Comforts in a time of disaster
Ionly wish our prime minister had not been caught hugging people after a disaster – yet again. I like her. I think she’s great. I think she’s sincere. But there’s just something a bit uncomfortable about hugging the afflicted after something really horrible has happened – again – and people are dead and badly wounded.
A hug is a kindness, instinctive, but it doesn’t make anything better, and it sure doesn’t bring back the dead. But what are you to do? Another disaster. We do them extremely well, and as a famously depressive poet kind of said, we do them so they feel like hell.
Being older than Jacinda – I think it’s an age thing – I weep at many things. Cute kittens and clever police dogs are on the list, and, higher up the weepy chain, any and all acts of heroism.
Some days, and there were a couple this week, I have to put down the news pages and start on the puzzles lest I begin sniffling and talking in a squeaky voice yet again, overcome with how decent people can be in a world of so much lousy behaviour.
I admire everyone who helped in the Whaakari/White Island disaster, and I’ve shed tears for the lot of them. That’s about as useless as Jacinda’s hugs, but it’s a kind of solidarity, maybe, among people who want to rise above the endless cruelty and destruction in the world.
We have to tighten up adventure tourism so that it’s got something for thrill-seekers, but they get to go home intact. Can’t we be boring? We’re good at that too.
This week I searched Netflix for something to watch that wasn’t about murders or disasters. I’m far from wanting to watch cartoon critters talking in American accents, but I do get tired of eviscerated corpses (almost always of women) and smart-ass detectives who break the rules but bring killers to justice.
I’m driven back to Clint Eastwood in despair some nights. He may be awful but he’s the closest you can get to a good comic, and I read a lot of comics when I was a kid. At the peak of his powers he was always reassuringly the same, which was right. About everything.
It’s been said of Michelangelo that he looked at many blocks of marble, and in one of them saw Moses. Sergio Leone, who cast Clint in many westerns, said he’d say the same in reverse: Looking at Clint Eastwood he saw a block of marble, and that was what he wanted.
Solid. Dependable. A bit mysterious (‘‘the man with no name’’ his famous role), and a satisfying catharsis at the end, with no-one dead who didn’t richly deserve to be. Tragedy at a distance is what I want, not tragedy here and in real life.
Unfortunately, stuff turns up on the internet that has me tearing up as well – not vile child abuse or nasty sex acts, which I wouldn’t watch, but a political action by women that was deemed offensive in Turkey a few days ago. The chant and performance by many women in Chile, where it originated, has now been performed around the world. It’s called A Rapist in Your Path, and it’s become an anti-rape anthem that feminists everywhere should applaud.
The first performance was outside the Santiago National Stadium where in the wake of a 1973 coup, most women brought in for interrogation suffered sexual violence. The women chant about continuing violation of women’s rights in the police, judicial and political systems.
As an embarrassing weeper I find it oddly comforting. And always the trigger word for me, heroic.