Back to Black
Donald Trump has about as much chance of charming the Brits as I have of being replaced by a machine.
When I was at high school, a science teacher told my class that we each needed to get good at table tennis. We demanded to know why. “Because all the research is showing that your generation will have a lot of leisure time,” he said.
This news sparked simultaneous trains of thought, which was a first for me in a science class. One strand immediately questioned my teacher’s definition of “leisure”, because for me, leisure and table tennis were as synonymous as “tropical” and “Antarctica”. My version of leisure was altogether more sedentary. But more important, I did not believe him.
Looking back, it seems a shame that the only thing I ever instinctively got right in science took 40 years to be proved correct. In my time at school, “machines” were forecast to replace the jobs that otherwise would have been ours when we became adults. Doubtless, some jobs were lost to mechanisation, but other jobs and industries emerged, including IT, personal trainers, graphic designers, communications and food technology.
Now, “robotics” are apparently going to mean the end of work for the next generation, but I do not believe that either. Again, some jobs will be replaced by robots, or the more ephemeral and darker “robotics”, but other jobs will emerge, even if they are table-tennis coaches.
Humans, for whatever reason, tend readily to embrace a dystopian view of the future. In-between our table-tennis matches, it was envisaged, we would take a pill instead of dinner, but if anything, the slow trend in food is for less processing and more home cooking, along with a return to gardening.
And if my own working life is at all representative, it has been about longer hours of work and less leisure, not the other way around. Which is just as well, because I still could not land a ping-pong ball on an aircraft carrier, much less a table-tennis table.
It was amusing to read that US President Donald Trump had allegedly deferred a trip to the UK until the British people were more likely to welcome him. The expression “when Hell freezes over” sprung to mind.
The White House and Downing Street both denied the visit is off, but it’s hard to imagine what the signal will be that it is safe for the President to pack his bags. Presumably he’s not waiting for rose petals to be strewn in the streets.
I do not expect the welcome mat to be laid out for this US Administration, but I was sorry and, yes, embarrassed to read that New Zealanders had “flipped the bird” to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when he visited.
I agree with the bird flippers’ sentiments and support anyone’s right to protest, but I do not applaud downright rudeness to a guest of our country.
It says more about us than it does about our guest. Also, it has long seemed to me that Kiwis’ anti-Americanism is real and barely disguised. Because I now live in the US, where ordinary Americans have a lot of goodwill towards New Zealand, I worry about whether Kiwis will differentiate between the US Government and the country’s citizens when they visit New Zealand.
American friends, mortified by every tweet their President belches out, are visiting New Zealand for the first time next summer. Should I warn them that as soon as they open their mouths, they might be harassed about Trump as though the mere fact of their citizenship makes them responsible for him?
I hope that is not going to be necessary.
I agree with the bird flippers’ sentiments, but it says more about us than it does about our guest.