We're told that back home in the islands Blakely's people value things like prestige and mana, and that those who bring the family/village name into disrepute do so at their peril. How quaint. Pity the same attitude hasn't survived amongst other ethnic groups, like the one that produced Prime Minister John Key's daughter, who clearly has little idea of the meaning of prestige and mana. A talented artist she might be, but many will be reserving judgement on that.
A fellow artist, one with rather more claim to the title than Stephanie Key has so far earned, last week described her as a pretty young thing conforming to Western notions of beauty, and soft porn was the norm. Konrad Hurrell, on the other hand, is presumably more a fan of hard porn, although the video of his star turn with Blakely was removed from Facebook or wherever it ended up before it could achieve true notoriety.
Most people with IQs higher than room temperature wouldn't give a toss about how rugby league players, TV 'stars' or others with inflated egos choose to amuse themselves, however. And if they are stupid enough to send videos to a so-called friend, who then releases them to the universe, so what? No one expects anything better from some sports codes anyway.
It might be disappointing to some that, despite all the time, money and effort that is reportedly invested in them so they won't behave like immature third formers, some still do, but it is of no importance to the great majority of us, excluding Samoan villages where people still have pride in themselves and expect their offspring to respect that.
It's not only league players who might have taken one high tackle too many who have fallen foul of social media though. At the other end of the continuum is Judith Collins, one of the most able and experienced Cabinet ministers in the country. It seems that she's long been an avid twitterer, or tweeter, or whatever they're called. Goodness only knows why. Maybe it's an addiction.
Whatever it is, it's difficult to explain why someone of Ms Collins' ilk would willingly expose herself to what her boss described last week as trolls and bottom feeders.
The trouble is that social media enable those with no judgement whatsoever to display that fact for all to see and admire/tut tut via a platform that no one else will ever give them.
This has strong appeal for those who would otherwise have difficulty commanding any sort of an audience. This new freedom of speech has uncovered some truly horrible people, although some may just practise being horrible on the weekends, instead of playing golf or mowing the lawns.
Whatever they are, it doesn't take much to bring them out from under their rocks. Even MasterChef lit some people's fuses, defeated finalists Jaimie Stodler and Bec Stanley reportedly copping threats and abuse on a TVNZ Facebook page. Not satisfied that the friends from Queenstown had been beaten to the title by the sisters from Maketu, some really let rip, to the point where some of the more offensive contributions were removed by TVNZ, and a small number of individuals were blocked from posting.
What did these people do before they acquired a keyboard that gave them almost unlimited access to other people's eyeballs? Whatever the answer to that might be, they have clearly succeeded in proving that open slather doesn't work, or at least not for the good. They've also succeeded in proving that there are some extremely dimwitted people in our midst, who persist in leading with their chins. They might learn from their mistakes, but no one else seems to.
All this casts new light on the profound words penned by John Clarke all those years ago about how lucky we are. We could do worse than consider how propitious our circumstances really are, Frederick, when she see, hear and read of real news, stuff like Nigerian mothers weeping for their stolen daughters, Syrian families wondering where their next meal will come from, where they will sleep and when and where the next bomb will fall, Solomon Islanders who have lost everything, meagre as 'everything' might have been, to floods that are already falling off the news radar in countries that could help.
Life is short, cruel and unforgiving in many parts of this planet, but we here at the bottom of the Pacific amuse ourselves by watching people self-destruct on Facebook and wonder exactly what it was that Konrad Hurrell was doing in that car.
Our children suffer the misery of cyber bullying - has anyone ever told them to turn the phone/computer off, or just stop looking?
Pro-Russians shoot anti-Russians in Ukraine, where simply walking to their equivalent of the Lotto shop on a Saturday evening has become a death-defying act, and South Africans vote in the knowledge that the outcome has already been decided, while here we can hardly be bothered to vote at all. Maybe if we could vote via Twitter we might take more interest in exercising a right that many people around the world are prepared to die for.
John Clarke wasn't thinking about the price of smartphones or most of New Zealand's lack of a housing crisis when he wrote about how lucky we were. He was thinking of a mate who had just returned from Europe, another mate who had imbibed a little too freely at the pub, a stock agent with a beach place where his wife had been eaten by a couple of crays, a father-in-law who was unimpressed with Greece and Greeks, and an acquaintance who had had a heart attack and a haemorrhage in his ear, whose wife had left him and was now bankrupt. An unlikely set of circumstances, perhaps, but the parallel universe created by social media would have seemed equally far-fetched 40-odd years ago.
But this is New Zealand, and every so often there is a glimmer of hope that some of us still inhabit the real world, and still recognise good old-fashioned values and standards. Like the Whangarei school that has suspended a student who egged the Prime Minister's car last week, and is hoping against hope that its reputation has not been permanently sullied. That's more like it. A Samoan villager would understand that.
