Random Play by Graham Reid

A hoax 111 call yesterday had police, emergency services, the Westpac helicopter and army units mobilised and rushed to an area of native bush 30 kilometre west of Dargaville.

The anonymous caller -- who identified himself as Stephen Bainbridge, a 23-year old horticulture student from 27 Lone Pine Rd, New Plymouth -- alleged that a kauri tree had been illegally felled in the remote area of bush. He further demanded his student loan of $12,000 be written off or he would reveal that another kauri might have been felled in August 1972 in the Hokianga.

“The prime minister’s department was immediately informed of the hoax,” said the Commissioner of Police Mr Robert Robertson, “and we were very pleased with the speed at which emergency services and Victim Support groups swung into action.

“Although it was clear from the outset that this was a hoax you cannot take such pranks lightly and so we wanted to present a clear and united front in which all emergency services would act in concert.

“Within two and half hours of the call being received at our call centre in Bluff we had identified which island and which region the caller was referring to, and then it was just a matter of following a series of clues -- like the name of the forest which he gave and the actual track up which the kauri was located -- so we could get our people to the scene.

“It helped that he also faxed in a map with the tree clearly identified and we are grateful to New Zealand Post for couriering a copy of it up to Dargaville so quickly, along with some questionnaires about the appearance of houses in a few streets in the district which would seem to be in need of a lick of paint.”

The value of the New Zealand dollar took a slight dip after the prime minister’s emergency address to the nation on television and radio simulcasts, and when there were suggestions an official state of emergency be declared.

“That was just loose talk, but understandable given the seriousness of the hoax,“ said a deep-voiced woman in the prime minister’s department last night.

“The dollar has steadied again after some slow overnight trading,” said Theresa Van Gelding of the New Zealand Stock and Station Exchange,” but an incident like this just proves how fragile our clean, green image can be. International investors -- and those locals who will dump their dollars at the slightest sign of anything untoward in the New Zealand economy -- are very sensitive to such threats to our eco-friendly image.”

While police and other emergency services today count the cost of responding to the hoax -- believed to be in the region of $12 million -- there have been calls for more research into response times.

The Minister of Police said yesterday that the speed at which the army in particular came to full alert was emblematic of how much response times had improved under a Labour government.

“A hoax like this tests the mettle of our brave people in the services who would otherwise be doing nothing but sitting around, or maybe building bridges on rural properties.“

The speedy involvement of 237 police personnel, including members of the Armed Offenders Squad, however left many other emergency cases unattended.

Clarence Matthews, a 73-year old pensioner of Matakana, lay injured on the front step of his home for seven hours after a brutal beating by an Immigration Officer.

“I had been having a good chat when he suddenly wanted to know why I had two tea-towels on my washing line. He wanted to know if they were some kind of foreign headwear and if I was harbouring illegal immigrants in my home.

“Then he started lashing out. I lay there for a long time and my wife kept ringing the police 111 number repeatedly, but we were told they were all busy attending a hoax in Northland.

“I was pretty sore about that initially, but when we found out how serious the hoax had been I thought that was fair enough.

"My problems are pretty minor when you think about what a threat to New Zealand’s image it would be if a kauri tree was cut down illegally. Or not, as it happened.”

Tonight Simon Dallow will host a special one-hour discussion about the danger to New Zealand’s economy and international image such hoaxes can be and guests will include representatives of most iwi, the remaining members the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and Sean Plunkett who will speak about the number of e-mails Morning Report received over the issue.

He will also read all 4,529 e-mails the programme has received about the intended scrapping of the bird call, and will say something flattering about Linda Clark.

The prime minister has indicated she will be unavailable for comment as she has other really important things to do.

Contacted last night she said even though this incident was clearly a hoax and it been identified as such right from the start it was imperative that the Labour government act in the best interests of the country and the economy, and act quickly.

“And we did that. There have been calls for further investigation into this, but that won’t be necessary. And you can quote me on that.

“And now we’ll be on our way,” she said.

Or words to that effect.

Swear to God, but the first thing I bought in the States was booze and a mix: a small bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and some Minute Maid pink lemonade from a Korean liquor store on the corner of Third and Townsend in San Francisco.

There was a good reason of course (not that you need a reason), we needed money for the meter.

We’d hired a car at the airport for our 16 days drive up to Seattle and back, and drove it into Downtown. It was still only early afternoon and despite a 12 hour flight I thought we could check out the Museum of Cartoon Art at 665 Third St. I hauled the car over into the first space I saw on the way up Third and there, directly opposite, was 665.

Even closer was the parking meter.

I had 10s, 20s and 100s even, but no change. So I went to the nearest place I saw, the liquor store.

As it happened the museum had moved but at least we were provisioned.

And embarrassing as that is to report, the next thing we bought was a beer.

We swung through the shabby Tenderloin area with its strip clubs and panhandlers, where toothless men slept on the footpath or in their wheelchairs, and dropped the car in a parking building. We started walking. Past girlie bars and nude review joints, past hookers in piss-soaked alleys, and past the helpless and the homeless.

I needed to pee so we went into a bar, the shabby 21 Club. The sign on the door said, “No bicycles inside”.

It was a haven for the hopeless: a guy asleep across the wall seats, the guy complaining about his tumour, the maniac with the rolling eyes …

We’d been in America less than two hours and I was loving it.

That night we stayed at the nearby Hotel Bijou just two blocks from Union Square. It was cool: the place has a movie theme and it’s own tiny theatre (two rows of old cinema seats in an aubergine coloured room front of a big screen television) where they show two movies a night set in SanFran.

The night we were there they were showing Dirty Harry and Pacific Heights.

The rooms were named after movies and had appropriate posters and pictures on the walls. We were in The Birds (actually filmed further up the coast in smalltown Bodega) but who knows what lurked behind doors marked The Fan, Barbary Coast, James and the Giant Peach, and Crazy?

I’d have felt cheated if we’d got The Jazz Singer however, the doorway was almost blocked by the Coke machine.

That night we went out to dinner then up to the Starlight Lounge which was a top floor club with a great view of the city.

It was cold so I had put on my long black woollen coat. The girls lining up at the door were wearing skimpy halter-tops and crack-revealing jeans. Who knows why -- was it the coat? did they mistake me for someone else? -- but the bouncers cleared a path for us to enter. Later when I was inside I walked over to the toilet and two massive men did the same again, easing the young punters out of the way so I could get through.

I felt like P. Diddy.

Maybe they just thought the old guy looked like he needed help.

Our holiday-cum-business trip had begun in perfect manner, and over the following fortnight as we drove from Sacramento up to Seattle by the smaller roads, engaging people in bars and restaurants, we had a ball.

But big-ups especially to those who showed us the hospitality of their homes, notably Bob and Mary in Victoria (great halibut meal), Jeff and Susanne Kelly in Seattle (new friends, Jeff is Green Pajamas one of the great cult bands of our time) and to Shayne and Andrea up there north of Victoria.

After the last blog when I said I was heading up that way Shayne, a self-described “big Maori boy from Whangarei”, sent an e-mail saying he’d love it if we dropped by.

It was a three hour drive, the last 45 minutes climbing on a gravel road, but when we got there we were met with a view which encompassed half of Canada and most of Heaven, and genuine Kiwi hospitality.

More on what they are doing way up there where cougars, bears and two metre snowdrifts are common at some later date, or in some other forum.

Meantime, to all of those people, watch your mailboxes, the care packages are on their way.

But it’s nice to be home for the petty politics, Winston Peters, immigration issues and all the rest of it. There‘s an election coming up obviously.

Yes it is good to be home, but I tell you something. It was also very good to be away.

You can gain a lot of perspective in places like the 21 Club in SanFran.

To paraphrase John Lennon: life is what has been happening to other people while we’ve been busy making plans.

We leave tomorrow for a fortnight in the States: a trip from SanFran to Seattle and back to visit the Boeing factories, maybe catch up with cult musician Jeff Kelly in Seattle (of Green Pajamas), hopefully speak with some of the weirdos in Mt Shasta who believe inside the mountain is a race of people called Lemurians, party with our friends Bob and Mary on Vancouver Island, and much other fun besides.

The idea is to pick up stories for publication and also for my next travel book. (The first, Postcards From Elsewhere is launched on May 20 during Writers and Readers Week. More details here should you care.)

So the past weeks have been busy trying to meet writing commitments in advance, sort out some house-sitters, and make contacts in the States.

Which means news about which I might have commented on here has gone right past me.

The Tamihere thing was unravelling so fast that you’d have to be onto it on a daily basis and as I write he’s winging his way to caucus, despite being invited to take extended leave. (Nice to see he’s trotting out his kids again on the cover of today’s Herald too.)

Frankly JT, as they like to style him, strikes me as a man with serious anger and ego problems, and in that he’d be a liability in any political party. More than that however there seems to have been so much special pleading in the past days by his supporters that it makes me wonder about their attitudes to gays, women, Jews, and whomever else JT has taken, or may yet take, a swipe at. I addressed something similar in a previous blog: Brash pop and Brash politics.

If JT is speaking for these apparently voiceless people with their approval then I think we have some deep-seated and serious problems out there, but I’m inclined to think he isn’t really.

There’s something in our culture (more pronounced in Australia) that kinda likes a wide boy, and JT is certainly that: driving convictions, something about fraud, taking a golden handshake after saying he wouldn’t (that‘s called fibbing I think), down on the women-folk and poofters and so on.

He lashes out, and that’s not an attribute in a world where more clear heads are required.

But even in that world dobbing in your mates surely isn’t acceptable. Time for JT to go.

To quote from history: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Or from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “When you blame others, you give up your power to change.”

In other news that skidded past me: the Windsor wedding. Enough now. Yes, the bride looked lovely (Don’t they all?), and yes the groom looked like a man with a pickle up his arse (Doesn’t he always?)

But now that this sorry farce is over at least we won’t have to endure more comment from people on the street who say they should be left alone. I was always happy to leave them alone. I never want to hear about these people again until someone weens them off the public purse and teaches that ungracious Charles some manners.

Jeez, it wasn’t like the press at Klosters asked a hard question, it was simply: “Are you looking forward to your wedding?” Patsy stuff really.

Bloody people, they should have asked something like, “Are you looking forward to being a tampon?”

And finally: the late Pope and the Diana-like hysteria that surrounded his death.

I had a piece prepared about the late Pontiff’s propensity to create saints (often out of people about whom nothing or bugger-all is known) and how he presided over a declining church.

It ran in the Herald a few days after he died but, for space reasons I guess, some of it was cut and it came out rather muted.

For the record then, here are the missing bits, judge for yourself.

While the world waits for the announcement of who will succeed Pope John Paul II, there is inevitable speculation on how the late pontiff's 26 year reign will be remembered.

John Paul II headed the Catholic church for longer than any other pope in history, bar three, and many commentators will doubtless recall his stoicism and moral fortitude. He was also the frequent-flyer pope.

Others, such as Catholic writer and commentator John Cornwell, have already noted that this papacy was marked by declining membership in its traditional strongholds, and a schism has emerged between Catholicism in the First World and that in Third World countries.

In his book Breaking Faith Cornwell laced together distressing facts for the Catholic church: in the United States, a country with the world's fourth largest Catholic population, marriages before a priest have halved since the 60s, only a third attend church regularly (down from three-quarters in 1958) and ordinations into the priesthood had declined by more than two thirds.

In Europe things aren't much better. Between 30 and 50 per cent of parishes in Western Europe have no resident priest, only a quarter of Italy's Catholic population attend church these days.

The optimistic argue the future of the faith lies in the exploding populations in Africa, South America and Asia.

But things aren't quite so rosy there either according to Cornwell: In South America the number of priests per head of the Catholic population has gone from one for every 6000, to one for every 7000 in the past two decades. Attendance at Mass stands at around 15 per cent of the population.

The late pope was aware of these trends and his efforts to counteract the decline were politically astute and might not bear fruit for decades.

Pope John Paul II has been widely referred to as ‘the saint-maker’ because of his propensity to create saints, and occasionally elevating some whose history was unknown or faith suspect.

John Paul II created more new saints -- 483 in his pontificate -- than all popes in the previous four centuries combined. And you can add to that more than 1300 created as saints-in-waiting through beatification.

Sainthood became a growth industry under John Paul II. And, as in the case of the Martyrs of Vietnam, he was sometimes a volume dealer. [There were 100 martyrs made saints by JPII in 1988]

Four years earlier John Paul II made saints of 103 priests, missionaries and lay people who died in the early days of the Church in Korea. Most were murdered during waves of persecutions in 1839, 1846 and 1867. In late 2000 he canonised 120 martyrs in China, many murdered in the Boxer Rebellion or under the Communist regime.

And later some of this was edited out:

In 98 John Paul II visited Croatia to beatify Cardinal Alojsije Stepinac who was Archbishop of Zagreb during World War II. While Stepinac took steps to protect the Jewish community toward the end of the war, he previously sat in the Ustashi Parliament -- created as a Croat puppet of Nazi Germany -- which approved a policy of extermination of the Russian Orthodox Church, gypsies and communists.

He also declared in January 42, ‘Hitler is an envoy of God'’ and oversaw a church which forcibly converted about one million Orthodox Serbs and set up concentration camps where a quarter of a million non-Roman Catholics who refused to convert were tortured and executed.

He was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment in 1946 for war crimes.

The year before Stepinac's beatification John Paul II canonised a notorious anti-Protestant priest Jan Sarkander in the Czech Republic who was executed for treason in 1620 after he brutally converted Protestants and executed those who resisted. The canonisation caused widespread anger among Czech Protestants and five evangelical church leaders due to meet the Pope at an ecumenical round table boycotted the meeting.

Then there were these concluding comments:

What is also true is, despite secular cynicism, many still feel the need to have heroic models, whether they be Diana Princess of Wales, Sir Peter Blake or football-flicker David Beckham.

Such people embody attributes many aspire to. So it is with saints. It would also be naive to diminish the part politics plays. It is well noted the canonisation of Jewish-born Carmelite nun Edith Stein who died at Auschwitz came at a time of heightened scrutiny of the Church's compliance during the Holocaust.

The announcement of the 120 Chinese martyrs in 2000 -- which included 87 native Chinese, the first ever canonised by the church -- came against the backdrop of a rapidly changing political climate in China where many Catholics attended underground churches rather than the officially sanctioned state-controlled churches which have no official connection with the Vatican.

As the rigid Vietnamese communist cadres loosened their grip in a bid for western acceptance and domestic investment the announcement of the Vietnamese martyrs was equally timely.

So it was mostly politics, church politics, really. As my Dad used to warn me: ‘God’s business is big business.’

And last night on the tele I heard that already some are clamouring to make John Paul II a saint: apparently an unidentified man was cured of cancer in 1998 after meeting with the Pope.

To which I only ask, Why did he heal just the one?

Righto, time to find the passport: If we’re in a Kinko’s and have time to spare and something weird has happened I’ll blog on, otherwise it’s just the highways and byways of the Pacific Northwest for a fortnight.

And that’s my idea of fun.

I wonder if JT will still be around when I get back?

I wonder if I’ll care?

The Pope, Terri Schiavo, Graham Capill and the self-styled “bishop“ of the Destiny Church? Matters of faith, the faithful and faithless are much on our minds. Here’s a short story. I think it should be read aloud in a voice like that of Alfred Hitchcock. Preferably with a cigarette in a long McGuffin holder.

THE POWER OF SPEECH

I recently spent a rather distressing luncheon engagement with a moderately well-known author. Aside from hearing much invaluable gossip about better known writers than my friend, I was also treated to a complex of language and literary theories that I did not think interesting or even appropriate over a long lunch.

For our first cocktails my friend was diverted into a discussion of the free verse of Jules Laforge and T.S. Eliot’s debt to this much neglected French master of the late 19th century, the anniversary of whose death my companion was observing that very day.

Over smoked salmon the monologue was on current models of analysis of idiomatic language and by dessert wines, as I am now forced to recall, I was listening to certain translations from the Greek, a language I have not been blessed to understand.

This was not seen as any other than a minor inconvenience by my companion.

She continued over ports and coffee.

As the end of this increasingly unpleasant afternoon drew upon us I realised that my friend was actually speaking in a different language. I was reduced to silence by the sheer intensity and number of polysyllables, impenetrable aphorisms, oblique asides and phrases in Latin.

This unhappy incident put me in a mind to recall an elderly aunt who lived happily in the country for many years.

Rather late in life this robust woman became extremely religious as is the custom of the elderly and feeble-minded. She began to fall prey to many and various senior figures of unscrupulous religious sects.

My uncle tolerated this aberration in her behaviour for some months and in fact watched with what I suspect was mild amusement as more and more bizarre figures appeared to speak with this sad old woman.

One weekend however my uncle took her to a church in Mt Roskill. It was one of those modern, sterile buildings constructed with the money of the innocent and lost, and presided over by the rich and manipulative: lawyers, aspiring politicians and building inspectors for local councils. You know the type.

In the course of the afternoon my aunt fell into speaking in tongues, that curious phenomenon considered a sign of true communion with God.

Regrettably, my aunt did not stop her inarticulate babbling when the others did.

Frightened and somewhat helpless, she found that she had lost all power of ordinary speech and, despite knowing the Lord was at her side, she could no longer communicate with her fellow man.

Doubly tragic when, I imagine, she had important truths to impart.

Certain members of the church, elders as they style themselves, were distressed by this unexpected turn of events. Some of the more simple in the congregation took my aunt’s increasingly fevered ramblings to be A Sign and a crowd gathered filling the carpark. But the elders recognised the potential damage to their church if this fact were to become widely known.

Sad to report, my aunt never regained her power of ordinary speech. She simply spewed out odd sounds which no one could understand as she sat in the lounge of the house in Hillsborough that the elders bought her.

The last time I saw my aunt she was sitting, bird-like, on the corner of the settee in her new home, her shoulders drawn up high, her face thin and deeply etched.

The light from her eyes had all but gone, and just a faint flickering of a pleading for release was discernible in her gaunt expression.

She looked no happier for her singular and sad communication with God.

A few years ago I went to Taiwan for a fortnight. In the first week I interviewed the then-premier Chang Chun-hsiung and various government and opposition officials. In the second week I made my way around this interesting island which is now in the news again.

Taiwan is small. Really small. You can probably drive around it comfortably in three days, two if you were in a hurry.

For a little place it causes big China quite a problem. And right now the Chinese have passed legislation which says that if Taiwan makes a move towards independence then it will be prepared to take military action.

There’s nothing new in this sabre-rattling except that China has now made it official: they are mad as hell and not going to take it.

Taiwan repeatedly clears it throat and makes noises about declaring itself independent while China considers Taiwan, population 23 million, part of itself so any such declaration would be considered secession.

When I was there things were sort of quiet in the cross-Strait war of words, although you couldn’t help but feel the tension sometimes. One day in the coastal town of Taichung (warning: lots of places in Taiwan start with “tai”) the local squadron of Taiwanese jets patrolling the coast flew so low as to be absolutely deafening for many minutes.

I was told this was a daily occurrence. That’s the kind of thing which keeps you edgy, I reckon.

The premier, and a few other political figures I spoke with, were optimistic that things could be resolved with their bullish neighbour. Taiwan was a sovereign state, they said, and “patience” was the watchword on everyone’s lips.

However things hadn't been helped when George W Bush was elected and weighed in saying any attack on Taiwan would be met with retaliation by America. At that time no attack by China had been threatened.

More sabre-rattling.

Premier Chang had his work cut out: his Democratic People’s Party (DPP) had just won the election and they had tossed out 50 years of rule by the Kuomintang (KMT), a party which invented the concept of corruption, or “black gold” as they called it.

The KMT had its fingers in almost every pie (those that it didn’t own outright, and the bakery they were made in) and the DPP was trying to clean up business and get more transparency into government. They were making a pretty good start too.

But if the DPP had to focus on domestic matters it also couldn’t to take its eye off China which has been pissed off with the existence of Taiwan since the KMT had fled in the face of Mao Tse-Tung’s communists 50 years before.

In China the old cadres and communist camp-followers don’t want to go to their graves with the Taiwan question unresolved: after all, they got back Tibet and Hong Kong, and that only leaves this nuisance -- a powerhouse of business and industriousness -- a few miles off the coast.

And they are remarkably few miles. Today -- and this might be what would prevent outright military action -- the fact is that these two countries (oops, you can’t call Taiwan a country in earshot of the Chinese) enjoy considerable cross-Strait trade. Billions of bucks worth.

What one Taiwanese politico told me is that for their bio-tech and computer industries to grow -- not to mention smaller businesses and those of enthusiastic entrepreneurs -- they needed a cheaper labour market than their small but highly educated and hard-working island could offer.

For what it cost to employ one Taiwanese you could get 12 workers in China and 20 in Vietnam.

So Taiwanese eyes were always looking to invest in, and trade with, China. And they have: to the tune of around $100 billion last year. There are also about one million Taiwanese living in China, and next month some more regular flights are scheduled between the two.

So these two countries aren’t in a situation like the two Koreas, they have a lot to lose by way of trade and investment if someone pulls a trigger.

Wealthy Taiwan, despite the small Asian market recessions, has put around $50 billion into China.

"A peaceful Taiwan Strait is not only good for regional peace but also would be in the interests of the United States and mainland China, “ premier Chang -- now the DDP’s secretary-general -- told me.

“So a peaceful Taiwan Strait is not only important to this region but also of importance to the world. I think peace is the language that is spoken, not only in Taiwan but also in New Zealand."

But that optimistic talk was in mid 2001.

Commentators in Taiwan are hopefully noting that because the new law doesn’t contain a deadline for military action that "it does not have specific lethality in its content," as Wu Pei-wei, a fund manager with ABN AMRO Asset Management in Taipei said.

"Therefore, it will not have any [economic] impact on Taiwan."

So China has racked up the rhetoric, some in Taiwan are demanding an apology, Australia and New Zealand are treading cautiously, and -- mercifully at the moment -- the US has gone peculiarly quiet.

Taiwan is an irritation to China, but as that lumbering beast becomes increasingly industrialised and high-tech, especially on its eastern coast from which you can spit to Taiwan, then it is becoming more like the country it despises, and to some (economic) extent, envies.

Various parts of southern China, notably the economic zone around Guangzhou and Hong Kong, as well as more liberal Shanghai, have no will for any kind of scrap with Taiwan, be it a blockade, a tactical military strike or an invasion. It would serve no economic purpose and would invite more problems than it resolved.

But then again, one thing all China watchers will tell you is that you just never know what it might do.

The sound you hear may just be sabres rattling. Let’s hope so.