Island Life by David Slack

2007: the year of law and order. Those Saudis don't pamper their criminals. Never mind fourteen convictions for drink-driving before you go to jail, or three strikes and you're out. They just go for the doctor. You pinch someone's purse; you get your hand lopped off.

And guess what? They might be on to something.

Look at this story from last Sunday's paper:

Graeme Burton will be the first new amputee in the prison system in at least 30 years.

I hope I understand the report correctly: not one amputee has been sent to the Big House in this country in thirty years.

Thirty! That would make it 1977. I was still in High School. I couldn't count how many amputees I've met since then, but it seems to me there are plenty of them about. I can't think of even one I didn't like.

So what are we dealing with here? Nature or nurture? Do only well-behaved people encounter the misfortune of losing a limb, or - assuming it sometimes happens to an evil-doer, does the loss of the limb make them well-behaved?

There are the simple practical explanations, to be sure: You can't get caught with your fingers in the till if you don't have any.

Losing a leg is clearly going to slow Burton down. Again from the Sunday Star Times:

Above knee artificial limbs extended up to the person's hip and were almost impossible to run on because of discomfort.
"I think even the slowest cops would be able to catch him," said Mitchell.

Let us now dip our toes in a tributary of the great policy river known as Eugenics. Who's up for a little ambulance at the top of the cliff in our law and order policy? How about an ambulance at the top of the cliff that could lop off a limb or two?

Pre-emptive intervention is what I'm talking about. It could be just a trial, to begin with. You pick out a few really bad buggers, and lop off a hand or a foot or something, and then track them. See if they don't straighten up and fly right.

This could be huge. You could see the crime figures just plummet.

Perhaps I'm a little more permissive in this area of policy - I was considering an elective shortening of a body part of my own last year, after all - but I see an opportunity here and frankly, I have a dream. I see empty feather-bedded prisons in Ngawha, Paremoremo and Mt Crawford, prison doors all swinging in the gentle breeze, the occasional LCD TV tuned to the Sky Arts Channel. Not a crim in sight, just Simon Power and a TV crew traipsing forlornly around the site, rooting around for signs of departmental ineptitude and waste.

I have given this some careful study and by that I mean I have just spent five minutes on Google, and it has been most instructive. Amputees and prison really are like oil and water.

In Phoenix, my browser tells me, Deborah Lynn Quinn is the envy of 26,000 convicted criminals doing time in Arizona prisons.
She was sentenced to a year inside for violating probation on a charge of attempting to sell marijuana, but now the state's top corrections official wants to kick her out of prison and send her home.

Why? Because she is almost entirely disabled. She has no arms, no right leg and a partial left leg, and she needs a battery-powered wheelchair to get around. They can't afford to keep her in there.

The answer is there for a bold politician. And look: if you take it up as a platform, even God will be on your side. Click over to this site where you will find the answer to that question we must all surely have pondered at some point: Why won't God heal amputees?

It's a revelation.

Hey kids, come in here for a minute. I want to tell you something while Mum and your ‘Uncle’ Paul are watching Big Brother. I don’t want to frighten you but we need to talk about something a little bit scary.

Has anyone told you about an 'electoral predator'?

It’s a bit like stranger danger, only for grownups.

There are some very sneaky people out there who want to get something very special and private out of mum and Uncle Paul and all the grownups. Do you know what it is?

No, not exactly, Jayden, but you’re close. It’s called their ‘vote.’

When a man or a woman really likes someone, they go into a private little cubicle and they give their ‘vote’ to that person.

But sometimes they can be tricked into giving them their vote when they never would have done that if they’d known what that person was really like.

Does that sound fair to you?

So if someone tried to trick mum or Uncle Paul into giving them their vote, do you think that would be right?

Well that’s what’s happened to them quite a few times since they became grownups. There was a man called Richard who promised he would save the railway and all the jobs of the people working on the railway, and then do you know what he did when he got their votes? He took all their jobs away.

And there was a man called Jim who told all the nanas and the grandads that if they gave him their vote, he would change the rules so that they weren't made to give back some of their pension.

So they gave their votes to him and do you know what he did? He said “sorry, we don’t have enough money, you’re going have to give it back anyway.”

Well, very soon a whole lot of people just like Jim and Richard are going to be coming back from their holidays and they will be trying to do it again.

There is a lady called ‘Helen’ who says to Mum and Uncle Paul that that they should give their votes to her because she is popular and competent, and that if you were in a lifeboat with her, you would be okay. But mum and Uncle Paul are worried that it might not be safe to go to sleep in her lifeboat if there wasn’t much food left.

And there is a man called ‘John’ who says that even though he lives in a house with three plasmas even bigger than Mum and Paul’s one, he is really just like them, and he likes the footy and the Maoris and the greenies and the ladies who wear overalls.

But your Uncle Paul thinks that maybe John might be pretending, because last week when there was an argument about the war that America is fighting, John said that Helen and her flunky should have pretended that the war was going really well and that it’s a really good idea, even though it isn’t, because we want America to be our friend and let us sell them more hamburgers.

Uncle Paul thinks that ‘John’ might have got the idea from his Australian friend ‘John’ when he visited him last month. The other ‘John’ is really good at tricking people into giving him their votes, and so New Zealand ‘John’ might have got the wrong end of the stick about what people in Australia think, compared to what people in New Zealand think about wars that don’t make sense.

Anyway, your mum and ‘uncle’ are really confused, because they think that ‘Helen’ might not be who she really says she is, and they’re not sure whether ‘John’ is really who he says he is either.

And then there’s another man called ‘Rodney’ who is probably exactly who he says he is, which is really scary, and there’s also one called ‘Winston’ and nobody can really tell who he is pretending to be any more, so it makes it all very confusing for Mum and ‘Uncle’ Paul, and that’s why they drink so much rum and coke and spend so much time changing channels on the TV.

So I want you all to know that something bad might happen if any of these people get to trick Mum and Paul into giving them their vote when they shouldn’t, and I want to give you a very important job.

Do you think you could do a very special job for me?

Good. Well here it is: you need to make some rules around here.

First of all you need to make Mum and Paul agree to keep the computers and the newspapers and the TVs and the radios in the lounge, and not tucked away in their bedroom.

You need to let Mum and Paul know that if anything they hear from ‘John’ or ‘Helen’ or ‘Rodney’ or ‘Winston’ makes them feel a bit yucky, or if they’ve been asked to do something they don’t think they ought to, they can always come to you.

Now, you might feel like you’re snooping, but you’re not. This is for their own safety.

So do you think you can do that?

Good. Now: whose turn is it on the PS3?

When you see an office dweller at their desk, staring into their monitor, shuffling their mouse once in a while, do you think, as I sometimes do: "not much work going on there". This is the prejudice of our time. What you're watching is a brain at work. That, or someone engrossed in an NSFW web site.

There are computers everywhere, but still we are inclined to see them as some kind of interloper, or imposter. Whatever it is you're doing when you're looking at it, you're not doing nearly enough for it to qualify as work. Work puts a sweat circle on the back of your singlet. Work is what harried clerks are paid to do with huge piles of paper. Work is a builder swinging a hammer, and a miner covered in grime. Work might be what people do in the money market, but if you can persuade me why some monkey on a trading desk should earn more in a month than a doctor might earn in a lifetime, go right ahead.

But staring at a screen, inert? How can that possibly be right? (Leave aside your Internet addicts, they're a special tragedy. If you don't believe me consider the case of a friend's sister in law. Sitting, inert, at her monitor in Auckland she found love in Chicago. They were soon emailing and messaging like excited bunnies, and within months he was on a plane, babygirl, with a ring. They married, they flew back to her new home in US and A. Now they both sit inert watching the Internet and chain smoking. Pet canaries die in the fug of it. Money is short and they no longer live in the apartment, but they've found a nice trailer park. It's all true; even the canaries.)

If you are to earn your keep doing this sort of thing, staring at a screen will entail contemplation, analysis, sifting, weighing; God willing, this will yield moments of inspiration and revelation. On these criteria, I claim justification for hours upon hours upon years of sitting, staring, inert.

I have the support of my very patient wife in all of this. She believed that my little online speechwriting site had the prospect of being a modest but viable little home business. No-one was more proud than she when I proved it could be bigger than that. But it also irks her that few people regard it as a "real" business. It neither irks nor surprises me much. I am inured to having people here in the house - friends, family, tradespeople, neighbours, who see me at "work" staring at a screen and occasionally moving a mouse, and thinking to themselves: "not much work going on there".

I wonder if the talented people going about their Space Station tasks 80 miles above Wellington were wondering at all about the people below and contemplating whether or not they were hard at work. It would surely take just the flick of a button to hook up to CIA equipment if they wanted to eavesdrop, but how interesting would it be to an Astronaut to listen in on a Beehive press conference or coffee drinkers at Astoria or Gary at Placemakers taking an order for a shower door hinge? They probably wait till splashdown to catch up on that kind of thing. There's plenty of it on YouTube.

Here's a suggestion for a New Year resolution. Ask yourself: while they were drifting past our strategically benign little corner of the planet, how did whatever it was you were doing down here compare with the things those astronauts were doing up there? If they picked you up on the spy camera, would it have been interesting to them? If they come back in ten years time, might they find you doing the same thing?

In this past year, we managed to generate more than 100 billion dollars worth of gross domestic product. That's a lot of steaks and butter and logs, and a few Karen Walker sunglasses as well. There was even a little rocket science in there. But to a dismally substantial extent we were stuck on the same track on the same battered old LP: buy a house, sell it, buy a house, sell it, buy an extra one, count the gains on paper, spend them like a drunken sailor.

If that's ever going to change, my money is on a few good people sitting in front of the monitors, moving the mouse about. If they're looking for fresh ideas, they could do worse than to click here to see what this guy has to say.

Happy 2007.

Let's climb up here on the grassy knoll and take a look around. David Farrar has a "more conspiracy madness" roll call of recent left wing conspiracy theories here.

I can't disagree with him about the implausibility of any 9/11 Reichstag fire theory, and it seems to me that US senators are as likely as any mortal to succumb to one of the most common causes of death in America. On the other hand, if some unfavourable report about Diebold should emerge one day, I wouldn't be completely flabbergasted.

Oh, those lefties with their tinfoil hats. But look! Over here in John Drinnan's Herald column! Wayne Mapp sees a dastardly plan in the Billboard Blitzkrieg. It's not aesthetics they have in mind. No, these lefty Auckland City Councillors want to emasculate National's hugely successful billboard strategy.

Altogether now, in John McEnroe tones. You cannot be fucking serious.

He must surely be having a bit of a political flourish. Either that, or press releases and interviews don't go well with Christmas egg nog.

It does raise an interesting question, though: can this particular lightning strike twice? Would National necessarily do so well with a billboard campaign next time around? And would they use the same He Said/She Said device again?

That could prove tricky if the new leader wants to continue his tack to the centre. This, for instance, is unlikely to work.

Do ad campaigns get refreshed because the device has lost its effect, or do they change because the ad agency needs to justify a whole new round of invoicing?

Have you had enough of the Tui billboards, I wonder?

If we pull out our copy of The Hollow Men, (and you can guarantee commentators will be doing that all the way to polling day) we learn that John Ansell was the creative talent behind the billboards. If the book is reliable on this matter, it would seem that the quality of Ansell's creative output is a little inconsistent. Some of it sounded to lack the deft touch of the Iwi/Kiwi series.

But this is all assuming that things will just repeat themselves.

It may well be that trader Key is looking to win this thing, policy debate by policy debate. Take forestry and the carbon neutrality goal. If we want a land full of pine trees, should the government not be a little stronger on the carrot and not quite so heavy on the stick? This is their third go at this and it seems once again that they may have mis-cued it. There are gaps there for Key to make strong arguments, and they will resonate, with or without a billboard on Queen Street.

So. Farewell then
Dr Michael Bassett,
'Columnist for the Dominion Post'
Or, for short, 'Compost'.

Tim says you jumped,
But you say he pushed you.

History is a dark, slippery beast
But it will probably
Judge
That you were
Right.