What’s left over when the bluster balloon bursts?

grant.shimmin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz Just before I left South Africa 17 years ago, I was fortunate enough to go on a walking tour in the Kruger National Park, one of the world’s great wildlife sanctuaries.

An excited group of eight was met at Skukuza rest camp and driven to a remote bush camp by a pair of rangers, who would be our guides on walks in areas , frequented by the so-called Big Five, and plenty of other game besides.

We walked in single file, the armed head ranger in front, his colleague, rifle similarly at the ready, bringing up the rear of a column that, not to put too fine a point on it, tended not to spread out too much.

As it happened, we saw two of the Big Five while on foot, rhinoceros and, in a herd numbering in the hundreds, buffalo.

However the moment of greatest danger came when, returning to the parked vehicle at the end of that walk, the head ranger urgently signalled the group to a stop, and complete silence.

He’d spotted a lone buffalo in a muddy puddle. Being upwind of the group, he explained, it wouldn’t have detected our scent, so suddenly having 10 humans walk past would possibly spook the animal.

Fortunately the ranger’s quick thinking averted that.

That night, around a campfire, he told us of a tour he’d led where participants were briefed on the possibility of encountering lions, and how to react.

A burly, outspoken Afrikaner man, showing off for the ranger in front of his wife, who was apparently small and petite, and friends, had blustered on about how he would shove his bulky forearm into a lion’s mouth to hold it at bay.

The next morning, walking in a dry riverbed, the group had indeed encountered the pride of lions rangers had known to be in the area, and with a couple of the big cats staring them down, he’d instead grabbed his wife and placed her in front of him as an impromptu human shield.

Time may have embellished that story, but the tale of that burly bloke’s boorish behaviour came quickly to mind this week as I contemplated our society’s continuing obsession with what I’ve come to call The Cult of the Blokey Bloke.

Is it a creation of the media that exploits it? I don’t know. It seems to me there clearly is a demand for the leaning towards overt blokishness sometimes portrayed in the media, otherwise I don’t think it would have lasted as long as it has. But which came first?

Anyway, my title stems from one of those ubiquitous stories this week that make it onto the web about something controversial some blokey broadcaster has said.

This one featured the line since much reacted to that ‘‘you can’t say motherhood is a job’’. I’m not naming the speaker – you probably know who he is – because this isn’t about an individual, and he’s just the latest in a succession of controversial figures saying such controversial things. I’m just wondering what it says about our society that there’s still the public appetite for such seemingly cheap, blokey bluster, when the kind of deep-thinking discussion the inimitable John Campbell once facilitated on the same channel, at night, couldn’t fly, commercially, in the long term.

I’m referring to the kind of pronouncements of which it will inevitably be said, by a man: ‘‘He’s just saying what everyone else is thinking.’’ Well, actually, if he was doing that, wouldn’t we all just nod and get on with it?

What that usually means, from where I’m sitting, is: ‘‘He’s just saying what I and others in this non-representative section of society, who happen to think we have the right to say whatever we like, are thinking.’’

Sadly, this has been legitimised to a degree by a return to ‘blokishness’ at the highest levels of society. It’s been widely observed that when the infamously boorish Donald Trump talks about making America great again, he’s actually talking about making it as white, and maledominated, as it once was. The socalled ‘American dream’ is not, if you drill down a little, a dream of equality.

He may not [yet] be Britain’s prime minister, or quite fit the profile, but buffoonish Boris Johnson’s behaviour is also empowering this regression, in a poncier way. Blokey blokes are here to stay, for a while yet, at least. But is that what masculinity is about? I doubt it.

To me, as someone trying to address my own lazy tendency to gloss over or play down the legitimate concerns of others because they don’t personally affect me, I feel like what appeals about the blokey bloke approach is its once-over-lightly nature.

It means we don’t have to do the intellectual labour involved in trying to understand how those on the wrong side of ‘‘what everyone else is [not actually] saying’’ view important issues, and why. It’s left to those unfortunate enough not to live in a society slanted in their direction to do that work.

I read a compelling column this week, written in October, called ‘‘Confronting Manhood After Trump’’.

Of many lines in Lisa Wade’s piece on publicbooks.org that jumped out at me, this shouted loudest: ‘‘We should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women in order to feel good about themselves.’’ I think she might be referring to someone in particular, as well as men in general. Just a sense I have.

I agree. As ‘lion man’ himself would surely confirm, a sensible group discussion, properly informed by the advice of the experts, the rangers, about how to handle a confrontation fraught with mortal danger, could have led to a far safer, more memorable experience for all concerned. In the end, though, all his ultimately deflated bluster and its fallout would have brought him was isolation.