Spitting between his shoes,
someone I might have been
has lost all fear.
And from that unassailable sanctuary
can hate, with methylated vigour,
those like me who are merely
clean,
sober,
afraid.
His eyes say Fuck you,
and I think Fuck you too,
and damn you to Hell.
Too late: he’s there already.
I mouth, “You chose”,
but his eyes pierce my back
and leave the words tattooed:
So did you.
Boethius 1
The Linwood House of Horror
A verdict was reached today in the High Court in the trial of Mrs Annie Hutchkins of Linwood. The jury took only two hours to reach its decision, finding Mrs Hutchkins guilty on all seven charges, which ranged from willful disregard for human safety to environmental vandalism.
The horrific nature of Mrs Hutckins’s offences became apparent when her property in Cashel Street was raided on 2 July. Police had a tip-off that someone was lighting unauthorised fires, and Mrs Hutchkins was discovered “obtaining warmth from an open fireplace”. She was actually burning wood, thought to be her own dismantled furniture. A store of wood prepared for the purposes of combustion was found hidden under the floorboards of her living-room.
The existence of the fireplace had been concealed from neighbours and the LASER (Light And Smoke Emission Reconnaissance) squad because the chimney had been dismantled by council workers 13 years before. Mrs Hutchkins had lit fires in the grate and allowed the smoke to pass into the room.
‘It was truly disgusting’, reported Detective-Sergeant Peter Melder, who was one of the first on the scene. “There was carbon monoxide, particulates and sulphates everywhere.” Dr Ian Parkin gave evidence at the trial that there was a 0.003% likelihood that smoke escaping from apertures in Mrs Hutchkins’s house had detrimentally affected 0.15 people with respiratory problems. In addition, this would have increased the carbon footprint of the whole city substantially, and another polar bear was likely to die and a major chunk of ice fall off the Antarctic ice sheet as a result. The room was decontaminated by the Environmental Special Emergencies Squad.
An electric heater of a kind long-banned (August 2010) was found in a cupboard, and forensic tests indicated that it had been used within the last month. To her plea that she had been cold, Justice Callen replied that if we all turned on a heater when we were cold where would the country be? This brought a round of cheers and applause. He also noted that if Mrs Hutchkins had been doing the Exercise Commission’s mandatory exercises she would have kept warm that way. Having osteo-arthritis was no excuse.
However, it was the backyard that revealed the true horrors of what has been dubbed “the Linwood House of Horror”. An unregistered dog was discovered chained to its kennel. The dog, a mixed Labrador-retriever, was well over the legal weight limit for dogs (10kg), had not had its teeth removed, and barked at a police officer who approached it. There was no record of its having been taken to the Canterbury Approved Dog Exercise Facility in Rangiora for two hours a day, as is required by law. Subsequent investigation showed that anyone with wire-cutters, and who had what Detective-Sergeant Melder described as a ‘very basic knowledge of alarm systems’, could have got into the yard and been bitten. The dog was shot on site.
Next to the dog was found a bowl of water, which at 4 cm deep and 20 cm across was over the legal limit for unfenced bodies of water. ‘Some child could have got in here, gone face down in that water and drowned before you know it,’ Detective-Sergeant Melder commented in court, visibly distressed. During this part of the trial Justice Callen twice had to warn the public to be quiet or he would be forced to clear the courtroom.
Finally, when Mrs Hutchkins was strip-searched at the police station she was found to have on her possession two roll-your-own “cigarettes”. Since smoking was banned in private in 2017 there has been a black market in tobacco, but it was unclear how Mrs Hutchkins had come by the illegal substance. Neighbours reported that she “had seemed such a nice person”. The damage to Mrs Hutchkins own health was only part of the story, according to Justice Callen. Secondary, and even tertiary, smoke could have affected a large number of people passing the house, who as a result would be likely to contract cancer within the next ten years and would be absorbing health funding for many more.
In summing up, Justice Callen said the case was one of the worst of its kind in recent years. The police officers involved are all receiving psychological counselling and are likely to be off work for at least 12 months. Mrs Hutchkins was sentenced to a total of 87 years imprisonment. After the sentence was read she appeared stunned. Justice Callen said he did not condone the painting of green triangles on the doors of members of Mrs Hutchins’s immediate family, combined with some petty vandalism, although it was an understandable reaction given the severity of the offences.
The death of a toddler in Otahuhu has been widely condemned as “completely avoidable and utterly unforgiveable”. The toddler, Baby Jay, was drowned in the bath by his stepfather. The Ministry of Social Welfare said that there were three social workers permanently stationed in the house, but that budget cuts had meant the “One Room, One Social Worker” for at-risk families action plan had not been able to be implemented. The driving force behind the action plan, Mr Richard Hewson, said that this was not good enough. “A report from seven years ago mentioned the possibility of violence from the stepfather (whose name has been suppressed), and there should have been constant surveillance of this poor man”. The stepfather was acquitted, and is undergoing counselling.
In response to this crisis, the Ministry says that it has has come up with a revolutionary new plan for monitoring at-risk Maori families, who are particularly vulnerable. The Minister, the Right Honourable Martha Douglas explains it as follows: “We’ve known for a long time that each child needs to be assigned at least two social workers, and that it is best if these come from the child’s iwi (tribe). Lately, research has shown that there are improved results if the social workers come from the child’s hapu (sub-tribe), or even whanau (extended family). The radical idea in this new plan is that the biological parents will take the place of social workers, which should provide an even closer affiliation between the caregivers and the child.” This radical plan has been widely hailed for its insight and sensitivity.
In other court cases, an organiser of a “fun” children’s soccer match at Leithfield Park, Mr Dennis Athfield, was found guilty of criminal negligence and ordered to pay a fine of $100,000 or accept imprisonment for ten years. An 11-year-old boy playing in the soccer match had gashed his arm falling on a piece of glass. The gash required two stitches. It was found that Mr Athfield was not registered as an events organizer, and had failed to provide written advice to all players that there was the possibility of encountering hazardous objects on the field. A council representative pointed out that over the previous five years the council had erected 47 hazard signs around the park, and all users of Hagley Park should first read a 60-page manual outlining all the drowning, falling, bacterial, cycling and other hazards that could be encountered in the park. Entering the park without having first read the manual was “just asking for trouble”.
Mrs Muriel Beckett was found guilty of failing to provide suitable access to her house without encountering a dog. Mrs Beckett, who celebrated her 84th birthday while remanded in custody, sobbed in Court as she explained that the wooden planks from the barrier had twice been stolen, presumably for illicit combustion. Justice McClennan said that this was no excuse, and that Mrs Beckett should count herself lucky that the inspector had not been bitten. The fact that her dog, Bessie, was unable to walk was irrelevant. This brings to 373 the number of elderly people imprisoned for access offences. Mrs Beckett’s husband, Stan, a retired carpenter, was also charged with erecting a building without having a current registration. His excuse that it was only a doll’s house for his grand-daughter and that it was hardly worth paying the $3,500 annual registration fee was dismissed by Justice McLennan, as was Mr Beckett’s claim that he had spent 47 years in the building industry.
An office manager, Ms Marion Hodge, was convicted of failing to wear a pedestrian helmet on a Class B3 road. To her plea that she had “just nipped out to put some money in the parking meter”, Justice McLennan responded that if people wished to use footpaths next to roads on which more than five motorised vehicles passed every 10 minutes, they would just have to get used to the idea of wearing helmets, as required by the revised Health and Safety regulations. He labelled as “irresponsible” evidence in a recent report that pedestrian helmets had not altered the number or seriousness of pedestrian accidents.
Finally in this day at the Courts, Mr James Wilson appeared in Court today after proceedings were interrupted yesterday and the Court had to be cleared due to disruption. Mr Wilson, a prominent member of OAMDF (Organisation Against Media-Driven Fascism) has been charged with vandalism and disturbing the peace after incidents that occurred during a protest against recent changes to the way legislation is passed, popularly known as “the New Democracy”. Mr Wilson said in a written statement that “the constitutional move to have legislation enacted and/or amended by popular electronic vote following the six o’clock news is simply government by hysteria”. He was convicted and fined $10,000. Justice McLennan noted in his decision that “we live in an advanced liberal democracy, and any group who tries to subvert that will be ruthlessly suppressed”.
On a brighter note, in international news, the Minister of Enhancing Abilities applauded the completion of wheelchair access to the summit of Mount Everest, but described as “appalling” the delays that had been encountered. The project, which had cost $14 billion, was “long overdue” according to the Minister. “It is simply disgraceful that people with enhanced abilities, such as those using wheelchairs, had been denied access to Mount Everest by a callous and biased international community.” People with enhanced abilities (previously referred to as people with disabilities) had been victimized too long, he said, and Mt Everest was just another step on the road to making the entire Earth accessible to all.
Boethius 2
According to Wikipedia “The Precautionary Principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.” In other words, if the potential consequences of doing something are bad enough, it’s not up to opponents to prove they will, or are likely to, happen. It’s up to those contemplating the action to prove that these consequences won’t happen. If you can’t supply this proof, you shouldn’t go ahead.
This principle is often employed in relation to genetic modification (genetic engineering, transgenics). It is often argued that even if nothing demonstrably bad has happened so far as the result of genetically modifying food crops, the consequences of something going wrong are so terrible that, on balance, the risk is not worth taking, because it cannot be shown that such risks can be reduced to zero. Put another way, even in the absence of conclusive evidence to show that genetic modification is dangerous, the onus is on the genetic modifiers to show that the negative consequences are well nigh impossible. The Precautionary Principle would therefore seem to indicate that we should not genetically modify our food.
Take something like corn syrup, which is incorporated into a huge range of processed foods. If some genetic modification to corn turned out to be toxic to humans, carcinogenic say, the consequences would be truly horrendous.
If one accepts the argument from the Precautionary Principle, it is not enough for scientists to remonstrate that selective breeding for the last five thousand years has done similar kinds of things, in a more random way, to genetic modification. By changing the genetic make-up of people’s food in rapid and radical ways that would be impossible in nature, they are putting whole populations at risk – and the risk is not worth it. Doesn’t this sound like a reasonable argument?
Of course the same reasoning also applies to not taking action. Which is to say, if the consequences of not taking action are horrendous enough, then the onus is on those who oppose this action to prove their case. Again, in the same way, even in the absence of conclusive evidence, if the consequences of inaction are terrible enough, then the onus is on those opposing the action to prove their case and show that these consequences are well nigh impossible.
In attacking Iraq on the basis of a belief that it was preparing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had the will to use them, Tony Blair and George W Bush can be seen as applying the Precautionary Principle in just the same way as it is applied to genetic modification. There was some evidence that Iraq was preparing WMDs, and even if this evidence was not conclusive, even if in hindsight it would appear to have been exaggerated, at the time the consequences of being wrong and of not acting were so genuinely terrifying that the Precautionary Principle applies. Even a crude WND targeted at Jerusalem, with 747,000 people, or Tel Aviv, with 390,000 people, would have caused huge devastation and doubtless begun a war that would have claimed many more.
Of course someone might argue that GM is different, in that the alternative course is harmless. Thus, they might argue, when it comes to GM, stopping the action has no negative consequences, apart from monetary losses to the fat industries involved, whereas the alternative course in the case of Iraq caused tens of thousands of deaths. On the one hand, this overlooks the fact that one of the drivers of the genetic modification of food crops has always been to create crop varieties that will thrive in adverse conditions, such as in Africa, and that will help feed whole countries. The enormous counter drive to prevent genetic modification may thus potentially cause millions of deaths. There are indeed negative consequences of applying the Precautionary Principle in this case, and with global warming the need for hardier crops to feed a starving world will become ever more pressing.
On the other hand, the decision to invade Iraq and ensure there were no WMDS caused relatively few deaths. It was George W Bush’s decision to stayand attempt to establish a democratic state in a country long run by a ruthless dictatorship that caused the large number of deaths. It was naive, absurdly optimistic and badly handled, but it was a different decision. If George W Bush had pulled out of Iraq after establishing the absence of WMDs, mirroring the tactics of his father in the first Gulf war, it would certainly have saved thousands of American lives and billions of dollars – dollars that are now in short supply.
Yes George Bush was wrong about WMDS. But was his decision to invade Iraq based on inconclusive evidence wrong? Was it reasonable to apply the Precautionary Principle in this situation given the potential consequences of inaction? Those high-minded individuals who eat organic food and despise Bush should try, for a few moments, to put themselves in his place. Your advisers, your intelligence agencies, are telling you that a rogue state that fosters terrorism and tortures and murders thousands of its own citizens may have WMDs. You agree with the use of the Precautionary Principle. What do you? What do you do?
Boethius 1
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
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