Dialogue: Riddle of middle America

Scenes from one's festive season: "Capital punishment wins votes, matey," a drunken little man at a drunken little party dribbled affectionately in my ear a short while ago.

I remember feeling terribly moved by this observation, as well as its speaker: I could not understand why no one else in the room could see that this little guy, with his genius for controversy, was the party find.

People were really rather hostile. (In fact, the party had kind of turned its back on us both by this point. People kept asking us to take our polemic outside, not understanding that one must be loud when one is being brilliant.)

I see now that our conversation may have offered our audience fewer thrills than I imagined at the time. Still, I can't understand why it irritated such a large number of people quite so much.

Our topic? - the unlikely rise and rise of one George W. Bush. More specifically, the rise and rise of the great middle-American halfwit - those voters who genuinely felt that George W. was a credible choice.

I thought the fact that millions of drongos voted for Christendom's all-time dingaling was kind of witty - at the end of the day, it rather put human life in perspective.

(I realise that George W. may put human life even further in perspective by one day entering a nuclear war with Iraq, Pakistan or some other thrusting nation he's never heard of. For now, though, I kind of like his averageness and all-too-human style.)

When it comes down to it, too, there is not much that we can do down here about the conservative American mainstream and its choice of President. Personally, I am barely interested enough to read about it, let alone freak out about it.

But some people genuinely have their knickers in a twist about what they perceive is a dumbing-down of American politics. In their minds, something ended with this election. In their minds, too, this seems to matter.

"Liberalism is dead for ever," one particularly humourless partygoer intoned. "All that counts today is the mainstream's taste."

That's tripe. The mainstream has always had power and tastes that the rest of us hadn't a hope of understanding.

In fact, people have become rather unwell trying to understand them: Martin Amis had an excellent piece circa 1980-something in which he drove himself close to nuts trying to work out what middle America and Ronald Reagan saw in each other, and Clive James had about a thousand excellent pieces in which he tried, repeatedly, to understand what middle America saw in Barry Manilow.

Neither was able to answer these questions, even though both desperately wanted to. Like so many of one's contemporaries, they looked at middle America and thought they saw the beginning of the end.

Speaking of which, I would like to share a few thoughts with members of our fair nation's service and hospitality industries. Most of you do a magnificent job on our behalf, but a few perhaps need to get the old KiwiHost certificate out and polish it up, taking a moment to steep yourselves again in its excellent teachings.

I mention this only because, on two or three occasions in the past week, I have walked into several Ponsonby-Grey Lynn concerns with money to spend and have been greeted by a surly little shop-person who has decided that service means sitting behind the counter with a face like a slapped arse and talking to nobody.

'Tis not on, people. Let us remember that our customers pay our salaries.