Dialogue: Don't worry, be happy (you might live in Fiji)

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I'm travelling into Wellington from the airport on a raw morning recently when I notice the Kiwi Indian driver has a hand-written note taped to the dashboard in front of the steering-wheel. It reads: "I feel great."

I start to feel pretty good myself after a week of national "Woe are we."

I ask him if he always feels great, or does he seldom feel great and is using the note to change his attitude. He grins broadly and says: "I feel great most of the time and this is to remind me."

Well, he reminded me that in this small, intimate society a run of scandals, disasters and political squabbles is suffocating.

Right now our citizens are drawing deep breaths in shock, and banging their foreheads with the backs of their hands, at the lack of business confidence, allegations against Mark Todd, the reckless past life of Dover Samuels, the mud-slinging of Richard Prebble and Winston Peters and the pathetic puerility of Grant Gillon.

And this turmoil is being played out against the lunacy of Fiji just over the horizon and the long-running, hand-wringing, tear-washed Gisborne cervical cancer opera.

A kind of medical recklessness happened in Gisborne that tragically shortened the lives of women and may have been more widespread than was at first thought.

This won't win me a popularity contest, but I believe a small, smart, businesslike group of investigators, uncloyed from sentiment, would more likely get to the bottom of the problem, measure its malign extent and mend it than a public sob-saga which seems to obfuscate more than it enlightens.

On Tuesday night's television news I heard an expert witness from the Health Funding Authority asked whether some smears might even have missed being read at all.

She replied: "Theoretically, that might be just about possible."

In the privacy of my own home, I leapt from my chair shouting: "What the hell does that mean?"

So maybe the time has come to lighten up a bit. As far as politicians are concerned, let them wallow in their own chagrin.

Quite a few years ago I was keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Institute of Management in Dunedin, my old home town.

The country was in the grip of Muldoon mayhem at the time, with many people allegedly fleeing to Australia (I can't remember when they weren't, by the way). Scandals and rumours of scandals were whispered along corridors, in buses, and probably in beds by the sources of them.

Sporting defeats were actually being blamed on the national depression.

At the end of my speech I said they should all take time out from the national gloom. Go to dinner and get a bit shickered (southern dialect), I suggested, laugh, do a tap dance, read a book to your kids or your grandchildren or take them to the movies - anything to get the thumbs of puritan angst off your throats.

They looked at me as though I'd done a down-trou and afterwards an elderly woman told me off at length for urging people to abrogate their responsibilities. "If we don't worry about what's happening in our country, who will?"

I wanted to say, "Woody Woodpecker, you boring old bag" but, though she was a small woman, a Calvinist ferocity shone from the eyes above her smile, redolent of the tribe of great aunts that haunted my childhood; so I agreed with her that we should worry more, lots more, coward that I am.

On the subject of scandal, have you ever noticed that people berating others for succumbing to some human frailty often won't say what the offending act was, as though to say it is to be infected by it?

The more prudish they are, the more immoral acts there are, and the less they can discriminate.

So what happens is they find a tepidly pejorative word to cover all moral acts of turpitude.

This decade the word is "inappropriate." Someone has already referred to Mark Todd's alleged cocaine-snorting as "inappropriate," leaving me to wonder whether the actions themselves are okay but should be done only during a month with an "r" in it, or not while the wife's out of town, or before the northern summer solstice.

Next thing, genocide will be inappropriate, giving the impression that it may depend on which race you wipe out.

So could we call a moratorium on that word? And, while we're on the subject, what about abandoning "celebrate" (as in "our diversity") and "passionate" (as about our work).

But, above all, let's take it easy. There are good things happening out there. A man famous for mangling the language, Murray Mexted, used the word "egregious" in a rugby commentary the other week. This is a huge breakthrough for high culture, the most exciting use of an expressive word since David Lange let fly with "solipsism."

Mexted's colleague sneered and patronisingly asked him what the word meant.

"Outstandingly bad," he replied quick as a stab kick, proving conclusively that he's swotting a dictionary, almost certainly the Collins Millennium Edition, which, alone among mine, gives exactly that definition.

Goodonya, Murray, you beaut.