Dialogue: Flaming burst of fruitcake therapy

By GORDON MCLAUGHLAN

Got an extraordinary piece of incandescent hate mail the other day. I started smiling when he called me "a petty little pundit trying to look like a cross between Rodin's Thinker and Attila the Hun" - one of a number of "micro-fart columnists in this pompous little would-be 'nation' of ours".

Then I laughed aloud when he went on with: "Places like Massachusetts and Connecticut had constitutions and legally appointed governors before old Abel Tasman was unfortunate to even sight this silly little blot on the map."

From there on it gets funnier as it gets more explosive until you can imagine the guy, having worked himself through a kind of combustibility therapy, going for a lie down, emotionally razed.

All columnists receive this sort of thing from time to time. As he goes for me with open throttle, he also sideswipes Jamie Belich, Joe Bennett, Colin James and others.

But the difference with this letter, apart from the sustained volcanic wrath over more than 500 words, is that the guy signed it. Usually people this ... well ... this disturbed, write anonymously.

What caused his tantrum was that I suggested George Dubya's Texan swagger could be a bit of a worry, that American policy and attitudes were not beyond reproach.

The letter degenerates quickly into angry obscenities but the gist of it is that I am possibly a descendent of "one of Herman Melville's boys and some Maori whore"; that the rest of the world is inferior to the Americans in war; that "wog terrorists are nothing new to Uncle Sam"; that the highest form of life is the fighting man; that the American Civil War with its huge death toll somehow makes the United States a greater nation than European countries, especially because "many of the 'modern' nations of Europe did not even exist at that time".

Yes, it gets that irrational. But what is interesting is that the spelling is okay, by and large, the grammar suggests he's had the privilege of at least a rudimentary education, and it's typed on paper that suggests he reads business books.

The point of mentioning this is to demonstrate that away and beyond those with robust opinions who legitimately and sincerely test our ideas and emotionally challenge our attitudes, there are fruitcakes among us who are firing from well outside the range of reason. And a crisis of some sort tends to flush them out.

So what do you do about this sort of inflammatory writing? Nothing.

But is there someone dangerous lurking behind these violent words? Well, I'm convinced it's more often therapeutic to the person under stress, that freedom of expression should be total and that the laws governing threatening behaviour, harassment and physical assault are enough protection. And I think most New Zealanders would agree.

A few days after receiving the letter I chaired a Courage Day forum convened by the Society of Authors (Pen NZ) on the subject of freedom of expression and censorship, with a panel including Chief Censor Bill Hastings, the author of A City Possessed (the Christchurch creche case), Lynley Hood, the Anglican bishop of Dunedin, Penny Jamieson, and the dean of the Otago law School, Mark Henaghan. Sixty members of the public were present, questioning the panel and commenting on their views.

The mood was generally genial and only the slightest hint came from one participant of a once widely held view - that freedom of expression is a priceless commodity for me but far too rich for those who disagree with me. No one declaimed against the amount of sex and violence at loose in our society, and no one wanted greater curbs on what we are allowed to read, view or hear.

I cast my mind back a few decades when I used to report politics at local and national levels. Argument was white-hot then on whether society needed protection from obscene and violent material. Where has the argument gone? It has largely disappeared, and the great majority of New Zealanders seem indifferent to its passing.

When I talked to Bill Hastings afterwards, he agreed that the argument was not there any more but he couldn't explain why. Was it apathy? Or is it that we've grown up at last, the way the Swedes and the Danes did many years ago.

I think the politicians should read a warning into this: don't try and be in loco parentis like governments used to be. Keep your noses out of our affairs and your hands off our liberties.

* Courage Day is the tellingly ambiguous name New Zealand writers have given to the international day held every year on November 15 around the world, called elsewhere Writers-in-Prison Day. It is here named to honour Sarah Courage, the feisty Canterbury 19th-century pioneer who wrote about the lifestyle of her neighbours. About half of the 18 copies of her book that were privately printed were burned by those offended by her words. It also honours her grandson, James Courage, forced to leave New Zealand in the homophobic climate of the middle of last century. He became a novelist in London. His Way of Love was published in Britain and New York in 1959, but banned here.