Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
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In the wake of the terrorist attack in New Zealand, much of the conversation in the US has dripped with envy. That’s right, envy. First, a great many voices have pointed to the outpouring of empathy by the Kiwi public after the attack as exemplars of just what a “nice” country New Zealand is. Television hosts intoned that New Zealand is full of the friendliest and kindest people that they have ever met. Videos of Haka performances in tribute to the slain were posted across the Internet as evidence of Kiwi high-mindedness. All of this, even though anyone who grew up as a racial minority in New Zealand as I did can tell you that there’s as much racial tension to go round there as anywhere else. Kiwis have mostly been helping along this idealization of New Zealand, at least Kiwis who are Pakeha. I suppose we all want to think the best of ourselves. But Americans have been pushing it as well, because they have long idealized New Zealand.  “Harden up,” they used to say. They were my teachers and, soon enough, my fellow 14-year-old boys. “Harden up” — it could be the response to a great many things during those months when we lived three to a room in wooden huts at the former mill in rural New Zealand. But I remember it most frequently said when we hiked in the forest, stumbling and panting and sweating. “Harden up,” one teacher might say to a boy complaining on his first hike that his backpack was too heavy. “Harden up,” one boy might to say to another if he fell and scraped his knees and looked like he was going to do anything other than to brush it off. The new and controversial Gillette ad campaign focusing on the now-popular concept of “toxic masculinity” has prompted me to think back to that semester in high school in the woods.  Screen shot of the Gillette commercial. Last month I was on Easter Island. Legally a part of Chile, the island is really part of the great Polynesian triangle whose other two points are Hawaii and New Zealand, where I grew up. Easter Island is of course famous for its Moai statues. At various “ahu” or shrines where the Moais stand, signs in English and the native Polynesian language, in an effort to stop visitors from climbing on top of sacred rocks, read, “STOP — TAPU.”  |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
March 2020
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