KEY POINTS:
Hey diddle diddle
We've solved the great riddle
Of violence by lout and by loon
They do this bad thing
Says our dear Mrs King
Because of that frightful full moon.
Many years ago, when the world was young and hormones flowed, every fledgling TV reporter had to perform one vital task before switching off the lights and plunging into the night to squander their petrol vouchers on sexual excess and substance abuse.
Before embracing such delights, we cubs were obliged to ring the police, lest we missed some outrage - the disappearance of a kitten, the theft of money from a milk bottle - which might add piquancy to the late bulletin.
"Hullo," you'd say to the chap in the watch room, "anything happening?"
"Nah," he'd reply, sieving tea through a manly moustache. "This is New Zealand, not The Sweeney."
But one night he said something interesting. "Not yet," he said. "But it will!"
But it will!!! How those words set a junior newshound slavering, redolent as they were with the promise of chaos and grief. Pressed, the officer casually revealed "it's a full moon tonight and things always go crazy then".
"How?"
"The usual stuff. Violence, assaults, domestics. Whenever there's a full moon they go through the roof. It happens every time. All the beat guys know that. We try to get the night off, it's so bad."
Well, you can imagine the gleam in the journalistic eye, the exultant clenching of the Cronkite fist. This was a SCOOP!!! Proof positive that whoever it was who'd embedded the cause of lunacy - behaviour affected by the modes of the moon - in its name was absolutely right!!
The man in the watch room said so. He confirmed the mysterious pull of Armstrong's orb didn't just influence the oceans' tides. It also tugged invisibly on the blood tides of human behaviour.
Next day, Mr Junior Scoop rang The Most Senior Plod to arrange an interview that would not only confirm this astronomical sensation but also guarantee receipt of some top award.
"Don't know what you're talking about," said The Most Senior Plod, clearly covering up. "The moon's the least of our worries. It doesn't affect anything as far as I'm aware."
Which obviously wasn't very far, thought his disdainful interrogator, sensing the Pulitzer fading fast.
No, added The Senior Plod in response to merciless questioning, we don't chart daily crime statistics and correlate them with the phases of the moon. And no, I won't give you an interview.
Damn and blast!!!!!!
Clearly, much has changed since then. A truth once known by the blokes on the beat (but not their superiors) has now, through some process of institutional osmosis, filtered up the police hierarchy.
Today's Senior Plods manifestly do know about the moon's sinister influence. And they've told their minister of our satellites' malevolent power. And she, good woman, a former dental nurse who could spot a medical canard a mile away, has generously shared the news with us.
The great sadness of this is that Mrs King has paid a high price for her candour, being generally mocked as silly when, in truth, she's only reiterated what we knew already, thanks to that previously mentioned student of human nature who first coined the words 'lunatic' and 'lunacy'. Because if that anonymous soul was right then so is Annette. And, if both be wrong, then it doesn't matter. We have a nigh insatiable appetite for silliness. We swallow all sorts of codswallop. We believe all kinds of nonsense. Adding one more myth to the list shouldn't matter a toss.
Especially when we live in a country where radical young evangelists believe it is a sensible and grandly indigenous thing to drive across the Auckland Harbour Bridge flying Maori sovereignty flags, irrespective of the fact that 'Maori' and 'sovereignty' are both European constructs and flags a foreign invention. Irony obviously isn't a core subject in the modern curriculum.
Equally, for some other inexplicable reason, we now believe passionately that every skerrick of land which changed hands 150 years ago was stolen or confiscated, regardless of the fact that the first confrontation between Maori and the Crown occurred in 1845 when Northland tribes took militant exception to the rules obliging them to sell their estates only to the government - which, in the absence of taxes, acquired its meagre income by buying cheap and selling dear.
Needless to say, like good capitalists anywhere, the Northerners took exception to this, preferring to sell their property (sometimes more than once) on the much more lucrative open market.
Moreover, if a hand-holding, camera-hungry repository of cliches like Mrs Titewhai Harawira can be presented by today's credulous journalists as an exemplar of what we all should really believe about Waitangi Day, then Mrs King should surely be equally lauded - not lambasted - for her lunar presience.
Alas, no. Oh well. That's life. Maybe us poor sods in Outer Roa just have to accept we've got a full moon all the time.
