A reckless scheme

Paul Janman and I went to the University of Auckland's School of Architecture to give a guest lecture a couple of months ago. 

In one of the school's shadowy, open-plan buildings we met with Bill McKay and his students, who were together researching the architecture of the Pacific. I showed the students slides of a series of buildings raised by innovative religious and political movements, like the campus of the 'Atenisi Institute founded by Tongan pro-democracy campaigner Futa Helu, the psychedelic shack of the Seleka Club, Tonga's movement of kava drinking artists, and Fanafo, the utopian village that prophet and politician Jimmy Stevens had his followers hack out of the bush of Espiritu Santo in the years before the independence of Vanuatu.

After the lecture, Paul and I talked with McKay and his students. The teacher explained that he and several of his charges were trying to count and catalogue the churches of Tonga. This seemed to me then, and still seems to me know, a recklessly ambitious task.

Tonga is, after all, the most religious nation on earth, and its galaxy of Christian denominations multiply and divide more quickly than a junior maths champion. This month Bill McKay has published an article in Architecture Now that includes descriptions of one of the most remarkable Tongan churches, the Catholic cathedral of Nuku'alofa. It is marvellous to think that the cathedral's creators, who lacked any formal training in architecture, are gaining new admirers.

Winston? Really?

New Zealand has jumped in a time travel hot tub and ended up back in 1996, with Winston Peters holding the balance of power in parliament and retreating to inaccessible pieces of the coastline pursued by journalists and emissaries of the National and Labour parties. Bryce Edwards thinks that Peters might well spurn National, and help Labour take over the Beehive. But should such a prospect please Kiwis who voted for Labour and the Greens?

I haven't had time to make a proper argument, but on twitter I've been taking some potshots (here, here, here, and here, for example) at the notion of a coalition between the left and New Zealand First. Looking at pro-Labour sites like The Standard, though, I see post after post in favour of a deal with Peters' party. It is interesting how the Kiwi left can resolutely condemn Donald Trump, but be so keen to befriend the local politician who most resembles the American leader.

Hobson's Pledge, and Brash's cop-out

Don Brash says that he'll be voting for New Zealand First in the upcoming general election. Brash almost won the 2005 election for the National Party, and led the Act Party during the 2011 contest. These days, though, he's a spokesman for Hobson's Pledge, a group that lobbies against the supposed 'Maorification' of New Zealand. Hobson's Pledge likes Winston Peters' denunciation of Maori 'separatism', and is keen on New Zealand First's promise to abolish the Maori seats in parliament. 

Hobson's Pledge claims to be opposed to all forms of racism, but the group's detractors claim it is home to white supremacists and supporters of conspiracy theories about New Zealand history. At the end of July I posted about the praise for white Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, puerile abuse of Maori, and bizarre claims about a pre-Maori white civilisation that were appearing on the Hobson's Pledge facebook page. 

Don Brash announced his endorsement of New Zealand First in the Franklin E Local, a giveaway magazine with a history of publicising strange conspiracy theories. The E Local thinks whites built a huge and technologically sophisticated society in New Zealand thousands of years ago, before being vanquished by Polynesian latecomers. It also thinks that UFOs regularly visit the earth, and that aliens sit at the head of a number of governments. Last year the magazine ran a fawning interview with David Icke, the former British broadcaster who claims that shape-shifting lizards from a distant planet are colonising our world by impersonating celebrities and politicians. 

As I noted last year, Don Brash has been a long-time contributor to Franklin E Local. 

After I posted about the antics on Hobson's Pledge facebook page, a disillusioned supporter of the group named Chuck Bird responded. Like Don Brash, Bird is opposed to Maori seats in parliament and on local councils and Treaty-based legislation. Unlike Brash, Bird is uncomfortable with the conspiracy theories and white supremacist memes at the Franklin E Local and the Hobson's Pledge facebook page.

Chuck Bird is particularly troubled by the case of Alan Titford, the farmer, anti-Treaty activist, and believer in a pre-Maori white civilisation who was sentenced to twenty-four years in jail in 2013, after being found guilty of arson and rape. For a number of opponents of the 'Maorification' of New Zealand, like the ad man John Ansell and Franklin E Local, Titford is not a criminal, but instead the victim of an intricate conspiracy by the New Zealand state, the National Party, and Maori activists. Chuck Bird fell out with Hobson's Pledge after attempting to debunk the 'Titford was framed' conspiracy theory on the groups' facebook page.

Here's the message Bird sent me: 

I have not been banned by many blogs Facebook ones or other. However, I have been banned from Hobson’s Pledge FB. My offense was for condemning convicted rapist and arsonist, Alan Titford who John Ansell believes was framed by the National government.

I contacted Don about this and thought he would sort this out. However, he says it is not he that looks after the FB page and he would not get involved.

I would have hoped Don would have learned from the Exclusive Brethren. You get judged by the company you keep. HP has a racist that monitors what is said and bans people who criticize anti-Maori racists.

If one looks at the main page of HP there are 12 people listed. I am not sure of there titles. Two are Andy Oakley and Mike Butler. They both believe Titford was framed by the government. This is ridiculous.

I do not know if Don has wasted his own money on this group with many anti-Maori racists but he has spent at lot of time.

If he believes from his discussion with Winston will insist on a binding referendum on the Maori seats he would make a lot more sense for him to directly support NZF and Winston rather than expect others to fund HP adverts.

It would be good if Don would comment.

I think Don's continued lack of comment about this subject says a great deal. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The Rush Pirates

I spent the weekend just passed looking after Aneirin and Lui by myself. By Sunday afternoon, after a series of excursions and games, I felt that a restful movie was in order.

The kids had been dressing up as pirates, so I promised to find them a pirate movie on Youtube. I was horrified, though, when the telly wouldn't respond to the commands of my remote control (I later discovered it was turned off at the wall).

Aneirin was unphased. 'I can make my own movies' he told me. 'I've been studying how.' He dragged a huge bedcloth from a closet and hung it from a high point in the lounge room, so that it resembled a movie screen, arranged the couches in the room so that they faced his screen, and filled the couches with an audience of teddy bears and dinosaurs. Then he made Lui and me sit down too, and announced the premiere of a film called The Rush Pirates.

Aneirin stepped behind the screen, so that we could see only a vague semblance of his shadow, and began to act out a drama between two characters, Good Pirate and Bad Pirate, playing first one character then the other. The two pirates argued about treasure, brandished swords and pistols at one another, and finally exchanged shots. The movie ended when Aneirin fell through the screen and sprawled over the floor. Lui and I applauded The Rush Pirates loudly, and the dinosaurs and bears offered positive reviews.

Aneirin announced that the movie would screen again in a couple of minutes, rushed to the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of tomato sauce. When he burst through the screen for a second time and fell on the floor, his shirt was covered in red liquid. 'Neirin's hurt Daddy', Lui said in alarm. 'Lui you silly' Aneirin muttered, coming to life. 'I'm just pretending. It's a movie.'

I was confused at first by Aneirin's insistence on acting out his movie on the far side of a screen, but then I remembered a few precedents for such a manoeuvre. Didn't the Balinese stage puppet dramas from behind screens? Didn't Pink Floyd sometimes perform behind a wall?

After the third performance of The Rush Pirates Aneirin took a break, and Lui went and sat behind the screen. Aneirin was unimpressed by his little brother's unmoving shadow. 'Lui's making a really boring movie Dad' he said. 'Nothing's happening.' 'It's just a slow movie, that's all' I replied. 'Not all movies are as exciting as The Rush Pirates. There was a guy called Andy Warhol, and he filmed his friend sleeping for hours and hours, and then showed his film to audiences. He called it Sleep.'

'What happened at the end of Andy Warthog's movie?' Aneirin asked. 'I don't know' I said. 'I've never actually watched it. I think that the man who has been sleeping wakes up, and that's the end'. 'That's so boring' Aneirin said. 'If I was in that movie I'd run at the man with a pirate sword and wake him up a whack.'

'I think I would prefer The Rush Pirates to Sleep' I said. 'Are you going to show your movie to Mum, when she comes home, and to Marie'. 'Oh no' Aneirin said. 'My movie's only for boys. It's way too violent for Mum and Marie.'

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Watching Ballard

My father-in-law is an idealist and a humanitarian, and therefore finds the world of 2017 a painful and disappointing place. Alan watches the news, sees carnage in the Middle East, a nuclear standoff in Asia, and a buffoon in the White House, and wonders why humanity, with all its resources and technological prowess, is unable to live in anything resembling peace and harmony. Alan and I often talk about the manifest failures of modern civilisation, and he often asks me what has gone wrong, and I often make some vague and jargon-filled and contradictory reply.

My father-in-law is probably tired of listening to my attempts to explain the world, so I have sent him a link to this superb documentary, which the BBC made about JG Ballard in 2003. Ballard is probably most famous as the author of a series of science fiction stories about the end of the world, and as the man whose autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun inspired a lavish Steven Spielberg film.

As the BBC's doco shows, though, Ballard was also a prophet and a philosopher, who understood the world of late modernity earlier and better than almost anyone else. The BBC's team travels to Shepperton, the unglamorous London suburb where Ballard lived for decades, and interviews him beside a bleak reservoir and in a bar close to Heathrow airport.

The elderly author's commentaries on modernity are interspersed with dramatisations of scenes from some of his most important books: The Drowned World, which imagines melting poles, overflowing oceans, and a tropical Europe where lizards displace humans; Crash, the notorious portrait of a cult whose members get sexual gratification from smashing into each other's cars; Concrete Island, in which a twentieth century Robinson Crusoe finds himself stranded, after his car is wrecked, on a traffic island surrounded by motorways; High Rise, which describes the conversion of the two thousand inhabitants of a forty-storey luxury apartment embrace violence and a hunter gatherer lifestyle; and Super Cannes, which explains how a group of well-paid suits form a gang and begin to attack the vagrants and migrants who live on the streets of their city.

Again and again, Ballard argues that the apparent safety and wealth of modern consumer capitalist society is both ahistorical and unnatural, and can only disguise and create violence. In the most chilling section of the documentary, Ballard points to the 9/11 attacks on America, and notes that the young men who flew planes into buildings came from the shopping malls and suburbs of wealthy countries. Violent zealots, Ballard says, are an inevitable response to the world in which we live. Ballard's vision of the world is pessimistic, but like all great writers he sometimes manages to find a perplexing beauty in the places he condemns, and to make disaster and dysfunction not only vivid but uncomfortably exhilarating.

Ballard does not provide a comprehensive view of the modern world. He has little to tell us about economics, sociology, demographics. Nor does he offer anything like a coherent alternative to the civilisation that both appalls and beguiles him. But as an anthropologist of late capitalist consumer culture he is without rival.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Ta'e mahino

Here's a poem for Tongan Language Week. It is part of a series of verse letters that I wrote to my mate Sio Siasau when he was living and painting in Gotham City last year.

When I turned up to Pah Homestead to give a talk about Sio's art a couple of weeks ago, I attempted to give a Tongan greeting my audience, and was embarrassed to realise how much of the language I'd forgotten. The great Peter Ackroyd said that he cam assimilate masses of information when he's working on a book, but that much of it slips out of his head when he moves on to a another project. Can I claim the same failing?

Sonnet for Sio: 18

Your language is a portable homeland, Sio.
Inside my local Free Wesleyan Church
men must wear beaten bark around their waists,
dresses must waft safely around women's ankles,
and each deacon must carry a white handkerchief
in case the deacon's brow needs drying
halfway through his sermon. No word may begin
or end without a vowel, and choriesters must lift their voices
for the first syllables of 'uma and 'ata
so that no one may mistake a shoulder for a kiss,
or twilight for freedom. We repeat the prayer
to 'Otua, that god who demands
a glottal stop. Last night I dreamed
that I was on my knees, inspecting
the goddess Hikule'o's dress,
lifting its hem as carefully as an umu stone,
and sniffing gratefully
as an air conditioner's breeze blew down on my brow.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Tonga's king gambles

Michael Field has been thinking about Tonga's political crisis. Field hasn't been impressed by the embattled government of 'Akilisi Pohiva, but he doesn't care much for the royals and nobles trying to overthrow Pohiva, either. 

I don't know if Field would agree, but it seems to me that King Tupou VI has gambled a lot by dissolving parliament and calling new elections a year ahead of schedule. Prime Minister Pohiva has accused the king of a coup, and has signalled that he and members of his government will stand for re-election.

It is quite possible that, when they go to the polls, Tongans will feel that they are being asked to choose between king and the prime minister, between monarchy and their democracy. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there seemed to no way to reconcile the near-absolute monarchy with the aspirations of Tonga's pro-democracy movement. The elderly Tupou IV was determined to prevent any erosion of his powers, and so advocates of democracy began to resort to radical actions, like a general strike and a mass demonstration and, eventually, the riot that destroyed so much of Nuku'alofa in 2006.

Tupou VI's brother and predecessor was an eccentric and unpopular man, but he managed to stabilise Tongan society by ending the contradiction between the monarchy and democracy.

By giving away many of his powers and allowing a commoner to become Prime Minister, Tupou V made Tongans feel that they could have both democracy and their monarchy. Now, though, Tupou VI seems to have recreated the dichotomy of the early 2000s.

Tupou VI has also gambled by linking himself so tightly to Tonga's nobles, who are far less popular than the monarchy. Many Tongans are critical of the way a third of the seats in parliament are reserved for nopeli, and of the role that they are allowed to play in the distribution of land and other resources. Yet Tupou VI has let noble Lord Tu'ivakano become the salesman for his attempt to oust 'Akilisi Pohiva.

Pohiva's government has not been very efficient or consistent, and is far from universally popular. But many erstwhile supporters of Pohiva may turn out to vote for him out of a sense that the nobles and the king are trying to strangle Tonga's democracy. And if Pohiva is re-elected in November then the credibility of Tupou VI will be devastated, and the very future of the Tu'i Kanokupolu dynasty that has ruled Tonga since 1852 will be at stake. Would Tupou VI allow a re-elected Pohiva to take office, with all the humiliation that would entail, or would he annul the election and return to the old days of direct rule? Neither option promises stability for Tonga. 

The enemies of Tongan democracy has been manoeuvring for some time. I wrote about what Maikolo Horowitz's calls the kingdom's 'Weimar period' here. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]