In my View [8]
It has often seemed to me that our political men look at life through a very narrow frame. And unfortunately the rest of us have to act as if this frame were wholly real, even if it is by reaction against it. I do not expect speakers in political debates to quote from the classics. Yet if they did the dimensions of debate might become a little more human.
I am not a fan of Mao Tse Tung. Like all military geniuses he lacks perception of the things that a gun can never do. Yet his poems are well worth reading. When he writes about the hills and rivers of China, I am aware of a mind curiously strong and anarchic that has put itself in fetters for the sake of apparent social good. Nor do I worship at the shrine of Ho Chi Minh. Yet when he writes of a peasant woman cooking grain on a brazier in a mountain village I listen with a non-political respect.
‘Ah,’ somebody may say, ‘that’s understandable. Poets like poets. But we don’t need poets in power in Pig Island. And the men you mention are no less politically bigoted because they are poetical.’
That is not quite the point. When I see one of our political men on TV, and hear him talk endlessly about money as if money were the life-stream of the human race, I feel shame for my country. Are we in fact a large well-oiled business concern that elects its directors once in so many years? Or are we men and women who require even in those who rule us something more than a good grasp on the principles of accountancy?
If a great plague of dullness has the country in its grip, may this not be because our rulers cut themselves to fit their respective party machines? I cannot answer this kind of question with certainty. And some good socialist at my elbow will probably remark drily that King Log is better than King Stork, that men obsessed by money will not have the imagination to become dictators.
Yet we are like a man who has chosen to marry a stupid woman because he thinks she will be too stupid to be unfaithful and will not interfere with his intellectual liberty. Ten years after the wedding day he may realise that the cow he has chosen to live with has heavy hooves and strong horns, and her stupidity makes her use of these all the more unpredictable and formidable.
On the great questions of the world – poverty, racism, coexistence – our democratic rulers have chosen as if by instinct the side that has the biggest guns. Nobody could accuse them of rashly liberal tendencies. And I fear that as in the evolutionary process the huge armoured reptiles with the small brains were wiped out by smaller but more intelligent animals, or simply by climatic changes, so the safety our rulers seek may be their downfall.
Do they rule us or do we rule ourselves? I think they rule us by indirect social conditioning. These cleverly stupid men are experts in handling the machinery of money and status which many of us would not give a fig for. We live in the mental cage they construct for us. Their prejudices become the international diplomacy of our nation. And because of this we are constantly ashamed to be New Zealanders.
1969 (576)