members admired some of the quirky advertising I was doing for our family business and thought they needed a less mature person to join them to design strategies to attract the younger voter. Mr Donald won the election and subsequent ones, but this was more to do with the fact that he was a successful businessman, had a distinguished war record and Wairarapa was a National stronghold than any contribution I may have made to his campaign. Nevertheless for me the die was probably cast at that time and I have been a conservative voter ever since.

Incidentally, sometime before then my father had been able to convince my mother of the error of her ways and she too was now voting National.

And so by accident or design I’ve been right-leaning and I have absolutely no understanding as to why some people actually believe that the true pathway to nirvana is socialism. Collectivism’s failings have been well-documented and were sagaciously signalled in George Orwell’s best-seller Animal Farm.

Socialism looks fine as a concept, but has failed in reality and has caused widespread misery and the death to millions wherever it has been introduced.

Let’s start off with the most horrendous example. Hitler’s National Socialist party of the 1920’s was born out of the German Workers Party (DAP). Today’s socialists will want to deny the Nazis were socialistic despite their title and will claim with some justification that in fact they were an extreme right wing party. And in the end they were. The National Socialists knew that a mass base existed for policies that were simultaneously anti-capitalist and nationalistic and the party was formed to draw workers away from the more extreme Bolshevism that had taken hold in Russia. Their political strategy nonetheless focused on anti-big business, anti-monarchist, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist rhetoric.

However once Hitler had secured absolute power he tended to change tack. The party became racist and anti-Semitic. A bit like the pigs in Animal Farm.

Socialism/Communism was a disaster in Eastern Europe. This was brought home to the world when the Soviet Union built the Berlin wall to stop its citizens from escaping to the capitalist West. Chinese communism didn’t work either until state capitalism was introduced, but despite the ensuing economic success there will be human rights issues, a typical characteristic of a one party state.

Cuba and North Korea speak for themselves. One of the greatest 20th century tyrants along with Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler was Che Guevara. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime only to enslave them in a totalitarian state worse than the last. He was Fidel Castro’s chief executioner and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of his fellow citizens after sham trials that he oversaw and yet today we see people in this country walking around in tee-shirts proudly displaying his image.

But last week I think I found out why, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, socialism is still an idyllic form of governance for a specific section of the community.

I read a sobering new study that said that scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life. The research was conducted by the University of Minnesota and claims to have identified a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study said, “And yet, somehow they have developed defences that, for all intents and purposes have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”

More worryingly, Logsdon said “As facts have multiplied, their defences against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorise that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en-route from the auditory nerve to the brain. “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified.” Logsdon concluded.

I presume Mr Logsdon and his research team were referring to those who deny climate change, but his findings could equally apply to those misguided souls who consider Karl Marx’s jottings to be more appropriate for mankind than George Orwell’s.

“Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.” - John Maynard Keynes

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Baking all the way to the grave

It will come as a complete surprise when I tell you that I have recently taken up cake baking. At this stage any plans to become a candlestick maker have been put on hold. You will note I said cake baker not cake maker. The intricate elements of the cakes I have been producing have been carefully put together by an ageless American lady named Betty Crocker.

It’s a very simple process. To Ms Crocker’s magic mixture I merely add a few eggs, some oil and water - oil and water apparently do mix - and then into a pan and into the oven. The remarkably clever people at the Crocker factory even supply ready-made icing in a tin foil packet and the end product makes me look as though I have been a master baker all my life.

My initial venture into cake baking occurred when my wife’s shopping list had just three items on it. She’d been to the supermarket a couple of days before and these items were left off at the time. I agreed to go along for the ride. She didn’t notice me furtively dropping an enticing packet of cake mix into the trolley and when she discovered the legerdemain she suggested that I make it.

Now I’ve got the bug.

I like supermarkets. Whenever we go on holiday, rather than look at the local items of interest as outlined in the glossy brochures, I inevitably make a beeline for the nearest supermarket. It’s true I spend an inordinate amount of time at the meat display, but I find the whole premise exhilarating. I am in awe of the marketing tools that these maestros employ to extract the major portion of what we have come to know and love as our discretionary income.

On this visit I wanted to take one of the little green plastic baskets at the door to carry the three items. The management hate this. I’ll swear they actually glue these baskets together so that eventually you give up and take the trolley. This is a fatal mistake. At the checkout the three items we had gone in for had expanded to thirteen. The majority of the extras, I confess, I had tossed into the trolley myself, including of course Betty’s attractively packaged Devil’s Food cake mix.

I’m a sucker for impulse buying. I asked the lady at the checkout would she mind if we just paid for the three entries on the original shopping list and although she was empathetic, company rules forbade her to show any fiscal compassion.

We didn’t really need any of the ten extra items. We struggled to find space for them in a pantry that was already stocked enough to withstand a nuclear holocaust, though just how we would get the produce down in to the non-existent underground shelter in time has not been explained, and I was reminded of the old saying: “everything I like is either immoral, illegal or fattening.”

Certainly, without exception, the ten items fell neatly into the last category; particularly the cake mix.

Lately we’ve been told, as if we didn’t already know, that as a nation we are eating ourselves to death. We are heading for an obesity problem and an attendant diabetes epidemic that will stretch our health funding resources to the limit. Blame is being laid for this situation on fast food outlets and, surprisingly, state-owned television, which regularly screens advertisements promoting fat-inducing convenience food.

And now sugar is fast becoming public enemy number one, ahead of Class A drugs and possibly even homicide.

I’m surprised that amongst all this criticism and blame-laying, supermarkets get let off the hook. If not the supermarkets as such, then at least the clever branding and marketing people who have come up with such compelling packaging that it’s well-nigh impossible to exit the premises without your shopping list being compromised.

When I was a kid obesity was only a problem for those who had a “glandular condition,” or so we were told. Our grocer’s shops had fewer products back then and most items on the shelves were in bland brown paper bags with the product name and price marked in indelible pencil. The groceries were out of reach behind the counter and the grocer usually took your list and checked it off himself. Occasionally he might suggest another product not requested, but mostly he complied with your requirements as quickly as possible so he could personally serve the person patiently waiting behind you.

Today we serve ourselves and are totally undisciplined.

We are bombarded with choices and a product range we once would only have dreamed of. No attempt is made to divert the bouquet coming from the bread being baked on the premises or the enticing smell from the rotisserie chickens sitting temptingly in a strategically-placed heated display unit. This aroma, when mixed and dispensed judiciously so as to permeate the whole store, is so persuasive that your wallet becomes captive to all food items within reach.

The seduction is complete when, having reached the limit of your credit card account, the checkout operator then offers you more cash out of the till!

All of this is a classic example of the trickle-up theory that governments don’t want you to know about. While you’re pleading with your bank manager to increase your overdraft limit so you can get in some more food supplies, the manufacturing and marketing gurus, living in the leafy suburbs in the North, are having no problem whatsoever coping with Auckland’s burgeoning house prices.

I might go up there and open a cake shop.

“To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals” - Benjamin Franklin

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The camera sometimes lies

Last week I wrote that my father had a wicked sense of humour and then described his party-trick penchant for anonymously pinching women’s bottoms. This trait will not have been universally admired so I have decided to reveal his jocularity in a more favourable light.

For instance when the young Queen Elizabeth came to Masterton in 1953 and had lunch at the Empire Hotel their dining room had their meat requirements supplied by rival butcher Mr. C. L. Neate, who had only recently settled in the town from Britain. Immediately after the lunch, while the Queen and the Duke were still driving out of town to their next destination, he wrote on his shop window in white poster paint: “The Queen ate our meat.” Quick as a flash my father wrote on our shop window: “God save the Queen.” One of the national weekly periodicals at the time, concluding a story of the incident, asked: “Would you buy meat from a man like that?” Fortunately many did.

In 1961 I went to Sydney to work in a butcher’s shop that had won an award that year for the most modern meat market in Australasia, Dick Stone Ltd. at Rockdale. Rockdale is one of Sydney’s southern suburbs, back then buoyant and predominately white Australian.

The owner of the shop was Richard Setten Stone. He had three shops in Rockdale; one called Richard’s, another called Setten’s and the award winner, where I worked, called Stone’s. Each was independently managed, mine by a hard taskmaster named Jimmy Blakemore, and each shop had a fierce rivalry going with the others. When I first started at Stones, as I was unknown to the staff at the other two shops, Jimmy Blakemore would send me to spy on their prices and report back. We would then undercut them. This, despite them all having the same owner.

Stone’s had a staff of eleven butchers and we were constantly busy. There was always a sea of faces at the counter waiting to be served. One evening, at around closing time, I managed to assemble everyone behind the counter and take their photo which I sent back to my father with a letter explaining this was the staff of the shop where I was working in Aussie.

This was too much for my pater. He had a staff of about seven back then so he rang up the laundry, asked for all of the white coats and aprons to be delivered back to the shop post-haste and then rushed around the neighbouring shops seeking recruits to boost his complement for a return photo. Dad managed to line up 17 people to pose for the picture. Another phone call, this time to photographer Ted Nikolaison, and the image was taken, processed and sent to me at the shop in Rockdale. A simple note attached said: Dear Rick, thanks for the photo of the staff in the shop in Sydney. Here is a recent photo of our team in Masterton.

I opened the large cardboard-backed envelope at the shop, saw the possibilities immediately, and soon had all the staff, including Jimmy Blakemore, gathered around me to see the photo. They were amazed, none more so than the erstwhile manager, who had justifiably been treating me like a serf/peasant type from lowly New Zealand. His attitude warmed markedly when he saw the apparent size of our family business. “What did all these people do?” he was keen to know. He was particularly intrigued by Tommy and Charlie Wong. Their fruit and vegetable shop was adjacent to ours and they had been Dad’s first two recruits as he sought to increase, albeit temporarily, the number of his employees.

Back then I could think quickly on my feet so I told the impressionable manager that they made the smallgoods. I said that they locked themselves in a backroom each morning and produced, with secret herbs and spices, the best sausages in the country. People, I prevaricated, came from far and wide to taste Long’s oriental polonies. Next on his question list was the huge bear of a man in a bow tie and chef’s hat. This was George Bogala, actually the Yugoslav cook at the A1 Restaurant, but I told Jimmy that he broke down all our beef. I said he could single-handedly process about six bodies of beef in a day, and that he kept a bucket of cold water on the floor beside him so he could dip his knife in it from time to time when it got too hot.

I found various jobs for the photogenic conspirators including gift shop owner Jack Whiteman, Army Stores proprietor Frank Pool, abattoir manager George Brown, plus two hairdressers, Mel Catt and George Corlett, all of whom had been press-ganged into posing for the photo. Pharmacist Wayne Snowsill had arrived when all the coats and aprons had been allocated. In his chemist white smock he looked a little too professional to be a butcher so I told the boss that he was a window dresser. This was the too much for Jimmy Blakemore. “You employ a window dresser?” he said incredulously, and now saw me in a totally, if unjustifiable, new light.

From then on I was looked upon as something of a guru in the field of meat retailing.

Jimmy would constantly ask me, as we were completing some task, if this was how we would do it in New Zealand. I enjoyed my newly acquired status and milked it for all it was worth. Once I had established myself, about six weeks after the photo had arrived, I admitted the deception. Fortunately Aussies enjoy a good joke and although I went back down the rankings ladder, I never descended to the bottom rung from whence I had commenced.

Wellington’s Evening Post published the story and cleverly captioned the accompanying photo: “Camera proves Masterton butchery a much larger joint.”

Like my own offspring today I always thought fathers were of little use, but I was pleased that mine, with his curious sense of humour, had given me the opportunity to excel in a country where New Zealanders had about the same credibility as the Irish have in England.

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” - Will Rogers.

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