Opinion
Good riddance to not entirely bad rubbish. I call on all cars, trucks, trains, and ships to honk their horns real loud at 11.59pm on Monday to mark the end of alert level 4, to celebrate its death, to make sure it bangs its fat, busybodying ass on the way out the door. Everybody, make a noise; shoo that sonofabitch off the premises, New Zealand. It took over our lives for five weeks. It drove us indoors. It was creepy, hostile, anxious.
Very well, it also stopped the virus. It won ugly: it was a necessary evil, it fought fire with fire. It got in quick and it did the job. It was the hate child of Jacinda Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield. It hated the virus, hated its influence. It called for obedience. New Zealand – "The team of five million", as the Prime Minister described us, niftily amending Helen Clark's famous "A stadium of four million" line – duly obeyed.
We were so good! We were the envy of the world – I was interviewed by the Washington Post this week, for a podcast in Spanish; they wanted to talk about the amazingness of gringa Jacinda Ardern - by doing as we were told. We stayed home. We snitched on those who transgressed. A nation of snoops, twitching the curtains, watchful for any sign of life being enjoyed out of doors: "We are a little people", as Auckland playwright and lifelong socialist Dean Parker once observed. He died last week - nothing to do with the virus; that guy always went his own sweet, principled way – and his sad passing was a chance to recall his public lecture last year at Wellington's National Library, when he said, "Being a New Zealander means loving to doff the cap. It means ganging up on anyone stepping out of line. It means being as obsequious as possible to the rich and powerful. It means the most tawdry display of brown-nosing you're likely to see. We are a little people."
Yes, also no. Being a New Zealander means applying common sense at all times. No one wanted the virus to spread. No one wanted to put lives at risk. We had to follow the rules. Alert level 4 was a health cult; the nation signed up as per instructions, and there was an exciting sense that we were not just witnesses to history but agents of history, that we were putting into place a historic act. Alert level 4 was an incredible moment in New Zealand history. The next generation will one day ask their parents, "What did you do in the lockdown?"
Some will answer, "Went surfing and got busted."
Others will answer, "Got someone busted for surfing."
Most will answer, "Nothing."
Alert level 4 was the Great Nothingness. You couldn't go out, you couldn't see anyone. Nothing was open, nothing moved. The empty motorways, the deserted main streets of one-horse towns that didn't even bring out the horse. To walk around the neighbourhood was to see campervans on blocks, and buses trundling hither and yon without a single passenger. I walked along the Te Atatu shore this week and looked out over the water to the silent city and a thin line of traffic on the harbour bridge; sunlight reflected on the few cars heading north and south, and they looked like shiny coins, rolling up and down. Where were they headed? The options were limited. Alert level 4 introduced a range of new, instruction-manual terms (the language of Covidese) such as "community transmission", "compromised immunity", "underlying medical condition", and the worst of them was "essential services". It rendered everyone else inessential, meaningless.
"What did you do in the lockdown?"
"Nothing essential. I had no meaning."
The lockdown has caused massive unemployment. At the onset, serious economists were reckoning that the impact of the sudden loss of jobs and businesses "might be worse than the GFC". Oh, you don't say. There were even aviation experts predicting that the impact on airlines "might be worse than 9/11". Gee do you think so. Covid-19 was like nothing else. It was the plague on all the houses of the world, it was the better, more powerful sequel to the Great Plague of London of 1665 – the storyline was the same, though. Daniel Defoe's classic book A Journal of the Plague Year, written 60 years after London was laid to waste, recorded the government prohibitions: "All plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads and such-like cases of assemblies of people are utterly prohibited… No publick feasting." No bear-baitings! At least we had the final episodes of The Bachelorette.
Defoe also wrote, "The necessity of going out of our homes to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city, for the people catched the distemper [the plague] on these occasions, and even the provisions themselves were often tainted." Every trip to the supermarket these past five weeks was fraught: you could see it in the eyes of the shoppers who smothered their faces in masks, and shuffled away when anyone came near them to stare at the empty baking aisles. There were learned conversations in many households about the efficacy of bleaching kitchen surfaces "tainted" by supermarket provisions. Alert level 4 was so boring.
It was interior, an entrapment, a drag. It was an infantilism, with its babyish cartoons of flattened curves, its Covidese use of the word "bubble". And yet we'll also think back on it with a kind of nostalgia. It wasn't all bad. Some of it was actually really beautiful. Covid-19 was war; Alert level 4 was peace.
It just so happened I was reading War and Peace during the lockdown. One of the war sections included an epiphany felt by Tolstoy's main character, that most loveable fool in all literature, Count Pierre Bezukhov: "It was just at this time that he attained that peace and content with himself, for which he had always striven in vain before…All his researches and all his efforts had failed him. And now without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with himself simply through the horror of death."
Bezukhov's understanding resonated all throughout New Zealand these past five weeks. Alert level 4 was the Great Quiet. Yes, daily updates around the world provided a staggering record of death, but you could look up from your phone and get on with the wonderfully pleasant routines of baking, reading, taking walks, hanging with your family – Alert level 4 was a long weekend, every home was a holiday home. God, it was nice. I had such fun mucking around with my daughter. When I look back on the lockdown, I'll see her animated little face, a 13-year-old beauty, happy and chatty, baking an apple pie, gleefully developing a taste for trashy thrillers on the Sky Premiere movie channel (The Intruder, The Midwife's Deception, The Neighbourhood Nightmare), slowly pedalling her bike as I plodded alongside her around the neighbourhood. The horror of death was close by – there was a Covid-19 cluster at St Margaret's residential aged care home in Te Atatu – but the lockdown brought about a lot of happiness. It was a tender, intimate time.
New Zealanders stayed in touch at a 2m distance. You would always see people stopping on the pavement to chat with neighbours on their balcony. Meanwhile, the sun was out, and cast long exquisite shadows. One of the characters in War and Peace remarks: "Russia and summer never do well together." New Zealand is made whole by summer, and made romantic by autumn. Most of alert level 4, in Auckland, was spent in golden weather, in autumnal gold.
"What did you do in the lockdown?"
"Got a tan."
There was comedy, too, in the shape of the 5G cult. Darkest hours always bring out superstitions. Brian Tamaki duly took to the Twitter machine to express capitalised ravings to his paltry 4744 followers. Alert level 4 will also be remembered for the good humour of the Dr Ashley Bloomfield cult.
There was so much of that kind of underlying New Zealandness – cheerful, witty - to the lockdown. For all the panic buying, and the wearing of masks even though they likely didn't make a lick of difference, we took it in our stride. Outwardly, anyway.
It was all very well if you were insulated from the threat of the virus - and the threat of alert level 4. Easy enough to avoid death: stay home. But the cure of alert level 4 felt as worrying as the disease. The lockdown with its range of censures had to happen. Didn't it? To even ask, to even express doubt, was to be shot down in flames. Someone used the term "panic attack" to describe the Prime Minister's decision to maintain New Zealand under lockdown. Well, no, it was a reasoned judgment based on expert advice. Of course, alert level 4 was extreme. It was also a matter of life and death. But pretty much any form of dissent was mocked or shut down. (Dean Parker might not have been very surprised.) The rights of people to earn a livelihood were not seen as a matter of any importance. It was deemed a sacrifice and the piousness of it all had the same kind of ring as the worst forms of political correctness.
"What did you do in the lockdown?"
"Lost everything."
The cost and the harm has yet to be felt. The long road to recovery, etc. But at least we're heading in the right direction as of 11.59pm on Monday. Farewell, alert level 4. Take your place in history. Your era is ending. The last thing anyone wants is a sequel. "Don't ever do anything like this again," the sheriff warns Jon Voigt's murderous character in the final scene of Deliverance. "Don't come back up here." It came to be felt these past five weeks as the new normal but the day will come when we can wistfully regard it as the old abnormal. That day is Tuesday.
Takeaways were taken away in alert level 4. They're good to go in alert level 3. We can order pizza with everything on it – I might try a pizza within a Big Mac. We can buy a book – may I recommend War and Peace. We can swim – I must get some lessons. We can return to a version of active employment - the Prime Minister has estimated 400,000 New Zealanders are going back to work next week. We can put Alert Level where it belongs – behind us. Bring on 11.59, Monday night; bring on the release of the midnight hour.
• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website