Inequality and its consequences

It is always a pleasure to read in the NZ Listener the column by Rachel Morris, a New Zealander who is executive editor of Huffington Post Highline. Being an expat, she can see things that are not obvious to those of us living inside the national cocoon. We, that is, the New Zealand media, talk about rising house prices, people sleeping in garages or in their cars, child poverty and deprivation on a scale that New Zealanders have not experienced perhaps since the depression of the 1930s. We all, including politicians, agreed that this is terrible, unacceptable, and then file the problem as too big to tackle. Yet it is not the size of the problem but the political will to solve it that is the issue. The consequence of rising house prices is that wealth is shifted from those working for wages to those who have capital which they can invest in property. The inequality that this leads to changes the way people live, both individually and collectively. There are the "haves" and the "have nots" and their lives diverge further and further, with empathy shrinking across the divide. In the US both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into this sense of disengagement, and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn and some of his less savoury allies also give political voice to this discontent. In New Zealand, however, there is no appetite for radical responses to the obvious social problems besetting New Zealand society. The housing crisis is eminently soluble. The first Labour government faced an acute housing shortage after the war and they set about building thousands of  state houses, borrowed money, worked with the builder, James Fletcher, and created whole new suburbs that seemed like workingman's paradises. The houses were well designed, strongly built, didn't leak, and were developed around attractive public spaces and communal facilities. If the government would build a few thousand houses, making use of cheap credit available to it, the housing shortage would be solved and the escalating housing prices would come to a halt. Some investors would get burned, the value of their investments would decline and in some cases they would lose their equity. The banks would panic about bad loans. But people, "hard-working New Zealanders", people working for wages, would have roofs over their heads. If there would be a Labour Party in New Zealand that values its heritage, the heritage of Michael Joseph Savage, it would advocate such a radical measure which would do much to alleviate poverty and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. But this would mean trampling on libertarian sacred cows. It would look to solutions to social problems to the government, not to private enterprise and the market. It would accept that the government and bureaucracy can deliver needed social outcomes more efficiently than private enterprise. The NZ Labour Party lacks the gumption of a Bernie Sanders and risk turning against the prevailing libertarian political canon. 

Salinger and Catcher in the Rye

Last week I watched a documentary about J. D. Salinger. He was one of the generation of young American  writers who went to war and returned traumatised to a greater or lesser degree. Some wrote straight war stories, largely based on their own experiences, Irwin Shaw's Young Lions, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny, Norman Mailer's Naked and the dead. Some wrote books reflecting their disenchantment with the war as a great patriotic effort, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, but Salinger expressed his disenchantment differently. in Catcher in the Rye he got inside the head of a rich, spoiled seventeen year old student, a dropout from a prestigous school, who saw the world as one inhabited by phonies. Ambition, success were meaningless for him. He did not want to emulate his brother, a successful writer, who sold out to Hollywood, or his father, a successful lawyer. He could only relate to his younger sister, the embodiment of childish innocence. Generations of teenagers identifies with Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye. Mark Chapman shot John Lennon, then proceeded to read Catcher in the Rye. John Hickley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan had this book with him. Holden Caulfield and I were about the same age when the book was published in 1951 and I must have read the book in my time. I certainly read Franny and Zooey in the New Yorker some years later and I was interested in Salinger as a writer. I appreciated a kind of perfection in his writing. The characters come alive. It is not the story, not the action that matters but the people who inhabit the book. Catcher in the Rye takes place over two days, and nothing much happens, but the narrative is so complete, it would not be possible to add anything to it. Yet I, as a seventeen year old, or perhaps a few years older when I read the book, could not identify with Holden Caulfield. To me he was a spoiled rich brat who had nothing to complain about, he should have got his act together. The world was threatened by nuclear war, the poor of the world ware oppressed by the rich, wars were waged in parts of the world for the aggrandisement of the capitalist  or the communist system and my contemporaries were slaughtered in Malaya, Korea, later in Vietnam. Leaders chosen by their people were assassinated in the Congo, in Iran, in Chile.The challenge for me and my generation was to make the world a better, juster place, Protesting about wars, protesting about injustice was OK, but sulking, withdrawing from the world, killing John Lennon, did not help to make the world and its future any better.

Polish orphans of Pahiatua

There was an article in today's newspaper, taken from The Times about the Brexit debate. It was written by the eminent journalist and political activist Daniel Finkelstein, Baron Finkelstein. He argues that Europe's battle scars should bring Europeans together, an argument to keep Britain in Europe. His grandparents came from Lviv, now Ukraine, then Poland. His grandfather fought in Anders' Army, the Polish army recruited from the Polish exiles in the Soviet Union, which fought by the side of the Russians. The family was transported, from their place of exile in Siberia to Iran together with 77,000 soldiers, and 43,000 civilians, which included 20,000 children [Story of the Polish Children of Pahiatua]. Some of these children left behind in Iran needed a place to go to. The Polish Government in London appealed to the League of Nations for help in finding temporary refuge for the Polish civilians and children. Mrs. Fraser, wife of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, met socially someone from the Polish Government and was told of the plight of these children and persuaded her husband to bend New Zealand's immigration policy and accept, in the end 733 children and 102 caregivers, which included a priest. The children were Catholic. Although there were many Jewish civilians, including children, like Daniel Finkelstein's grandparents among the Polish refugees in Iran, they didn't make it to New Zealand. The New Zealand government's policy was that no Jews were allowed to come. Jews were perceived as hard to assimilate, even though Jews had lived here since before colonization, before 1840 and had a record of assimilation better than most, many became exemplary citizens and leading public figure. The government was also concerned that by allowing more Jews to enter the country more Jews would bring with them more anti-Semitism. When after the war New Zealand accepted refugees from the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe, many of whom harboured, no doubt, anti-Semitic sentiments, no such concern was evident. Polish Jewish children, stranded in Iran were not allowed to come to New Zealand. They were diverted to Palestine. Three years later New Zealand was one of the first counties in the UN to vote for the establishment of Israel in 1947. It suited the New Zealand Government to wash its hands of the world wide Jewish refugee problem.  They wished it on the Arabs.

The changed world of publishing

Pam, John Hall's wife, is terminally ill. I have John and Pam on my mind a lot and think of our time together with John on the road, selling books, representing our various publishers when he first arrived in New Zealand in the 1960s. That world of publishing and bookselling is long gone. The publishers I represented, the Oxford University Press and Faber and Faber are still around, though much changed, but the ones that John represented, Harrap, Jonathan Cape, and others, if around in name, are only imprints of large multimedia enterprises that had acquired them. The 1960s were colourful times of bookselling and publishing. Every country town had a bookshop, and some of them were outstanding bookshops with wide selection of books, run by well-read enthusiastic book people; Marion Middlemiss in Marton, a town of only a few thousand people, Lewis Cathew in Fielding and his brother, Alan, in Pahiatua, Alex Hedley in Masterton, Dave Avery in New Plymouth, Noeli Mellett in Blenheim, not to mention the large bookshops, outstanding by world standards, Bennetts in Palmerston North and Paul's in Hamilton. And there were the great, scholarly booksellers, Roy Parsons, Blackwood Paul, Bob Goodman, Gordon Tait, whom you addressed with deference feeling ignoramuses in their company. The publishers' representatives were also a colourful lot. For some reason I thought of Johnny Cochrane with who I spent an evening at the Criterion Hotel in New Plymouth in the company of Ralph Gooderidge and John Elphick. Mr. Elphick and Mr. Gooderidge, never John and Ralph, always traveled together and were known in the trade as the 'undertakers' or the 'heavenly twins' because Ralph Gooderidge, representing Oxford, sold Bibles. Johnny Cochrane was something else. He represented the educational publishers, Bell, and Arnold, with no light reading in their list. Johnny came over from Australia and traveled around New Zealand following the races while selling his books. He knew every horse, every jockey, and regaled us with stories about horse racing all evening. I, who knew nothing about racing, was captivated. But Johnny Cochrane was by no means the most eccentric or colourful of the publishers' representatives. There was Michael Catt, who represented Cassels and sold the books of Churchill, Nicholas Monsarrat and many best selling authors, who walked into a room and it was like a tornado that arrived, dressed in velvet jacket, sports trousers, every inch the fast talking salesman. In contrast, there was Richard Hollyier, not only representing Cambridge University Press, but also the British Council, every inch the well spoken English gentleman. John Hall added his personality to this colourful gallery. A real Englishman, previously the regional representative of Jonathan Cape in England, he was a willing exile to the colonies. When he arrived he could not get over the wealth of food available, butter as much as he liked, lashings of cream on his scones at the tea rooms where we stopped for morning tea. He brought with him a degree of professionalism and great enthusiasm for the books he sold. He never left a stone unturned or overlooked a book in his catalogue. Poor John became a victim of the conglomeration of publishers. His empire, Bookreps that sold and distributed books for a wide range of publishers was merged with Random House and he, a senior member of the book trade, was out of a job. He continued hawking books to libraries and reminder books to booksellers, but this was not the same as representing some of the most prestigious British publishers, though it might have been more lucrative.

This is what going old is about, you remember the good old days, even if they were not always that good. And you carry the memories of a whole era, John and I. Pam was there as the constant support for John. She also ran a good second-hand bookshop that now faded into the distant memory of the Auckland book scene.

Who writes the history, why, and who funds it?

This week I went to hear Prof. David Ekbladh talk about Battle for the History of World War II. If you are naive enough you believe that history is history, that there are facts that are indisputable, and all you have to do is to dig out these historical facts and bingo! the story presents itself in all its shiny clean narrative. But things are not like that. The victors are always the ones that tell the story. The questions that interested David Ekbladh however, were the  disputes, controversies that went on behind the received narrative. William Langer, head of the department of history at Harvard, was the voice of the progressive view of history. His monumental works, the history of American diplomacy leading up to the Second world War, The Challenge to Isolation (1937-1940) and Undeclared War (1940-1941) argued that the US had no choice, it had to enter the war to confront Fascism. Charles A. Beard, an equally distinguished historian argued that the US had no business getting involved in a fight among Europeans, their conflicts were their problems. Yet the prevailing view as transmitted in textbooks and popular narratives is that of Langer. The dispute between interventionists and isolations is ongoing to this day. Wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan were seen as wars that touch on America's security, yet conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans were considered local conflicts and none of America's business. The conflict in Somalia was too dirty, too unmanageable, and the US walked away from it. The question David Ekbladh raised is 'who is telling the story, why, and who funds the narrative'. Langer was a part of the American progressive establishment, associate of Roosevelt and an influential public figure. His books on prewar diplomacy were published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a quasi government body; Beard, from a Quaker background, became one of the leading proponents of American Non-Interventionism. He argued that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Europe and accused Roosevelt of lying to the American people to go to war. Towards the end of his academic career he became a prominent voice of the 'right'; isolationism and an economic interpretation of history. It is his widely used textbooks on the History of the United States that enabled him to steer an independent course. History in totalitarian states is glorified propaganda, but history in democracies tells the narrative that the establishment at the time sees as reflections of its aims and aspirations. In New Zealand there was the curious case of W. B. Sutch's Quest for Security in New Zealand, which was commissioned by the government as a centennial history of New Zealand, but because it did not present New Zealand as a benign Liberal Pacific paradise, the government refused to publish it, and although it was published by Penguin later, it never prevailed as the historical narrative of New Zealand. The Zionist leftist heroic account of Israel was disputed by Benny Morris and the account of the Arab - Israeli conflict is still a work in progress. Read history and ask who is the storyteller. 

Bigotry 

OK! Australian politics are in disarray; four Prime Ministers in five years, back stabbing the norm, and very weird comments from politicians who ought to know better or should have no place among responsible statesmen. Peter Dutton, Immigration Minister, described refugees as illiterate, innumerate, who would take jobs from Australians or would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare. The fact that many of these refugees are educated, successful middle class people driven out of their countries by social and political upheavals mattered little to the Hon. Peter. Nor did it  enter into his consideration that some of these highly qualified people were prepared to do work that Australians are not prepared to do, cleaning hospitals, caring for the sick, doing menial jobs at minimum wages. The record that refugees come come, by and large, with enterprising spirit and willingness to work hard and create jobs was beside the point. Xenophobia is populist politics, not just in Australia. Read Donald Trump's speeches, Sarah Palin's comments, but also Victor Orban's, the Hungarian Prime Minister's comments on refugees and the stance of many other European politicians. I had a conversation about Brexit, the move for Britain to leave the EU, and was told that it is prompted  by the fear of refugees, who are perceived as criminals misogynists and terrorists. True, established facts, not just hearsay or vague accusations are thin on the ground. The 'sexual terrorists' of Cologne are nameless, vague shadowy figures. Yet people in Britain are scared of these phantom terrorists. They want to leave the EU which underpins Britain's prosperity. And closer to home, though our politics is not as vicious as that of Australia, and our politicians are thought of as more responsible, the race card and xenophobia is not far from the surface. Racial comments resonate with the ignorant, dyed in the wool section of the population, yet very unfortunately, these people also have the vote. Those of us, who believe in a more tolerant, just society, have to go out of our way to fight bigotry.

Egyptian plane falls out of the sky

It is yet to be confirmed that the plane that disappeared over Egyptian air space was a victim of foul play, but the likelihood of that is great. Planes these days don't fall out of the sky. Egypt has some vile enemies. Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that this occurred a day or two after Egypt's President, al-Sisi offered to facilitate a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. The rise of extreme fanatical forces in the Middle East brought some enemies together on the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend. The Islamic State is as much of a threat, if not a greater a threat to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as it is to their common enemy, Israel. Saudi Arabia offered to open an embassy in Israel should the Palestinians and Israel come to a peace agreement. Jordan and Egypt have both been actively cooperating with Israel on security matters for some time. Only the fertile imagination of a George Orwell could have imagine such a reshuffling of former enemies. But the potential implications of such cooperation are huge for the future of the whole world. With the decline of Europe, Russia and the United States, all fraught with great internal divisions, the centre of economic power and possibly culture and civilization could well shift to the Middle East. The region as a whole has enormous natural resources as well as vast human resources, large population, great underdeveloped land mass, and educated and underutilizers middle class, and in the middle of it there is Israel, world leader in innovative technology. All that is needed is a degree of cohesiveness, cooperation and mutual trust, and the Middle East could become the powerhouse of the world.