KEY POINTS:
Forthrightness. It doesn't look like a real word, but as a trait (dictionary meaning: going straight to the point without ambiguity or hesitation) it once marked out New Zealanders as different. Perhaps it was our geographic isolation; the tyranny of distance, as one of the Finn brothers wrote.
But now, sadly, we're losing our capacity for boldness, as the culture of tolerance-at-all-costs, be-nice-to-everyone takes hold.
A friend, who is left-leaning in her politics, blames Helen Clark and her quest for a bland nation bereft of outspoken voices. Maybe, but Clark herself doesn't hold back. Remember her description of the hikoi as "haters and wreckers"?
For sure, New Zealand had nasty prejudices that needed healthy exposure - foam-at-the-mouth anti-gay attitudes, for instance. I remember a primary school teacher saying Maori liked doing road works because they love the rhythm of the bulldozers. Even at the age of 6 I saw this as intrinsically silly.
But how quickly the oppressed become the oppressors, as we head down the road towards separately categorising hate crimes (tautology, surely), and newspaper editors being forced to have "meetings" with Asian communities because they object to headlines calling some Chinese students "cheats".
Isn't it better for silly attitudes and bigoted language to be exposed to the light, rather than suppressed? Isn't the best antidote for a silly idea to come up with a better one?
By stamping out boldness of speech, I fear we're damaging the robustness of our national psyche. I was reminded of this recently when I read the autobiography of Sir Patrick Eisdell Moore, an ear nose and throat surgeon and the only Pakeha in the Maori Battalion.
No doubt his forthrightness earned him the dislike of many colleagues, but his focus was on healing people, often the nation's poorest, not on being liked. The son of a doctor, Eisdell Moore regularly drove the not-inconsiderable distance from Auckland to Te Puia, treating Maori children with glue ear and, when necessary, arranging for them to travel to Auckland for surgery.
In 1945 when the Maori Battalion farewelled Eisdell Moore, Sir Apirana Ngata's son, Bill, told him: "You were not the most academic of our takuta. You were not quite the bravest. But you were the most Maori."
I enjoyed this book because it brought back memories of my own father, so forthright that I, as a child, was acutely embarrassed. Stories about my father are guaranteed to reduce a dinner party to tears of mirth. Suffice to say he did not suffer fools, even though he could be one.
Once, after buying a motor mower which he could never get started from Hawke's Bay Farmers in Waipukurau, he threw it onto the trailer and roared into town, cursing all the way, marched past the astonished ladies at the cosmetics counter and up the stairs to the manager's office. "Your bloody mowers are useless," he raged, and pulled on the cord, only to have the machine roar into life immediately and, because he'd left it in gear, roar around the carpeted office.
He could be agonisingly bigoted yet, along with my mother when they retired from farming, studied and became reasonably fluent in Maori. He could be illegally violent, yet before he died he carved beautiful pounamu, tutored by his friend, Hepi Maxwell.
And now feisty Robyn Langwell's been dumped as editor of North & South, I fear her courageous and forthright style will be purged from this wonderful, 21-year-old magazine.
Last week, Parliament's minor parties signed a code of conduct so MPs behave nicely to each other. Isn't that what Standing Orders are for? This code looks suspiciously like a desperate attempt at headline grabbing. Act's Rodney Hide says he's now the "bad boy trying to be good". Does anyone fall for that? I've had more than my share of men behaving badly, and they never truly change.
And sometimes they shouldn't. We know where we stand with our Prime Minister. Sir Robert Muldoon was feisty to the end. Voters knew what Act stood for when irascible Richard Prebble was leader. My father did not go gentle into that good night when he died of cancer 21 years ago.
Today's wimps should read again that fine poem by Dylan Thomas and remember: "Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night."
