The Internaut
She'll be right
by Deborah Hill Cone
What others are saying about us during our 15 minutes of fame.
Are we out of step with the rest of the world? Reason magazine editor Jesse Walker says New Zealand is the single country that responded to the financial crisis by moving to the right, not the left. It was said with an approving nod, I think. Then again, Walker may not realise how centrist John Key’s Nats are.
Walker’s item provoked a babble of revealing comments – mostly off-colour sheep jokes and references to the All Blacks’ “intimidation dance”. Read it if you need a reminder of the humble wee nook New Zealand roosts in.
Even Walker said he was tickled at how the Times identified New Zealand as “known internationally for its pristine environment and as the backdrop to the Lord of the Rings movies”. Cheers, so would that be the Times from Great Britain, known internationally for its royal family and as the backdrop to Notting Hill?
Reader Matthew Hogan remembered us for The Piano. “New Zealand made great strides in the advancing of vastly overpraised, excruciatingly boring, surreal female-oriented drama, overlaid with the unmitigated horror of gratuitous semi-naked Harvey Keitel.” Steady on, mate.
Another reader, Rainer Thiel, said he was disappointed about the change of government because he wanted to return to live in New Zealand and the left-leaning coalition was one of the main attractions.
“I hear your pain. But if you go now for a few months, I don’t think the concentration camps and summary executions will have started. Re-education will probably not be in full swing until around April,” a sarky Australian reader shot back.
Love-her-or-hate-her conservative columnist conservative columnist Melanie Phillips is not joining the collective media swoon over the election of Barack Obama, which reminds her of the hysteria over Tony Blair’s election in 1997. “Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip and relaxed in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the Paleolithic Era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord.”
But Phillips says Blair’s attempt to introduce “progressive” values to the UK ended up creating a profoundly illiberal culture where no dissent was permitted. Blair comes from the same ideological territory as William Ayers, who helped Obama start his campaign, Phillips says. But she could just be lumping all evil lefties in together.
Shades of Naomi Lange. Pulitzer-Prize-winning fashion commentator Robin Givhan has suggested Michelle Obama should ditch the cardy. Givhan, an African-American, gave the Obama family’s red and black matchy-matchy style on election night the thumbs up. “The colour matching declares loudly: We are a family. We are in this together.” She liked Obama’s Narciso Rodriguez dress but not the knitted cover-up. Michelle Obama “is more substantial than a starlet and more pragmatic than a socialite. And with her proven attention to aesthetics – and a few less cardigans – her photographs can deliver an articulate and powerful message.”
But not everyone was so keen on the frock. Ruth La Ferla on the New York Times politics blog said some of the most heated conversations the morning after the election centred on the outfit. “I voted for Obama, but I didn’t vote for that dress,” one voter said. Arts critic Jeff Weinstein was another who found the speckled pattern distracting. “It was definitely a lava lamp look,” he said, “with a volcanic nod to her hubby’s Hawaii.”
In case you haven’t had enough financial crisis hyperbole, economic historian economic historian Niall Ferguson writes in Vanity Fair that this year we have witnessed the death of a planet, which he calls Planet Finance. In a scholarly 17-page think piece, Ferguson traces the financial collapse back to the development of the idea that every punter ought to own a house. But he says it is derivatives – “financial weapons of mass destruction” – that make the crisis both unique and unfathomable in its ramifications.
“On Planet Finance, it may have made sense to borrow billions of dollars to finance a massive speculation on the future prices of American houses and then to erect on the back of this trade a vast inverted pyramid of incomprehensible securities and derivatives. But back here on Planet Earth, it suddenly seems like an extra-ordinary popular delusion.”
