I won and I’m furious about it
Why do so many people choose to be such sore winners, asks David Slack.
We were on a long drive north to Auckland and just out of Tokoroa when everything went south. Our little girl was maybe two or three. She was an unhappy traveller. She was making her point loudly. Patience and calm words were getting us nowhere. Daddy was getting angry.
I pulled the car to the side of the road. I turned around to Mary-Margaret in her car seat and I told her in loud words to stop it. Now.
By loud words I mean I was shouting. Her eyes went as big as saucers. The most talkative girl in the world was all of a sudden mute.
I turned back around, put it back in gear, and pulled back onto State Highway One. Cars and cattle trucks were hurtling past, but inside the car it was deathly quiet. After a minute, she said quietly, in a mixture of trembling and wonder, ‘‘Daddy spitted on me.’’
I don’t think it left any psychological scars. She’s turned out pretty great. But you wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. I didn’t do it again.
I was telling this story last week to a friend. She said: ‘‘I can’t imagine you shouting at anybody. Ever.’’ She’s right really. I almost never do, unless you count typing in capital letters on Twitter. And you were asking for it, Orcon. You were.
But there’s so much shouting in the world right now. So many angry people. I thought once the election was over it would subside. It feels as though it’s still rising. I expected the losers to be noisy; I wasn’t expecting anybody to be so angry about winning.
The comments and messages from the Trump fans all seem to be flavours of: he won, we won, you lost, shut up.
Winning doesn’t suddenly make Trump’s arguments right. It simply means he now has the right to do things that may be wrong. And I reserve the right to say so.
Give him a chance? One week in, he’s appointed a white supremacist as his chief advisor. He’s begun to blur the boundaries between running the family business and running the country.
That may not perturb his fans, but it perturbs me. Yes, democracy made him president but democracy also gives us the right to say he’s doing things that look mad, bad or dangerous. Shout all you like, winning an an election does not give a president-elect or any of his fans the right to shut anyone up.
Anyone I know in the media who has written a critical story about a business has war Anyone I know in the media who has written a critical story about a business has war wounds. wounds.
One wrote a harsh but wholly accurate story about an outdoor goods company and the quality of its products. The chief executive called the editor insisting she be sacked. Another friend criticised, at length, an urban design project in Auckland city. A prominent business involved in the design insisted he be brought to their office to deliver an apology.
You may ask how you’re supposed to buy those stories with so many particulars missing. Who’s to say I didn’t just make it up? I didn’t, but the unhappy reality is that people in business can make you burn through your time and money defending yourself. They can intimidate and bully you out of reporting the truth. They see the news media as a place where their new product can be announced but everything else is SHUT UP.
A lie is indefensible. So is misrepresentation. Take media to task for that, feel at liberty to shout. But expecting them to shut up about the truth is just wrong and dopey.
Angry people have been covering me in spit telling me the stupid media got it all wrong about the election, that the reptiles of the MSM are fatally biased and crooked. They might be accurately quoting candidate Trump, but there’s no earthly way you can read the Washington Post or the New York Times or the New Yorker and find the evidence.
The dumbest thing we can do is be dreamy and romantic about democracy. It’s not a honeymoon on the beach; it’s family life in good days and bad ones. You might have to pull over and shout at some point. But if you want a functional family you wouldn’t want to make a habit of it.