by Ian Harris Otago Daily Times Jan. 13, 2017
I have a problem with new year resolutions. It's easy enough to make them. They're always super well-intentioned. The problem is that by the middle of February I've forgotten what they were. Even jotting them down somewhere doesn't help, because the "somewhere" has a way of quickly losing itself amid a paper miscellany. So what's the point?
This year, however, I am surprised by a resolve to revive the custom. Just one resolution, mind, but growing as it does from a couple of cameos in the news late last year, it seems one worth sharing.
First was a comment on television in October by former trade union leader Helen Kelly, broadcast a fortnight before she died. The interviewer raised the question of leadership and, switching the focus to values, she drew on the Trump phenomenon in the United States election to make her point.
What she hated about Donald Trump, she said, "is that he's so unkind. I want him just to be kind."
It left me wondering what incidents in her life of championing those at the bottom of the pay scales lay behind such a remark. Disputes where safety was the issue? Or exploitation? Or fairness? Or respect? In a healthy workplace those issues place demands both ways, employer to employee and vice versa. They're to do with personal decency, where questions of what is humane, what is responsible, what is just, what is kind are not only relevant but central.
The second cameo comes from the very different circumstances of November's Kaikoura earthquake. Residents were well and truly shaken, visitors stranded, businesses disrupted. How to respond?
Jeff Reardon, who moved to Kaikoura after experiencing the Christchurch earthquakes and had stored crayfish to celebrate his wife’s birthday, thawed them, cooked them, and handed them out to tourists whom the quake had prevented from moving on. Asked why, he said simply: "It's not hard to be kind, eh!" The phrase flashed around the world, and was quickly given pride of place on local T-shirts.
Kindness again. How human relationships thrive on kindness, whether in families, schools, workplaces, wherever! Spreading wider, kindness to pets, bobby calves, hens (free-range, please), porkers does something unique and positive for both the owners and their charges.
Kindness to the environment does likewise – everyone who tends a garden knows that. The natural world has an intrinsic value both in itself and for human sustenance, enjoyment and restful calm.
In her Christmas broadcast, the Queen echoed the theme, highlighting the myriad acts of kindness that are neither dramatic nor showy, but part and parcel of everyday life. She praised the quiet dedication of ordinary people who do extraordinary things, adding: “The cumulative impact of thousands of small acts of goodness can be bigger than we imagine.”
So can neglecting to do them, since that opens the way to unleashing a range of more malignant impulses. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth presents that murky alternative most graphically when she worries that Macbeth is “too full of the milk of human kindness”, lacking the steely resolve to sweep others aside in his desire to be king. And she saw to it that the milk of human kindness curdled in his being.
A pity neither had the chance to ponder the line from Tennyson that “kind hearts are more than coronets”. But they would have ignored it. They were already caught in the quicksands of ambition and the lust for status and power.
Nor would wise words attributed to French-born American Quaker Stephen Grellet early in the 19th century have moved them. He wrote: “I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it; for I shall not pass this way again.”
As with the Macbeths, cynical moderns might sneer at such a sentiment. That would be as damaging as it is sad, because failure to nurture it, or worse, a determination to get ahead by foul means if fair won’t serve, corrodes character and corrupts relationships.
Which brings us back to new year resolutions. Last week, as revellers around the world counted in the new year, many joined in singing Robert Burns’ turn-of-year chorus:
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
Capital! All they need do now is project that intention into the everyday circumstances of the year ahead. It’s not hard to be kind, eh!
Monday, 16 January 2017
The single story is not the whole story
Barbara Chapman Sydney Morning Herald January 11 2017
In 2009, Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk called "The danger of the single story". It has been viewed more than 11 million times. "Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become," Chimamanda said. Irrespective of its accuracy, the single story becomes the definitive account of a person, group, country or continent simply through repetition. Plausible falsehoods become accepted as truth if repeated often enough.
Stories are immensely powerful – look at the longevity and sway of religions founded entirely on narratives. Power itself also determines how a story is told and what the broader agenda is. Truth may have little to do with it. An old African proverb encapsulates this power: "The hunter is glorified because the lion doesn't have a storyteller." Thus the single-story genre will always do great harm to the relatively voiceless while barely touching the powerful.
The single story can also reveal a great deal about the teller(s), often more than it reveals about the intended subject. Consider Faysal Ishak Ahmed, who was detained at Manus Island and died just before Christmas. Faysal was/is routinely described as an asylum seeker, which is now a loaded term. But he was much more than that. He was a son, husband, father and friend. All of those roles defined him and fleshed out his life far more accurately than the term "asylum seeker".
The single story stereotypes and truncates because it artificially narrows the frame of vision. It is particularly dangerous because of its power to over-simplify complex entities, from an individual person to an entire continent. I taught a large migrant English class of some 30 adults, with many strong personalities. The class was about 60 per cent male, mainly well-educated and of widely differing ages, ethnicities and religious backgrounds. The students had to elect a leader to represent them at management forums. The unanimous choice was "Mariam".*
Forthright, sincere, witty, strong, unassuming and intelligent, she represented her classmates with alacrity. Mariam took on a notoriously rude official and resolved the problem painlessly, with no hard feelings. A born leader, her management skills were second to none and would have been an asset to any business. Yet, she had no highfalutin CV. Limiting people like Mariam to the usual single story of young wife and mother, or refugee, shears off a wealth of human capital.
At what point can a person stop being a refugee and become a born leader? The former is temporary circumstance; the latter is innate talent, much needed by the society. My grandmother travelled the world by ocean liner in an era when – we are now told – all married women were shackled to domesticity. "But that's an exception," counters the teller of the single story.
Although individual lives are complex and multifaceted, they are constantly being homogenised into an all-A powerful but erroneous single narrative, depending on the viewpoint of opinion leaders. For women, especially, this leads to exceptional personal ability and achievement being frequently eclipsed. The public domain is peppered with terms such as bleeding heart, disgruntled employee, victimhood, loser and the gamut of political pejoratives. They are vectors of the single story, deeming those people not worth listening to and unworthy of being shown humanity, fairness and respect.
In the aftermath of World War II, Hannah Arendt wrote that moral imagination requires the broadest possible frames for decision-making, including dissenting opinion, to preserve a society's ethical standards and safety. We need to hear the voices that demur and to hear from individuals who are commentated on but never able to directly respond and put their point of view across.
As US writer Andrew Solomon said: "It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." The single story, and the prejudicial impulses it taps, keeps alive forces of dehumanisation that have underwritten extraordinary cruelty throughout history. Yet, it occurs all around us, in the public domain, and social, work and other contexts. To counter such polarisation, we need stories that present the variety, depth and complexity of individual human beings throughout the public domain. This encourages empathy and understanding, even across deep philosophical divides. * Not her real name. [Abbrev.]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-single-story-is-not-the-whole-story-20170110-gtowwj
In 2009, Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk called "The danger of the single story". It has been viewed more than 11 million times. "Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become," Chimamanda said. Irrespective of its accuracy, the single story becomes the definitive account of a person, group, country or continent simply through repetition. Plausible falsehoods become accepted as truth if repeated often enough.
Stories are immensely powerful – look at the longevity and sway of religions founded entirely on narratives. Power itself also determines how a story is told and what the broader agenda is. Truth may have little to do with it. An old African proverb encapsulates this power: "The hunter is glorified because the lion doesn't have a storyteller." Thus the single-story genre will always do great harm to the relatively voiceless while barely touching the powerful.
The single story can also reveal a great deal about the teller(s), often more than it reveals about the intended subject. Consider Faysal Ishak Ahmed, who was detained at Manus Island and died just before Christmas. Faysal was/is routinely described as an asylum seeker, which is now a loaded term. But he was much more than that. He was a son, husband, father and friend. All of those roles defined him and fleshed out his life far more accurately than the term "asylum seeker".
The single story stereotypes and truncates because it artificially narrows the frame of vision. It is particularly dangerous because of its power to over-simplify complex entities, from an individual person to an entire continent. I taught a large migrant English class of some 30 adults, with many strong personalities. The class was about 60 per cent male, mainly well-educated and of widely differing ages, ethnicities and religious backgrounds. The students had to elect a leader to represent them at management forums. The unanimous choice was "Mariam".*
Forthright, sincere, witty, strong, unassuming and intelligent, she represented her classmates with alacrity. Mariam took on a notoriously rude official and resolved the problem painlessly, with no hard feelings. A born leader, her management skills were second to none and would have been an asset to any business. Yet, she had no highfalutin CV. Limiting people like Mariam to the usual single story of young wife and mother, or refugee, shears off a wealth of human capital.
At what point can a person stop being a refugee and become a born leader? The former is temporary circumstance; the latter is innate talent, much needed by the society. My grandmother travelled the world by ocean liner in an era when – we are now told – all married women were shackled to domesticity. "But that's an exception," counters the teller of the single story.
Although individual lives are complex and multifaceted, they are constantly being homogenised into an all-A powerful but erroneous single narrative, depending on the viewpoint of opinion leaders. For women, especially, this leads to exceptional personal ability and achievement being frequently eclipsed. The public domain is peppered with terms such as bleeding heart, disgruntled employee, victimhood, loser and the gamut of political pejoratives. They are vectors of the single story, deeming those people not worth listening to and unworthy of being shown humanity, fairness and respect.
In the aftermath of World War II, Hannah Arendt wrote that moral imagination requires the broadest possible frames for decision-making, including dissenting opinion, to preserve a society's ethical standards and safety. We need to hear the voices that demur and to hear from individuals who are commentated on but never able to directly respond and put their point of view across.
As US writer Andrew Solomon said: "It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know." The single story, and the prejudicial impulses it taps, keeps alive forces of dehumanisation that have underwritten extraordinary cruelty throughout history. Yet, it occurs all around us, in the public domain, and social, work and other contexts. To counter such polarisation, we need stories that present the variety, depth and complexity of individual human beings throughout the public domain. This encourages empathy and understanding, even across deep philosophical divides. * Not her real name. [Abbrev.]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-single-story-is-not-the-whole-story-20170110-gtowwj
Monday, 12 December 2016
Donald Trump
by Ian Harris Otago Daily Times December 9, 2016
Vox populi, vox Dei, the saying goes: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” And then came Donald Trump. Another phrase bubbled up from my dim Latin past: Quem Jupiter vult perdere, prius dementat, loosely “Whom the gods (Jupiter was king of the Roman gods) wish to destroy, they first make mad.”
Have the Americans gone bananas? Vox populi, vox Dei is usually cited to promote the view that ordinary people should have the power, through due process, to govern themselves – in practice, that the will of the majority should prevail – because God works through them. This idea was abroad in northern Europe in the late 700s, so much so that the great English monk and scholar Alcuin advised the Frankish King Charlemagne to resist such a dangerous notion. Don’t listen to those who say the voice of the people is the voice of God, he warned, “since the riotousness of the crowd is very close to madness”.
Kings claiming to rule by divine right did not endear themselves to their subjects either. In 1327 the archbishop of Canterbury denounced the misrule of Edward II in a sermon titled Vox populi, vox Dei. By the people, of course, he meant barons and prelates like himself. But their excesses, too, could sometimes verge on madness. Ironically, the idealists who drew up the United States constitution in 1787 took great care to ensure that the popular will would always be tempered by wise heads like their own: “The separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires,” wrote conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine, back in May.
At the time, Trump was barnstorming through the Republican primaries towards the presidential nomination. Wildfires were taking hold. Barriers to an unbridled popular will were crumbling before his populist – Sullivan calls it protofascist – demagoguery. This, he says, is behaviour typical of a late-stage democracy, as foreseen by Plato 2400 years ago, where everyone is aggressively equal, traditional elites are despised, and anything goes. Then vox populi prevails – but the restraint and responsibility that flow from vox Dei, intrinsic to which is a concept of the common good, are greatly weakened.
“And what mainly fuels this,” says Sullivan, “is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public spiritedness.” Kindling those wildfires in the latest election season was a simmering frustration among many white Americans that the future was slipping beyond their grasp. Neoliberal economics have hugely enriched the top echelon of society, but generated inequality and stagnation for the middle and working classes.
White Christians, currently 43 per cent of the population, are steadily diminishing as a proportion of the whole. “So,” says Sullivan, “our paralysed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.” This helps to explains the part evangelical Christians played in propelling him to power. Indeed, one observer pinpoints religion as the missing piece in understanding Trump’s triumph. Trump presented himself to the Christian right as their last hope in their fight against the evolving culture in general, and abortion and same-sex marriage in particular.
According to exit polls, white evangelicals, who make up 26 per cent of the electorate, voted 81 per cent for Trump, only 16 per cent for Hillary Clinton. White Catholics favoured him by 60 per cent to 37 per cent. Most baffling of all, Trump’s sexual predations, lying, refusal to pay contractors and dodging of his tax obligations did not deter these one-time “values” voters. One evangelical leader explained that grace and forgiveness are at the core of Christianity, and “fussy moral values” were not the issue they used to be.
Another, Dr James Dobson, judged Trump “tender to things of the Spirit”, and “God’s man to lead our nation”. That’s weird. Last time I looked, the fruit of the Spirit in the New Testament were the virtues of love (not the Trump variety), peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, humility and self-control.
Not all evangelicals are so infatuated or pliable. Women’s ministry leader and broadcaster Jen Hatmaker condemned the way Trump consistently normalised violence, sexual deviance, bigotry and hate speech. She branded him “a national disgrace”. But the voters have spoken. Mrs Clinton won 2.5 million more votes than Trump – isn’t that vox populi? – but Jupiter gave Trump the White House. Vox Dei, which calls for dignity, respect, compassion, justice and the sharing of burdens, is shaping as a sad casualty of this bruising electoral circus.
Kings claiming to rule by divine right did not endear themselves to their subjects either. In 1327 the archbishop of Canterbury denounced the misrule of Edward II in a sermon titled Vox populi, vox Dei. By the people, of course, he meant barons and prelates like himself. But their excesses, too, could sometimes verge on madness. Ironically, the idealists who drew up the United States constitution in 1787 took great care to ensure that the popular will would always be tempered by wise heads like their own: “The separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires,” wrote conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine, back in May.
At the time, Trump was barnstorming through the Republican primaries towards the presidential nomination. Wildfires were taking hold. Barriers to an unbridled popular will were crumbling before his populist – Sullivan calls it protofascist – demagoguery. This, he says, is behaviour typical of a late-stage democracy, as foreseen by Plato 2400 years ago, where everyone is aggressively equal, traditional elites are despised, and anything goes. Then vox populi prevails – but the restraint and responsibility that flow from vox Dei, intrinsic to which is a concept of the common good, are greatly weakened.
“And what mainly fuels this,” says Sullivan, “is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public spiritedness.” Kindling those wildfires in the latest election season was a simmering frustration among many white Americans that the future was slipping beyond their grasp. Neoliberal economics have hugely enriched the top echelon of society, but generated inequality and stagnation for the middle and working classes.
White Christians, currently 43 per cent of the population, are steadily diminishing as a proportion of the whole. “So,” says Sullivan, “our paralysed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.” This helps to explains the part evangelical Christians played in propelling him to power. Indeed, one observer pinpoints religion as the missing piece in understanding Trump’s triumph. Trump presented himself to the Christian right as their last hope in their fight against the evolving culture in general, and abortion and same-sex marriage in particular.
According to exit polls, white evangelicals, who make up 26 per cent of the electorate, voted 81 per cent for Trump, only 16 per cent for Hillary Clinton. White Catholics favoured him by 60 per cent to 37 per cent. Most baffling of all, Trump’s sexual predations, lying, refusal to pay contractors and dodging of his tax obligations did not deter these one-time “values” voters. One evangelical leader explained that grace and forgiveness are at the core of Christianity, and “fussy moral values” were not the issue they used to be.
Another, Dr James Dobson, judged Trump “tender to things of the Spirit”, and “God’s man to lead our nation”. That’s weird. Last time I looked, the fruit of the Spirit in the New Testament were the virtues of love (not the Trump variety), peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, humility and self-control.
Not all evangelicals are so infatuated or pliable. Women’s ministry leader and broadcaster Jen Hatmaker condemned the way Trump consistently normalised violence, sexual deviance, bigotry and hate speech. She branded him “a national disgrace”. But the voters have spoken. Mrs Clinton won 2.5 million more votes than Trump – isn’t that vox populi? – but Jupiter gave Trump the White House. Vox Dei, which calls for dignity, respect, compassion, justice and the sharing of burdens, is shaping as a sad casualty of this bruising electoral circus.
Put Away the Flags
Howard Zinn July 1, 2007 The Progressive
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves. Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.” When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war. We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture. Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies. How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling “A People’s History of the United States” (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project.
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves. Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.” When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war. We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture. Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies. How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling “A People’s History of the United States” (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project.
Some Thoughts on Flags
by Arthur Palmer
Yes, flags. My first encounter was when, as a six-year-old, I began school at Naumai in Northland New Zealand. This was at the beginning of 1925, only six years-and-a bit since the Great War, as it was called then, had ended. I had to learn that the impressive flagpole which stood fifty yards from the school entrance door was more than simply the main mast of a vessel wrecked in the Kaipara harbour. Certainly it was that, and it must have been the envy of other schools. But it was also the centrepiece of a ceremony which occurred from time to time, when the British Union Jack was hoisted and saluted by the entire school of about 45 students.
We were roughly half-and-half Maori and white pakeha, but there was no acknowledgement that we differed in any way from a traditional English school in Britain. Our Principal was a very British woman who appeared to my young eyes quite elderly. She kept order without any corporal punishment or regime of fear. The only penalty that I can recall seeing was a pupil’s mouth being ceremoniously washed out in the corridor for swearing. It was patiently endured and the swearing continued unabated.
And so did the flag ceremony, supported by songs of Empire glory. The chorus of the only one that I can still remember included these lines:
Hearts of oak are our ships. Jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready. Steady boys, steady.
We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.
And in the playground I often heard a very un-British song which puzzled me:
Take me over the sea, Where the Allyman can’t get at me.
Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home.
Yes, flags. My first encounter was when, as a six-year-old, I began school at Naumai in Northland New Zealand. This was at the beginning of 1925, only six years-and-a bit since the Great War, as it was called then, had ended. I had to learn that the impressive flagpole which stood fifty yards from the school entrance door was more than simply the main mast of a vessel wrecked in the Kaipara harbour. Certainly it was that, and it must have been the envy of other schools. But it was also the centrepiece of a ceremony which occurred from time to time, when the British Union Jack was hoisted and saluted by the entire school of about 45 students.
We were roughly half-and-half Maori and white pakeha, but there was no acknowledgement that we differed in any way from a traditional English school in Britain. Our Principal was a very British woman who appeared to my young eyes quite elderly. She kept order without any corporal punishment or regime of fear. The only penalty that I can recall seeing was a pupil’s mouth being ceremoniously washed out in the corridor for swearing. It was patiently endured and the swearing continued unabated.
And so did the flag ceremony, supported by songs of Empire glory. The chorus of the only one that I can still remember included these lines:
Hearts of oak are our ships. Jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready. Steady boys, steady.
We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.
And in the playground I often heard a very un-British song which puzzled me:
Take me over the sea, Where the Allyman can’t get at me.
Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home.
It was clear that the singers of that plaintive ditty felt themselves to be victims. Victims of what was not clear to me for some time. And flags were in the background of that one too.
Now here I am, many decades later, staying with my daughter Ruth in the home that she has just bought. And only ten feet from the window where I eat my breakfast there stands a stainless steel flagpole with all the necessary cords to hoist an emblem of loyalty to some important concept, of nationhood perhaps. Fixed on top is a small globe about four inches in diameter to deter any birds from alighting and polluting this semi-sacred erection which is there to declare the owner’s loyalty to the flag displayed. The pole is likely to stay unadorned while Ruth is living here.
We need to listen to the voice of Howard Zinn on this. He is speaking to his fellow-Americans, but we in New Zealand seem to regard the American military umbrella as our best guarantee of security, even as we pay our dues by supporting US action in Iraq and Afghanistan. So Zinn’s warning is there for us too.
“Put Away the Flags” was written almost a decade ago. In that time US arms have been continuously in use to destroy the infrastructure and many of the people who live and die in this difficult area. This is not the road to a better world of peaceful cooperation. Nor to security. Yet in the near future with a Trump as US President we are likely to see more, rather than less, of confrontational politics, nation against nation, class against class. As Zinn tells us: “We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.”
Idealistic and fanciful nonsense? Yes, I can hear the dismissing comments. But I do believe that there is a growing anger and disillusionment with the assumption that we must concentrate on maintaining our dominant position, with the help of powerful friends and the most advanced weapons. The unexpected support for Bernie Sanders in the US Presidential election was a positive message, disregarded but still there. Trump is almost sure to serve no more than one term as President.
But what are your thoughts on all this? I welcome your comments. Meanwhile let’s listen to Howard Zinn.
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