Gordon McLauchlan: In so many words, it's a bit curious

COMMENT

Language has been under stress again this week. A word increasingly taking on a curious meaning, almost always in the hands or mouths of the indignant, is "taxpayer".

The implication that accompanies its daily use is that a special representative group of people not only pays all the taxes but shares views on how it should be spent and are constantly incensed that their members are not controlling this expenditure.

This alter ego of those macroeconomically obsessed reared its uncomely head this week when the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement were announced.

A correspondent bridling under this generosity towards what he or she clearly sees as a lot of literary layabouts suggested the awards should be called the Taxpayers' Awards for Literary Achievement.

Another correspondent is, ironically, "so glad we taxpayers have been able to work our butts off so we can pay this bonus with our hard-earned taxes".

Every day we hear from this mythical band of plundered people who mutter away at the irresponsibility with which the rest of us fritter away their money.

Well, a taxpayer, according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, is "a person who pays taxes".

So who pays taxes in New Zealand? All of us except toddlers in their strollers, and when they first reach up and slip a dollar or two onto the counter for an icecream, they become taxpayers, too.

Even - wait for it - writers pay taxes. Not much as a rule because most earn damn-all. They are so stupid these scribes (my turn for irony) that they don't understand the first obligation of the human being is avarice.

Indignation won't take wing on such phrases as citizens' money because we all know instantly that that means everyone with their full diversity of their views and not some mythical group of people carrying the rest of us.

So when someone says "taxpayers" to support their case, mentally transpose "citizens" or "everyone" and the falseness of their case becomes immediately apparent. Then these seething citizens will be forced to protest because "I" believe taxpayers' money is being wasted ... and they will not be able to pretend to rally these phantom hordes.

Another word being gradually distorted is "conservative", the tag given to the American broadcaster Rush Limbaugh this week when it was announced he might be addicted to painkillers. Conservative is a word worthy of respect: it stands for those who want to preserve what they regard as time-honoured values.

Now I am a liberal by temperament and opinion and regard conservatives as constituting a bulwark that should sometimes be assaulted by force of reason or in the interests of more compassion.

Looking into the Oxford Concise again, I find political conservatives defined as "favouring free enterprise, private ownership and socially conservative ideas". I accept that as accurate.

So they are a touchstone of political and social values and certainly worthy of respect. But almost nothing about Limbaugh is worthy of respect.

He belongs to a powerful, rabid-right group in the United States which divides people into the holy who agree with then and the evil who don't, and daily he dishes out vindictive abuse at any kind of liberal thought or action.

When people are as nastily judgmental as Rush Limbaugh, you guess they have more than a normal range of human frailties and, therefore, excel especially at hypocrisy, and he may soon suffer the consequences of bigotry and hypocrisy. I don't mind that but please don't give him the dignity of calling him a conservative.

Another word that looked very odd in its context this week is "suspected". A correspondent to the Herald is full of contempt for those "raving on again" about Ahmed Zaoui and the conditions he is being held under. While people with an ounce of compassion for their fellow human beings find it hard to believe anyone in this country could be subjected to the kind of solitary confinement imposed on Mr Zaoui, the correspondent considers sympathy for him is "idealistic nonsense" because he is a "suspected" terrorist. Being suspected is apparently enough.

Mr Zaoui's lawyer told Brian Edwards in an interview a few weeks ago that he had been kept in a cell with one high window for 23 hours a day over 10 months and given one hour of exercise in the corridor outside. I thought Edwards might go "What!" and display disbelief and anger at this news as I did in the privacy of my own living-room, but I guess too many of us are becoming inured to mental cruelty inflicted on outsiders. All these strangers are now seen as potential mass-murderers.

I have been waiting for New Zealanders to erupt in protest against Mr Zaoui's treatment but I fear we have moved now into an age of callous indifference to the suffering of others, even in our own country.

I understand that his conditions have been somewhat ameliorated but I invite readers to close their eyes for a while and imagine how they would survive under those circumstances for all that time with all their marbles.

In some Orwellian way, people we class as "outsiders" are all now automatically considered to menace our peace and well-being. Although many of them are angry about it, most Americans seem unconcerned at the appalling scandal of hundreds of prisoners being held for years without trial under God knows what sort of interrogation at Guantanamo Bay - despite sickening television clips of them being helped by guards just to walk, their legs tightly shackled.

We may reach the stage in the West where the way of life we claim to be protecting is not worth the effort.