Rosemary McLeod: Leaders facing tough times

Attorney-General Chris Finlayson. Photo/File

It's natural to be suspicious of people who seek top leadership, on the grounds that most of them are not people you'd want to kill time with if there was an enticing opportunity to watch paint dry elsewhere. They start as prefects at school, revel in the glory, and it's downhill from there.

The prefect badge lodges in their brains like that weird American amoeba that gets up your nose and into your brain, where it eats the part that makes you likeable, and you could end up as Donald Trump.

Whatever holds the rest of us back, it isn't modesty. It's wanting to think for ourselves, to talk to our kids, to grow things, read books, and hang out with people we like, not just people we can use.

I don't think you die happy over blocking a piece of legislation, or because you got away with financial deceit. Growing a fat pink dahlia is more satisfying, surely, but even a scrawny one will do.

It's a long time since anyone appeared in politics who seemed to really have a dream. Maybe Barack Obama did, but he paid a price for being the first black American president, an achievement that President Trump, who's in a singular category of his own, seems keen to erase from history. Emmanuel Macron in France may be another. In this country Norm Kirk seemed to stand for something good just by being an ordinary guy, and then we got Helen Clark, robbed of being our first female prime minister by Jenny Shipley. That must have rankled.

A new documentary about Clark's bid to head the United Nations reportedly blames sexism for her failure to win enough support, though she was no more entitled to the job than anyone else who chased it. Now she can climb real mountains again, which is her idea of fun. I call that a win.

People are attracted to extrovert egotists who seem to have all the answers to the questions you ever asked, though you never asked the right ones. But as with many top comedians, who are often depressives, there's a hollow inside them, full of fear of the dark, and spiders, and never managing to have the prettiest wife in the world. If you could break through Trump's blustering carapace you'd find nothing underneath except, perhaps, a corset.

While former FBI chief James Comey inflicted flesh wounds on Trump last week, and America chewed over what happened between them, British Prime Minister Theresa May inflicted a few wounds on herself. I hope she doesn't blame sexism for her poor judgment in calling a snap election. The real reason may have had a lot to do with her opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, being a jam maker.

As a fellow jam maker I commend him for making blackcurrant and apple jam, a favourite of mine. A man who does that is comfortable in his own skin. A woman who doesn't deprives herself of an innocent pleasure, and for what? Bought jam is never as good. Check out Aunt Daisy. She knew.

Against a backdrop of these major world events, verging at times on black comedy, a serious political event here wouldn't have made international news, but was significant all the same. It had everything to do with the English in the 19th century, their beliefs about their racial superiority, how they craved an empire, and what they were prepared to do to get it.

I grew up knowing nothing about Parihaka until I read Dick Scott's Go Ask That Mountain, and then I was appalled. Since then Herbs had a hit with a song about Parihaka, and more people know about the shameful day in 1881 when 1600 government troops sacked a pacifist Maori community.

The troops were greeted by singing children, with no aggression from Maori holding out against illegal land grabbing and confiscations, but they were shown no mercy. Their homes, crops and livestock were destroyed, and the Parihaka men, including leaders (these ones exceptions to my usual suspicions) Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, were jailed for more than a year without trial.

Meanwhile the women and girls, left unprotected, were raped by the soldiers. The then government delayed releasing official documents about the atrocity for several years, which may be why the shameful event eluded our collective memory.

It was brave of Attorney-General Chris Finlayson to face the small Parihaka community, apologise for the wrong, and give compensation, but nothing could ever heal such a wound, and neither it should. Both Pakeha and Maori, and whoever else comes to settle here, need to know what really happened here, not the fairy tale, once featured on Weet-Bix cards, that too many Pakeha cling to in place of the truth.

Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.