The highs and lows of modern life

The all-male cabal that runs NZ Incorporated, Key, English and Joyce assure us that the rock star economy is still rocking despite declining dairy prices and a falling dollar. It’s a line they must take to keep our spirits up whether it represents the real position or not.

This is not how governments normally operate. Famed cultural critic and satirist H. L. Mencken reckoned the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Meanwhile serial protestor Claire Bleakley, who cut her teeth on expostulate action earlier this century opposing the use of 1080 and is president of GE Free NZ, recently led her fellow dissidents around the metropolitan streets of Featherston protesting against the elusive Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. Mr Groser, who sounds and looks like someone right out of the kids card game Happy Families, assures us he won’t sign the dreaded document until he’s convinced it’s in New Zealand’s best interests.

The populace has often been unnecessarily alarmed. In 1970 Hal Lindsay wrote the best seller The Late Great Planet Earth warning us that we would never get to see the dawn of the new millennium. Not long after that international think tank The Club of Rome said we were about to run out of oil and the end result would be catastrophic for the world.

We now know the world is awash with oil and at a new low of $40 a barrel American petroleum barons are laying off staff and plugging their wells until the price gets back up to a level where they consider it is worth extracting.

Last week The Wall Street Journal warned of another recession looming as the Dow Jones plunged and said the US, with a balance of payment deficit in the trillions, has no money left to stop the outcome really biting hard this time around.

I’m starting to sound like The Club of Rome myself and H. L. Mencken will have thought that I should have gone into politics, but I suspect the real threat for the world today is the propensity for some very clever people to hack into significant computers. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, now both living in forced exile, have done so to devastating effect, but the real risk lies with ISIS types breaching the world’s banking system.

And already would-be adulterers are running scared because the Ashley Madison website has been skilfully sabotaged.

Twenty-two thousand New Zealanders are said to be implicated, many of them Aucklander’s who are probably wanting to emulate the antics of their meandering mayor.

Apparently 85 per cent of adultery aspirants are men, but only 15 per cent are of the fairer sex. Just how Ashley Madison was going to achieve partnership pairing is a mystery, unless the ladies were going to be asked to do multiple shifts.

American comedian Dave Barry once asked his audience: “Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults have in adultery?” It was a rhetorical question, but if asked, I would have said, “No, they probably don’t.”

“No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” -Edmund Burke

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Anatomy of a murder

A quaint expression once used when a young lady weds a man considered not to be her equal was that ‘she’d married below her station.’ In today’s egalitarian society the saying has all but disappeared from the vernacular, but I’m going to reinstate it by suggesting that Millie Elder-Holmes married below her station.

Except of course she didn’t marry Connor Morris; she was merely his partner.

Back in the good old days when the ‘below her station’ was in common usage “partners” were usually people you went into business with.

Videos at the housewarming party Ms Elder-Homes and Mr Morris were attending, taken just prior to the altercation that eventuated in his demise, show Morris verbally abusing his attractive partner and gesturing towards her in a frightening manner.

It’s hard to understand how some women find this sort of behaviour appealing.

The late Mr Morris had taken on celebrity status simply by his association with Ms Elder-Homes and as a result the trial of the man accused and eventually convicted of murdering him dominated our TV newscasts nightly over recent weeks.

The accused, Michael Murray, who had used a sickle on a pole to strike his victim, was seen each day sitting in the dock looking for all the world like a possum caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

I couldn’t blame him. Connor Morris was a prominent member of Auckland’s feared Head-Hunter’s gang. There are apparently over a hundred Head-Hunter gang members languishing in our ghastly jails.

The trial was something of an insight into modern Auckland society. Michael Murray had spent the day of the murder at theme park Rainbows End with two of his children aged 10 and 12 from a previous “relationship”. He took them back to a sleepout he often used at his sister’s home at 401 Don Buck Road where they had takeaways for tea, then played Guitar Hero on PlayStation. Murray’s present partner lives at another address, not disclosed for fear of reprisals, with their three-month-old daughter.

After playing Guitar Hero Murray smoked cannabis with his brother in an adjoining sleepout.

We hear a lot about our low-waged economy, but Mr Murray, a labourer who mainly builds retaining walls, can afford a day at Rainbow’s End, takeaways, a PlayStation and smoke cannabis while presumably paying child support for his two older children.

Meanwhile at 425 Don Buck Road Connor and Millie were at a housewarming party at his sister Cymmion’s home when some of the guests decided to go to get some pineapple juice to replenish their cocktails from a service station down the road. Connor wanted cigarettes so they agreed to buy those as well. They bumped into guests from a 21st birthday party bash at 403c Don Buck Road which was next door to where Mr Murray was entertaining his children and smoking cannabis.

The rest, as they say, is history.

From the comfort of my living room I had concluded that Murray was guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. The jury of course heard more than I did and decided otherwise.

But then again a jury is really just twelve people chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

“Murderers are really very agreeable clients. I do think murderers get a very bad press.” - John Mortimer

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A Disney view of the jungle

When we were first married we built a home on a 200 acre farm our meat company owned in Norfolk Road. I decided to assume the role of laird of the manor and to do this I needed to buy a rifle and go hunting. Rifle as in a 22 calibre model commonly known as a “pea” rifle, and hunting as in rabbits. The back of the farm bounded the Waingawa River where there were rabbits galore.

Mr Harold King, notable gunsmith from King and Henry, sold me a brand new rifle at a modest cost and I proceeded to the riverbed site and took aim at my first wild animal. It wasn’t difficult; there were plenty to choose from and my first shot hit the target, but didn’t kill it; it was now writhing in agony in front of me. I knew what I had to do, but hated having to do it. I put the front end of the barrel between the rabbit’s pleading eyes and fired the fatal shot. I discovered there and then that I could never be a hunter; I was a wuss.

There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that due to the career I was born into, over the next thirty or so years I was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of sheep, cattle-beasts and pigs, but couldn’t bear the thought of actually killing an animal myself.

So you will have concluded by now that I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for the American dentist who paid $US50,000 to go to Zimbabwe and shoot a majestic lion and then find himself hounded by the vociferous and sometimes ghastly sections of humanity who flood the new phenomenon known as the social media.

But there are always two sides to every story, and sometimes only one side gets told.

A Zimbabwean named Goodwell Nzou, writing to the New York Times, had this to say: “Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “loved” or a “local favourite” was all media hype? Did they choke up because Cecil was murdered or because they confused him with Simba from the Lion King?

“In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or given an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.”

He went on: “Recently a 14 year-old boy in a village not far from mine wasn’t so lucky. Sleeping in his family’s fields, as villagers do to protect their crops from hippos, buffalo and elephants that trample them, he was mauled by a lion and died.”

Americans tend to romanticise animals by giving them actual names and then hastily join a hashtag train and turn an ordinary situation - and there were nearly a thousand lions legally killed over a decade by wealthy foreigners who paid serious money to prove their questionable prowess - into to what seems to Zimbabwean eyes to be a maniacal media maelstrom.

Nzou concluded, “We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.”

How things change. At the dawn of time if you killed a lion and could fix peoples teeth you would be the king of everything.

“I like animals as much as the next guy, but if I’m hungry, I’ll eat a panda sandwich.” – Howard Stern

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Change for change sake

The Prime Minister wants to change the flag, Andrew Little wants to change the national anthem and the leader of the opposition, Winston Peters, doesn’t want to change anything, except perhaps the number of Asians we allow to settle in our Godly of nations.

Meanwhile Masterton’s lady Mayor goes on the airwaves exalting the good citizens of the town to buy locally and support our business people. It’s a good message; and timely too.

With no data to confirm this, I suspect the only growing enterprises at the moment are the courier companies whose vans are seen speeding around the town delivering goods from countries afar. If Mr Key and Mr Groser’s claims are to be relied upon, and the Trans Pacific Partnership is passed into law, these goods are likely to become even more competitive.

I walked up the main street of Hamilton one Saturday morning recently looking for somewhere to have lunch. Provided I liked Asian food the choice was overwhelming, but the number of empty shops was surprising and distressing. The once buoyant Victoria Street has all but died. I asked the locals what had happened and they told me the Tainui people, bursting with money from well-managed investments, had recently built a huge shopping centre at Te Rapa with acres of free carparks. They said no one wants to feed parking meters these days and so many main street businesses had failed.

Local retailers here are facing the same problem. Masterton’s pseudo-mall, the Warehouse sells most everything and as a result you can get a park in Queen Street pretty well whenever and wherever you want. But you pay.

The shopkeepers want the council to consider a parking regime-change allowing the first ninety minutes free.

They cite the story of a town in West Wales called Cardigan where vandals smashed all the parking meters and the council can’t afford the 22,500 pound bill to have them repaired.

This has led to a surge of visitors to the town centre with shop owners claiming sales are up by 50 per cent. The small retailers, who were still paying exorbitant property taxes, and seeing an ongoing decline in business, have long blamed parking meters pushing shoppers away from local high streets to out-of-town superstores.

And so change is in the air, the flag, the anthem and perhaps the parking meters.

But it was recently brought to my attention that the biggest change facing my generation is Facebook and not really coming to grips with just how it works.

An old friend emailed me last Friday with these claims:

“Presently,” he said, “I am trying to make friends outside of Facebook while applying the same principles. Therefore every day I go down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I have done the night before and what I will do tomorrow night. Then I give them pictures of my family, my dog, and me gardening and spending time pruning roses. I also listen to their conversations and tell them I love them.”

And apparently it works.

He said “I already have three persons following me: two police officers and a psychiatrist.”

To change and to change for the better are two different things - German proverb

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