Greed, and hair gel, is good
David Slack sees Max Key as a bit player in a vast soap opera.
When Bill Clinton became President, a radio personality - a grown man - said something quite horrible about Chelsea Clinton, aged 12. He said, on his New York radio show: ‘‘She looks like she got hit in the face with a bag full of nickels.’’
There was some comfort in the story. The station was flooded with angry calls from hundreds of listeners and the complaints did not end until he apologised a few hours later.
There was also Rush Limbaugh – gentle, kind, thoughtful Rush Limbaugh – comparing Chelsea Clinton, aged 12, to a springer spaniel. Kid looks like a dog! he told them. How the audience laughed! They laughed so much he said it again a few days later, and a few days after that. He likes to do that kind of thing.
Max Key is not 12. But I think about that bag of pennies when I’m about to say something about him, even when he’s in his underpants holding an unlit cigarette and clenching his abs.
I thought about the bag of pennies as I watched his new video this week. But I had to ask: what is it he’s showing us, exactly? When Lassie came running, all she could do was bark and you had to figure out that little Timmy was stuck down the well. That was hard work if you didn’t speak dog.
But Max makes things very easy for us in the video. These appear to New Zealand. It might not be a great place to bring up children any more but it’s still a really good one to bring up Max. be things he likes: hot chicks, expensive cars, helicopters, VIP access to hot clubs, pillow fights that don’t go on too long. He wouldn’t be the only commerce student who thinks that way. He wouldn’t be the only rapper either.
Is it fair to say this? Should we just be letting it all happen in the privacy of his Instagram account? How much of this is real? How much does any of it matter?
‘‘You’re just jealous,’’ Twitter says to my sarcastic friends and me. We say, ‘‘No, and I think you’ll find you mean ‘envious’.’’
But are they right? Do we secretly wish we were young and ripped and tanned enough to wear underpants on our head? What we tend to point to in our defence is the First Boy sharing jokes on social media about unaffordable Auckland houses. ‘‘Nice for you, pal’’ we say through gritted teeth.
New Zealand. It might not be a great place to bring up children any more but it’s still a really good one to bring up Max. If he and his friends like the idea of a Wall Street career and aren’t too troubled by the deepening gulf between the vastly wealthy and the poor, we could hardly be shocked and ask: ‘‘where did that come from?’’
He might say I’m judging him without really knowing him. Perhaps the next video will make things more clear. But there does seem to be a pattern and I’m not picking up much of a Buddhist monk vibe.
If you look at modern news media from a certain angle, what you see is a vast soap opera being told day by day with entertaining two-dimensional characters. Silly, bumbling Andrew Little. Clever, crafty Steven Joyce. Wacky, scary Vladimir Putin.
There are two stock characters in any EU story: power-mad clipboard-wielding bureaucrats and power-mad fat cats. Journalist Martin Fletcher this week described the harm this has done over decades. ‘‘What kind of EU story is this?’’ the newspaper asks itself. ‘‘Does it have the bureaucrat being a ludicrous form-filler? Does it have an EU politician wallowing in a trough? Run the story.’’
The effect, over time, can be enormously distorting and can leave many Britons believing ludicrous things about the EU, and voting accordingly.
The John Key stock character is a guy you have a beer with who’s above politics. ‘‘Leave it to me, don’t you worry about politics, that’s for chin-strokers and Andrew Little, I’ll just sort things out’’ is the message. It’s nonsense, but it works, and it cramps political debate.
What the Max character seems to be saying is: ‘‘Greed, and hair gel, is good.’’ There’s no overt political statement in that, but in a funny kind of way, as his Dad likes to say, it’s political all the way through.