Felix Geiringer: Will 'bit of fun' end up like pate polishing?

Prime Minister John Key. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Opinion

Bob Jones has a point. All of the fun is being leached out of this world by the political correctness police. And John "Ponypuller" Key is only the latest victim.

I still remember how much fun we used to have pate polishing, until that PC crowd of naysayers put a stop to that one too.

For those of you too young to remember, pate polishing was a sport practised exclusively on Bald Property Tycoons (or BPTs, as we liked to call them). It might have been possible to play pate polishing with someone who wasn't a BPT, but where is the fun in that? The basic game went like this: someone would grab the BPT in a quick headlock and start rubbing the bald top of his head. If anyone saw this happening they would run over and join in the fun until the BPT's head shone like the full moon.

I don't think I've ever laughed as hard as I did while PP-ing a BPT. Even just watching from a distance gave one quite a chuckle. The BPTs loved it too. Sure, they squealed quite a lot while it was happening, but I know that was just for show. In reality, a PP-ing, if done well, was the highlight of their day.

A pate polish could happen anywhere: down the pub, or if you happened to see a BPT walking down the street. But it was never more fun than when done in the BPT's own offices.

Often, this would occur during negotiation meetings. The silly BPT might start putting on airs or pretend to play it tough during a negotiation. Perhaps, the BPT would be trying to secure a variation without the due compensation. The contractor would just grab him and start rubbing that noggin. The lawyers around the table, especially the BPT's own lawyer, were usually the next to join in.

At the height of PP-ing, you didn't even need to schedule a meeting. If you craved a rub on a tantalising pate, you could just wander into the BPT's offices any time you liked. At one point, I thought Pate-Polishing Day, with its countrywide BPT PP-ing competitions, was going to grow to replace the quarrelsome Waitangi Day.

A national day of which we could finally all be proud.

These days, of course, all that has changed. The PC Police saw to that. Not the real police, mind. If a real police constable came into a pub and saw a PP-ing, they would, likely as not, have run over to join the fun. Policemen were some of the best BPT polishers I ever saw. They could make BPT heads look like mirrors and they extracted the loudest squeals from the BPTs as well.

No, the real police are not the problem. You can pull as many ponytails as you like, blackmail some politicians, or sleep with a few comatose underage girls, and the real police have the sense to leave you alone.

It's that Graham McGreedy and the sphere of left-wing tweets who yowl and moan and bring private prosecutions and suchlike. And don't get me started about the Human Rights Commission. If it weren't for that lot, I reckon us rich white men would be free to say or do whatever we liked.

So let's hear it for the rights of our "Ponypuller" PM, and all the hot-blooded white men of privilege like him. Let this be our line in the sand. If we cannot embarrass and humiliate people in their workplace in this way, then in what way can we do it? Answer me that!

Felix Geiringer is a Wellington lawyer.