Dialogue: It's little wonder we're negative

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

A campaign has been unleashed to complain about complaining, and to be negative about negativity, and I object to these muddy generalisations.

The Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, John Bluck, has written a book about it called Killing us Softly, Challenging the Kiwi Culture of Complaint. I don't know about softly but there's certainly a touch of the Chinese water torture about a book that's meant to be popular but is without vivacity, wit or whimsy.

And Chris Laidlaw prattled on about the need for more passivity, more adulation for the successful, on National Radio last Sunday.

Bluck does acknowledge that Kiwis were lied to and cheated by successive governments for near enough to two decades but he doesn't seem to think that's enough to launch a complaining society.

I do. We were told to sit quietly while the playing field was levelled, reassured that such economic landscaping would eventually make us a fit and fecund society with riches for the humblest. Rubbish, as it turned out.

And think of this. You're earning $10 an hour at some menial task and you go for a rise to, say, $11 an hour. No go. But the CEO gets a $40,000 a year rise and the company's losing ground. Do you get negative? You betcha!

Lately we've seen a CEO who earned a quarter of a million dollars a year for exercising great managerial judgment end her career in a bonfire of the vanities, an explosion of bad judgment. How do you think they feel about that at the bottom of the food chain?

That's how we got from she'll be right to chronic complaining in one generation.

Then there's this old carthorse platitude about the Tall Poppy Syndrome, the whinge so frequently on the lips of the famous. (Funny that). Well, what about Britain where they not only chop the poppies down but grind them into the dirt. The newspapers there don't wait for celebrities to make fools of themselves, they set baited lines to catch people like Mark Todd and Sophie Whatshername, the Countess of Wessex.

Chris Laidlaw has been sucked in by this nonsense, berating us on the radio about not having enough unselective regard for the successful. He wants us to be stupidly indiscriminate. For example, we are nagged to love entrepreneurs. Well, there are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. I'm a fan of Stephen Tindall and Dick Hubbard - clever, energetic men, successful and each with a social conscience and a sense of community. Some other businessmen I admire haven't been all that successful but they've given it a go. But what about corporate bandits, of whom we've had our share?

The kind of national self-loathing malaise Bluck and Laidlaw think is peculiar to New Zealand is probably no worse here than almost everywhere else. There is, in America, an effluence of boring books berating, as one writer put it, whiny, narcissistic, paunchy baby boomers. Half the people in the US don't bother to vote because they don't think it matters enough, and that's starting to happen in Britain as well. They've opted out. The cult of the victim is global.

New Zealanders nowadays do suffer from justified cynicism. We feel we've been so badly let down we don't believe in anyone any more, least of all ourselves. Something positive, though: we have a Prime Minister now who uses real language. She's not mealy-mouthed, does not use weasel words, is neither smarmy nor condescending. We might strongly dislike some of the things she does, but at least she appears to be straight with us. What a change that is. That's why I think she polls so well.

My biggest complaint, my most sustained negativity, against the Culture of Complaint and Laidlaw's whinge is that they till exhausted soil, lack any kind of real insight.

But all is not lost. As I finished Bluck's book I picked up a new satirical publication from Wellington called The Babylon Express. It's typographically a disaster and its design appalling. In places it's obscene and the quality of its stories very uneven; but I can forgive it all those things because in places it's outrageously, laugh-aloud funny.

I got hope, too, for the future from watching the Sports Cafe nude day report on Wednesday night. They have the Aussie touch. That's what we need more of: vulgar, volcanic, to-hell-with-it, hilarious whingeing.

Creative complaining, that's what they're up to, and good on them. Bluck and Laidlaw are just unforgivably boring.