taipoutiniblog

The need for urgency

I attended a community meeting called to discuss a spate of vandalism at a car park and found myself in an episode of The Simpsons or a Brecht skit on Mussolini’s Italy. A local cop, all taser and trimmed moustache and shaving rash had been rapidly tapping the table with his notebook to show how busy he was before he suddenly pronounced that the police were now focused on catching baddies rather than hugging them. That was the directive and he was putting it into effect. Catching baddies is the thing, he repeated. Don’t worry, we’re onto them. The DOC guys looked like bush fairies and simply said they had no money to do anything. The council reps smiled a lot. The meeting of course, resolved nothing. A culture of totalitarianism has appeared, with bureaucrats competing to put the orders from above into practice. One of the main orders is to cut costs (I’ve heard they’re going through contracts to providers line by line). Another is to catch baddies and jail them. Another is for teachers to focus on essentials. Another is to give the unions a kick in the balls. It’s all about violence.

And then I had a further episode of a cold turning into ‘walking pneumonia’ so needed some antibiotics, which involved negotiating the local health system. Rumour had it that it was taking a month to see a GP, who are clogged up tending to the chronically ill (those with ongoing issues and ongoing medication), so I steeled myself for a visit to A&E as an acute walk in.

When the new local hospital Te Nikau was being designed we were promised a seamless service with the main local medical centre moving there, the pharmacy opening a branch, and then you’d have A&E, before you get to the wards. So, you go to the GP, she deals with you, if you need medication you can get it and go home. Or, if things are more serious and you need x rays or blood tests, you may advance to the A&E section, where these services are located and then, if you are seen as in need of secondary care it will begin to happen, with maybe you ending up in a ward. Meanwhile of course, ambulance patients enter via A&E but could, in fact be sent off to a GP if that is really the level of service required. It was sensible and aspirational, emulating what happens in a place like Poland or Cuba.

What has happened instead is that the GP practice (who are always short staffed) is overwhelmed with tending to chronic patients. Hence the 4 weeks wait. As well, it’s hard to find doctors. So that section becomes isolated and absorbed in its own crises.

The seamless concept has been transferred to the A&E section of the hospital which accepts walk ins. There are GPs there (usually locums), working from rooms attached to the waiting area. You are triaged and wait for however long it takes (at least put aside a morning). Eventually I saw a nurse practitioner who insisted on a chest x ray and blood tests. This meant entering through the portal to the A&E section. Eventually an X ray technician arrived (he didn’t seem very busy) and then an interminable wait for a blood test. There was only one patient and the staff seemed to be mooching along very comfortably and uninterested in anything much, despite prompting, so I went back to the triage desk and said I had to go. They protested that it was very busy in A&E – I suspect this is always the excuse. I explained that I just wanted a prescription for some bloody antibiotics, last time I’d done a tele call and the whole thing was over in 5 minutes. There were placatory noises and pleas to wait a little longer.

And then the shift changed and the nurses from Kerala arrived : gracious, very efficient, a blood test done in a moment, a swab, a bag of fluid to bring down my temperature, and then an antibiotic to take, and a script sent to the pharmacy for picking up. Now, you can go home. No cost for treatment or medication. With a few more GPs and a greater praxis it would be an efficient service.

But what about the GPs and the medical centre, with the four week waiting list? If there were continuity of care it may be worth it, but there isn’t. Nor do they keep an eye on people. At my age an annual check-up should be mandatory but I’ve never been contacted. I’ve got an optometrist request for a specialist opinion that I suspect will never be processed. And then there’s the Primary Health Organisation. What do they do? I’ve never come across them nor have I been aware of them in the local community.

I can see how the original model could have worked well, but it would require a greater number of committed GPS (rather than locums). We’ve got our nurses from Kerala, let’s bring in some doctors from Cuba.

Moving up the ladder (just a little), there’s the extraordinary interview with President Biden, arranged to reassure the public after his debacle in the first presidential debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kpibhlagG0

The rest home candidate, after a few minutes of stuttering becomes animated when he talks about taking on Putin and expanding NATO and confronting China in the South, of capturing the production of semi conductors and of ‘running the world’ – for the US must remain the eminent power. And he’s the scout leader to do it. The nakedness of power is on show. It is an extraordinarily clear example of Hannah Arendt’s wonderfully apt description of ‘the banality of evil’. So, the American people have the choice between a cantankerous, self absorbed, cognitively compromised ‘Emperor’ and the unashamed criminal, Trump.

Before watching this I had caught an interview with the President of Grenada, a humble, erudite, civilised man obviously devoted to his community, lamenting the destruction caused by the recent early hurricane and the failure of the rich nations to address climate change. The poor, island nations are at the forefront. But where is the urgency? He was a despairing, tragic figure.

At a recent workshop at Kotuku the young climate action people there stressed their feeling of urgency in terms of the global order and their willingness to take direct action. It was obviously a visceral feeling and I understood the feeling.

It really is time to withdraw from the Empire.

July 6, 2024 0

Tears in the social fabric

Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger, makes for an uneasy read as she tracks the coming together of two groupings in Western society: the right wing paranoid conspiracy theorists and the New Age wellness, fitness, diet faddists obsessed with self. Both groups are hyperventilating on individual rights and so called freedom in what they see as an oppressive society fronted by a domineering state. Social media tools allow disinformation to easily circulate and instant gurus to surface. The shared view is flavoured with racism, eugenics and protofascism. It’s a spin off of neoliberalism and spawns political monstrosities like Trump.

And they are clever as they pick up on absences and contradictions that should be material for the Left: covid combatting programmes promoted both isolation of the individual and state imposed collectivism; rust belt bitterness felt by mainly white workers betrayed across the political spectrum; affirmation for sectors of society who at the neighbourhood level are not seen as particularly disadvantaged; income inequality; small business versus transnationals; climate and refugee stresses…

Klein uses the doppelganger paradigm (Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde is the best known instance) to embody the mirror images and shadows that are at play as identity becomes ever more fluid and yet people become ever more obsessive in the need for recognition. Information and disinformation play a distorted mirror game – remember those sideshow mazes at the old A&P shows? Klein finds herself stalked by another Naomi (Wolf), a 1980s feminist writer who has turned neo con anti vaxer and readers confuse the two women.

While able to understand the motivation of this new phenomenon (in a society that is obviously falling apart you get your physical and emotional self together as a whole, beautiful high achieving person who lives above the chaos), Klein writes that they never acknowledge the cause of the chaos: the capitalist system which has always walked hand in hand with colonialism and the genocides of the colonist. This in turn reveals that Hitler simply colonised Europe, with the Jews becoming the ‘indigenous people’ needing to be cleared. This in turn becomes a new doppelganger taking us to Israel as a colonial venture and the deeply disturbing distorted mirror of the genocide being played out in Gaza and the West Bank with the victim Jew turning into the militant soldier.

Is there any way out of this panorama of evil which begins to have colourings of original sin and homo sapiens as a deeply flawed species? Or is the problem identity whether religious, ethnic or national leading to this evil? Or is it the economic system of capitalism which exacerbates to an intolerable degree? And now identity politics sees it entering a more personal realm which is obviously being played out with great intensity in the North. She suggests a solidarity which takes account of diversity is the only solution and that this can only be achieved at the community level. She suggests we need to blur the edges of identity in order for a blending to take place. As with other writers, an anarcho syndicalist model is the favoured ‘genre’ to see us through the potentially apocalyptic 21^st century.

June 2, 2024 0

Six months later

‘revenge: to be satisfied with retaliation for offence’

‘vengeance: punishment inflicted, retribution exacted for wrong to oneself’. (OED)

The Israelis must be feeling satisfied. They have inflicted punishment and obtained retribution in a grandiose, biblical manner. Civil infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed. Schools, hospitals, universities, cultural centres, mosques, churches, police stations, council offices, electricity supply, sewage, water supply, roads, communication networks, commerce, media, housing – all gone. Thousands of men, women and children dead, whole families wiped out, thousands more wounded and disabled, the population traumatised. And now, starvation. As order disappears and dribbles of food arrive, gangs form. Brute survival takes over, a new vengeance.

‘Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry, Palestine will never die!’ was a chant at initial demonstrations.. But a people and a culture have been destroyed. ‘Treat them like dogs’, ‘They are animals’ were the slogans. An army of brainwashed youths, armed with the most sophisticated weapons on earth, have run riot in a prolonged killing spree. The new technologies buzz overhead, the robots command, the algorithms rule. I look at Netanyahu and his cabinet of fellow thugs, at Biden and Sunak and the Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘the banality of evil’ comes to mind.

How does one react? What are the ethics of reaction, the ethics of living alongside this? To be in for the long, obsessive haul of persuading a majority of fellow citizens, many of whom are indifferent, to boycott this society and then to judge the individuals? For the brave to choose martyrdom so that the murdering becomes internationalised and the above process is hastened? To dream of and work toward a better world? Like Sylvia Plath, to insist on the poetry of death? To immerse oneself in the day to day before the next horror impacts viscerally? To vainly hope that there is some innate ethical necessity in human beings which leads to Israeli society itself imploding?

We live in strange and difficult times.

April 4, 2024 0

Facing the crisis

I have spent the last three weeks in Sydney with my three year old moko and his whanau, going for walks and bike rides, playing ball, building things, attending bath times, throwing stones in ponds, braving waves at the beach, choosing foods to eat, bouncing balloons, learning catching and batting skills, accepting challenges, language skills growing exponentially, experiencing moments of hilarity and mischief, fascinated by pee and poo, occasionally dissolving into tears at a knock, and occasionally experiencing moments of deep pondering – you know the score and the joy of life for a three year old.

In which context, the horror of Gaza is inconceivable. Yet, what do you call them?: thugs, fascists, brutes, liars, manipulators, colonists, collaborators, are conceiving this horror on a daily basis. They are the embodiment of evil – and I don’t use the word lightly. Often there is a psycho analytic excuse for the murderer – a childhood trauma of intensity, but these people don’t have that excuse. They embody what has been called the banality of evil, the everydayness of the death camp. And as for the collaborators, the excusers, the US officials, that empty eyed UN ambassador, that tottering President… contempt is the singular badge for these people.

Occasionally the three year old would take pleasure in knocking over a sand castle or a construction, would throw the miniature baby toy out of the bath with a maniacal cackle and I would think that dictators probably operate at the level of three year olds. But the three year old is also rapidly learning empathy.

But not Israel. Israel has become a state embodying evil and thankfully more and more people and states are acknowledging this reality, bar some distressed religiously confused souls, some cultural pretenders like Bob Marley’s son; and of course the courtiers – the mouthers of platitudes and the dead-eyed Dicks of the talk shows.

But there is as well, the indifferent, too busy with their three year olds and the washing and the mortgage.

And there are the arms and oil sellers, busy with their profits. Perhaps these are the most contemptible. For, if Israel were denied arms and oil, the war would stop tomorrow.

And what are we learning from this crisis? I would repeat the sentiments of some Canadian activists:

We have to admit the crisis and realise that all the crises are connected. Rather than put our energy and tolerance of risk into surviving individually within a decaying capitalist system, let us put our energy into and take the risk of establishing relationships of solidarity.

And then they pose a set of questions:

Given unstable incomes, unstable housing and an unknown future how do we organise?
Can we organise without money, space, stability and experts?
Do we trust ourselves?
In the dark age of data collection, control by algorithm and the neuro-hacking of social media, can we disentangle our nervous systems from the habits of capitalism ?
Have we the courage to be disobedient in terms of energy and time?
Can we look at wishes not problems?
Can we understand that difference and change are our greatest powers?
Can we understand that reciprocity is complex and that post capitalist reciprocation looks different? (By this they mean that relationships of gift and reception, work and payment are not simply binary.)
Let us understand that what we are doing and making is done and made by workers, for the community.
Whatever we do has to be such that it cannot be colonised by google, has to outlast capitalism and doesn’t replace the government’s work.
Radical change is no longer about a singular confrontation or revolution, but rather a complex integration of multiple responses operating in a precarious manner – indigenous, gender, worker, hunter and gatherer, sexual orientation, national, ability, age, environmental, with often the conflict being between this diversity and the imposers of regularity.

March 4, 2024 0

Taking a break from Gaza

The totally brutal destruction of Gaza continues. The knowledge that there is a large natural gas deposit off the Coast which would come under the jurisdiction of any Palestinian state which included Gaza lends a Job-like cynicism as the body count grows. There are global murmurs of discontent but only the South Africans and the Irish are blunt in their condemnation. New Zealand hiccups apologetically.

But it is play week, a week each year when we resurrect and perform a classic within seven days. This year it is Bruce Mason’s The End of the Golden Weather, so it is back to the 1930s and the coming of age of a lad with artistic urges. It is an age of seeming innocence, despite the Depression, with the only blot the lunatics who need to be locked away. Netanyahu? Biden?

Story telling is a complex task, to include description and to play the myriad characters – curiously Cubist in nature – even though it is the most ancient of art forms. So, the world faded away as a singular intent took over.

Of course there is the fallacy of art – those orchestras in the death camps. Will, one day, people make theatre out of what’s happening in Gaza? If so, why? And then the diplomacy. One could make theatre out of the diplomacy. Those daily phone calls between Netanyahu and Biden, perhaps becoming sterner, each with their scripts concocted by advisors. What a task for a scribe.

Before the performances are over and life returns to normal. Except in Gaza there is no normality, nor likely to be, for the gas exploration leases have been let and the aim is to supply Europe so that it is no longer reliant on Russia. Politics is, as Machiavelli wrote, a despicable practice.

At least theatre has the grace to disappear, leaving only a memory.

February 3, 2024 0

The fragmentation of the working class

Once, political and union knowledge was passed on within working class families. That is no longer the case. As a result, there is an uphill battle for unions to prove their effectiveness in the workplace. It is made even more difficult bby the fact that many of the gains made by unions have become workplace law administered by the Labour department. And then there is the free loading by non-union members, with gains made by union members automatically being passed on to all staff.

But as well, there is the fragmentation of community, especially in urban areas. Recently I proposed to a labour history group I belong to, that the new history curriculum in schools, which emphasises local content, presented an opportunity for unionists and labour historians to provide local working class stories to schools in an area. There was something of a stunned silence. How do you make contact with schools? How would you write up the material? Who’s got the time? Doesn’t take long I reassured them. But the making contact proved insurmountable. Yet community unionism is a buzz word?

Generally, the urban left is divorced from the working class communities who have often been pushed into the outer suburbs in order to leave the urban centres to professionals. The gap becomes even wider as the urban left becomes engrossed in identity issues. And of course the academy and the community are rare bedfellows.

The fragmentation therefore continues.

February 3, 2024 0

Out of control

The tragedy of Gaza assumes biblical proportions: an angry Jehovah, destruction, plague… unthinkable in a period of supposed rules-based global order. The pain is visceral. A sermon is preached in Jerusalem which resurrects Christianity as a spiritual force, but the genocide will continue. The aim is clear: to expel the Palestinians from the territory claimed by Israel. Those remaining will be exterminated. The gods of war hope the conflict escalates so that they can bomb Damascus – if only Iran would give them an excuse as well – I’m sure the AI logarithm has identified the targets for the dumb bombs to fall. Meanwhile, Uncle Joe prissily studies his fingernails.

The only hope is for the Arabs and the Chinese and other Brix nations to hastily install a new world order; the French and the Irish (who have been wonderfully staunch – shame on NZ and Australia) might join. Only a massive boycotting, sanctioning and divesting will stop this terrorist state.

December 28, 2023 0

The banality of evil

I visited a friend who lives on a lifestyle block; a good person, even a virtuous person, but when I commented on the horror of what is happening in Gaza, the friend looked away and talked of the garden. I repeated the statement and our eyes met, then we looked away. When faced with evil one ends up looking away. Some resort to the rally, chanting the slogans to passers by who are looking away. And beneath the evil is the banality of a leader who has been humiliated, whose reputation is at stake, who has been made a laughing stock of and is now on a revenge rampage. Age old, these raping, looting, wreckers trampling on the enemy, the act dreadfully magnified by modern weaponry.

Add the disgusting games of diplomacy, the evil buried in carefully chosen language. One looks away. And we can. We’re not faced with the bombing, the death, the cell, the torturer… we can look away from the banality of evil. One day it may change.

December 20, 2023 0

The bureaucracy of genocide

Primo Levi’s astonishing account of a year in Auschwitz, If this is a man, reveals a mad bureaucracy at work as the Nazis administered this concentration/death camp: the giving out and tattooing of numbers, the incessant roll calls, the requirement for neat bed making and uniform wearing, the constant selections of those fit enough to work and those for the gas chamber, the detailed hierarchy with standard of food, clothing and accommodation attached to each role. Children were expendable, being useless mouths to feed; ditto pregnant women. Those seeing out each day as slave labour had to learn complex and dehumanising skills of survival without any hope in a future. And at the end, as the Russians advanced, the total disintegration into a macabre, corpse-ridden world.

There is a similarly mad bureaucracy of genocide beginning to operate in Gaza, with the IDF bureaucrats, having obliterated Northern Gaza and world opinion tut tutting, spending the ceasefire period designing a more intricate map of destruction for Southern Gaza, presumably having realised that not all the world is unconditionally supporting their final solution to the colonial state’s ‘Arab problem’. Accordingly, they will warn a district’s inhabitants before reducing the district to rubble. They will then move to the next district. It’s not painting by numbers, rather destruction by numbers.

A ridiculous logic is operating. Hamas is hanging out in tunnels, so don’t go into the tunnels to sort it out, bomb that which is above the tunnels. I get the impression of a defence force of cowards, hiding in planes (Hamas have no air force or air defence system), or tanks or drone command centres. Person to person combat is too dangerous.

It seems they’re using AI to generate the list of targets. Presumably data is inputted: name of presumed militant, sympathetic facebook posts, overheard conversations, seen at a demo or two, address, movement patterns, family connections; the algorithm spits out a target and boom, there goes an apartment block, the bigger the better, for those suffering the collateral damage will be losing sympathy with Hamas.

Further craziness is revealed. The IDF knew of the October 7^th Hamas plan a year ago, but dismissed it as aspirational. They were further warned by their ‘spotters’ (those who keep an eye on the strip) during the week leading up to it but told them to be quiet. Did they actually want it to happen so they could then have an excuse to begin the final solution: to expel all the remaining Arabs into tents in the Egyptian desert and that’s been the plan for a while? Nothing is impossible.

The whole world’s watching. This is all over the news. So what? Those who count have given unconditional support. The Israeli intelligence system is intertwined with the CIA and MI5 and the Europeans, as is the Israeli military with the other militaries. And the politicians. The media connections are sound. And always the Israelis have the excuse of being privileged religious/ethnic victims who are eternally deserving of compensation. As for ‘the Arabs’ in the West Bank, they put them in prison for as long as they want, without trial, they torture them, destroy their houses and kill them regularly, the settlers assisting.

There is rumour that before any such operation as the Gaza invasion, a death figure is proposed. Forty thousand seems to be the current figure, mainly women and children. That’ll help the demographic problem.

It is all obscene and insane, and the worst thing is that Auschwitz was kept secret. This is being universally witnessed and no-one in authority is saying no apart from demonstrators and wimps at the UN and NGOs who don’t really count. This situation is as psychotic as any final solution. And there begin to be the photos now that remind one of the death camps – the texture of hopelessness is the same.