Because We Hate Them?

The subject of imprisonment has few equals for highlighting partisanship. Chris Trotter writing on ‘Prison Smoking Ban Out to Hurt,’ Otago Daily Times 2nd July, made some good points about the comfort value of smoking but went on to suggest that a cigarette has the power to calm “pain, anger and confusion tearing your guts to shreds.” I doubt that even Phillip Morris in the good old days would have gone that far. 

Chris Trotter went on to suggest that we forget for a moment the indisputable evidence of cigarette smoking’s fatal effects and acknowledge the “smoker’ heroic status.” This was  merely a precursor to the point of the article: 

According to Trotter, the ban on cigarettes in prison has nothing to do with health and everything to do with giving us, the law-abiding majority, the opportunity to really hurt prisoners by taking away their last shred of autonomy. In other words, it’s all about spite. There is some truth in this. Spite is one of the common emotional responses to criminal acts, and, I would suggest, a natural one. But a moment or two of thought would suggest that spite is merely a by-product of the no-smoking-in-prison legislation.  

As an ex smoker I have sympathy for prisoners who are going to be deprived of their fags.  They are more vulnerable than the rest of us. When the urge is upon them they cannot divert it by going for a run or having a coffee with a square of chocolate. But I have even more sympathy for the inmates of psychiatric institutions who are going to experience a ban on smoking not next year but today. 

Yet, given the evidence that smoking destroys health, it is hard to reasonably argue against a ban on smoking in hospitals. Hospitals make for an interesting comparison with prisons because we pause when we think of ‘innocent’ inmates of an institution being deprived of the fag that calms their nerves. Cannabis also calms the nerves. This train of thought could be interesting but for the moment I’ll restrict myself to practicality. The ideal solution; separating psychiatric and prison inmates and staff into smoking and non smoking buildings, is not practicable and never will be.

So, we have this new law, which in my view is a pragmatic response, more to do with the fear of litigation than concern about health. We live in an age of litigant’s suing residential institutions and Governments for neglect or abuses perpetrated generations ago. Who would have a better case than a non-smoking prison inmate forced to share a cell with a smoker for years? 

Talking of hate, imagine a bitter ex prisoner lying in a hospital bed right now dying of lung cancer. Never smoked in his life but shared a cell with smokers for years. Would he, I wonder, conclude that we forced him to share a cell with smokers because we hated him.   

A Sop For All Occasions.

You are offered it automatically if one of your family is murdered, or if you are one of a hundred family members sorrowing after a disaster, or one of a thousand students who attend a school where someone has been assaulted. So it follows that the same fashionable solution applies if you lose your job.

   The workers in a Canterbury freezing works were notified today that their factory is closing. But of course, the workers "have been offered counselling." I can imagine it: 

   "Mr Nikora, I understand you have been here for twenty years and, because of your age and the fact that we are in the middle of a depression, you have no hope of getting another job. That is most unfortunate, very sad. How does it make you feel?"

   Whack!

Modern Gods and Religious Beliefs

Those among us concerned at the demise of worship may rest assured that worship is more vibrant in New Zealand than it has ever been. What’s more, the schisms of the past have been trampled underfoot. Such is the reverence of new generations who have no room and less time for time-wasting Bible disputes. What matters is that all agree on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Or, as they are more commonly referred to; the Dow, NZX fifty and the FTSE show. And to hell with the unemployed. When did they ever show a profit?

Sleeping Soundly.

 

 I slept soundly through the war, in my cot unaware   

Of blasted buildings, despair and life-long grief, 

People burning or blown apart, the stray bomb

That crashed through the school-hall roof.

My mother’s father boasted of killing the Boer.

My father’s father was killed on the Somme.

A generation later, though they’d seen it all before, 

Few said no to the second world war.  

 

I don’t know what slaughter my great granddad saw

But he probably fought in someone’s war, he and 

Generations that went before. Men who followed

The call to battle and left their blood to feed the grass 

For a stranger’s grazing cattle.

In the year two thousand and sixty five,   

In Guatemala, the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur, 

I hope this year’s babies can look back and say,

I slept soundly through the war.

The Money or the Glory? I’ll take the...

I always turn to the sports pages of my newspaper first. Perhaps I delay reading about politics, money-making and violent crimes until I have been uplifted by the purity of athletic endeavour. Which just goes to show how I cling to naivety. Because, more and more, the sports pages are more about money than sport.   

   I’m soft on nostalgia too. The excitement and colour of the Commonwealth Games. All those wonderful athletes marching around the track, eyes shining with the pride of representing their country. For, no matter what the competition may hold in store, this is the hour of glory they have dreamed of.

    So much for nostalgia. Probably since the 1974 Games in Christchurch, (which I loved) the Commonwealth Games began losing its lustre. Commerce had come to stay. Glory was all very well but it didn’t have the allure of money in the bank. 

   Last Sunday Morning when I took out the sports section of the Sunday Star Times, I read about Kimberly Smith, a high performance marathon runner and a serious medal prospect. Alas, unlikely to compete in the games because her agent advised against Deli’s pollution and security. 

   Agent! Pollution! How pathetic that the world’s fittest physical specimens are being advised to use this as an excuse for spurning an invitation to the best that India has to offer. Safety is something else. No one in their right mind would encourage athletes to take a chance on terrorists. If only that were the primary reason for turning down the invitation. 

   Smith is quoted as saying, “It’s just really bad timing with the Commonwealth Games being in October when all the marathons start.” The article went on to say Smith would like to run a marathon in New York, Chicago or Berlin. Unlike Deli, which offers only glory, these are lucrative events for top athletes.  

   For all I know Kimberly Smith is wonderfully unselfish and wildly patriotic, and I look forward to following her progress. However, because she is a child of the professional sports era, she would be dumfounded by my disappointment at her reaction. Our generational attitudes to sport cannot be reconciled.  

   Yet my reaction to Carl Hayman, the ex All Black, taking the money from a French club rather than returning to represent New Zealand, was quite different. Perhaps my understanding of professionalism in Rugby is more developed. Players get knocked about then realise they’d better sell their services to the highest bidder before they get laid up. Fair enough. But in the dream time of my youth I never saw rugby players parading on a Commonwealth Games athletic track.

   So, I need to get up with the play. Carl Hayman and Kimberly Smith represent modern sport. So does renowned kayaker Ben Fouhy, who baulked at competing in national trials with lesser mortals because it didn’t suit his programme. It seems he may now be funded by Sport & Recreation New Zealand to run his own programme. This is where everyone else needs to get up with the play. 

   If athletes want to be treated as professionals they should not expect taxpayers to fund their lifestyle. They should pay their own way. Perhaps then the 70 million dollars that Sport & Recreation New Zealand spends could be devoted entirely to genuinely amateur sport.

  

Confessing.

We are witnessing a boom in media-driven public confessions; yet another area for exploitation by reality television. The script format could have been decreed by Mills and Boon: Scandal, relentless pursuit of the sinner, tears, remorse, anguish, forgiveness. To conform to the titillation format the subject matter is usually limited to adultery, embarrassing intoxication, fraud by a respected member of the community, and more adultery. We have not, as far as I know, witnessed attention-seeking sinners pursuing the media but it’s sure to happen soon. I suggest this development has the potential to be tedious in the extreme? 

No doubt the Pope agrees with me. His clergy managed to keep scandal at bay for about a thousand years. It was easy for much of that time because they were in charge. They had the power and the authority of law; they wrote it. But over time the secular voice became more important than the ecclesiastical and now the church is up to its ears defending the indefensible. As is most powerful institutions such as multi-national corporations and governments, secrecy is paramount. But from the start the catholic church had an unfair advantage on its competitors, it enshrined secrecy as a divine right. It’s pretty hard to argue against divine wisdom, sanctity, and the Holy Ghost.

In the modern context a priest’s divine right to keep secret the confession of a child molester is ridiculous. In my most thoughtful moments I am willing to believe the seal of secrecy could also have had a positive function. Perhaps as a means of maintaining professional discipline. Priest are men and men tend to give way to enmity, greed, malice, anger and envy, especially when all powerful, unless they are curbed. However, my experience tells me that the main motivation of the church was to avoid scandal and thus falling numbers and decreasing power. Such is the way of powerful institutions. The difference with the Catholic Church is that secrecy once had the authority of law.

Which is not the case with international corporations or parliaments or even relatively minor financial institutions. But while scandal costs money, careers, and seats in cabinet, silence remains the unwritten rule. So, tedious or not, that’s why we need the attention-seeking sinners.

 

Just wondering.

More and more I wonder about the Israelis. I have lost count of the number of books I have read about the holocaust. Each time shocked anew at the insensitivity of the perpetrators but also acknowledging to myself that, given the right circumstances, every country is capable of acting with the same inhumanity shown by Nazi Germany. Except Israel, surely?

But sadly, no. Over the past decade the rhetoric flowing from Israel about the Palestinians reminds me of apartheid South Africa’s appeals for understanding. You cannot understand us, they used to say, until you have lived here. Well, I did go and live there. What I found was a government and most of the white people in the country with a distorted view of the world. A world shaped in their image and identified by rabid racism, privilege, and hate.  

So now I have something else to wonder about: How remarkable it is that the only people who have not learned from the holocaust are the children of the survivors.