PO Box 2 Blackball

Visiting Invercargill we joined the local Palestinian Support Network as they protested in the local supermarkets against the selling of Israel sourced products, in particular Obela hummus. They were good people and it was a privilege to join them. But when we went home to family only the eleven year old was interested. You what? You went into a supermarket and took stuff off the shelves without permission? They didn’t try and stop you? He took some convincing. Palestinian protestors become in fact a different species. So that the  puzzle of the other 49993 local people who are witnessing a live-streamed genocide without protest becomes slightly less puzzling – and I’m not being critical of Invercargill here – it is the same everywhere. For some, protest is foreign, as is the issue. Some are scared off by visa requirements. There’s the danger of getting known in a smallish city. Some will have registered the ineffectiveness of the moral outrage protest. After all 100 million people protesting the Iraq invasion had no effect. How many have protested this genocide with no response from the Empire?

As the international protest turns more to the boycott, it does take it into the tetchier and more serious territory of economic interests. Quite simply, if Israel was denied weapons and fuel, the war would stop.. The Israeli economy could be crippled by an economic embargo such as is placed on Cuba, and its identity undermined by education, cultural and sporting boycotts.  If weapons were no longer manufactured because workers, supported by unions, were no longer willing to make them, wars would stop. But it’s not seriously happening. And if it started to, there would be a crunch point which would be very volatile indeed.

It all becomes self interested in a way. The group were pleased with their action and they should be. There is always the energy that results from performance, plus the video on facebook, the comments of passers by, the moral reward from having participated. We exist. It is no different from any performance. So, the performances compete for position in the performance cacophony which is the modern political scene.

So, change is incremental. I do wonder whether the constant simple non-judgemental questioning of the uncommitted would be useful? Do you know what’s happening?  How do you feel about it? Why aren’t you with us? A bit of a door knocking campaign, a collation of the answers into a theatre piece. Trying to puzzle the complex web behind it all.

The providers of social services to children and whanau who contract to Oranga Tamariki but sometimes other state institutions like health and education, are currently under attack by the coalition government who seem dictated to by ACT and NZ First to a surprising degree. As Gordon Campbell has pointed out the minor parties, cobbling together something like 12% of the vote are running the policy show. It is far worse than First Past The Post.

The neo liberal and managerial ‘revolution’ in the late 1980s and 1990s created social dislocation and unemployment as production moved offshore or became centralised. The agenda: rid the state of assets and their management, plus the management of social provision, because the state’s bad at management for a variety of reasons: its staff are comfortable, in a job for life, bureaucrats and the system is subjected to vote grabbing, political opportunism.  Where the state must still be involved, separate funder and provider (that is, operate within the structure of managerialism). The state becomes funder of what the private sector cannot really do (although the private sector would like to do everything where there’s a possible profit) and maintains accountability. The providers(whether for profit or not for profit) provide diversity and efficiency.

Initially the community providers were critical of what was happening (and were promoting a better model, or at least a return to social democracy) as, at the same time, they picked up some of the pieces. But by the end of the 1990s the state as funder was controlling the providers through criteria and reporting requirements. Some providers grew as the requirements became stricter and more voluminous – getting rid of the small scale and the amateur (running a performing arts course for 10 students involved as much policy as running a polytech).   You even began to get multinationals entering the scene. Any criticism of the system per se, other than administratively, disappeared.

There have always been tensions: Corporates making product can separate divisions: management, R&D, design, production (go where labour is cheap); and the market (plus the brand) is the reporter of outcomes. But even in business there were problems. The state has sometimes had to buy back assets (Kiwirail, Air NZ for example) for the private sector can sometimes just asset strip then bugger off and then there was the subprime mortgage fiasco …

And when it comes to social provision it is much more complex.  Provision is not a product and outcomes are harder to measure. Sometimes, as with Oranga Tamariki, the state, as well as the funder, has remained one of the providers. In fact, the state continues to provide a great deal: the corrections service, education and health; even though the private sector tries to get hold of as much as it can (private hospitals, private schools, radiology etc). The community-based, not for profit provider has become the NGO, with tendencies toward expansion into corporate scale, even some multinational sinews forming. Tino rangatiratanga makes it even more complicated and dense. Or could it provide clarity?

So, what are the politicians up to at the moment? Ideologically geriatric, they are probably just trying to strip out the state and the NGO sector is seen as part of the state: downsize the funder, downsize the provider. All these dead beats need to get their shit together and get on like everyone else rather than be a burden on the taxpayer. Or go to jail. And then we might start a factory in the prison – return to the workhouse. And get a brown face to front it.

In terms of opposing this latest piece of demolition which it will cost a lot to fix and meanwhile the most vulnerable suffer, the comparison in cost of ‘fixing’ a child and whanau as opposed to accommodating someone in prison is a key argument.

They remain embarrassed by dead or beaten up children.

ACT and NZ First are ignorant shits and National is gutless.

Watching Ka Whawhai Tonu in Greymouth’s Regent Cinema, with whanau and two other people was a revelation. Finally, NZ filmmaking has reached maturity. The action, beautifully restricted to virtually a single location, the defensive stockade at Ōrakau, has the real time flow of a Greek tragedy.  With the emphasis on the young, the future is being preserved via the inevitably doomed but heroic attempt to hold the defensive line against the colonialists. The two teenage protagonists are beautifully imagined: the reluctant spirit channeller and the half caste, traumatised by his guilty, possessive, militaristic  Pākeha father. The te reo dialogue and subtitles are both vibrant and resonant.

But it is the authenticity and honesty of the cultural portrayal which is, for me, new. These are two warrior cultures  clashing, with all the intricacy of the Māori warrior culture on display – from iwi rivalry to slavery, to ritual sacrifice, to the mana, wisdom and occasional irony of the rangatira.  ‘Learn to lie better’ is surely a classic survival tool of realpolitic. The spiritual confusion of recent conversion to Christianity, the mana and self possession of the women, the cheekiness and charm of the kids, are all on display. In contrast, the colonial soldiers are scared and confused, faced with the life and death of serial slaughter. Finally, the fine portrayal of the boy’s complex father: well on the way to the racist ideology that will come to rule the country, an ideology derived from greed, the need to conquer, confusion and guilt, even a parody of love. There is no romanticism here, no persecutor/victim/rescuer syndrome and that is a great relief.

It is a brave and uncomfortable film, occasionally visceral in its impact, the sabre/taiaha duel a symbolic highlight. Finally, the back story, the skeleton in the boy’s closet, is left to near the end, enabling the concluding image of the boy’s kuia, still living in an autonomous zone in Te Urewera welcoming his return to his turangawaewae.

Politically, this becomes the message, the need for the autonomous zone, whether it be the King Country of Rewi Maniapoto or the seclusion of Te Urewera, or an authentic Aotearoa film culture.  

Congratulations to Mike Jonathan and Tim Worrell, both of whom have earned this moment through decades of cultural and artistic pilgrimage. I salute you.

When I was working on bicultural theatre projects in the early 1980s I would on occasion listen to Karlite Rangihau telling stories of pre Pākeha Tuhoe culture and think, What a wondrous film that story would make. Given that this is Mike Jonathan’s first feature perhaps that is a path he might venture upon.

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.

‘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.

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.