Archive for January, 2009

A Brief History of the Slipperiness of Time

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

 

I could always remember the date Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon because it was my Mother’s birthday, July 21. History is a lot easier if you can hang it on familiar pegs. Then recently I was browsing an encyclopaedia and paused at a section on space travel. It said that Neil Armstrong took his small step for a man and giant leap for mankind on 20 July. Don’t you hate that feeling: you know you’re right, but you might be wrong. In fact it looks very much like you are wrong.

 

But then you can’t believe everything you read, can you? So I looked up various other sources and sure enough they all agreed that the lunar landing was on 20 July. Had I been deluded all these years? It took an enormous faith in my own infallibility, sometimes cruelly misinterpreted as pig-headedness, plus managing to unearth an old scrapbook to figure out that I was right after all. In my old evening daily, the Napier Daily Telegraph, dated 21 July 1969, it said Neil Armstrong “climbed down from the lunar landing module onto the moon’s surface at 2.55 pm today New Zealand time”. Houston Space Centre is 18 hours behind us, which would have made it 8.55 pm on July 20. Problem solved. Or is it?

 

I mean, what date are our children taught for the Moon walk? Doubtless it is 20 July, but why should we put up with this piece of intellectual imperialism? It’s not as if we are talking about an event that happened in the US, and which could therefore stake a claim to happening in US time. Oh well, you may say, they were all Americans on Apollo 11, so they deserve the date. Why? What happens when we eventually land on Mars and the crew are from different countries? It’s not unlikely the mission will be multinational. Who gets to claim the time and date then?

 

This may sound picky, but the point is we have a perfect right to date history from our own perspective, and we should exercise that right. Take a more recent event, what everyone now calls 9/11. Why should we call it 9/11? For a start we don’t use that crazy system of putting the month before the day. More importantly, the Twin Towers were bombed on 12 September, thank you very much. It’s something everybody knew without doubt when it was actually happening.  “Hey, did you hear the news?” “What?” “The Twin Towers in New York has just been bombed by terrorists.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “And what’s the date?” “What do you mean what’s the date? Are you crazy?” “Just bear with me.” “It’s 12 September.” “Are you sure?” “Sure I’m sure. Look at the damn calendar.”

 

You see? Absolute certainty. But now let’s ask that same irritable person when the Twin Towers were bombed. “Are you crazy?” they say. “Do you live in a whole in the ground? It was 11 September 2001.” They sadly shake their head as they walk away. What’s happened? They have been intellectually colonised, that’s what’s happened.

 

This sort of thing has been going on for a long time, since 1520 to be precise. That’s when what was left of Magellan’s expedition finally limped back to Spain, minus Magellan, who has been hacked to death in the Philippines after an attack of megalomania. On board a man called Pigafetta has been fastidiously keeping a day-by-day diary of the voyage. When he arrives back home his diary tells him it is 6 September but everyone tells him, no, you must have made a mistake, it is 7 September. So they argue, and he is outraged at this accusation that he has missed a day, and he shows them the diary entries, every day since he left and not a day missed. Let’s face it: when you’re creeping across the Pacific with your skin cracking and your teeth falling out you’re not going to miss the only diversion available. It wasn’t as if Pigafetta had failed to hear the hostess crooning that he had crossed the international date line. There wasn’t one.

 

Here’s something even weirder. Suppose you are researching your family tree, and you discover that a distant ancestor was born in London on 3 September 1752. Without batting an eyelid I would politely inform you that you are mistaken. Furious at my groundless arrogance, you demand to be told how I could possibly know such a thing. The answer is simple. There was no 3 September 1752, or 4 or 5. In fact 11 whole days were simply deleted, and the poor folks of London and the rest of Great Britain and its colonies went to bed on Wednesday 2 September and woke up on Thursday the 14th. This drove many people into a frenzy of frustration and confusion, but it was simply a long-postponed adjustment to the calendar brought about because the Brits had rejected what they saw as a Catholic plot to fiddle with the calendar. The result is a black hole in history.

 

This is a bit disturbing, you must admitt, because you tend to think of the days and dates stretching back in time in regular succession so that you could, at least theoretically, give a date to that meteor that froze out the dinosaurs. But pursuing this line of thought you can run into trouble with years, let alone dates. As we all know, the year 2005 is a Christian invention for measuring time, based on the year Jesus Christ was born. Okay, fine, but what year was he born? Not absolutely sure? Well let’s go back to before his birth and count forwards to make sure we get it right. Let’s say we settle on the fourth century BC, then we go to the third century BC, then the second century BC, and then, bizarrely, we hit the second century AD. There is no first century BC or first century AD, because there is no year zero. The very year that Christ was born, and that we celebrate with our dating system, and that we use every day, has simply disappeared. Another hole.

 

All of which leads us to conclude that time is a lot more slippery than you might think. But nobody likes slipperiness in a world time-regulated down to the last nanosecond, so people try to pin it down. Which brings us back to the point about not being bullied into adapting our own history, our own memories, to that of the major powers. The Wizard produced a world map with New Zealand at the top.  When you think about it, this is just as accurate as any standard map, there being no right way up when looking at the Earth from space. It’s just that we’ve been the long-time victims of negative hemisphere-ism. Let’s make sure the same thing doesn’t happen with our history books.

Boethius 1

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Obama Hysteria

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

I’m sorry, but I really don’t get it. Sure Obama seems like a nice guy, and he talks well, but why the hysteria over someone with almost no experience and no track record? Somone said to me recently, “Well he’s got to be better than Bush”. Why? How could you possibly know that? Has he faced anything yet, let alone something of the magnitude of the Twin Towers. No.

There is the race thing, though. And that’s where things get interesting. Some people refer to Obama as a Black American, some as an African-American, and some as a mixed-race American. He famously referred to himself as a “mutt”, when comparing himself to the type of dog he may get for his children. So which is it?

Well, his biological father was a black African from Kenya, his mother was a white American, he had an Indonesian stepfather for a while, and he was raised for much of his life by his white American grandparents. So it’s not at all clear he is a Black American or an African American. This only follows if his mother’s race counts for nothing, if the dominance and importance of one race so outweighs another race that it doesn’t come into consideration. But isn’t that racism?

I used to think about this when watching James Blake, the top ten tennis player. The commentators would talk about his achievemenst as an African-American tennis player, and comapre him to Arthur Ashe. But every so often the camera would show his white mother, sitting in the stand. What does that mean for her? Was she just a vessel for passing on the African-American race? Does she mean nothing to his heredity? Do her genes contribute nothing? Isn’t that racism?

As things stand, if James were to marry his white girlfriend (my apologies if they’ve now split up, but the point rermains), their children would be African-Americans too. That’s how the system works. Because “the system” is based on the concept of “a single drop of blood”. It’s a concept with a bad history. Slave owners used this to ensure the illegitimate children of white plantation owners and Black slaves had no rights: just one drop of blood and you are tainted (see Lawrence Wright, “One drop of blood”, The New Yorker, July 24, 1994 on this). The Nazis used this concept to classify Jews: just one drop of Jewish blood and you are a Jew, and forfeit all your rights to property, freedom and life.  

Of course, any oppressed people thrown together as the result of this sort of discrimination will tend to associate and sympathise with each other, and this is what happened with creoles, mulattos and all other classifications of mixed-race people. But that doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t mean that anyone with a great grandparent who was Black is Black, or ought to be thought of as Black, or ought to see themselves as Black.

A number of commentators have seen in Obama the chance to do away with racial and racist viewpoints and see him as a coming togther of peoples and races, a symbol of harmony in a world that is overly obsessed with difference. But Black America doesn’t want to see its final triumph diluted in this way: at last we have a Black president, and woe betide anyone who wants to say he’s not Black. And liberal White America is just as fervent in its desire to see Obama as Black, because it means they can say to the world, “See, we vote for Black people, we’re absolved of our sins”.

In New Zealand racial classification is based on choice. People can select their ethnicity. Well, that’s what everyone thinks anyway.  In fact many government institutions employ what is called “prioritised ethnicity”. What this means is that if on a form asking for the ethnic groups you belong to you write “Pakeha” or “White New Zealander” and “Maori”, in all subsequent statistics and policy you will be treated as a Maori. Statistics New Zealand recently abandoned this policy, but it is still very common in papers produced by government departments and academic institutions.

Similarly, if you write “Samoan” and “Maori” you will be treated as a Maori. This is because there is a priorised list of races, with Maori at the top and Pakeha/Other at the bottom. I know it sounds bizarre, and racist, but it was done with the best intentions, in terms of distributing social welfare. Believe it or not there is also an “ever” concept often used. This means that if, on any official form you have filled out at any stage of your life, you put “Maori” and “Pakeha”, even if for the rest of your life you just put “Pakeha” you will be treated as Maori under the “ever Maori” concept.

Why would someone change their mind about something like this? Well, according to the reasoning of Statistics New Zealand, the important thing is the ethnic group (or groups) you associate with. So presumably one can change one’s mind, or become clearer about which ethnicity you feel you belong to. So is there a free choice? Can we choose our ethnicity? Hardly.

Imagine Obama stating to the nation that because of his upbringing he associates more with his White background so he wants to be known as a White person. Does that sound weird, offensive, disgusting? In fact it’s just the other side of the same coin. You utterly reject one race in favour of another. Not only Black America but the politically correct world would be shocked: How can you reject your Black ancestry? Well, how can you reject your White ancestry?

This sort of things happens on an everyday basis too. Someone I know went for an interview to become a primary teacher. She has a White mother and a Maori father. During the interview she admitted that for a number of reasons, including the fact that she had been brought up by her White mother and hardly seen her father, she didn’t really see herself as a Maori and associates more with White New Zealanders. The result was shock, anger, a stern lecture, and the possibility of having missed out on the job.

It seems there is no choice. A single drop of blood and you are tainted, or blessed, whichever way you look at it. White genes are at best something to be ignored, at worst an embarssment that condemns you to being “not brown/black enough”.

Obama should not be seen as a symbol, a member of a slave race finally ruling the country, or as a redemption for White liberals. He should be seen as a mixed-race president, a wonderful coming together of races and countries in one man. And he should not be lauded just because he’s not white, or because he’s not George W Bush. He should be given a chance to achieve something, rather than being set up to fail because of the absurd, distorted expectations generated by Obama hysteria.

Boethius 2

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