Cleansing quality of air
Forgive me, mother, for I have sinned. I left my washing on the line – and here I pause to intensify the gasp of disbelief and horror – overnight. And this at a time when the US Senate, touting itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body, is about to side with Trump. It would be easy to assume the world is ending.
The rules by which we live are laid down early. For as long as I can remember it’s been unthinkable to leave out washing overnight, and since my father was as likely to peg the washing on the line as he was to take up ballet, I presume I got this notion from my mother. But I don’t think she ever said it. It was just part of the moral atmosphere of childhood, like the importance of please and thank you or the unmentionability of genitals.
Quite why it was wrong I’m not sure. Was it fear of theft, or a sense that it was slovenly to leave the day’s work incomplete, or perhaps a superstitious dread of what the dark might do?
My mother never owned a tumble-dryer so there was little she didn’t know about drying clothes. All her life she was alert to the possibility of rain. As the first drops spotted the path she would dash for the backdoor and rip clothes from the line with a speed and dexterity of peg-work that I could only admire.
And it went the other way too. In midwinter when the snow lay deep as Wenceslas she would still peg out clothes to catch a fleeting hour of weak sunshine, to get the clothes, if not dried, at least aired. Aired was everything. For clothes or wounds or rooms my mother had unlimited faith in the cleansing quality of air.
There’s a confessional element to pegging out clothes. It is good to show the world one’s sadly honest undergarments: vast bras and knickers, socks with holes, dispirited, yellowing y-fronts. Here I am, the washing says, take me for all in all.
I peg out a line of shirts all upside-down like a rack of dead beasts at the freezing works, and I wonder at the expanse of them, the great sheets of cloth cut and sewn by deft and tiny Third World hands to house my First World flab.
And then a nor’west breeze gets up and plumps the shirts and sends them streaming out to lee, their desperate empty arms stretched out to grab at airy nothing, their waistbands tugging at their anchor pegs. And as the shirts go dancing on the line like Wordsworth’s daffodils, you can’t mistake the ritual quality of washing.
We drench our clothes in water to rid them of the earth and then we hang them high for the wind to seize the last sour molecules of self and yesterday and sweated disappointment and give them to the nowhere of the air to leave us free and clean and fresh to start again.
It’s a rebirth that you just don’t get from the tumble-dryer. It’s the self-renewing world in miniature. Every air-dried armful of laundry – even if, as I have just discovered, it’s been left out overnight – smells of hope.
And as for Trump, when the States finally rids itself of him and all his hideous lying henchmen, they should strip the White House of its furnishings, strip it down to walls and floorboards only, then fling the doors and windows wide and let the cleansing winds blow through the place, not overnight but for a year.
Politics in the 21st century is often characterised as a contest between the elites and the populists. The elites – often referred to as the metropolitan or inner-city elites – are Leftist idealists who prefer to describe themselves as ‘‘progressive’’.
Leading global figureheads include the two HCs, Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark.
You could almost call the elites the new ruling class, since they have power and influence far beyond their numbers.
They predominate in the universities, the media, the arts, schools, the churches, the public service and the not-for-profit sector – that vast and perpetually busy plethora of organisations, mostly taxpayer subsidised, that lobby for politically correct causes.
The elites also beaver away behind the scenes in local councils, where the elected representatives of the people, the councillors, often seem powerless to control them.
The elites are big on climate change, racism, women’s rights, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality issues and the rights of aggrieved minorities. These are not issues that keep ordinary people awake at night.
They are often described as liberal – a misnomer, as it implies tolerance of other opinions.
There is a streak of totalitarianism in the way the elites attempt to shout down dissenting views.
Their supposed liberalism is also selective. They heartily approve of liberalised drug laws, for example, yet they have a decidedly prudish streak when it comes to alcohol and think the state should be far more active in restricting what we can eat.
There’s also a striking inconsistency in the way they champion the rights of vulnerable minorities while simultaneously insisting that women should be free to terminate the lives of the most helpless minority of all.
A central article of faith with the elites is that ordinary people can’t be trusted to make the right decisions for themselves.
The path to Utopia requires a supposedly benign interventionist state which knows what’s best for us. The influence of the elites is all-pervasive. For the past two decades they have largely controlled the public conversation. Even supposedly centreRight governments, terrified of getting offside with the elite commentariat, have fallen into line with their agenda.
The corporate sector has been captured too, with its timid capitulation to codes of corporate social responsibility created by the Left with the aim of emasculating capitalism.
But there are some things the elites can’t control. They can’t dictate what people think or how they vote. The magic of democracy is that the vote of a shop assistant or farm labourer carries the same weight as that of a university professor or government mandarin. Hence the rise of so-called populism, which can be seen as a pushback against the ideological agenda of the elites.
It was the populist vote that got Donald Trump elected in the US in 2016 and Scott Morrison in Australia last year. Both results came as a profound shock to the elite media commentariats, isolated in their self-absorbed metropolitan bubbles and unable to see past their noses.
An even more devastating blow to the elite agenda came with Boris Johnson’s triumph in the British elections, which emphatically settled the bitter argument over membership of the European Union. The concept of a European superstate was a project dear to the hearts of the elites, with their dogged belief in the virtues of big government. But after all the rage and agonising political paralysis, no-one was left in any doubt that the majority of the British public wanted out – not because they had a racist aversion to immigration, as the elites insisted, but because they had a perfectly rational desire to govern themselves rather than submit to rule from Brussels.
The only way the elites can make sense of such outcomes is by concluding that voters have been manipulated by the dark, malevolent, nationalistic force they call populism. It confirms their suspicion that ordinary people can’t be trusted to vote sensibly. In the glossary of the elites, the word populist has become a pejorative synonym for the far Right, which is how they classify anyone mildly right of centre. But a populist politician, by definition, is one who seeks the support of, or holds the same views as, ordinary people. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about?
So what about New Zealand? We tend to think of Winston Peters as our own example of a populist politician, but the Great Tuatara won only 7 per cent of the vote in the 2017 election and lost his own seat. It follows that he doesn’t represent ordinary people in the way Johnson or even Trump can claim to. He occupies a position of power only through his ability to manipulate a dodgy electoral system to his own advantage.
A populist politician, by definition, is one who seeks the support of, or holds the same views as, ordinary people. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about?