Roger Douglas is ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’; painting by Francisco Goya; (Remix: Lyndon Hood).

Late last month, Sir Roger Douglas’ bill to scrap the mandatory payment of the minimum wage to young workers was chosen from the private member’s ballot, and thus became part of Parliament’s agenda. The avowed purpose of his Minimum Wage (Mitigation Of Youth Unemployment) Amendment Bill is to end the current legal entitlement of young workers to equal access to the minimum wage. The draft legislation states:

The purpose of this Act is to end minimum wage parity between youth (15–17 years old) and all other workers by enabling the Governor-General by Order in Council to set minimum wage rates defined by reference to the age of workers.

Douglas’s rationale for re-introducing this form of workplace discrimination is that, in his view, the removal of minimum wage youth rates is responsible for the high unemployment rates evident among the young. The facts, as he sees them, are these:

Since the 1st quarter of 2008 until the last quarter of 2009, youth unemployment amongst Maori has increased by 4,000 (over 50 percent). The unemployment rate now sits at 38.7 percent for Maori youth – almost 2 out of 5 are out of a job.

The figures for all youth are also horrific. Almost 20,000 more young people are out of a job compared to the 1st quarter of 2008, and overall the unemployment rate sits at 26.5 percent.

A simple model of the relationship between youth unemployment and overall unemployment created by the economist Eric Crampton shows that there was a sudden increase – far beyond previous differences between the model and actual unemployment – from the 1st quarter of 2008 – the time at which youth rates were abolished.

The existence of minimum wage rates – and the requirement to pay them to young workers – have long been an ideological flashpoint, both here and overseas. Last December for instance, the 2025 Task Force headed by former National party leader Don Brash called for a cut in the minimum wage, which is currently $12.75 an hour, and the re-introduction of a separate youth wage pitched even further below the reduced level. Whether such plans become reality will depend on the stance taken by the National caucus. At time of writing, National’s likely voting position on the Douglas Bill was still unclear. Opposition MP Darien Fenton has claimed to have received a written response from Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson, to the effect that National do not support the re-introduction of a youth rate minimum for young workers. However, much water is still to run under the bridge on this one.

Given that the minimum wage/youth rates issue is such an ideological battleground, the claims made by Douglas bear scrutiny. For convenience, I’ve grouped the issues under a range of headings.

1. The Causal Fallacy aka It’s the Recession, Stupid. Douglas argues that unemployment has risen sharply among young people during the period since minimum wage youth rates were abolished – first quarter 2008 until last quarter 2009. He implies a causal link.

In fact, the period Douglas has chosen perfectly co-incides with the recession that hit the New Zealand economy, and every other economy in the world in 2008-2009. (Presumably, Douglas is not arguing that the removal of youth rates here caused the global recession.) On the principle of ‘last hired, first fired’ one would normally expect young workers – especially unskilled ones – to be disproportionately affected by an economic contraction.

Demographically, they also comprise the bulk of new entrants and thus when job opportunities contract they (again) tend to be affected in large numbers. The findings of the Crampton model referred to in the Douglas quote above – that the recent co-relation between youth unemployment and overall unemployment is stronger than previously recorded – is again exactly what you would expect, given the worst recession since the 1930s.

2. The Local Fallacy. Douglas sees a local problem – high unemployment among the young – identifies a local culprit ( the abolition of youth rates! ) and leaps to legislate. Yet obviously, high youth unemployment is a global problem and not a locally caused one. That doesn’t mean that one should not seek local solutions, but Douglas is implying causal connections, and pinning the essential problem of youth unemployment onto the lack of youth rates, for supposedly pricing young people out of jobs.

Yet to date, Douglas has simply asserted this, without offering any supportive evidence. He (and the National party caucus if it chooses to support him) have an onus of proof – because young workers will be asking for evidence to justify turning back the clock and re-introducing a form of discrimination against them in the workplace. So will their parents. On the evidence, they will achieve little or no measurable gain in employment, for losing their right to equal wage treatment in the workplace.

Since the recession began, the ratio of youth to adults among the ranks of our unemployed has risen substantially – but is this because (as Douglas would argue) the actions of the previous government has priced young people out of jobs ? Or is it because a global recession was always going to hit the young the hardest, and the current government‘s stimulus package comprehensively failed to recognize that fact – as reflected in our stimulus package being smaller than the OECD average, and lacking an adequate range of targeted measures (eg for skills training, enhanced apprenticeships, job creation and employer subsidies) that have been common to the response in so many other developed countries ?

What we do know is that an increase in youth unemployment and social marginalization is occurring simultaneously in other countries, which means that the prime driver cannot be a local cause. In the US for instance only 46% of people aged 16-24 had jobs in September last year, the lowest since the government began counting in 1948.

In Sweden – due to an emphatic workplace policy of ‘last hired, first fired’ during recessions and an alleged mismatch between educational skills and labour market needs – youth unemployment has been over four times the adult rate. On the same graphs (pages 8-9, figures 2-3) in this major OECD report. New Zealand’s performance has been interesting. While our actual rates of unemployment and youth unemployment remain below the OECD averages, the rate of deterioration in the youth vs adult ratio within the unemployment stats has been higher than the OECD average –partly because we started from such a low base of unemployment when the previous government left office. Single issue campaigners like Douglas would attribute the subsequent decay to the abolition of youth rates – but others, to repeat, would sheet it home to the significant contraction of our economy thanks to the recession and the inadequacy of the stimulus package.

Some countries have taken up the Douglas Remedy – but it remains a minority practice. Among 21 OECD countries that have a minimum wage, slightly less than half (nine) also have in place a sub-minimum wage for young people.

3. The Plan Nine* Fallacy The connection between scrapping youth rates and rising youth unemployment that Douglas is making will always attract more support in a recession. When bad things happen (especially to our sons and daughters) something tangible has to be held responsible – and for those already ideologically opposed to the minimum wage, the culprit seems obvious.

In reality, minimum wage rises and a lack of youth rates are of limited relevance, come rain or shine. That fact is blindingly obvious when normal economic conditions apply – because if minimum wage/youth rate impacts were as decisive as claimed, you’d think that raising them significantly would serve to stifle economic activity. Yet as Unite union organizer Matt McCarten recently pointed out in the NZ Herald (January 31, 2010):

Under the [previous]government the minimum wage almost doubled from $6.12 to $12 an hour. Yet unemployment dropped from 11 per cent to 4 per cent during the same period. In 2003, 16 -17 year-old kids got a 41 per cent increase in their minimum rate and that age group’s employment actually rose 15 per cent.

When I negotiated union employment agreements some years ago with fast food chains, they insisted that if we abolished youth rates and increased their workers’ hourly rates by $3 we’d put them out of business. In fact, the opposite happened. Every restaurant chain expanded its number of employees and opened more stores. My experience is that if all employers in an industry get paid a higher wage it makes no real difference to any of them.

All well and good, some would grudgingly say, when times are good. Douglas and the hardliners in Treasury would still insist that the negligible employment effects of raising the minimum wage and/or scrapping youth rates during good times, will intensify during a recession. To which the obvious retort is : if the response is relevant only in exceptional times of recession, why should a law be passed to make it a permanent feature of our working landscape?

In essence, how can Douglas be proposing to apply a sub-minimum youth rate for the periods of average to positive economic activity – which is surely the norm – when on the evidence, the only bearing it has on hiring decisions occurs during a recession. The timing of this proposal therefore, is all wrong – given that the economy is now supposedly re-emerging from the recession. By the time the Douglas’ Bill gets passed, its alleged benefits would no longer be necessary – and young workers will have been left permanently worse off in relative terms, for no good cause.

Clearly, the ball is firmly in Douglas’ court. Since the co-relation is negligible to non-existent during normal economic times – obviously, the scrapping of youth rates did not hinder youth employment during the 2000s – he has to prove that it could still play a decisive role when times are bad, even though that is when ( almost by definition) there will be far more powerful forces buffeting the economy. In sum, Douglas’ remedy is mere fiddling during the times when his alleged co-relation is strongest, and is virtually irrelevant during times of normal economic activity.

*The script for the film Plan Nine from Outer Space contains a perfect example of something true by definition : “It was murder – and someone was responsible ! “

4. The Every Expert Thinks Like Me Fallacy. One of Douglas’ undoubted public relations strengths in the 1980s was his ability to portray extremism – in his case, a particularly brutal form of Thatcherism – as if it was ordinary, mainstream economic thinking. In similar vein, Douglas has offered this gem within his “Open Letter” on youth wage rates:

A leading textbook in economics (Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Micro-Economics) presents survey data that shows that 79 percent of all economists agree with the statement: “A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers.”

While there are occasional studies that challenge the mainstream view (such as that undertaken by Card and Krueger), they are typically subject to ongoing criticism for their method. They have also clearly failed to convince a majority of economists – those who are experts at analysing such studies.

This is a Topsy Turvy version of history. The reality is almost exactly the opposite : (a) the historical trend among economists has been away from the belief in the co-relation that Douglas is espousing; (b) a central reason for this change has been the validity now ascribed to David Card (pictured left) and Alan Krueger’s work which rather than being an occasional study, has revolutionized the field; and (c) among labour economists, the recognised experts at analyzing such studies, the support for the social and economic benefits of retaining and raising the minimum wage is stronger, not weaker, than among other economists.

Douglas’ choice of expert support for his views is particularly unfortunate. Greg Mankiw is an increasingly isolated and somewhat crackpot figure, even among right wing economists. During the first term of the George W. Bush presidency, Mankiw was chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and – in a memorable duel last year with US economist Brad DeLong – the latter produced fairly convincing evidence that in 2004 the CEA might have cooked the labour productivity growth/employment figures and thereby given a helping hand to the Bush administration, going into the 2004 election. DeLong’s evidence is here.

Even on right wing blogs, Mankiw has also been decried for his specious attack on the spending/saving habits of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sontomayor. If Mankiw is the sort of authority that Douglas intends to offer to advance his cause, he will really need to do better.

That aside, it would be folly to pretend to offer here a complete and comprehensive survey of the bloody battles that have raged for the past 16 years in academia over minimum wage research. The fighting has been about whether raising the minimum wage/scrapping youth rates has negative, negligible, or positive effects on youth employment and unemployment rates.

The work of the Princeton University economists Card and Krueger does pose a major stumbling block for Douglas’ argument. Fast food outlets are a good testing ground, since they employ a lot of teenage workers paid at or around the minimum wage. Briefly, Card and Krueger found that raising the minimum wage – in some cases by up to 10 % – in fast food outlets in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had negligible negative effects and even had positive effects upon youth employment – others subsequently have explained this result by pointing to the contribution of minimum wage hikes to job retention and the attraction of more skilled teen workers into the jobs. The criticism of their method that Douglas refers to has been largely a boomerang. Card and Krueger have showed that the methodological flaws were actually rife among their critics – such as Neumark and Wascher – whose work had formerly supported the textbook approach.

The result has been a trend among mainstream US economists on this issue that is almost exactly the opposite of the one claimed by Douglas. Yes, an old 1978 American Economic Review study had revealed that nine out of ten economists accepted a causal link existed between minimum wage hikes and unemployment among low-skilled workers. Yet, by 2000 a sample of 308 American Economic Association economists found that only 45% agreed, 27.9% agreed only with certain added conditions, and 26. 5% disagreed. The authors concluded that the reduction on consensus on this question was “likely” due to the Card and Krueger research and to the debate it had engendered.

By 2006, another survey of the American Economic Association by Robert Whaples found that over half of respondents supported an increase in the minimum wage or wanted it kept at current levels, thereby outnumbering those who wanted to see it eliminated. These figures are much more balanced than Douglas’ claims about current opinion – let alone about the trend of opinion on this issue among economists.

The research battle is still being fought, but Card and Krueger seem to be coming out on the winning side. Late last year, they published their latest salvo – a 432 book called Myth and Measurement : the New Economics of the Minimum Wage. A range of glowing reviews are excerpted here and the gist of them is that minimum wage increases at the levels found in the United States have had little or no effect on employment. True, there may be different effects in countries where minimum wage rates are pitched at a higher level relative to the median wage – which is certainly the case here – but this does not shift the onus of proof now resting on the Douglas camp to make their case. The standard economic textbook view on the negative employment impacts has been upended by Card and Krueger, and their work is not an isolated exception, as Douglas patronisingly implies.

Their findings were confirmed in the UK by the Dickens et al research, by the Machin and Manning study, by Wellington, and by the Turner and Demiralp study – adding up to a body of work far more substantial than the “occasional.” To be fair, this argument is not settled. I think there are also contrary signs in the Pereira 2003 study from Portugal for example, which showed negative effects on the employment of young workers after the scrapping of youth rates.

Yet precisely because it looks like there is a hung jury on the international evidence – as to whether minimum wage rates serve to price kids out of jobs – what does the New Zealand research say ? Well, there is local research evidence that also tends to refute the dire consequences on youth unemployment of minimum wage hikes that Douglas is claiming. In a 2007 paper published in the prestigious Labour Economics journal entitled “Youth Minimum Wage Reform and the Labour Market“, authors Dean Hyslop and Stephen Stillman studied the impact of a 2001 reform by the Clark government that is still clearly relevant to the current debate. In effect, the reforms of 2001-2002 lowered the eligible age for the adult minimum wage from 20 to 18 years, thus creating a 69 percent increase in the minimum wage for 18 and 19 year- olds. Secondly, the reform raised the youth minimum wage in two annual steps from 60% to 80% of the adult minimum, thus creating a 41 percent increase in the minimum wage for 16 and 17 year-olds over a two-year period.

Now, if Douglas is right, all hell should have resulted for young job seekers. What Hyslop and Stillman found instead was :

We find no robust evidence of adverse effects on youth employment or hours worked. In fact, we find stronger evidence of positive employment responses to the changes for both groups of teenagers, and that 16-17 year-olds increased their hours worked by 10-15 percent following the minimum wage changes. Given the absence of any adverse employment effects, we find significant increases in labour earnings and total income of teenagers relative to young adults. However, we do find some evidence of a decline in educational enrolment, and an increase in unemployment and inactivity, although these results depend on the specification adopted.

Similar conclusions were reached from a comprehensive review of the international literature (on the employment impact of minimum wage increases and the scrapping of youth rates) carried out in 2006 by John Stevenson of Otago University, and published in the Otago Management Graduate Review, Vol 4, 2006. “It was decided that upon analysis of the literature that evidence points towards there being either a small positive or negative effect on youth employment from minimum wage changes, and that this could be expected to be the case in New Zealand.” In sum, this is hardly a ringing mandate for Douglas to try and re-introduce wage discrimination against the young into the New Zealand workplace.

5. The Surrogate Dad Fallacy. On a planet in a galaxy far far away a race of benign employers would dearly love to hire 15-17 year olds and instill in them a vigorous work ethic – were it not for the fact that they must needs endure the tyranny of having to pay them the full adult minimum wage. Many an employer has tearfully turned away an earnest young job seeker – ‘just give me a chance guv. for the love of Gawd that’s all I ask’ – for this very reason.

Back on Planet Earth however, people behave somewhat differently. Real young people tend to find it extremely difficult to negotiate a wage that is commensurate with the worth of their labour and with what they produce. That’s partly because most employers do not behave like surrogate fathers – and they do not tend to pay the highest possible wage that the firm can afford, but the lowest possible wage that the worker can be induced to accept. Without a decent, legislated level of wages – and in some industries and workplaces the minimum wage functions as a ceiling, not a floor – young workers forced to work at a sub-minimum rate would be left entirely at the mercy of their employer. Is that what most parents would want ?

6. The It Ain’t Broke, But Lets Fix It Anyway Fallacy. Supposedly, paying 15-17 year olds the minimum wage is pricing them out of the job market – and stopping employers from taking on young people at an affordable cost, trying them out and training them up. Well, newsflash – all that is entirely possible under the existing law. When Parliament scrapped youth rates, they actually retained them for the first 200 hours on the job – so effectively, employers can pay young workers a sub-minimum for the first three months on the job. On April 1st this year, that ‘new entrant’s minimum wage’ is increasing from $10.00 per hour to $10.20 an hour.

A reasonable balance, many would say. Let the kid show what they’re made of at a lower rate of pay. Yet then, if they’re worth keeping, recognise that fact and pay him or her accordingly– thus giving the kid some reason to believe that effort will be rewarded. Instead, what the Douglas Bill promises is a free ride for employers to pay young workers sub-minimum rates in perpetuity. It claims to instill a work ethic – but the ‘ethic’ being promoted allows for no motivation-enhancing reward in wages for hard work and productivity increases shown on the job. Instead, it would create a charter for exploitation. Again, the National Party caucus should be thinking through the political impact of being held co-responsible for what is so clearly an exploitative piece of workplace engineering.

7. The It Would Only Affect 15-17 Year olds And They Don’t Vote Fallacy. In fact, the re-creation of a sub-minimum wage for 15-17 year olds opens the door to a possible displacement effect for those aged 18-24. Cheaper young people are likely to replace slightly older and more expensive workers, especially in relatively unskilled workplaces. Already, the minimum wage provides a low level of remuneration.. This year, even the Ministry of Labour recommended raising the minimum wage to $13,10, and not the $12.75 chosen by the government.

Logically, opening up a layer of sub-minimum wage workers below that again, can only help to displace voters slightly further up the earnings ladder – that is if, for arguments’ sake, we accept for a moment Douglas’ premise that labour pricing in the minimum wage zone does have a measurable negative impact on the job market. Meaning : if the Douglas Bill became law any social gains could well be cancelled out by the negative ripple effect it is likely to create slightly further up the age and income chain, with further inevitable costs in unemployment benefits. True, many 18-24 years olds don’t vote either- but the passage of this Bill would create an incentive for them to vote in future against its perpetrators.

8. The ‘This Won’t Hurt A Bit’ Fallacy . The guiding rationale for the Douglas Bill is that if you cut the wages of young people, the price of labor falls so employers will hire more workers. Unfortunately, the reality is that firms only hire the workers they need – largely irrespective of small changes in wage costs, and especially so among the workforce employed at or near the minimum wage.

Even so, as their wages were forced down to sub-minimum rates, the young workers involved would have less to spend (since these days, loss of wages tends to have a greater and faster impact than any subsequent decline in prices) thus driving down demand, and – potentially – helping to create a climate in which more layoffs will occur, thus creating more demand for welfare benefits. And this would be good for the economy – how ? The last thing this economy needs right now is an impetus to contraction.

Since Douglas seems willing to invoke Economics 101 to support his Bill, his critics can certainly do the same, and point to the contractionary impact of cutting youth wages in the manner intended, an especially stupid trend to foster during recessionary times. The more churlish of his critics could also point out that, given his track record, Douglas is the last person to whom the nation should be turning for a remedy for youth unemployment. Because the last time youth unemployment was at its current levels was back in 1993, when the economic policies of Douglas and his acolyte Ruth Richardson were at their zenith. Unemployment among 15-19 year olds peaked at 24.5 per cent in 1993, and stayed resolutely high for the following five years. Historically, Douglas has been more part of the problem of high youth unemployment, and not part of the solution.

9. The Race Card Fallacy. In his press release Douglas cited high youth unemployment rates among Maori as a rationale for passing his Bill. It will be interesting to see Hone Harawira’s response to the suggestion that cutting the wages for young Maori and Pacific Islanders should be treated as a pressing priority as we start coming out of this recession. Harawira would seem more likely to believe that other economic factors – and social and racial attitudes – were to blame for those high rates, and that Douglas should not be putting the onus on Maori youth to accept less for the work they do, in order to earn a seat at the table.

What this exercise usefully does do though, is identify whose kids we are talking about. Keep in mind that not every industry that could pay the minimum wage resorts to it – some fast food outlets for instance, now pay even their youth workers above it, presumably in order to attract and retain good workers. Last year in the House, Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson indicated that between 94,000 and 123,000 New Zealand workers would be affected by the changes to the minimum wage.

Who are these people ? In 2006, the Cabinet papers for the Minimum Wage Review usefully noted that the benefits of minimum wage increases are most likely to be felt among women, younger workers, Maori, Pacific peoples, other non-European/Pakeha groups without post-school qualifications, part-time workers, people with disabilities, recent migrants, the low skilled and people with non–English speaking backgrounds.

And the places where such people work ? The Cabinet paper had that sorted out as well – “Employees in the retail, hospitality, health community, agriculture/forestry/fishing/mining, manufacturing and property sectors, and in small and medium enterprises which have a higher proportion of low wage employment.” Plainly, there is a balance to be struck between the affordable value of employees in those sectors, and a fair wage – especially since after three months on the new entrant wage, many of these jobs are unskilled enough that a young worker would be just as productive as an older one, in very short time. The Key government talks up the need for balance when it comes to tax cuts and GST rises. It can hardly expect the Maori Party to support a measure that would deliver a wage cut for young Maori workers, in return for the kind of nebulous benefits that Douglas is peddling.

For that reason, the government would need to raise the adult minimum wage substantially if it decided to support the Douglas Bill – because that would be the only way it could re-introduce youth rates at a percentage rate below the adult minimum wage without delivering in real terms, a substantial wage cut to young workers. There would also need to be explicit grandfathering provisions to ensure that no young people currently employed had their wages slashed. To achieve this, the government might well need to be offering the Maori Party a $15 an hour minimum wage as an incentive, so that Mrs Turia and Dr Sharples could be re-assured that Maori youth, women and other vulnerable work groups – such as young people with disabilities – would not be left to bear the cost of the Douglas Remedy, for little or no employment gain.

At the end of the day, the Key government may simply decide that the Douglas Bill is just an empty gust of ideological rhetoric, and more political trouble than it is worth. Out in the real world, there are far more useful things to be done within the school to work transition than this.

ENDS

by Neil Adcock

“The Herald today undertakes a task more important perhaps than any we have done. It is an attempt to move the public discussion of Maori privileges beyond the palpable Pakeha resentment…and to begin to distil fact from fiction, experience from impressions, and find the substance of the discontent”

(Editorial, ‘What’s Bugging non-Maori people’ The New Zealand Herald, 23 February 2004)

If the most popular forms of public commentary were anything to go by – Internet comments on mainstream media sites and talkback radio – you would think that New Zealand stands at risk of being bankrupted (or worse !) by the so-called Treaty gravy-train, and by never-ending claims of historical injustices. Of course, some may disregard some of the ‘extreme’ opinions in these forums due to the anonymity that drives much of our entire public debate of national issues. However, it should make us question how people gather their information about New Zealand’s history.

Most people don’t have to deal with the Treaty of Waitangi or “Māori issues” (pardon the gross simplification – though this gross simplification is part of the problem) on a day-to-day basis, and the history books and university courses about Kiwi history aren’t necessarily blockbuster successes. As a result, much of the information about Treaty settlements or about Waitangi Day commemorations ( for example) are mediated through the mainstream media. Given the current government’s push on Treaty settlements, the role of the Māori Party in the Government, the current foreshore and seabed review, and the continued debate on republicanism, Waitangi Day, and multiculturalism, it should be crucial to have the general public engaged on the issues, or debating the historical background. Yet despite the gravitas with which the New Zealand Herald described its role in the opening quote of this article, it may well be the media’s own institutional practices that are preventing such an investigation from actually taking place.

It would be near impossible to objectively deny the impact and legacy of colonisation on Māori populations in New Zealand’s history. Whether that be in the wider context – such as over three million acres of Māori land being confiscated following the Land Wars in the 1860s, the role of the Māori Land Court in facilitating fraudulent land purchases, or governmental policies which actively discriminated against Māori, te reo Māori and particular cultural practices – or within localised contexts.

Even in relatively recent times, one can cite the misused Public Works Act process which led to Ngati Turangitukua having land taken by the Crown in the 1960s to set up the town of Turangi (despite there being free Crown land a few kilometres down the road, and despite the land taken being particularly significant) or the confiscation of over a million acres of Tainui land and its resulting economic dislocation, which was finally redressed with a $170 million settlement in 1995 (a fraction of what was lost). The Waitangi Tribunal for example, releases publicly available reports on particular claims, many of which run to hundreds and hundreds of pages of careful historical research, and outlines the considerable injustices that have affected specific iwi.

The current National-led Government appears to be taking the Treaty process seriously, and negotiations are occurring at a rate rarely seen in New Zealand politics before. For this article, Treaty Minister Chris Finlayson explains that he sees government acknowledgement and redress as being very important. “Acknowledgement of grievances is almost by definition the first step towards addressing them. This is not a process about apportioning guilt – many of the most ingrained grievances occurred before anyone alive today was born – but it is about putting right to some extent, the wrongs of the Crown in the past. As the representatives of the Crown in the present day, we have that responsibility.”

Finlayson suggests that the purpose of redress isn’t necessarily driven by monetary imperatives. Official recognition of the connection and relationship of a group of people to a particular land can be just as important as the ability to develop economic possibilities.

Part of the interesting dynamic involved is that such a policy doesn’t necessarily accord with previous National governments’ views on race relations (with the exception of Doug Graham’s Treaty push in the 1990s), or perhaps even with the views of many of National’s core supporters. However, it can be argued that some of the most revolutionary changes in New Zealand politics have come from parties acting contrary to stereotypical ideological positions e.g. Rogernomics in the 1980s by Labour, the settlement processes in the 1990s by National – mainly because it’s an ‘easier’ sell.

Finlayson cites what he sees as the previous government’s relative inaction. “One challenge we have is that before 2007, when Michael Cullen applied himself energetically to the Treaty role, Labour’s time in government was a very slow one in terms of settlements being concluded. That government concluded an average of 1.6 settlements per year over almost a decade.”

None of this constitutes an easy sell for a government to the public – particularly when the negotiations require years of dialogue and considerable historical research, and particularly when the public aren’t necessarily engaged with the issues relating to a specific claim. Labour’s panic over the Foreshore and Seabed issue in 2004 stemmed from the fact that it had already faced considerable criticism for being a centre-left party pandering to minorities, and from the fact that the Court of Appeal’s decision in Ngati Apa was widely misreported as affecting ‘New Zealanders’ access to beaches’ – when instead it acknowledged the rights of individual claimants to attempt to seek a ruling that a particular foreshore and seabed was customary land.

Finlayson suggests that while the specifics are difficult to compress “the more general narrative as to why we seek to settle historical grievances can be put concisely: the Crown signed a Treaty undertaking to treat Maori in good faith, and it often failed to do so.”

Yet despite the grand narrative appearing so simple, the little narratives get lost in the process being publicised. Part of the issue is that the mainstream media – relied on, as mentioned, by so many rely for their understanding of political issues – face particular institutional pressures which can affect the way the Treaty, or other issues such as the foreshore and seabed or Waitangi Day, are reported.

Dr. Sue Abel, senior lecturer at Auckland University, suggests specific factors have a big impact in the way a news story is constructed. Firstly, she suggests that the media often make the assumption that the audience is non-Māori. Given the commercial imperatives of mainstream media, it is obvious that ‘majority’ considerations will largely drive content.

Secondly, the media does not have the time and space to fully explore historical issues in any given story. Of course, this limitation is applicable to any news story, but this is particularly fatal when detailed historical research and context is the story itself, as it is in settlements. The government settlements are a result from this individual research, yet by paying little attention to the research, the redress becomes de-contextualised.

Also, history is hardly the commercial goldmine for the media when compared to a news headline such as “Maori claim airspace above Rotorua marae” (Dominion Post, 24 June 2008), or ‘Give Us $10m or we occupy – hapu” (Dominion Post, 3 March 2009).

Finlayson suggests the media are interested in particular public hooks – if popular public buildings or landmarks such as Auckland’s One Tree Hill or Wellington’s Railway Station are involved, that will result in more media attention than a wahi tapu site in unused rural Crown land. Finlayson uses the example of the “Te Tau Ihu agreements in principle [which] I signed last year got a lot of media attention because they included an undertaking to investigate ways of recognising Ngati Toa’s intellectual property in the ka mate haka – but the dollar amount of a few hundred million was deemed singularly uninteresting.”

Further everyday pressures affect the construction of news stories. Most journalists would not have the time to read a full three hundred page report on particular historical injustices and discuss the importance of the settlement with all interested parties – especially when all a journalist has is two minutes on the news, or a few hundred words in a newspaper. As always, the media also favours conflict over stasis.

Abel says : “I spoke to several reporters this year who said ‘nothing happened on Waitangi Day this year’”. When it comes to Waitangi Day, even a lack of conflict becomes a narrative when discussing Waitangi Day – which gives the impression that conflict and Waitangi Day are inextricably linked. Abel says “[British cultural theorist] Stuart Hall said many years ago that violence, especially anti-establishment ‘violence’, is such a strong news value that if there is none, that itself becomes the story.”

The fact that Waitangi Day is covered by political reporters, as opposed to other kinds of reporters (e.g. arts reporters etc.) suggests a particular impression is being created of the day. When it comes to specific movements, the use of particular words equate controversial ideas with Māori. The Kupu Taea report, which analyses reporting of Māori issues in the mainstream media, highlights the use of particular loaded words in Māori-specific contexts – words such as “activists” or “radicals”, which can frame the debate. The “terror raids” of 2007 were tied in with Māori activism and Tuhoe, despite the majority of those arrested not being Māori.

Finlayson suggests that all this could present problems, politically. He says Labour’s slow pace before 2007 “meant that Treaty settlements often flew under the radar, and were rarely in the news. The pace at which settlements are concluded obviously needed to increase, and that has meant a flurry of activity. That can give the impression, if it’s not properly managed, that there is less progress rather than more.”

Further, Finlayson acknowledges the length of negotiations in Treaty settlements, and the fact settlements happen in stages “may give the public an idea that more money is changing hands during the process than is actually the case. That was noticeable in the case of the Central North Islands forestry deal, worth around $500 million, because there was also an asset transfer a year after the legislation passed. Without background, casual audiences could be mistaken for thinking numerous half-billion deals were concluded between 2007 and 2009.”

However, Finlayson argues that the media aren’t as poor as some may think – with a few exceptions which he highlights, such as Michael Laws’ prediction of ‘blood in the streets’ following the Tamaki Collective’s settlement in Auckland. “Obviously some are better than others. Media coverage is often not particularly in-depth, but that is hardly unique to the Treaty area and reflects resourcing issues and audience preferences. I can’t think of any news outfit that is trying to overturn political and public support for Treaty settlements. Some commentators are in that camp, but they are mainly professional provocateurs or simply ignorant.”

However, Abel suggests the pressures can have an impact in terms of public perception. “I’m kind of wary of stating the media as the sole determinant of something. But certainly it has contributed. Off the top of my head I can think of two things: the lack of any historic context to stories means that breaches by the Crown are not widely known.”

Secondly she says that “historically, claims under the Treaty were reported as a threat to ‘us’. Although this does not usually happen today, (the foreshore and seabed is an exception.) ” Given how removed people are from much of New Zealand’s ‘controversial’ issues on a day-to-day basis, the way the issues are reported in the media can have an impact in terms of public perception. Given the Government’s current policy of resolving all Treaty issues by 2014 and the upcoming foreshore and seabed review – a clearer representation of New Zealand’s history, and one that acknowledges the diversity that makes up the process of dealing with this history, would be a much more effective way to differentiate between, to use the Herald’s grandiloquent words, the experience from the impression.

Neil Adcock is a writer living in Wellington

By James Robinson

There is a generational split you may have noticed. And it doesn’t lead itself to labeling as easily as the Generation X/Generation Y divide. The divide falls between those who were in school when computers started to take hold, and these new, younger, digital natives. This divide is the sort of abyss that leads a 26 year old to feel alien staring out a bus full of text messaging school children without a hint of melodrama.

Digital makes all else quaint. It does by hand what was once done by machine.

79 percent of 15 year-olds have a cell phone. Roughly 30 percent of 10 year-olds have a cell phone. It is a sharp dividing line. Computer use is equally as rife. In the industrialised world 59 percent of all children have direct access to a home computer with internet. It is a sharp contrast to the schoolyard that most people over the age of twenty-five lived through.

And it is these sorts of statistics that are driving people to muse that the art of handwriting is dead (Slate, Time, BBC, The Guardian amongst many other reputable publications have all weighed in on this matter), with the amorphous idea of “the kids” at the centre of this debate. Too keyed up in iPhones and IMing to appreciate the simple art of pen of paper.

*****

Heading to the battle lines of our education system, there are many pieces of information immediately evident that those long finished with school might not have considered. And notably, the idea of the death of handwriting generates a slight shrug of the shoulders among teachers.

Handwriting is not emphasised at all past primary and intermediate level education. Across the board girls are neater than boys, priding presentation long past the point when it brings them direct reward. Converse to expectation, at the average school students have very little face time with computers. Internet policy is too hard to police, and printing costs are prohibitive. While some private secondary schools are apparently placing laptops in front of their kids, this is far from the norm.

The one prerequisite is legibility. Students need to be able to be understood. Damagingly, some teachers reported that electronic communication has weakened grammar and spelling. While it has opened new doors in learning potential for students with dyslexia, it has created new hurdles for the perfectly capable. Going off-road and on to the pen and pad, easy mistakes start to creep in.

Subsequently, it becomes a teacher’s choice whether assignments need to be handwritten or typed. Some choose handwriting – citing fostering a sense of accuracy, and preparing a student for exams. This could be a source of imaginable complaint for a young-student forced to work by hand with a taunting computer near by. But in the words of one teacher, “students will complain about doing anything that requires effort, and thought”.

Many students don’t have great handwriting, and while computers may undercut an encyclopedic knowledge of language when a spell-check isn’t handy, handwriting can also undermine a student’s performance in an exam. Tony, a retired headmaster, with nearly 30 years experience in schools says: “consistently, throughout my time in schools it was really frustrating if you had a script that looked like a spider had thrown a major fit over the pages. Some exams were often largely unintelligible.”

“There was a fair likelihood that the student had a good brain but he was untidy on paper and so he would have performed much better in an oral situation.” There are always two sides to every coin.

And we now have the notion tabled that bad handwriting has been around a lot longer than the internet, and is in no way a direct result of misshapen Playstation thumbs.

Teachers in 2010 outline a situation that probably sounds familiar. Handwriting drills in the early years, leading into a need for quick to produce, easy to read no-frills handwriting from secondary and up. Sure, there’s a bit of influence from new technologies. But if handwriting is dying, it is not here.

It seems rather that, handwriting, like mathematics, is a skill that dies with age. As soon as word processors hit the workplace, writing skills were always going to be obsolete past university level. The more resistant a person to the concept of a computer full stop, the more likely they were to hold on to a heavily stylised method of handwriting. But when you have the Dalai Lama on Twitter – this itself is increasingly unlikely.

So we have the workplace – rather than the schoolyard – eating the tradition of handwriting. And while the tradition of handwriting dies off slowly with age, beginning somewhere in the frantic note taking of University or NCEA, it isn’t dying. We’re still handwriting, and technology may have changed this for better or worse, but we’re still handwriting.

Katy, 33, works in communications for a Wellington IT company. Katy, even at 33, manages to possess about as distinctive and stylised style of handwriting as you will probably find on your average adult. She also works at a firm where outmoding such cumbersome activities as handwriting is part and parcel of the ethos.

Katy maps out her own personal decline of handwriting. These sorts of stories are common, and cement the idea that the ability and will to handwrite well slowly dies in us. It isn’t driven by a wider push from society.

“I remember being quite fastidious with my writing, and quite proud of it. I spent quite a bit of time cultivating it. I don’t know if it was partly because I really only ever went to an all-girls school, but handwriting was a bit of a status symbol. Or at least I thought it was.”

“I remember making a mental note when the changeover happened to working more from a laptop at University, it was a gradual changeover, and thinking – “I’ll never be as expressive”, but then it happened. And you adapt very quickly.”

At her work, note-taking software and dictaphones are used to remove a lot of the grunt work of handwriting. “Whenever I have to write like crazy I end up lamenting the fact that my handwriting has gone to hell and even I can’t read it.”

She keeps her handwriting alive like most people do, writing notes, cards, or the odd letter. It is just a bit harder on the hand these days.

*****

If anything, handwriting is the most personal media format. Everyone has a story to share about their handwriting abilities and adventures as a child. One teacher referred to perfect handwriting being as “important at the age of eleven as owning a tamagotchi” (and there is a dated reference). People offered up stories of winning handwriting cups in the 1960s, at the age of seven, or still talked with visible pride about being awarded their “pen licence” in primary school.

Katy recalls with still vivid horror: “One of my earliest angst episodes had to do with me running out of ‘publishing paper’ in Standard One (year 3) and being stricken with fear for weeks as the pad got thinner and thinner. We were given a certain amount of publishing paper at the start of the term and that was it. I couldn’t help but write lots of stories at home. It ended up with me breaking down in front of my parents. The upshot was I got another publishing pad and no one was cross with me.”

So what does it all mean? As email undercuts letter writing, and word processors nullify the need for writing in the work place – is this a mere technological shift, or is it culturally something more significant?

Everyone spoken with all shared a similar view of handwriting. It is individualised, and there was a relative level of pride or shame attached to perceived handwriting successes and failures. No one really writes by hand that often any more, but even when the handwriting devolves into the positively spider-like it is still an expression of yourself.

People simply do not feel the same attachment to the typed word as the written word. We feel compelled to hold on to handwritten birthday cards, and old letters, far more so than the intangible correspondence stored in the digital cloud.

Katy sums this up astutely: “When people print out emails I find it quaint, a little backward and unnecessary. But is that what I need to do? Print everything out and stick it in a ring binder in order to have something physical to hold on to, rather than just a computer screen filled with words from a loved one? To read the actual hand-writing of someone who has passed on, or who is far away, is more immediate and evocative than any printed out email.“

“Where will it all go when we’re gone, and there’s no one around to remember our passwords?”

ENDS

by Brannavan Gnanalingham

On 7 March, the biggest show in town will be ithe Academy Awards, in which considerable attention will be paid by the media to Hollywood and its “best films”. At least, that’s how the awards are self-billed and self-promoted. The Best Picture Award of course, is he most important and prestigious gong, which studios spend millions of dollars trying to win – purely because of the artistic and commercial implications of winning. Yet given that it is considering art, what do the Academy’s choices about the “best art” say about Hollywood, the institution that makes and judges the films – not to mention the history and prejudices that dictate so many of Oscar’s final outcomes.

The Academy Awards have been awarded since 1927-8, and were designed to commemorate film excellence (n.b. Hollywood excellence). The Awards have taken place alongside many of cinema’s key technical, social and critical changes.Its birth happened on the cusp of the shift from silent to sound film – and it and has spanned the rise in the late 1960s of auteurism as a concept for judging film (whereby consideration of the director is paramount in ‘reading’ a film) to this year’s consideration of digital 3-D technology.

Many of the ‘Best Picture” winning films have co-incided with particular social contexts, starting with the Production Code morality that commenced in the 1930s (which meant that award-winning films like Rebecca, The Lost Weekend, From Here to Eternity or The Apartment had to tone things down. The Awards continued through the Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s and 1950s; the breakdown of the Production Code towards more adult filmmaking – at least a decade after everyone from the French to the Brazilians were doing it. Still, a neo-Puritanism has meant no Best Picture’Award winning films have explored homosexuality or graphic sex in any sort of interesting way. (The paedophilia of American Beauty or the petrified-to-acknowledge-homosexuality Midnight Cowboy are as far as Hollywood has gone) The feminism and minority politics which gathered pace from the 1970s onwards have not been reflected in Hollywood’s top honour – again, none of the winning films have treated these social movements with any respect.

This year is the first time since 1943 when ten films have been nominated for Best Picture. Yet the increase in nominations hasn’t seen the Awards become more adventurous, or seen more acknowledgement of filmic diversity – nearly all the films were made by Americans (An Education which is British the sole exception, unless ultra-patriotic New Zealanders also try to claim Avatar) and nearly all have a big name or two behind or in front of the camera. (At least the Best Foreign Film awards have nominated Michael Haneke’s disturbing The White Ribbon, which is a big difference from the usually unremarkable foreign film nominees).

The biggest film in terms of box office receipts this year, James Cameron’s Avatar, is predictably one of the leading contenders. The Academy Awards have traditionally favoured the “big films” (or the event films), throughout its history, starting with the original winner Wings which was a huge box office success and starred the original “It Girl” Clara Bow – though pedants will add that in the original year, an award was handed to the Best Artistic Film as well – F.W.Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise.

Other winners Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, Titanic, and Return of the King were some of the biggest films of all-time and won truckloads of awards (e.g. Ben Hur, Titanic and Return of the King each won 11 Oscars, and share the record). Other huge successes like Star Wars and Jurassic Park won a number of technical awards. The obvious reason is that the Academy Awards depend on ratings to justify their exulted status, and the highest rating shows of the last decade involved Titanic and Return of the King sweeping the awards. However, the Best Picture films require some sort of contemporaneous critical acclaim to be considered worthy enough – something which Avatar for all its simplicity and obvious politics has. Despite any sort of critical reservations, the film is also hugely enjoyable, which undoubtedly make it the favourite to take out the big award.

However, Avatar’s biggest rival is a film made by Kathryn Bigelow. The fact that Bigelow and Cameron were once married hasn’t escaped those looking for an angle to promote the Awards. A further hook is the fact that no woman has ever won Best Director before, and certainly no female-directed film has won Best Picture. Hollywood, which arguably has one of the worst glass ceilings in any professional environment, has only ever nominated three women before Bigelow for Best Director.

The fact that is has been so rare for women directors to even be considered, creates a vicious circle – Bigelow is trapped by being considered a female director, above simply being a director, and all talk of her before the ceremony has highlighted her “woman-ness”. However, her film is very highly regarded critically, politically topical but not too controversial, all of which should be in its favour.

Further adding to its chances of success is that the Academy often reward films/directors/actors/actresses in a token kind of way – a result from enough pressure criticising the Academy for its tardiness towards “minorities” (for example Best Actor wins for Sidney Poitier and Roberto Benigni were seen as “about-time” wins).

Precious, this year’s ‘indie’ nominee, is also notable as the first film directed by a “black” director to be nominated for Best Picture. This is a feat that even Spike Lee never managed, despite directing arguably the best American film of the 1980s in Do the Right Thing. (Ironically, the Best Picture that year went to Driving Miss Daisy, a film all about the dutiful and fiercely platonic service of a “black” man to a “white” woman).

However, the film is too much of a dark-horse to be considered likely to win – it’s far too downbeat, and it hasn’t had any sort of commercial momentum like Slumdog Millionaire (to date, the only film which has featured more than a few minutes of sub-titles to have ever won Best Picture – despite the film being utterly terrible) or Crash (a film that is even worse) to become an upset winner. Best Pictures have hardly gone to films which are politically adventurous. Crash for example won over heavy favourite Brokeback Mountain, a win which has been read as purely driven by homophobia against Brokeback Mountain rather than an acknowledgement of Crash’s merits. Further, Crash benefited from the fact the Awards have frequently gone to films which have a semblance of liberalness, but aren’t as radical like some of the nominees.

But even when one considers past winners, liberal themes are hardly at the forefront – despite Hollywood being criticised by conservatives for its ‘overwhelming’ liberalness. Whether it’s Gone With the Wind’s depiction of a utopian antebellum South, or director Elia Kazan casting himself as a martyr for ratting out his peers in the Communist witch-hunts with On the Waterfront, to the unashamed misogyny in The Sound of Music or Kramer vs Kramer, or Forrest Gump’s conclusion that if you love your Momma and unthinkingly fight for your country you’ll win fame, money and the girl of your dreams, but if you’re a hippie and take drugs, you’ll die of AIDS.

Many of the winning films have also involved “white” protagonists interacting with “others” and learning something profound from the process (it’s a shame that such profundity hasn’t extended to the films themselves), Films such as Rain Man, Dances With Wolves, In the Heat of the Night, or Gentleman’s Agreement. All of this makes The Blind Side a possible sleeper victor – the Sandra Bullock helping out a “black” man vehicle is essentially that patronising plot told over again. And given its sleeper box office success (and Bullock’s favouritism for the Best Actress Award) it could well be a popular, if totally undeserved, winner.

The Academy have mostly ignored films which are too radical or anarchic. Hollywood was about a decade late in reacting to the French New Wave, a movement in film which shifted filmmaking towards more adult-content, and concepts such as homages, auteurs, and narrative-trickery. And in the mid-1960s, when the world’s cinema was re-writing the language of cinema, the Oscar Best Picture went to films like My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. When films like Bonnie and Clyde (pictured left) do come along, they tend to lose to much safer films (Bonnie and Clyde lost to the much more safe In the Heat of the Night).

Avant-garde films certainly do not get considered, and directors/provocateurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, or Nicholas Ray never won Best Director awards. (Hitchcock’s Rebecca did win Best Picture, but Hitchcock lost to John Ford, director of the more simplistic Grapes of Wrath). That said, there are rare occasions when Academy Awards have gone to more unique films (for example The Best Years of Our Lives, Annie Hall or No Country for Old Men). This could lead to a film like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds sneaking a victory – especially because he conveys a love and knowledge of film like few filmmakers have shown since the French New Wave – and especially as it is perhaps the only film to have ever been nominated which is named after a film made by obscure Italian spaghetti western director Enzo G. Castellari.

Of further New Zealand interest is the nomination of the Peter Jackson produced District 9, an unexpected box office hit. A few things aren’t in that film’s favour – one is the film was released mid-last year, and with the rare exception of a big blockbuster like Gladiator, many early released films don’t have the momentum to win at what is the final major awards ceremony for the year. Another important factor is that District 9 is sci-fi: the Academy has displayed a snobbish bias towards ‘serious’ cinema, which has meant very few comedies (e.g. Shakespeare in Love, Annie Hall, The Apartment, or Frank Capra’s films in the 1930s) or sci-fi/fantasy films (Return of the King) have won.

The one genre exception to this blackout are musicals – surprising considering some of the winners Going My Way, Chicago, Broadway Melody, and My Fair Lady are egregious pieces of cinema (the one exception to the anti-masterpiece rule is West Side Story). This also means animation won’t win – and Up despite considerable critical acclaim is a token nominee to add more commercial appeal.

The remaining three nominees are perhaps too hard to place for them to be taken too seriously. British films have proven the rare exception for the Academy Awards never really considering “foreign films”. Only eight foreign language films have been nominated before – and only three of those are notable (Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). British films (or co-British productions) like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire were rare exceptions of winners defeating Hollywood productions. This year though, it’s hard to see An Education, the token British film, being seen as worthy or popular enough to win. Up In the Air despite its name cast, and A Serious Man despite being directed by Oscar-winning directors the Coen Brothers, haven’t had any momentum behind their films to be considered likely to win.

All of this points to a remarkably open Best Picture race. The winner (and nominees) whichever film it is, would speak a lot about the Academy’s melange of politics, art, and insularity. And this isn’t even considering the intersection of race, politics, age, artists’ histories, sexuality or ‘foreignness’ which will affect the individual awards like Best Actor/Actress or Best Director. But it is this curious blend of it all, this unashamed subjective awarding system, which is what makes the Awards so fascinating to watch.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

Obviously, war movies are fiction – there is an entire generation whose mental images of the Vietnam War owe more to Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone than to any news bulletins of the day, or any dutiful war memoirs. Same for me. My most indelible image of WWII was probably the sight of Jack Palance getting his arm run over by a tank – but did that stop him ? – in the war movie Attack ! that I saw as a very small child.

In other words, war movies are (for most of us, anyway) virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Or at least, almost indistinguishable from any other real thing we haven’t directly experienced. Thank goodness then that when it comes to looking back on the current war in Iraq, future generations will have at least one good film to rely on. At time of writing, it remains to be seen what – if anything – The Hurt Locker will have won at the March 7 Oscars. For quite a while, it was a film that nobody wanted. After screening at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival it was left on the shelf for nearly a year – before re-emerging last June on limited release, where it earned a miserable $15 million at the box office.

The prominence the film has since achieved – mainly by word of mouth, because relatively few people have actually seen it – will have certainly raised the ante by the time it finally reaches theatres in this country. I saw it last September on a tiny screen on a plane somewhere above Central Asia and thought it was extraordinary – the only one of this year’s contenders that anyone will care a jot about in ten year’s time.

Maybe the fact it has made the Oscar final list is victory enough. If Academy voters finally choose the sugary fable (The Blind Side) or the stale charms of George Clooney in Up in the Air, then so be it. Only Avatar deserves to beat it, and then only because the forces of global democracy sort of demand that it should. Who would have thought that James Cameron, director of Titanic, would ever be known for anything else ?

Back to The Hurt Locker, and to war films in general. The list of good to great war films is not a particularly long one. My own shortlist – if we’re allowed to include the sub-category of prisoner of war films – would consist of Paths of Glory, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Big Red One, Attack ! (pictured left), Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Battle of Algiers, Cross of Iron, Hamburger Hill, Platoon and The Thin Red Line – and (maybe) Pork Chop Hill and the sainted anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front, both directed by Lewis Milestone. At a stretch I’d also include Robert Aldrich’s 1972 movie Ulzana’s Raid, which is really a Vietnam war movie disguised as a Western.

Even these films – Platoon excepted – tend to demonstrate the futility of war from a fairly safe distance. Usually, by pitying the combatants trapped in the carnage, and by feeling outrage from the popcorn stalls on their behalf as they struggle against the bad decisions of incompetent and/or corrupt leaders. Poor Jack Palance in Attack! for instance, was up against one commanding officer who was a coward (Eddie Albert) and another who was a political schemer (Lee Marvin) – and compared to them, the Germans were a breeze.

What I’m getting at is that war films have tended to be on either blatantly on our side – the Krauts/Japs/Commies are coming ! – or they take the side of the ordinary bloke in the trenches, trying to get home to wife/sweetheart and family. The Hurt Locker is the latter kind of movie. It is about a squad of soldiers who defuse bombs in Iraq, and their survival techniques, day by day. Some will criticize it for not taking an overt stance – or any stance at all – about the morality of the invasion, or the motivations of its main characters.

I would argue that the politics of The Hurt Locker – if you really need them – are to be found in the actions depicted on screen. Some of the characters in the film are scared, some are doggedly hanging on, and some of them enjoy the uncomplicated buzz of immediate danger more than the ambiguities of civilian life back home. Moreover, an unlikely sequence where one of the soldiers ventures into the city to find the family of a child that the Americans have accidentally put in harm’s way can easily function – if you really want to see it in this light – as a terrific metaphor for the entire American presence in Iraq. Namely, we kill those who we try to befriend. Hell, the soldier even threatens the very people he is trying to console.

Ultimately, it is the action sequences that make The Hurt Locker so outstanding. This film is a masterclass on where to place a camera and how to move it while you’re shooting an action film. It has very little in common with the usual action blockbuster – where ultra-fast editing, noise and a seasick camera try to fake up the excitement. Silence can be just as ominous, and exciting. And yes, the director Kathryn Bigelow is a woman. Fans of her hilariously macho film Point Break will be unsurprised to learn that there is a sequence of bare-chested male bonding through beating the shit out of each other.

I mentioned the Gregory Peck film Pork Chop Hill before. It came out in 1960, only six years after the war in Korea finally ground to an uncertain halt..It dealt with an incident very late in the Korean war – a bloody battle for a barren hilltop conducted purely so that the Americans could negotiate peace with the Chinese from a position of strength. The Chinese had a similar motive. As with The Hurt Locker, the soldiers are trying to survive within a framework made by people seperated safely from the consequences by layers of social class and thousands of kilometers.

Milestone, ever the obliging hack – he had bowed to Army complaints over his 1946 film A Walk in the Sun – agreed to tack on a ridiculous Cold War voice-over ( “Millions live in freedom because of what they did’) that totally contradicted the amoral realism of the rest of his film. Mind you, the script had also done its best to de-humanise at least half of the combatants.onscreen (“These people aren’t just Orientals, they’re Communists!”) In Bigelow’s film by contrast, the insurgents are simply unknown – just another factor in the environment that may or may not go off, before it can be defused.

SO WILL IT WIN ? Theory A says it won’t. Under Theory A, US critic Dave Karger has traced the astonishing similarity between Bigelow’s film and the losing campaign for Brokeback Mountain in 2006. Here are Karger’s stats:

“Brokeback” managed the rare feat of winning Best Picture and Best Director at both the New York and Los Angeles film critics awards; so did ““Hurt Locker.” “Brokeback” also picked up those two big prizes at the Broadcast Film Critics Awards; so did “Hurt Locker.” “Brokeback” won the trifecta of PGA, DGA, and WGA trophies; so did “Hurt Locker.” “Brokeback” won 4 BAFTAs, including Best Film, Director, and Screenplay; “Hurt Locker” picked up 6 awards, including Best Film, Director, and Screenplay. And of course, “Brokeback” lost the SAG cast award, and so did “Hurt Locker.” (The main difference between the two films’ tallies is that “Brokeback” did win four Globes, including Best Drama and Best Director, while “Hurt Locker” went 0 for 3.)

Conversely, Theory B says The Hurt Locker will win. Theory B is based on the fact that Oscar voting is essentially an STV proportional system. Academy voters rank the ballot in preferential order – and by this logic, while Avatar could well sweep to a majority on the first ballot, the chances are it won’t. Therefore, preferences will come into play – and the feeling around town is that The Hurt Locker will score enough on second, third and fourth preferences to reach a majority some time around the third or fourth calculation. Of course, the same factor could skew the outcome in the direction of that nice Sandra Bullock and her wretched Blind Side movie. Everyone likes Sandy, don’t they ?

Footnote: one last point about those old war films. Ultimately, The Bridge on the River Kwai may have more in common with The Hurt Locker than any other of the war films mentioned above. This may seems an unlikely comparison – a David Lean epic from the 1950s and a low budget indie nearly sixty years later ? The similarity is that the content in both cases deals with the crazy things that people cling to in order to survive, within a morally perverse situation.

In the older movie, three irrational forces gradually converge – the stiff upper lip code of the British captive (Alec Guinness pictured left) the death before dishonour bushido code of the Japanese camp commander ( Sessue Hayakawa) and the cynically wise-ass worldview of the American (William Holden) who seeks to blow up the very same bridge that Guinness has decided will be a fine, morale boosting example of British moral superiority for the other chaps in the concentration camp. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out well for anyone. It doesn’t for the people in The Hurt Locker, either, which is just as well. That way, no one is ever likely to turn a war film into a franchise.

ENDS

Part II in a series (also see Part I: Shaping Up To Fight)

by Gordon Campbell

The announcement most likely to generate headlines in the Defence White Paper due on March 31 will be the official formation of an ANZAC Rapid Reaction Force to police (aka “assist”] the Pacific region. Last year, the Prime Ministers and Defence Ministers of both countries indicated such a force would consist of Australian and New Zealand troops, jointly commanded at the operational level, and capable of being rapidly deployed to meet any future threat to the stability of the Pacific region – regardless of whether that breakdown was due to internal factors ( civil unrest, natural catastrophe etc) or from meddling by outside powers.

Given the harm this is likely to do to New Zealand’s international image of relative neutrality, the force is bound to be controversial. From Europe to the Middle East to Asia, our perceived distance from the traditional military alliance of the US, Britain and Australia has been of benefit to us, in trade, tourism, diplomacy and security. The RRF could change those perceptions overnight and put us back within the old neo-colonial club. It will also blur the lines that have hitherto made us a less likely target than Australia for jihadi terrorism. It is hard to see how the advantages can outweigh the downsides.

The desirability of creating such a force was first raised by Australia in its own Defence White Paper last year. Supposedly, a joint Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) could ‘deploy seamlessly into our region at short notice’ as part of a trans-Tasman exploration of ‘opportunities to rebuild our historical capacity to integrate Australian and New Zealand force elements.’ Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and John Key advocated the creation of such a force, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported after their meeting in Canberra last August:

Mr Rudd has not released any details about the possible ANZAC contingent, but says there will be times when it would make sense for the forces to be jointly deployed. “We believe, given the enormous bonds which already exist between our two armed forces, their common training doctrines and the compatibility of so much of their equipment, that this is actually a useful thing for us to do together,” Mr Rudd said.

Mr Key says New Zealand is re-assessing its defence arrangements, and a joint contingent makes sense given the two countries already serve in many places together. He says he does not know what capability would be required for a joint force or in what circumstances it would be deployed.

“It’s a germ of an idea but it is something that the defence forces are interested in,” Mr Keys said. The chief of defence forces on both sides of the Tasman will discuss [it] and we’ll see how it goes.”

In late September 2009, the respective Defence Ministers (John Faulkner, Wayne Mapp) also met, and advocated setting up such a force:

The ADF and NZDF will form a Pacific-focused Rapid Reaction Force to

respond to regional contingencies including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The force will regularly train and exercise together and be able to deploy at short notice.

To ensure an RRF could be deployed quickly and effectively, Faulkner and Mapp indicated that improvements would be needed in the ANZAC airlift capability. Moreover, to ensure the RRF can communicate effectively with itself (and others) when planning and executing its actions in the Pacific, the next 12 months would require an upgrade of the existing communication technologies, trans-Tasman. .

Plainly then, the RRF will cost a lot of money to set up, to train and to deploy – at a time when any fresh money for this purpose is likely to be scarce to non-existent in the May Budget. Funds will be no more plentiful in the foreseeable future. Yet the closer alignment envisaged with Australia’s armed forces can only put upward pressure on the wages paid to our own armed forces. Since our military remuneration system began to be revamped in 2008, there has been greater scope for external factors in the job market to be taken into account when setting wages within the military. It would be deeply ironic if the formation of the RRF helped to speed up the rate of attrition by New Zealand’s men and women in uniform, as they left to seek better prospects across the Tasman.

Even on its own narrow terms, the RRF will entail a substantial opportunity cost. Inevitably, the costs related to setting up and maintaining this force will crowd out some of the peacekeeping activities (carried out under the UN umbrella) that have been consistent with the more independent foreign policy stance of the Clark government. This may already be happening. Is the Provincial Reconstruction Team for instance, being brought back from their aid and development work in Afghanistan in order to free up resources and personnel for this regional policing role in the Pacific ?

In general terms, will the commitment of soldiers and equipment to the RRF restrict New Zealand’s ability to provide soldiers and equipment for peacekeeping and other multilateral missions abroad – and conversely, what impact will a closer alignment with Australia and the US have on New Zealand’s standing and influence within international forums ? In the recent past, New Zealand has been able to punch above its weight diplomatically largely because of its readiness to take on a range of multilateral commitments – and from an independent position, not as a predictable helpmate and echo chamber for positions already taken by its traditional allies. In that respect, the RRF bids to turn back the clock 30 years and return New Zealand to the traditional fold, without incurring the political risk of scrapping the nuclear free legislation, The White Paper seems likely to drive around that legislation, back into the past.

At time of writing, there were no reliable indications on whether the RRF will be company size (around 250 troops) or battalion size, which would be around 550 troops.. Either way, a limited pool of soldiers and equipment can only be stretched so far. The more often the RRF trains together to maximize its efficiency, the larger the impact will be on the current roles being played by our armed forces. In addition, the formation of an RRF would have strategic and diplomatic repercussions in the Pacific, and beyond.

It seems significant that the RRF concept has been developed behind closed doors at the Ministry of Defence, and not via open consultation on the diplomatic circuit. Presumably, Foreign Affairs will be expected to manage any diplomatic fallout. How is the South Pacific Forum likely to react to the formation of a regional SWAT team by the two main neo-colonial powers in the South Pacific? Not well, one imagines. While the RRF’s intended roles would include helping out our Pacific neighbours in times of natural disaster, they do not appear to have been asked for their input to the proposal.

China, given its furious reaction last year to elements of the Australian White Paper, is unlikely to treat the RRF as being for purposes of defence or emergency relief. It seems more likely to view the RRF as a projection of offensive power by Washington’s main surrogate in the region. Having carefully cultivated an independent stance towards China for trade and diplomatic reasons, New Zealand seems about to throw away those advantages by painting itself as Australia’s military helpmate – which could prove very unfortunate for us, given that we cannot bring the sweetener of vast mineral resources to the negotiating table. When it comes to advancing our relationship with China, it is hard to see the RRF as anything other than a self-imposed liability.

In sum, selling the RRF to our South East Asian and Pacific neighbours as a purely defensive innovation – or as an aid and relief initiative – will be an uphill slog. This aspect of the RRF was briefly touched on by two defence experts last year, in a paper called ‘Australia and New Zealand Twenty-First Century ANZACS.’ The authors could hardly be closer to the action. They were Dr. Peter Greener, senior fellow at the Command and Staff College, New Zealand Defence Force at Trentham, and Colonel Nick Floyd, the Australian Chief of Army’s Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney. While noting that the ANZAC legacy and sentiment run deep, Greener and Floyd pointed out that ‘rarely] has the idea for such a force been raised ‘in the absence of a clear threat to common national interests.’

Well, exactly. Gallipolli. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Timor, Bougainville, the Solomons, Afghanistan…Beforehand, when Australian and New Zealand forces fought alongside each other – and forged those celebrated ANZAC bonds of courage, mateship and loyalty – it was in response to an existing threat. Yet currently, the likelihood of an attack on either country, as the authors say, is remote. Even so, we are creating an ANZAC joint strike force before anything that requires a reaction has emerged. For the first time, the ANZAC spirit is going to be expressed pre-emptively. Can it be quite the same ANZAC spirit, when it is being fostered pre-emptively within a regional enforcement unit?

No doubt, as Greener and Floyd indicate, politicians on both sides of the Tasman are keen to enhance closer defence relations between New Zealand and Australia. There would be obvious career advantages for the military personnel involved, and some business opportunities for defence industries in ramping up co-operation in procurement decisions. Greener and Floyd explain the logic of why the RRF will mainly be comprised of Army personnel, and is likely to be assembled on a rotational basis, rather than as a stand-alone bilateral force :

Whilst….raising an actual, bilaterally-manned ANZAC unit might make a politically potent statement, it would appear more practical to establish an enduring rotational commitment model – similar in some respects to Europe’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. Though in some ways more complicated, this would allow broader exposure to Trans-Tasman interoperability, and establish more personal-level linkages.

Given the greater suitability of a rotational model, any future ANZAC force would most likely have a predominance of army elements. Whilst it is clear that air and naval force elements are pivotal, nevertheless these elements can more easily achieve necessary levels of interoperability through sustained training and exercises, rather than needing to be home-ported together. The same cannot be said for land forces, which because of their environment and their way of operating, demand a far greater degree of intimacy at all levels of command and operation. More importantly, a visibly two-nation land force poses a starker message of common resolve.

Of course, it is precisely that ‘starker message of national resolve’ that is likely to raise diplomatic hackles in the Pacific, and beyond. Last month, in the first part of this series, I outlined the risks that New Zealand would be running if it buys into the strategic worldview of the Australians. Last year. Canberra’s own Defence White Paper set out what was widely taken to be a hostile stance towards China and its military role in the region over the next 20 years. To counter this imagined threat, the Australians advocated a procurement strategy based largely on maritime denial – via, for instance, a bigger submarine force. Under the previous government, New Zealand had declined to buy into Canberra’s mindset on defence, and foreign policy. The Key government seems far more inclined to do so..

The internal politics of the NZDF could well play into the government’s hands. The term of the current chief of the New Zealand Defence Forces, Army Lieutenant-General Jerry Mateparae has been extended for a year, and this should enable him to get the Army–based contribution to the RRF up and running. The leading candidate to succeed Mateparae in 2011 currently seems to be his deputy, Rear-Admiral Jack Steer (pictured left). This would mark the first time the Navy has led the NZDF since Vice-Admiral Sir Somerford Teagle’s stint during the early 1990s.

Steer could prove useful, given the current Australian emphasis on maritime defence. After all, New Zealand has just spent some $500 million on acquiring and kitting out the Project Protector fleet of ships, large and small. Looking ahead, while a couple of big ticket items are required for the Air Force (the Orion surveillance upgrade, the troubled Hercules refit) the Navy has some major bids on the table. As Wayne Mapp indicated to Jane’s Defence Weekly last June – in an article to which this series is indebted – the government expects the White Paper process to resolve the balancing acts between what is on the procurement wishlist, and what is actually affordable :

Things like – what do you do about the Endeavour [tanker vessel] ? What do you do about the truck fleet? What are you to do about the ANZAC [frigates] self–defence upgrade – the scale of it in particular? Because that is a major investment, it has to be looked at through the White Paper process. It’s got to be put into context.

Obviously then, the level of self defence upgrade envisaged for the ANZAC ships will be a litmus test of the Key government’s commitment to Defence. The ships need to be able to foil attacks by anti-ship missiles as well as by fast inshore attack craft – and the sky is the limit for those with an open cheque book. There are lavish options available but the likelihood is that the least will be done, on the cheap. Ultimately, taxpayers will need to be convinced to meet whatever costs are involved, and to support the rationale. In that respect, a public relations blitz that was sentimentally based on the ANZAC legacy would get the government only so far – and may prove not enough to allay concerns about the loss of sovereignty the RRF will entail.

Many New Zealanders already resent how this country has become a branch office of the Australian economy. For similar reasons, there could be widespread public resistance against buying into the strategic world view of the Australians on regional and global conflicts. Since 9/11, New Zealand has succeeded in furthering its own interests (and inflicted less harm on others) by adopting a relatively independent response to the war against terrorism, one guided by UN resolutions. In doing so, it has done far, far better than if it had dutifully signed up for the coalition led by George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard. New Zealand is a safer place, untouched by threats from jihadi terrorism, as a result.

Will the White Paper due at the end of this month seek to crush that independence? These days, sovereignty is a more complex concept that it used to be. Routinely, countries now regard a degree of delegation to global institutions – eg the UN or the World Court or the European Community – as a valid way of furthering their national interests. Even so, full control of one’s armed forces remains a central plank of all modern notions of sovereignty.

The symbolism of joining with Australia in a joint police force for the Pacific region is a statement of common purpose that is not only questionable in strategic terms – do we really share the same perceptions of the likely regional threats, or agree on how to combat them ? This healthy divergence of views, you would think, would render impractical any plans to act in unison, operationally. Whatever the jargon, we will be perceived to have surrendered a degree of our sovereignty – and in practical terms, that’s exactly what we will have done. While in theory, we may retain operational control of our RRF component, many decisions in the field will inevitably be made without prior recourse to Wellington.

In sum, it is hard to see any benefits to the wider New Zealand public or business community from the formation of the Rapid Reaction Force. Any narrow benefits to the armed forces stand to be outweighed by the actual and opportunity costs involved. Not to mention the risk to our wider trade and diplomatic efforts from being seen to be cosying up to Canberra. Already, our ability to advance proposals within the Pacific Forum is affected by suspicions of our collusion with Canberra, and by the grievances felt by its smaller regional powers and interests. The RRF would only intensify such concerns.

Arguably, New Zealand would be better advised to focus the development of its armed forces on tasks central to our own conception of national mission – and not on tasks and perceptions’ jointly’ arrived at in discussions with our bigger, wealthier, and more gung ho friend across the Tasman. Australia can still be our very, very, very good friend – but there are greater trade, security and diplomatic advantages to be won by New Zealand, through keeping our distance.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

There’s so much crap in children’s bookshops and children’s tolerance of what is put in front of them is so immense, it should not be abused. That’s why it seems worth singling out some of the enduringly good books that, thanks to librarians and online purchasing, are still available.

Curiosity has always been a good friend of creativity. Reportedly, Cynthia Voigt got the idea for Homecoming after looking one day at some kids in a supermarket parking lot, and wondering what would happen if their parents never came back to the car for them. Thus, we got the book’s opening paragraph, which could easily qualify as the “Call me Ishmael” of children’s literature.

“ The woman put her sad moon face in at the window of the car. “ You be good,” she said. “ You hear me? You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you. You hear?”
Yes Momma.” they said.

And so the mother slings her purse over her shoulder, and walks away, forever. The economy of that paragraph is remarkable. It conveys the sadness of the mother and her shaky grip on reality, the trust and dependence of the children, and the authority suddenly vested in Dicey as the effective head of the family. Over the next four hundred pages Voigt lets us know how 13 year old Dicey copes with this weight of responsibility, and how she manages – though left with hardly any money – to feed and shelter her siblings, keep them together as a family, and lead them finally to a place of security.

If you want it to, the story can be seen as having a mythic dimension. Obviously, there are a lot of folk tales about orphans who use their courage and wits to thwart adversity, and find their place in the world. Its probably no accident that the story of Hansel and Gretel crops up in the first chapter of this book. One critic has even found a plausible link between almost every single major plot point in Homecoming and The Odyssey – but new readers can relax, because the story easily stands by itself.

Dicey and her three siblings happen to be caught between irresponsible and/or mentally ill adults who have bailed on them, and authorities who threaten to pull the family apart and put the children into separate foster homes, The focus is always pragmatic, and down to earth. Dicey is a ferociously practical heroine. She needs to be, because the world is stacked against her survival. After she ingeniously manages to catch some fish while living off the land in a seaside park, a salesman tells her that it’s against the law to be catching fish in that location :
How were they supposed to eat then, Dicey asked herself. By buying food, she answered. The whole world was arranged for people who had money—for adults who had money…Well, she could handle it. Somehow.

Voigt, with typical clarity, once expressed her own personal appreciation of Dicey : “ She is the kind of 13 year old I would have liked to have been.. instead of being a sort of mashed potato, lumpish sort of person.” Like Philip Pullman, Voigt spent many years of her life as a schoolteacher, and has said that she learned in the classroom to respect people who seem to be difficult.

In her experience, the adult world commonly tells children more than enough about the need for compromise, and about not taking a stand too firmly on one side or the other. ‘There’s a kind of anti-character that society welcomes…[and] one of the things that’s true of the Tillermans that’s not supposed to be popular is that they’re very strong characters. They often slip over into arrogance, and I’m always delighted that people welcome that in them. Especially in young people, the call for the lowest common denominator bothers me…I guess I always like people who make unhedged bets.” In another interview, she put it this way :

Dicey does seem to speak to a lot of people despite her prickliness, despite the fact they probably wouldn’t like to have her living next door. She knows what’s important to her. I’d like to be the kind of person who knew that about herself. That I wouldn’t fall to pieces in a crisis, or I wouldn’t let other people take care of me badly, rather than taking care of myself. That the kind of things that were important, were that important to me. Most of us don’t know, beyond hypothetical dinner conversations, if my child or my dog were drowning, which one would I save? That kind of thing. But Dicey in fact, actually knows.

Homecoming, as veterans of the Tillerman saga will know, is merely the first part of the story. Dicey’s relationship with her mother is finally resolved in the excellent sequel Dicey’s Song. In all, there are seven books devoted to the Tillerman children, their relatives and various friends who cross their path. The grand result is an interlocking set of perspectives which serve to remind us that everyone has a history, and that everyone involved has their own vantage point on much the same events. Voigt wrote all these books in a burst of creativity from the early 1980s onwards. In 1989, she wisely left the 21 year old Dicey and the rest of the Tillermans to their own devices, and moved on.

The facts of Voigt’s life are easily sketched. Born in 1942, she pursued a career in advertising, married and became a teacher. After her divorce in the early 1970s, she re-married and began writing in earnest. Homecoming put her on the map, and Dicey’s Song won the Newberry Medal for excellence in children’s literature in 1983. A prolific writer in many different genres, Voigt has never quite got out from under the immense critical and popular success of the Tillerman series. Early on, she once explained, the decision to pursue her desire to write had been a defining moment in her life :

I remember turning 30, and everyone around me was palpitating at 30 and feeling they were terribly old. I had just successfully evicted my first husband, and I had a daughter of a year, with whom I had fallen in love, and I had my teaching profession. I didn’t feel like I was entering old age, I felt like I was ripe, and I said to myself : you know, maybe it doesn’t matter if you never get published. Maybe you just do it because you want to do it, because it makes your life richer, and keeps you sane. The question of whether I was going to fail or not became almost irrelevant…

Homecoming was her third book, and the first to be published. Dicey’s three siblings are all well drawn – and they establish their personalities largely through words and actions, not through overt description. James, ten, is academically bright and rational, his little brother Sammy is a feisty and emotionally volatile six year old, and in between is the musically gifted and ethereal Maybeth, a girl so painfully shy that strangers tend to treat her as mentally handicapped.

Initially, once they realize their mother has gone for good, the children head towards the home of an elderly great-aunt who had lived miles away in the city of Bridgeport. Unfortunately, their aunt is dead – and their cousin Eunice has a religiosity that proves to be a very mixed blessing. (‘Cousin Eunice’s house wasn’t free, it was expensive—and the price was always remembering to be grateful.’)

Ultimately, the plan that Cousin Eunice hatches for the family with the local priests and nuns leave the Tillermans with only one option – to hit the highway again, this time heading towards a distant grandmother who proves to be hostile, and could well be deranged. In Homecoming, any refuge for the children seems to be exceptionally hard won, and conditional. Dicey’s early encounters with the grandmother for instance, are like something from a darkly humorous Grimm’s fairy tale :

‘You like my spaghetti?’ her grandmother asked.
“No,’ Dicey said, “ but I’m hungry. Do you like it?”
‘Its easy to fix. You know what I sometimes think?’ Her grandmother looked straight at her, her mouth chewing.” I sometimes think people might be good to eat. Cows and chickens eat corn and grass and turn it into good meat. People eat cows and chickens. In people, it might turn into something even better. Do you ever think that?’
Dicey shook her head.
‘Especially babies,” her grandmother said. She swallowed thoughtfully. “Or children. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

In the subsequent books, Dicey develops friends beyond her immediate family. The book A Solitary Blue, for instance traces the back story of her boyfriend Jeff Greene. His hippie mother Melody had left him behind when he was seven, supposedly to go off and make the world a better place via a range of political causes. As Voigt once observed, Jeff doesn’t so much resolve things with his self-serving mother – in fact, he doesn’t at all – as arrive by book’s end, at a deeper understanding of the nature of love. “ And the nature of love,’ Voigt added wryly, ‘isn’t a plot point.’ As in real life, situations change, but nothing is ever finally resolved. It is one of the strengths of these books that the story of the Tillermans seems so open ended.

Voigt’s questioning – almost querulous at times – approach to her characters makes the journey through the saga a consistently surprising one. At 21 in the final book Seventeen Against the Dealer, Dicey is not being set up to marry her true love Jeff, though that could happen. Happily ever after, as Dicey says in one of the earlier books, is not how things work out for the Tillermans. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dicey’s leadership skills are the very things that render her personally obnoxious at times, and capable of making seriously bad decisions. In this case, they lead her into being conned out of her livelihood by an unscrupulous newcomer in town who turns out to have been her father.

There is a lot to admire in all these books. Sons from Afar, in which James and Sammy set out to find their father is flawed but worthwhile – and The Runner, which tells the story of Dicey’s angry and obstinate uncle who gets killed in Vietnam, is even better. Come a Stranger, which traces the story of Mina, an extroverted black girl who befriends Dicey at school, is also highly recommended. Even so, the Homecoming/Dicey’s Song story is really the core of the enterprise. Published in 1981, it has a couple of hippie-era incidentals at one point that date it momentarily – but it is easy to accept them, and move on. In Dicey and her grandmother, Voigt has created two unforgettably strong female characters, and watching the two of them lock horns is one of the book’s real pleasures.

Eventually, Dicey comes to realize how much she loves sailing. Not just for its tactile pleasures, but for its almost spiritual qualities .

Boats, waves, water, wind: through the wood she felt them working for her. She was not directing, but accompanying them, turning them to her use. She didn’t work against them, but with them; and she made the boat do that too. It wasn’t power she felt, guiding the tiller, but purpose.

While Dicey is trying to get the family somehow across Chesapeake Bay, Voigt spins a lovely extended metaphor out of this situation, one that speaks for the girl’s entire struggle :

Maybe…people were like boats. They were big, important yachts and little rafts and motorboats and sailboats and working boats and pleasure boats. And some really big boats like ocean liners or tankers – these would be rich and powerful people, whose lives engulfed many other lives and carried them along. Or maybe each boat was a kind of family. Then what kind of boat would the Tillermans be? A little one, bobbing about, with the mast fallen off? A grubby, worn-down workboat, with Dicey hanging onto the rudder for dear life ?

Everybody who was born was cast into the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats – they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbour.

* * * *

For this essay, Gordon Campbell drew upon essays (esp, the interviews with Cynthia Voigt by Roger Sutton and Hazel Rochman) and reviews from volume 48 of the Children’s Literature Review.

ENDS

by Rosalea Barker

As March begins, and with less than two weeks to go before candidates have to file their nomination papers for the June primary elections in California, there’s a whole lotta shake-up going on. Since I last wrote about the race for Governor back in November, Republican Tom Campbell has moved into the race for US Senate instead, and Democrat Jerry Brown’s campaign is emailing its list with the news that Brown will announce his candidacy ‘very, very soon.’

Meanwhile, the young whippersnapper that Brown forced out of the race, Gavin Newsom, has seemingly gone back on his own statement that his wife, baby, and mayoral duties are his highest priority by filing a Statement of Intention to run for the position of Lieutenant Governor— thereby prompting one longtime California political commentator, John Wildermuth, to opine that perhaps Newsom needs to get some serious help for his addiction to politics.

The idea of someone being ‘addicted’ to politics is about as daft as the idea that a chartered accountant is ‘addicted’ to bookkeeping. Politicianing in the United States is a career choice, with preparation beginning in high school when students volunteer on some prominent politician’s campaign, and continuing through college. With any luck, they’ll get noticed by someone who is already in tight with either of the major firms that employ candidates, and be given some small role to try out on. In Newsom’s case, he was appointed to the San Francisco Parking and Traffic Commission by then Mayor Willie Brown, who is a major, major player in Democratic politics in the state, having been Assembly Speaker from 1981 to 1995 and laying claim to having raised about $75 million to help elect and reelect state Democrats.

When a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors came vacant in 1997, Mayor Brown appointed Newsom to it. Six years later, Brown termed out as Mayor and his protégé ran for that office, beating Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez by only 11,000 votes in a run-off election. (Although local body elections are “non-partisan” under State law, everyone knows the party affiliation of those who are running, and the practice of political parties asking their supporters to vote the party’s entire slate of candidates means that a paper clip could run for office down-ballot and get elected if the party endorsed it.)

Newsom will be termed out himself at the end of this year, hence his casting around for another political role. Or is he? Maybe he’s just following the orders of the Democratic Firm to jump into races where they want to see a different candidate win. The love-me-or-hate-me relationship that Newsom has with campaign staff, along with his ability to provide a catchy soundbite, make him the darling of the media. With a candidate as dry as Jerry Brown being out-messaged in spades by the leading candidate among the Republicans, Meg Whitman, what else could the Democrats do but throw in the Sacrificial Gav to get some attention?

Heck, they even threw Bill Clinton into the mix, knowing full well the commentariat would come up with some sinister subplot to keep people talking about the Democratic candidates instead of the Republican ones.

As for the actual race for Lieutenant Governor…Republicans pretty much had the media quotient for that monopolized, because the post is currently vacant and Governor Schwarzenegger’s attempts to fill it were guaranteed to meet with resistance. When the confirmation vote for Schwarzenegger’s nominee, Abel Maldonado, was neither a majority of the Assembly against nor a majoriity for confirmation, the Governor managed to turn it into a saga by withdrawing his nomination and then resubmitting it.

What could the Democrats do but bring on the Sacrificial Gav, so that attention switched away from the Republicans to the Democratic contenders for the candidacy? Throw in the fact that Newsom’s former campaign strategist in his bid for Governor now works for the other Democratic candidate for Lite Gov, Janice Hahn, and is telling tales out of school, and you have a recipe for another pot-boiler that will keep Democrats on the front pages for weeks to come.

So what exactly does a Lieutenant Governor do? According to Hahn’s recently released campaign video, Newsom doesn’t know. Hahn also claims that she will be the first female Lite Gov in the State, which is strictly true, I suppose, if you ignore the fact that the Acting Lieutenant-Governor—appointed by Schwarzenegger when the incumbent Lite Gov won a seat in the US House—is not only a woman, but the first Filipino-American to hold that post, Mona F. Pasquil. As Acting Lieutenant Governor, she can’t take on the role of Governor in his absence—the Attorney General does that instead. Which must be a sweet gig for AG Jerry Brown, given his time as Governor.

Back in the 1970s, when Governor Brown—aka Moonbeam—was often absent from the state, Lite Guv (Republican) Mike Curb took the opportunity to promote an agenda that was not to Moonbeam’s liking. The resulting stoush ended up in the State Supreme Court, which ruled that “when the governor is out of state, the lieutenant governor is free to exercise all powers of the chief executive,” according to the 1979 news clipping on Curb’s website. You might better know Curb as a music producer and song writer—working with artists from the Osmonds to Moonbeam’s old girlfriend Linda Ronstadt, to LeAnn Rimes.

But generally, Lieutenant Governors are extremely low-profile, despite the responsibilities they have chairing various commissions that oversee California’s economic development and its land and waterways, along with “ocean protection”. Up until the mid-70s, they seem to have mostly resigned or died in office. One of the longest-serving Lite Govs was Leo McCarthy, who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, of Irish immigrant parents. They left NZ for San Francisco when Leo was still a toddler, perhaps because of some shady business dealings his father’s partner got into. McCarthy died in 2007, but his Center for Public Service and the Common Good lives on at San Francisco University.

Public service and the common good—now there’s an idea for a career!

ENDS

by Conor MacHugh

By anyone’s standards the Pamir Highway is quite a drive. The road through the ‘Roof of the World’ runs over a thousand kilometres south and then west from Osh in Krygyzstan through to Khorg and Dushanbe in Tajikistan. Public transport has always been a rare commodity here, ever since infrequent caravans braved the weather and the tribes to bring goods from India to China on this branch of the Silk Road. Marco Polo passed this way, and the region was systematically explored by Russians and British during the nineteenth century as both empires competed for influence in Central Asia. The era is made alive as I raced through Peter Hopkirk’s swashbuckling history, The Great Game. For glory and empire, my thumb was at the ready

I began in Osh by staking out the transport firms, finding just one truck going ‘soon’ and manned by a hyperactive little Russian who cheerfully demanded one hundred dollars for the entire journey. It was too early for highway robbery – so after some friendly banter I resolved to hit the bazaar in the morning. That meant another pleasant evening spent with fellow travelers in a bizarre chaikhana where we watched Kyrgyz totter the streets on bowed and drunken legs while talking to a melancholy left-behind Russian, and drank with a sozzled plastic map dealer, who had disappeared New Zealand. The nomadic Kyrgyz were pushed south as the Mongol Empire expanded and they speak a Turkic language – though in appearance they have a healthy smattering of Genghiz’ genes. Their Islam is lightly held in comparison with their more religious neighbours, the Uzbeks.Vodka and horsemanship seem to have as great an attraction.

At the bazaar’s jeep stand in the morning, the first leg to the border town of Sary Tash proved easy enough, though we were delayed by passenger defections and the ensuing co-operative crisis. By dusk, I was at the only intersection in this two-horse town when Khoroz appeared and told me of his ‘hotel’. The warmth of the kitchen was intoxicating and grandchildren set out the quilts for my bed.

We softened bread with mutton soup, drank sweet tea and watched the movie Cliffhanger via satellite, so badly dubbed into Russian that I think Sly Stallone was making sense. Perfect. Next day the old buccaneer Khoroz gave me a terrible rate for my ten dollar bill, and pocketed the change. He offered a ride to the Pamir turn off, and when he asked for petrol money I matched his business acumen by telling him I had nothing. He barked out a laugh, pirate to pirate, and gunned the Volga down the gravel. In the daylight the view from Sary Tash was stunning – the Pamir is laid out East to West in majestic and snowy perfection, like some Hollywood backdrop.

Metal containers at the turn-off housed a narcotics checkpoint, manned by cheerful Krygyz in a range of uniforms. The premise is that eighty percent of Afghanistan’s illicit crop is routed through Tajikistan toward Russia and Europe, but this seemed to be more of an official bribing station, as no vehicle was actually being checked. A truck ghosted by after only an hour and I recognized the shifty driver from Osh. He had killed the engine to slip through the sleepy narco-cordon, but the officers have a visitor with a car and duly gave chase. Upon returning to pay the road-tax, the Kyrgyz business woman who had hired the truck was livid. Meanwhile we embarked upon a side deal for a berth to Murgab and I was hastened into the cab. When the good lady of commerce espied me encroaching upon her ample seat all hell broke loose in Russian and Krygyz – and the dodgy truckie turfed me out with an apologetic shrug.

After only forty minutes another old Russian truck – and I began thinking that the fierce reputation here is nothing but an old hitcher’s tale. This time there were only two in the cab on a bench seat made for three, but there were packages and the incumbents would not move. And so I sat in the weak sun and continued with The Great Game – in more ways than one. One by one the officers interviewed me as to my provenance, profession and marital status and soon have me invited into the shacks for tea, and then lunch.

The hours draggaed by and not a single vehicle until six when the sun had given way to a sharp wind and flurries of fine snow, and no-one in their right mind was heading up to the border. Using my discretionary better parts, I was soon back in the warmth of Khoroz’ kitchen – drinking tea and laughing. Tonight we have Jean-Claude van Damm, in fact two for the price of one as he is playing twin brothers, one simple and one evil – perfect.

The following morning Sary Tash was covered in fine snow and columns of white smoke plume from every house, the burning dung acrid in the still air. Old Khoroz was not falling for the same trick again, so I marched toward the turn off until a Chinese trucker taking the low road to the Tajik capital stopped in a swirl of dust and air-brakes. Back at the turn-off the game began again, though this time I was armoured with full thermals and intended to fight harder for a seat. The good men of narco-control were up and brushing their teeth, and I delivered cheap cigarettes to curry more favour. At first nothing – and then three cars, all of them headed to Murgab, the central town of the East Pamir. The first was informed that they would be including me in the bill of lading, and I was happily ensconced in the back seat of an ex-Danish Audi with five smiling Kyrgyz spanning three generations, the youngest staring intently at my hair.

And so we set off with the two other cars ahead breaking the crust of snow. We climbed slowly, weaving to avoid the potholes and baking with the heater on and sun bright on the windows. The border was a chance to pat dogs and share biscuits with my new family, then onwards and upwards to the Tajik border post with their bored soldiers and dogs. As we ascended again to 4700m, the mountains were close on all side – then we were through the Northern range and dropped down to a lake plateau.

The hardy Kyrgyz stopped every hour or so to chip ice from our wheel arches and I marvelled at how an ordinary car can cope if driven carefully. Lunch was at the only town on the shores of Lake Karakol, pristine amidst the snow and unfrozen due to its high salt content. We pushed on and drove into the dusk, passing three cars headed the other way, one of them a broken Lada with four cold and lonely men hoping for something to happen. By night I didn’t notice we were in Murgab, because there is no electricity on certain days. But we stopped and asked after a hotel and a drunken man and his son hopped in to direct. I was eventually shown a room complete with a despondent British cyclist I had met weeks ago, though poor Tim was now a biker without a bike. He had been forced to leave it late at night with a broken down jeep and a driver for whom he has no name or number. Tim was running out of time with both the weather and his visa, and my arrival brought welcome relief – and a dinner greased with celebratory and consolatory vodka.

The next day a fellow lodger promised me a ride to Khorog, but never returned. Another guest promised to pick me up at one, but again didn’t show. So Tim took me down to the motley collection of sea containers that was the bazaar, and we talked to his familiars. Murgab was a collection of single story mud brick houses, each with a courtyard, dogs and bundled children. Due to Soviet whimsy, the population is actually mostly Kyrgyz, while the remaining quarter are Pamiri Tajik. The Pamiris are from different stock, probably east Iranian, and are Ismailis, a Shia sect for whom the Aga Khan is the spiritual leader. Just off the bazaar I found myself praying with any sect anywhere, sitting in a tiny Chinese mini-van waiting to fill with passengers. Four hours later the sun was low in the sky and so were my spirits. In an hour it would be dark and we were just starting out. I told the driver I can’t go – I’ve waited too long to travel the Pamir at night. Meanwhile Tim’s bike had turned up and that night’s vodka was the inverse of the night previous. .

The next morning after a few dusty hours in the bazaar I procured a seat in a Uaz, the doughty Russian van much prized in the mountains, and left poor Tim bargaining to get north to Kyrgyzstan with the two days left on his visa. Before leaving we loaded in a slaughtered yak and its salesman, and whoever else we met upon the way. The van-owner was PamirBek, who turned out to have good English from years of guiding trekkers and hunters and he happily provided commentary.

But silence was also welcome, because the Pamir highway was breath-taking. The plateau valleys continued in autumnal shades, lower and drier than before, walled up in the distance with bluff peaks that would be at home in the Rockies. We were descending slowly, following a river that would eventually join with others to define the frontier with Afghanistan. PamirBek couldn’t help playing guide and we stopped at a roadside inn for fried fish and then soaked in natural hot springs toward dusk. And eventually we were there, in the handsome Pamiri capital of Khorog, perched in a small alpine bowl at the confluence of two mountain rivers, though I didn’t discover this till morning. In five days I had traveled just seven hundred kilometers, and every minute a trip.

ENDS

by Lyndon Hood

Rather than paying for a real logo, the Auckland Transition Agency has decided to run a public competition, complete with an open brief and a panel of unqualified judges. The idea is, this will be as awesome as the NZ Herald’s flag designs.

Debate is raging as to whether this is a surprisingly stupid plan or merely the kind of fundamental mistake you’d expect from a budding autocracy.

They have requested something “distinctive, exciting and dynamic”:

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… although admittedly they also want it to reflect the nature of the newly-united city. This is trickier than it sounds, because you can’t really make a graphic of a giant clusterf#%k that’s appropriate for public consumption.

So I decided to concentrate on depicting the spirit in which the Auckland super city and its council were created.

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Unfortunately they say they’re not after a coat of arms or crest, because I was rather pleased with this:

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The blazon shows the National Party’s legendary sense of righteous indignation – a creature famously ready to savage anyone who would undermine democracy, pouncing at the first sign of anyone allowing unelected government lackeys to control our lives, at the slightest abuse of process, or at any attempt to use political deals to rush through laws that ignore the objections of everyday New Zealanders.

It is depicted as confused and angry, because it hasn’t been let off its leash and it doesn’t understand why.

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Some, who object to councils spending money on logos at all, have suggested the following:

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However, it’s worth noting that under recent court rulings this could breach the copyrights both of the estate of composer John Cage and of author Stephenie Meyer.

The only other selection criteria that stuck in my mind was that the proposed logo had to be suitable for rubbish bags. I apologise to my competitors if this sews up the competition, but my final offering is this:

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ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

CD reviews tend to be consumer guides, a few paragraphs that boil the music down to a buy/don’t buy advisory note. At The Complicatist, we’re pointed in the opposite direction. Each month, this column will be featuring a song or artist or genre that’s as complicated as anyone cares to make it be.

In the 1950s, cover versions enabled white people (I’m talking about you, Pat Boone) to cash in on black music without scaring the public. These days though, an artfully chosen cover version can usefully demonstrate the depth of your musical knowledge, and your sense of flair. By general agreement, the Jimi Hendrix version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is the greatest cover version of all time, partly because it so completely topped the Bob Dylan original, a feat the composer has generously acknowledged. “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this.” Dylan wrote in the booklet for his Biograph album, “ and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”

Like self esteem, originality can be an over-rated virtue. In the great French movie The Mother and the Whore, one character makes the case that cover versions are actually better than the original, because their fakeness is more genuine. I’ve decided to kick off this column with three of the better cover versions in recent memory

1. This Must be the Place (Naïve Melody) by Miles Fisher This has been out for over a year now, but in case you haven’t come across it, Fisher pulls off two cover versions at once here. He sings the Talking Heads classic while acting out some of Christian Bale’s nastier moments from the movie American Psycho…and in the process, puts a new spin on David Byrne’s wacky old “Psycho Killer’ persona. At the same time, he manages to insert a self-referential plug for this “Miles Fisher” guy’s great new EP. Who said guys can’t multi-task?

2. Dream Lover by the Dust Bunnies Down the years, dozens of people have liked Bobby Darin’s 1950s hit well enough to have a crack at recording it, but this version succeeds by focusing on the ‘Dream’ side of the lyric… In doing so, it treats the lover not as a teenage burst of wishful thinking, but as something out of a David Lynch nightmare, howling through the night after the singer …”I want a dream lover/so I don’t have to dream alone..” Not alone, never again and not entirely in a good way.

The Dust Bunnies are essentially a few pals of long time Atlanta scene-maker Adam Bruneau, who has made videos for Deerhunter. Bruneau numbers among his side projects a band called Kiwis, aka Kiwis of the South Pacific. The referential traffic on this track is also pretty dense. Yes, this Dust Bunnies version begins with the thunderclap drumbeat opening to “ Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, itself recycled famously as the intro to “ Just Like Honey” by Jesus and Mary Chain. To complete the circle, the closest similarity to this arrangement of ‘Dream Lover’ is this one from 1964 by the Paris Sisters…..which was produced by Phil Spector, and featured in the Kustom Kar Kommandos experimental film by Kenneth Anger, which can be seen in all of its refreshingly brief buffed cars/buffed boys entirety right here.

Finally, the Dust Bunnies have turned their hand to a few other versions of this same trick. Their droning, narcoticised take on Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ can be found here.

For a similarly strung out, string-laden version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ the link is here.

3. ‘Gloria’ by Robb London This deserves a mention for doing a reasonable job of the virtually impossible. At this late stage, I wouldn’t have thought anyone could take Van Morrison’s r & b chestnut ‘Gloria’ ( G-L-O-R-I-A) and re-imagine it. Yet this version enable us to hear the song in a new and (mostly) welcome light. Hurrah.

Live by the anthem, die by the anthem. As bands from U2 to Arcade Fire have found to their cost, it does get difficult to keep on delivering inspirational arena-sized anthems without becoming a self parody. The challenge for the new Arcade Fire album due mid year will be to resolve the anthem issue without being bombastic, and committing all the other busily self-important sins of U2-ness.

Talking of which…while Regine Chassagne’s charity work for her homeland Haiti has been admirable, the point in her recent editorial in the British Observer newspaper where she used earthquake metaphors to describe her own anguish (“Since Haiti shook and crumbled, I feel as if something has collapsed over my head, too. Miles away, somehow, I’m trapped in this nightmare. My heart is crushed..) was worthy of Bono himself.

Kurt Vile, whose Childish Prodigy was one of the more celebrated albums of 2009, is not an anthem guy at all. True, he gives props to older anthem-mongers like Tom Petty and Bob Seger, but Vile’s music is so swathed in reverb and slap delay that it doesn’t seem to be playing in the same room, let alone urging anyone to wave their lighters. Vile’s songs circle and repeat and echo like introspective ideas racketing around inside your head for a while, before they just peter out, and stop. Like Beck in the mid 1990s –who had a similar command of blues//folk/ soul tropes – he seems to have ended up in the spotlight somehow, by taking a wrong turn at the bar. Like Will Oldham, Vile projects a conscious form of primitive artlessness, and that’s a good thing. None of us wandered in from Appalachia, either.

Kurt Vile (his real name) is a 29 year old former skatepunk, one of ten siblings. He comes from Philadelphia, where his dad Charlie Vile still drives trains for the local metro system. Apparently, neither of his parents had heard of that Kurt Weill guy from the 1930s, who wrote ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Pirate Jenny.’

This time last year, the New York Times usefully contrasted Vile with the strand of current music known for cranking up the artifice and orchestration. Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, and Of Montreal have all gone down that self conscious route, mostly with good results. Vile has more in common with the punkier likes of No Age, the late Jay Reatard and ultimately ( to go right back to the drone source) with Velvet Underground. Vile has his VU moments, but he also taps into even older music traditions – much of them learned from his father’s large collection of bluegrass, country and blues recordings.

Not that he’s really a neo-folkie thumbing through his Harry Smith Anthology and looking for a direction home. The songs go round in circles, but keep adding layers as they go. From the NYT article :

“I don’t use computers at all,” he said, adding that music made on hard drives “loses all character whatsoever, all these nuances, slight mistakes you realize weren’t mistakes at all. You’re sitting at a keyboard editing out anything beautiful that happens.”

But…Vile is an exacting tinkerer. “I like adding layers to a song,” he said, “putting the mike a certain way, putting some weird delay or some weird phaser on the guitar. It’s kind of like Brian Eno, on a much less skilled scale.” After [recording] a song, typically using a digital 8-track at home or a 16-track reel-to-reel at a friend’s studio, he will drive around blasting it in his wife’s Toyota Echo, making mental notes about what to tweak. “I’ve pretty much blown out the speakers in there,” he said, grinning.

In other words, a lot of effort goes into sounding so effortless. “What I like about artists like Kurt is that they work with a four-track or whatever, but they think about the production of their songs in really ambitious ways, figuring out how to produce as if there weren’t those boundaries,” said Brian [Geologist] Weitz, of Animal Collective. Several years ago, Weitz said, he weeded a Kurt Vile CD-R from a pile of demos sent to his band by hopeful young musicians: “It was one of two CDs I didn’t throw out. I remember thinking it sounded really unique and personal.”

The Childish Prodigy album on Matador is Vile’s first widely available album, but his two earlier albums Constant Hitmaker and God Is Saying This to You are also well worth checking out. One of those early songs called “Red Apples” consists pretty much of the same repeated phrase “ Two packs of red apples, for the long ride home/ that’ll be just fine..’ Here’s a link to a downloadable January 16, 2010 concert by Vile at the Bowery in New York: http://www.nyctaper.com/?p=2318.

Previously, Vile drove a forklift for a air-freight company in Boston, to help support through college the woman now his wife, while she studied for a graduate degree in English. Until last July, he drove another forklift, for a brewing company in his old home town. He’s genuine blue collar, with the work ethic to match.

‘I’m not a slacker,” Vile saud in one interview.“I’ve worked hard my whole life. But I’m not going to be a total sucker, and put all my energy into someone else’s job.’ To quote another much cover-versioned song, that just gets you another day older, and deeper in debt.

ENDS