Among the big boys, New Zealand on the Security Council

After lobbying for ten years, New Zealand was elected to the Security Council by a clear majority. It is not obvious how New Zealand will benefit from this, but I hope that the Security Council will greatly benefit from the presence of New Zealand. There are times when a moderate voice at a divided meeting has a significant influence. The world is no longer divided into two political blocks. The interests of the great powers often overlap, even when they can't agree on a common agenda. Islamic fundamentalism is as much a threat to Russia in Chechnya, to China in Xinjiang, Uygor Autonomous Region as it is to Western interests in the Middle East, not to mention large parts of Africa. New Zealand, a small insignificant nation in terms of global power blocks, is a trading nation, doing business with China as well as America, India, the Arab world as well as Europe and Russia. New Zealand has no history of staking out extreme positions in world politics. And the rest of the world can learn from the way New Zealand is handling its race relations, its benign tolerant acceptance of a diversity of people who settled here. Despite the increasing division between the rich and the poor, irrespective of which party is in government, extreme poverty is unacceptable. The conservative government of John Key considers child poverty as the greatest challenge it faces in its next term in office, not economic growth, wealth generation or GDP. New Zealand is a country with a warm heart. This is something that the others sitting around the table at the Security Council could well learn from.

The generation after

We had a meeting at the Holocaust Centre today to set up a group of children of Holocaust survivors, or rather of anyone whose life was affected by the Holocaust. The meeting was open to anyone, and it was gratifying to see so many people turn up. It was a planning meeting, with no agenda. The aim was to discuss whether there should be such a group, and if so, what purpose of the group should be, what activities the group would have and how often it should meet. All of us in the room had different stories, came from different backgrounds, but there were some common threads that stood out.  All said that their parents did not, would not talk about their Holocaust experiences. Most said that their parents kept quiet about being Jewish, they didn't want their children to be different. Some were quite resentful when their children wanted to find out more of their Jewish roots. And all shared the experience of being children who came from homes that somehow were different, with unexplained Jewish artifacts, and silences, the absences of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Those of us who founded the Holocaust Centre have all turned 80 within the last twelve months. To ensure the future of what we set up we have to look at the relevance of the Holocaust and our programs in years to come. Talking about the impact of the memory of the Holocaust on generations younger than ours and its impact on life in New Zealand will set the future direction of the Holocaust Centre.

How to be unhappy, Richard Nixon and Leonard Bernstein

All sorts of amazing, interesting things happen in my life every day.Yesterday I watched an interview with Allen Shawn talking about his new biography of Leonard Bernstein, and later, in the evening I watched a movie of the play, Frost//Nixon by British playwright, Peter Morgan. The theme common to these two was that late in their lives, both Bernstein and Nixon were deeply disappointed, unhappy men. By everyone else's standards both men were successful beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals.What more can you achieve than to become the President of the United States, or the conductor of the New York Philharmonic and one of the most popular composers of the age. Yet Nixon was so worried about his legacy, so pressured to win under all circumstances, that he let his judgement be clouded and authorized the criminal break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters, which lead to his fall from grace and his resignation as President. Bernstein was concerned that the world would remember him not as a great composer, not included in the canon of great composers of the century, but only as a brilliant conductor (!!!) a fine pianist, and a composer in his spare time. Had Nixon not been so driven by ambition, had he been more at ease with people, more trusting, and less worried by the fear of failure, he would have gone down in history as one of the great Presidents, who ended the Vietnam War that he inherited from his predecessor, bridged the Cold War abyss between the great powers by meeting both Brezhnev and Mao. He had a lot going for him, but he also had a huge monkey on his shoulders, the resentment of the privileged, who never treated him with the sort of respect he believed he deserved, the boy who came from the wrong side of the track who had to foot it with the gilded sons from the right side of the track like the Kennedys. And Lenny Bernstein was the hugely talented Jewish boy among the over achiever goys in Harvard, for whom the whole world was his to conquer. Teaching the Vienna Philharmonic how to play Mahler after the war, composing West Side Story, one of the most popular musicals of the century, would have been more than enough for any other mortal, but not for Lenny. The huge egos of Nixon and Bernstein caused them to be unhappy instead of glowing in their success and treasuring their great achievements.

If only the Arab world would have listened to King Faisal

Last nigh I have watched the the last section of Simon Schama's Story of the Jews. He shows in that the letter Emir Faisal, king of the Arab KIngdom of Syria wrote to Felix Frankfurter, leading American Zionist. In that Faisal said: 'We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together. ... We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.      I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.' If only Arabs of Palestine would have listened to the canny Emir who knew what was best for his people, the whole of the Middle East would have developed differently. The Middle East would now be a prosperous, peaceful part of the world, a powerful economic block with vast oil reserves and a great store of intellectual talent as well as advanced technology. But the myth of nationalism that captured both Arabs and Jews undermined the vision of both Faisal and Weitzman. In an age when after tremendous wars and bloodshed the countries of Europe have largely moved on from nationalism, Jews and Arabs still fight over imagined borders and are deluded by myths about the past. I wonder where the next Faisal, the next leader who puts the self interest of his people ahead of empty words and dreams of revenge will come from.

Baby boomers hang in

The article in the NZ Listener (October 18) tell me that baby boomers don't want to retire. They want to work till they drop dead. And it gives numerous examples of people who are still busy working after their retirement age. Some work because they can't imagine what they would do with their time if they didn't work. Of course, we all want to work and be useful as long as we live. Pottering in the garden, playing golf or bridge as an occupation to fill in time, cultivating a hobby just for the sake of having something to do is too boring. But the downside of being active in old age is that you might find yourself irrelevant, that your frames of reference are no longer meaningful to a generation for whom these are ancient history. I was talking to a friend who celebrated his three-quarters of a century birthday. We first met over fifty years ago, and we both remembered our first conversation. It was about the imminent destruction of the world, the threat posed by the nuclear stand-off  at the time of the Cuban crisis. Whoever remembers now the Cuban crisis? Now people worry about ecological disasters, climate change, pollution, perhaps Islamic fundamentalism, but the threat of a nuclear war has faded. John Kennedy is remembered, if he is remembered at all,as a lover of Marilyn Monroe and numerous other women, but few remember that he faced down Khrushchev, and more important, his own military chiefs, who wanted him to rush into war. There may be merit in drawing on the memories of old people as guides for decision making, but it is important to bear in mind that much of this store of memories, terms of reference that were valid a generation ago, are now past their use by date. Perhaps one of the problems with New Zealand economy and productivity is that the decision makers, the directors of companies are these very same baby boomers who won't let go, won't retire, and run their business as they used to in their time.

Dump unpopular policies, refuse to face issues

So Andrew Little, the new found great white hope of the Labour Party wants to dump unpopular polices such as capital gains tax and the rise in the pension age; anything to win votes, to hell with ideas alternative to the current neo-liberal orthodoxy. Treat voters as ignorant sheep, give them what they want, a little bribe here, a little there, just don't confront the major issues facing the country. The successful Labour politicians of the past never hesitated to introduce radical measures needed at the time, from the welfare legislation of the first Labour government to the radical economic reforms of Roger Douglas, but such radical thinking is not for Andrew Little. He is the face of the new unionism, steady as she goes, but don't ever rock the boat. Are workers any better off with such a policy? Why can't workers working for anything less than the average wage live on their wages? Why do they need government subsidies to live and bring up their children? Why are the unions not crying foul? And why is the Labour Party confortable with this state of affairs? Perhaps David Parker had some sound ideas, presented an economic plan for our time, a plan that would change the financial management of the country, change the objectives and tools of the Reserve Bank, encourage investment in production rather than in speculative property, look at the provision of retirement for those reaching retirement age, without taking from the children of the present. But these policies got lost in the clamour over Dotcom's antics, or those of Whale Oil, or the irrelevant dirt dished out by Nicky Hager. People were not listening, or got lost in the confusion and didn't vote. So chuck out these policies and join the popularity contest, the political beauty parade. With thinking like this the Labour Party, like most formerly socialist parties all over the world, will consign itself to oblivion.

Interaction of history and fiction

With all the interruptions over the last couple of weeks it took me a while to finish reading Zachary Lazar's Pity the Poor Immigrant. I have read James Wood's review of this book in the New Yorker and I was intrigued. The Hutt library had no book by Zachary Lazar, but they got for me from another library Sway Lazar's novel about the early days of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Anita Pallenebrg, and the avant-guard film maker Kenneth Anger. I was captivated. This is how fiction should be written, a mix of the real and the imagined. This is what I would like to do with my own writing. I asked the Hutt Library to order Pity the Poor Immigrant and now I had a chance to read it. Let's face it, it is a convoluted book, lots of characters, lots of stories, all interwoven. But it is also a book of very great depth. One of the main characters is the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. He moved to Israel, claiming the right of return, but Israel was in no need of American gangsters. He was deported to American, where he faced trial and was acquitted. But Lansky was one of the founders of Las Vegas, a city of dreams in the middle of the desert. The parallels with the founding of a Jewish state in the middle of the Palestinian desert to fulfil a Jewish dream is fairly obvious. The novel's fictitious narrator, a New York journalist in Israel writing about the unsolved murder of a fictitious Israeli poet, David Bellen who might have been killed by Palestinians during the Intifada, or by Jewish fundamentalists for his poems about paintings by Ivan Schwebel, a real painter, 'out of place in a foreign context, out of touch with the culture around him but also with the "mother" culture he left behind' (The Report: Abrahamson),whose fictitious series of paintings depicted King David as a contemporary gangster, or he might have been killed by drug dealers who did business with his son, a drug addict, or he might have committed suicide. The link between these is Gila, a survivor of Bergen Belsen, a waitress in the Dan Hotel, who embarked on a liaison with Lansky, and moved to New York to pursue her dream as a fashion designer, where she became the mistress of the father of the narrator. Then there is the informer and guide of the narrator, who is also her indifferent, uncommitted lover damaged by his experiences in the Lebanon  war, who disappears and then returns. This is a very rich thick soup indeed, But complicated as this book is, it is beautifully written with an economy of style reminiscent of Hemingway, and with the power to encapsulate a scene or emoption in a brief apt phrase. Zackary Lazar, though not well known in these parts, is treated as a major contemporary American writer by the American literary establishment, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and is the recipient of a number of awards and grants.