Truth is the Victor
IT’S been a week for fakery.
First there was the awesome story about how Hurricanes star Victor Vito and a few of his teammates were undercover refs at a Saturday morning kids’ rugby game to expose poor sideline parent behaviour.
Bravo Wellington Rugby, I thought. What a creative way to highlight the spectre of Ugly Sideline Parent Supporter Syndrome, or USPSS.
I did struggle to see the ‘‘disguise’’ aspect of it. Watching the video you just think: there’s Victor Vito in sunglasses and a wig.
Still, the kids, who weren’t actors, were delighted by it and after the game they had a big talk about how important it is that we ‘‘support our team, but keep it clean’’.
And then it transpired that some of the sideline parents were actors.
Wellington Rugby is delighted with the video. They’re cool with the staged aspect of it, as long as it gets the message out.
It might have made for a cool 21⁄ minute video but there’s a danger that using actors could have undermined what is an important message.
It’s a real issue. USPSS is a major buzz-kill for a lot of young people who just want to enjoy their sport.
Using actors implies that it doesn’t happen enough for it to be captured on camera on the day your players are filmed at the game.
Spending a season using undercover cameras to document the actual abuse that goes on would have been cool. There’s nothing like seeing the real thing to embarrass people into change.
Meanwhile, Britain continues to be a hotbed of unfolding history.
Aside from the continuing political and economic fallout of Brexit, this week it was about a report by Sir John Chilcott. His name will now be indelibly inked into British history as the man who deserved the most resounding beat-down ever suffered by a former British prime minister.
Chilcott’s report into the Iraq war took seven years to complete and runs to 1.8 million words. That’s more than twice the length of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace, which at 587,287 is considered a bit long.
It makes for fascinating reading, and guarantees as much delicious analysis as there is about Brexit.
Chilcott delivers a damning
‘ I did struggle to see the ‘disguise’ aspect of it. Watching the video you just think: there’s Victor Vito in sunglasses and a wig.’
verdict on Tony Blair who was prime minister at the time and led the country into a war that wasn’t sanctioned by the UN and when all peaceful diplomatic efforts had not yet been exhausted.
This is despite all the warnings about how it could destabilise the country and create a power vacuum, letting terrorism flourish.
Perhaps one of the weirdest things revealed by the report is the fact that Blair seemingly pledged his country to the conflict months earlier when he wrote in GETTY (above) a memo to his mate George Bush: ‘‘I’m with you, whatever.’’
Between 160,400 and 179,312 Iraqi civilians died in the resulting violence, according to Iraqi Body Count, an organisation which tallies the figures
The report vindicates everyone who warned against the war, including Helen Clark’s Labour Government.
Too often, opponents of war are labelled as appeasers or gutless, as current Prime Minister John Key said of Labour when it opposed committing soldiers to the conflict.
Hopefully this report will remind us that war is never the optimal solution, especially when based on fake information.