Contemplating the unthinkable

In recent times at least fifty-two percent of the populous were rejoicing at the prospect that the world would soon be run by women. Angela Merkel was well-ensconced in the German powerhouse, Theresa May bowed reverently towards the Queen, took over the reins in Britain and then went on to deliver a scathing but witty admonition to the hapless Jeremy Corbyn in their strangely-configured House of Commons.

Since then however Helen Clark’s light has faded in her bid to be the UN Secretary-General, Mrs Clinton looks to only have a 50/50 chance of taking up residence again with Bill in the White House and Marie Le Pen’s prospects in France are dismal at best.

At time of writing the most unlikely of presidential candidates, Donald J Trump, had just been overwhelmingly well-received at the boisterous Republican Party annual convention, due in good part by the performance of his family, who fortunately look more like their mothers than their father.

Ivanka was especially stunning in both speech content and in the $138 sheath dress she designed herself which was understated, but elegant. To be fair Ivanka would look good in sackcloth.

Ivanka’s handsome husband Jared Kushner is a wealthy businessman in his own right and is one of Mr Trump’s closest advisers.

The good book says ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’ which may be why America’s evangelicals seemed to have endorsed Trump despite Mrs Clinton describing him as ‘a serial philanderer.’

Most of the speakers at the Republican convention concentrated on dissing Mrs Clinton rather than highlighting the salient points of their candidate’s policies and this week it will be the Clinton supporter’s opportunity to take the stage at the Democratic convention to dish the dirt on Mr Trump. There will be plenty of opportunities to berate the controversial billionaire. Much of Trump’s rhetoric is at best exaggeration and in the many instances simply not true.

Despite this, polls show that Americans have less trust in Hillary than they do in “The Donald.” Pundits must be asking just how a country with a population of more than 300 million ended up with these two. Surely a better option would have been Matt Damon versus Clint Eastwood.

And yet Time magazine reluctantly concedes that Trump may be better suited to the politics of the moment. At home and abroad, from the collapse of the traditional Republican Party presidential field to the Brexit vote in the U.K., elites of all kinds - governing, corporate, intellectual - are facing a withering populist backlash. Trump has positioned himself against the history of leaders of traditional experience and expertise. Trump’s admirers think of their man as a 21st Century version of Ronald Reagan - a charismatic leader who had an occasionally ambiguous relationship with facts and details, reported Time.

When asked why he thought he could handle the most politically challenging job in the world Trump surprisingly quoted Lydia Ko. “On the golfing channel they said to her, ‘When you bring your club up, how do you bring it down?’ What’s your thought?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t really have a thought, it’s just something special.’ I’m a bit like Ko, I’m a natural political athlete.”

Well we’ll see; or we won’t.

“When I was a boy I was told that anyone could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.” - Clarence Darrow.

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Comparisons are odious

Back in 1978 I was walking along on my own down a street in San Francisco when I was beckoned by an African-American man who was working under the bonnet of his car on the side of the road. I felt most uncomfortable. I had seen enough TV dramas to know that blacks in America were all criminals and I was certain that I was about to become another victim of a violent crime. I was probably going to be bashed and robbed of my exiguous wallet, or perhaps even kidnapped and my family asked to pay an iniquitous ransom they couldn’t possibly hope to raise.

I was in a catch 22 situation. If I ignored his beckon and ran there is no doubt he would shoot me with a hand gun he was certain to have in his pocket and I would be lying dead on the sidewalk with passers-by doing just that - passing by.

And so I accepted his invitation with fear and trepidation. He asked me if I would sit in the car and turn the motor over so he might determine what was causing it not to go. This was even more terrifying. Was he going to push me over from the driver’s side and drive off and subsequently murder me and bundle me into the trunk?

However I did as I was asked and used the starter motor to turn the engine over without it firing. After a few minutes he came over to the driver’s side, shook my hand through the window and thanked me profusely for my help. He said he would have to get a mechanic to determine what was wrong and after a few minutes of conversation I found him to be a genuinely nice person as of course the vast majority of black Americans are.

I walked back to my hotel feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself. I had fallen for the stereotyping that I suspect still prevails in America today.

“Black Lives Matter” scream the signs as protestors, African-Americans and liberal whites, line the streets of the cities where black citizens have been shot by police recently for seemingly minor misdemeanours.

Retaliations have been swift. A lone African-American sniper gunned down five Dallas policemen and then an ex-marine named Gavin Long, (relation?) who is said to have been eager for black people to take a strong physical stance against mistreatment by “the people that run this country”, shoots two police officers and a sheriff’s deputy in Baton Rouge.

To some extent America is its own worst enemy. A couple of weeks ago I was watching a movie on Sky where the criminals were vile African-Americans torturing their victims in the most hideous manner. There was one “good” black person, part of the law enforcement team who were examining the crime, but this was a flagrant imbalance. If this is nightly fare for the rank and file American then many will still harbour the same fears I had back in 1978.

In an effort to quell the dissent U.S. authorities claimed that the number of citizens killed for the six months ending 30th June of this year is 238 white people, 123 black people 79 Hispanics and 69 others of unknown race.

America has a population of 320 million, ours is 4.5. Last week our own “unarmed” police shot two citizens.

San Francisco is looking safer by the day.

“I hear that melting pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven’t melted.” - Jesse Jackson

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A stifling regulatory environment

Six near-new, well-designed and beautifully-crafted buildings are under scrutiny accused of not meeting the stringent new earthquake codes. This should be ringing alarm bells all around Masterton’s central business district. Throw the solidly-built majestic town hall into the mix and you can’t help but conclude that government regulators have gone quite mad.

One of New Zealand’s biggest ever earthquakes occurred in Masterton in 1942. No one was killed or injured; though masonry falling off the old post office may well have caused casualties had the earthquake occurred during business hours instead of late at night.

Much of the damage was residential; many chimneys were damaged and had to be demolished. The government offered encouragement to those who wanted to strengthen their commercial buildings in the form of a tax rebate to the value of the cost of the strengthening.

The work was delayed given we were in the middle of a world war, however most of the restoration was eventually completed in the decade 1950 to 1960. Prominent among these were the Masterton Municipal Building and the Empire Hotel.

Retired Masterton architect Neil Inkster, in a submission to the Ministry of Business Administration and Employment, noted that some of the strengthened buildings have since been demolished to make way for new modern buildings and in almost all cases the difficulties encountered in the demolition and the cost of the work was far greater than anticipated. Masonry, mainly brick, sandwiched between and keyed and bonded to concrete does not make for easy demolition. This also suggests there is a good measure of strength in such ‘sandwich’ kind of structure.

Under the heading ‘Life is a Lottery’ Mr Inkster reminded the ministry that earthquakes are just one form of disaster. The worst disaster was the airline crash on Mount Erebus where 257 lives were lost, 3 more than the death toll in the Hawkes Bay quake where 254 deaths were recorded.

New Zealand’s earthquake death-toll totals to date are Mount Tarawera where 108 lives were lost in 1889, 254 in Napier/Hastings in 1931 and 185 in Christchurch in 2012. That’s an average of 4.5 a year over 126 years. It may not be a fair comparison, but about 250 people a year are killed on our roads. If the government was to apply the same standards to our roads as they are to our buildings they would all be one way or at the very least have mandatory concrete median barriers on every carriageway.

But Masterton is suffering badly from the overthought regulations. The fence on the corner of Queen and Church streets is an ongoing eyesore and I doubt that the building that was demolished there posed any real threat.

A Real Estate agent told me recently that national retailers will not rent premises that aren’t up to code; hence the town has a lot of empty shops and he warns there are more to come.

One proprietor was told it would be cheaper to demolish his single-storey central Queen Street shop and rebuild rather than strengthen it. Demolition and construction costs would require a rent that simply wouldn’t be attainable in the present retail environment.

Never mind, after the last door closes we can all move to Auckland.

“It is not easy nowadays to remember anything so contrary to all appearances as that officials are the servants of the public; and the official must try not to foster the illusion that it is the other way round” - Sir Ernest Gowers

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Unknown powers and principalities

As a youngster I had two maiden aunts who spoilt me rotten. In the back corner of my grandfather’s vast section there was an oak tree with a hollowed-out trunk where apparently fairies resided. On those rare occasions when I was well-behaved they would suggest I go and talk to these invisible creatures and a treat might magically appear on the windowsill outside the kitchen. On one occasion I espied my aunt Joan placing a chocolate bar on the said windowsill and from then on I knew there were no fairies at the bottom of the garden.

I didn’t let on of course; I milked the situation for as long as I could.

It was the same with Father Christmas. There was inevitably a smart-Alec kid in the primers whose parents were either liberal-minded or just plain mean-spirited who revealed to us that Santa was not real, but for years we still went along with putting a bottle of beer and some edible morsels beside the fireplace on Christmas Eve.

And so it came as a bit of a surprise when I found out last week that the majority of Icelanders believe in the existence of elves.

Iceland, population 320,000, hardly featured on our consciousness until a few months ago when their Prime Minister was forced to resign over revelations exposed in the Panama Papers. (Spurred on by this, New Zealand’s government-owned TV One put together a dubious group of journalists and other hangers-on to try and dig up some dirt on the leader of the government who owns them, with little success to date.)

But then Iceland’s soccer team, managed by a part-time dentist, inexplicably beat the multi-million-dollar England football prima donnas in the prestigious Euro 2016 competition and the startling information about the Icelandic propensity to believe in the paranormal surfaced.

Apparently major road constructions in Iceland are regularly diverted at great cost so not to disturb elves’ resting places and a survey, with a result mirroring Britain’s Brexit poll, confirmed that most Icelanders are convinced the little creatures exist.

Terry Gunnell, a professor at the University of Iceland, said we should not be surprised that the majority (52 per cent) of Icelanders genuinely believe in elves. “This is a land where your house can be destroyed by something you can’t see (earthquakes), where the wind can knock you off your feet, where the smell of sulphur from your tap tells you there is an invisible fire not far below your feet, where the northern lights make the sky the biggest television screen in the world and where hot springs and glaciers talk.”

The conditions described by the learned professor sound remarkably like the New Zealand encompassment so I might have to revisit my childhood. No good looking for the fairies at the bottom of the garden, my grandfather’s oak tree has long since gone, but given that elves are supposed to be Santa’s little helpers, I now want to throttle the kid in the primers (I don’t think his name was Alec) for denying me the lifelong pleasure of knowing Father Christmas was in fact the real deal.

And if it wasn’t for their inclement weather I would probably immigrate to Iceland.

“Christmas was awful when I was a kid, because I believed in Santa Claus. Unfortunately so did my parents” - Charles Viracola

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