Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Reports from a failing system





I rode Auckland's collapsing train system yesterday, from Glen Eden to Newmarket. Fourteen stations, on the western line. Each stop was announced, well in advance, by an electronically distorted voice, a voice so slow, so solemn, that it might have been listing the stations of the cross. I was not riding Auckland's rails to get anywhere. I was riding just to ride. I knew there was trouble - rolling strikes, wildcat walkouts, unseemly arguments - at Britomart Station, the headwaters of Auckland's rail lines. I wanted to feel the system slow down, break down.



The trains and train systems are not supposed to break down. The train was, is, the vehicle of modernity. It taught humans the pleasure of acceleration, the thrill of speed, the shock of deceleration. When we sniff cocaine or inject heroin, we seek the same ecstatic transport as ancestors who bought tickets at King's Cross, St Pancras. Long before television, before movies, trains created moving images: their passengers were the first cinemophiles, watching plotless epics filled with cornfields, smokestacks, cacti, as they rolled across Europe, America.



The stops at each station on the Western line lengthened, until they became pauses, then delays, then extended delays. Shorthanded by their comrades' rolling strikes, crews struggled to inspect tickets, tracks. At each station there were crowds, coagulations.

 

At Newmarket, at five o'clock, I found a huge, glum crowd: yawning schoolboys from the western & southern diaspora of Auckland Grammar, suited commuters punching out anti-union tweets on their phones, Japanese tourists with tiny i pods hanging around their necks like dogtags.



I became preoccupied with one of the fellow stranded, a man I could not quite see. He had a blurred, hairless head, a too-small suit the colour of an old urine stain. He held his suitcase with a shivering, reluctant hand, as if it were the black box from some crashed plane.

By six o'clock I was suddenly desperate, like the old rail riders, for authority, for a blue uniform stamped AUCKLAND TRANSPORT. I wanted a strongman or woman, a leader, someone with a loud hailer & a timetable, someone who could conjure a train, fashion a queue from the chaos.



The escalator to Newmarket's ticket office had stopped in mid-flow, like an Alpine waterfall in winter. A dispensing machine took coins, but held its drinks. Auckland Transport had tried to replace workers with machines, but now machines were rebelling, & joining the strike...

Monday, February 26, 2018

Thiel and sticky ends

Billionaire Peter Thiel's purchasing of New Zealand citizenship has become global news. I've written for The Spinoff about the slavers, anarcho-capitalists, and island-builders who have shared Thiel's dream of making a dystopian utopia in the South Pacific, and who have tended to come to sticky ends. 

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Disarmament

A lot of people on the left are calling for the US to enact strict gun control laws in the aftermath of the terrible shooting at a Florida school. They should ponder some of these photographs.

The history of the US suggests that gun control would be a bad idea for the country's most marginalised groups.

Historically, African Americans have armed themselves for protection against lynchings, racist cops, and pogroms. America's first gun control laws were enacted in the nineteenth century to try to stop freed slaves from acquiring arms. For decades blacks in the south struggled for the right to bear guns, knowing that a rifle was the best defence against the ropes of lynch mobs and the burning crosses of the KKK. The Black Panthers are famous for patrolling American cities with guns, but even the pacifist Martin Luther King kept a huge arsenal of weapons for self-defence.

Not only the civil rights but the trade union movement was built with guns. Early America labor leaders carried guns wherever they went, and coal miners and railway workers fought pitched battles with police and soldiers, as well as armed strikebreakers hired by bosses.
Today African Americans have begun to form armed self-defence squads to defend their neighbourhoods from both out of control cops and criminals. In Dallas, for example, the Huey P Newton Gun Club, named after a famous Black Panther leader, patrols inner city streets. If a ban on assault rifles were enacted, groups like this could be criminalised, just as armed black civil rights groups were once criminalised in the southern states.

American cops will always be heavily armed; so will rednecks and criminals. Gun laws will disarm only vulnerable groups like African Americans. Is it really safe, in Trump's America, for the left to give the state, criminals, and white racists a monopoly on arms? The American left needs to arm, not disarm itself. The Huey P Newton Gun Club should be made into a model, not a target for the state.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Monday, February 19, 2018

Seleka has fallen; Seleka will rise again!

A few months ago a Hollywood star visited a lagoonside shack in Nuku'alofa. Sam Neil wanted to meet members of the Seleka club, whose kava-fuelled paintings and surrealist provocations have made them one of the twenty-first century's significant avant-garde cultural movements. (I have written about the club here, here, and here.)

Poverty, a lack of paint and canvas, and condemnation from Tongan conservatives couldn't stop the artists of the Seleka Club, but Cyclone Gita is another matter. Seleka's legendary clubhouse, with its disco ball and psychedelic murals and cryptic inscriptions, has been levelled. Virginie Dourlet took this sad photo of the ruined clubhouse. But Seleka will rise again. I know I won't be the only Kiwi fundraising for these incredible Tongans over the coming months.

You can keep up-to-date with Seleka's rebuild plans by following Virginie on twitter

Monday, February 12, 2018

Monu'ia Big Mama!


Cyclone Gita nears Tonga tonight, endangering not only people & fale but entire islands. I'm thinking of Ana 'Big Mama' Emberson, who with her husband is custodian of Pangaimotu, an atoll rich in history & poor in size. In 2014 Cyclone Ian turned part of the island to desert. 
Pangaimotu was home to a famous temple where chiefs came to hear kava-drunk priests ventriloquise the gods. Beach rock was quarried for royals' monumental tombs; cuttings can still be seen at low tide. Cook anchored at the island; Pompallier held Tonga's first Catholic mass there.
For all its history, though, Pangaimotu is barely a quarter of a square kilometre in size. It's one of a score of atolls that adorn Nuku'alofa harbour. When storms come the islands list like holed ships. In 2014, Monuafe atoll sunk completely below the waves.
Monu'ia Big Mama!

Sunday, February 04, 2018

Reasons for becoming obsessed by the Banks Islands


I regularly bother my friends with my obsessions. I sent this e mail to Paul Janman recently.

Hi Paul,

let me just take up an aspect of our phone conversation and explain - as brusquely as possible, since you are busy and I am engulfed by kids - why I am fascinated by the Banks Islands.

For obvious reasons, we tend, in New Zealand, to contrast European and Polynesian culture. There was, after all, a confrontation between these cultures in the 19th century, a confrontation which has shaped our society, a confrontation that in many ways continues today. And, to be sure, there are real and significant differences between the cultures of Britain and other northern European countries on the one hand and Aotearoa and Tonga and Samoa and other Polynesian societies on the other: differences in the ownership of land, in attitudes toward history and the environment, in the balance of power between the individual and the collective, and so on.

But I think that if we turn our eyes to Melanesia (a region which I'll define here as extending from the northern half of Vanuatu through the Solomons, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, sans their Polynesian outliers, and continuing into West Papua, Maluku and the eastern fringes of Timor-Leste), then we can get a new perspective on the European-Polynesian dichotomy. We can see that, despite all their differences, there are seminal similarities between the European and Polynesian civilisations.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary ability of both the Polynesian and the British to spread over vast areas of the world and plant and reproduce their culture there. Consider the homogenity of Polynesian civilisation, despite its vast reach: the fact that the language of Rapa Nui in the far east is so closely linked to that of Hawai'i in the far north, Aotearoa in the far south, and Nukuoro in the extreme west. Consider the gods and culture heroes - Maui, Tangaloa, and the rest - who have planted themselves on island after island. Consider the durability of the institution of hereditary chieftainship, in virtually every Polynesian possession. Consider the success of Polynesians in bringing their culture to the southern islands of Vanuatu, to Fiji, and to Kiribati in the last thousand years, despite the different cultures that the peoples of these places once practiced.

Patrick Vinton Kirch argues, of course, that the similarities between the various Polynesian societies can be explained by the fact that those societies had their origins in a single 'ancestral Polynesian culture', which was practiced by a discrete and very finite group of voyagers. And it is true that the Lapita ancestors of Polynesians only arrived in Tonga and Samoa and the other old parts of the civilisation three and a half thousand years ago. Polynesia doesn't, then, have the time depth of, say, Aboriginal Australian civilisation, or most Papuan societies.
But let us consider for a moment the fact that the complicated series of archipelagos we call Vanuatu were only settled three and a half years ago by the same Lapita people who became Polynesians. Where the Polynesians established what is essentially the same culture across their vast domain, the ni-Vanuatu speak, even today, one hundred and thirty mutually incomprehensible languages, and maintain at least as many cultures. In the Banks Islands, in the far north of Vanuatu, this diversity is at its most extreme: ten thousand people speak seventeen languages. In the 19th century they spoke at least thirty-five tongues.

The Lapita culture seems to have been relatively hierarchical, and to have been administered, like its Polynesian descendants, by hereditary chiefs. But in the Banks Islands and in other parts of northern Vanuatu, hereditary chiefs are hard to find, and societies often tend to be acephalous, headless. The hereditary chiefs who dominate southern Vanuatu are the result of Polynesian influence over the last thousand years.

Why have the descendants of the same monolithic Lapita culture developed in such different ways in northern Vanuatu and in Polynesia? What can explain the incredible diversity of the Banks Islands? The linguist Alexandre Francois, who has spent his career documenting the languages of the Banks, argues that there exists in the group a 'powerful social bias towards differentiation and egalitarianism'.

None of the teeming societies of the Banks has been able or willing to impose itself on another; the average islander has been obliged to speak half a dozen tongues. The linguistic and cultural innovations - idiosyncratic pronunciations of words, neologisms, iconoclasms in dance and design - that might be suppressed in other societies are praised in the Banks.

Let's talk about this later!

S