Day 49 (51): a pretty shitty day today.
Sick of some of our ludicrously purple media. Their bias and turgid bloody-mindedness is really distressing. It’s been like this for a long time but right now the negativity is at an almost all time high. This first slapped me in the face in 2015 when we were in Ireland on holiday. I had PhD interviews to do in Göteborg, Sweden so we decided to fly over but Finn intervened and asked if Sweden had a Disneyland. He collects Disneyland’s so it was a fair question. No, we said, but Paris does, so let’s stop off there for a few days and check it out.
So, we flew from Dublin to Paris before flying on to Göteborg via Stockholm and back to Dublin via London. Great fun, and the flights were cheap as chips.
It was exciting, except that, when we landed at Charles de Gaulle, my Facebook and email had gone nuts telling us to leave immediately, Paris was on lockdown, there had been a terror attack, and Parisians were fleeing the city in droves. I checked NZ Herald and my friends were right, a number of people from the Charlie Hebdo satiric magazine organisation had been murdered and the city was apparently locked down and in an horrific state of mayhem and fear.
Except that it wasn’t.
Life in the City of Light went on as usual with Charlie Hebdo barely a cafe talking point.
When I raised it with baristas and restauranteurs, they dismissed my questions with ‘ave more wine, a croissant, a pastry, shoot ‘em this afternoon’ and that’s exactly what happened. Parisians don’t frighten easily, and the cops are ruthless. We stayed in Montmartre 5kms away and you’d never have known there was an issue. On the day it ended we were walking to the Eiffel Tower past the Élysée Palace and there was a line-up of fifty or so cop cars and paddy wagons parked up by the side of the road with dozens of heavily armed gendarmes standing around, lazing against walls or smoking by their vehicles. Then they packed up and gone, silently down the Champs Élysée, in single file, off to do the business.
And they did.
No frills or furbelows, all sorted bar the burials, in less than an hour, and Paris barely blinked. But the Herald did, for them this was 9/11 all over again and Paris was shot up, locked down, terrified, but for us it was simply a charming winter afternoon at the Musée du Louvre and a quiet evening on the town. I learned a bit about Herald Hystériques that week and I’m seeing it all again now.
No balance, not much reason, precious little generosity, just hacking away endlessly at the tall poppies and cranking up the great Kiwi clobbering machine, a machine that I thought had been garaged forever, long, long ago, hidden way, out of sight and mind, in Rex Fairburn’s heavily fortified basement away from those ‘who have stayed and have soured, staying in turn to sour, to smile, and to savage our young.’ It’s sad, but there it is.
They make it feel like the inevitable, drawn out, death of hope.
Of hope.
In my view, the government is doing a damn good job under horrible conditions, conditions that may yet get worse, but if you read and listen exclusively to our media, you’ll only hear bad news stories, ugliness, the New Zealand Warriors, and the hissing and clacking of a rancid bevy of raucous, predictable, right wing pseudo-columnists.
Sorry, folks, but I’ve been locked up for 51 days. I’m one of the ‘at risk vulnerable’ but I’m still alive. And I’m here. ‘Good times and bum times I’ve seen ’em all and, my dear, I’m still here. Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer, but I’m here’. I’m here, and I thank the government and the Team of Five Million for that … and that’s a bloody good news story, a fabulous story, in anyone’s book.
dykiegirl 