The Late Show With Stephen Colbert started on a sombre note after news of the tragic shooting at a school in Texas broke. Video / CBS / Supplied
Opinion
OPINION
The ferals are coming. Their hot breath is scorching the backs of the necks of the liberal elite.
This could very well be the last full year of Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister, an end to the Age of Jacinda – the carnival is over, so many people aretruly sick to death of her, sick of her smile, sick of her tra-la-la, sick of her clothes and her celebrity and the air that she breathes.
They want change. Really, they just want rid of her. Christopher Luxon will have to do, that old brown shoe.
The ferals were sent packing from the Occupation of the Cenotaph and returned to their caves, where they lie in wait, marginalised, unhappy, plotting. They want an actual occupation, a storming. Really, they just want good times.
Richard Sanger, writing in the latest London Review of Books of the Ottawa occupation this year: "The people the occupation brought out were an extraordinary mix, although overwhelmingly white: born-again Prairie Christians, anti-communist Eastern European immigrants, New Age anti-vaxxers ('my body, my choice'), loudmouth hockey moms, free-thinking Mohawks, dreadlocked weed smokers, curious small-towners and their snow-suited kids, all brandishing the red maple leaf and other flags. The more fun it looked, the more people came out … A mass of people who had never set eyes on one another, unless perhaps briefly online, were meeting in the flesh after all the lockdowns. No wonder they were hugging and dancing."
The ferals are hated. They don't do as they are told. They ignore the health warnings, they ignore the evidence – incredibly, they ignore the patronising, know-better directives of the maskers, who are forever patrolling the virtual streets of social media, expressing dismay at the lack of masks in the community.
What a generation of scolds! Everyone hates these scolds. Really, they hate each other. Dunedin writer Victor Billot, in an essay at Newsroom: "The self-defined left have dissolved into competing tribes of lunatics shouting at each other on Twitter, irrelevant to the majority."
The ferals reserve the right to be 100 per cent over Ardern, the international phenomenon. They don't care that she appeared on a talk show hosted by that jolly sycophant Stephen Colbert. They don't care that she gave a speech at Harvard or wherever. They care about what happens in New Zealand. Really, they care about each other.
During the occupation, the Herald got a terrible scolding for daring to interview some of the protesters and showing them as human. Easier to regard them as haters and lynchers and fake newsers, all of them flat-out crazy. The truth is somewhere in between: the flat-out crazy are human, too.
The anti-mandate protest at the Beehive in February 2022. Photo / Mike Scott
The ferals are ungrateful wretches. Ardern and her Government delivered us from Covid in 2020 and saw us through Delta in 2021 but gratitude is a strange, powdery substance – it doesn't last long, it dissolves, and turns to resentment. No one likes to feel beholden.
It's a reminder of a time of need and weakness. Her calm, rational, intelligent presence during the first years of the plague were a constant reminder of the dreadful alternative - a government led by Judith Collins. That would have been bad. Really, that would have been a fate parallel with death.
No one entertained the thought for a second, including every single National MP. They finally saw sense and put her back in her attic, powerless and harmless, "some strange wild animal", as Mrs Rochester is described in Jane Eyre. At least we don't have Ardern to thank for that.
The ferals are going to have to back Luxon. Luxon is hard to take seriously as any kind of redeemer; he's just another ruling-class phoney with a bag of neolib-lite tricks. Anything can happen between now and the next election, and an election is a chaos in and of itself. Jacindamania in 2023 might have a new force, a new resonance.
But her annoying loyalists will be out in force, with their scolding, their we-know-better, their stink of the liberal elite, their moral superiority, their creepy little shamings, their whole, you know, vibe; and much of the rest of New Zealand is over them, over their leader, over it all. That's the thing about the ferals. Really, they are us.
