KEY POINTS:
Ever wondered how urban legends get started?
Take the one about alligators living in the New York sewers. They're supposedly descendants of baby alligators brought back from Florida as pets, then flushed down the toilet when they started behaving like the primeval predators they are.
An alligator found in a Harlem manhole in 1935 was thought to have escaped off a ship.
A former sewer official claimed to have discovered and eradicated a colony of the beasts in the 1930s, but he was a known bullshit artist. That's the sum total of supporting evidence for this enduring myth.
Then there's the one about Richard Gere and the gerbil.
I don't really want to go there (any more, I imagine, than a gerbil would) but there are two points worth making: firstly National Enquirer, a tabloid rag that runs articles about alien abductions and Elvis sightings, had a reporter on the case fulltime for six months and still wasn't able to fabricate a story.
Secondly, if you believe that, you'll believe anything, but clearly plenty of people are only too happy to do just that.
Kiwis who find themselves being treated as refugees from a country where free speech is under threat, I can suggest an explanation.
On August 29, historian Paul Moon gave Herald readers a hair-raising account of the reaction to his recently published book about traditional Maori cannibalism.
He evoked Nazi book-burning and compared himself to a character in Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, who is convicted and executed on charges that are never explained to him.
Moon wrote that the Human Rights Commission "dipped its toe into this acrid pool and considered the merits of a letter of complaint made about the book. The commission's response was to suggest I enter into mediation".
The Australian's conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen picked up Moon's baton and ran hard with it, demanding to know if there's now a human right to an airbrushed history. She accused human rights commissions here and elsewhere of "frothing at the bit to justify their continued existence and a steady stream of taxpayer dollars by perpetuating a grievance society".
As my wife works for the commission, I felt a vicarious responsibility for New Zealand's slide into politically correct tyranny.
Before joining the resistance, though, I thought it prudent to see what was on the public record. It turned out that Moon's and Albrechtsen's panic attacks were based on a single anonymous complaint to the Human Rights Commission.
It shouldn't need to be pointed out that the commission has no more control over the communications it receives from the public than do newspaper editors or talk-show hosts, nor that all societies have their share of cranks, malcontents and people capable of believing that a major Hollywood star could have a sexual relationship with a rodent.
It also turned out that the commission didn't "consider the merits" of the complaint at all.
It was in fact binned because the commission doesn't consider anonymous complaints full stop.
Thirdly, it put out a press release to this effect on August 27, two days before Moon and Albrechtsen frothed at the bit about the strangulation of free speech in this country, and subsequently denied Moon's assertion that he was invited to go to mediation.
At times Moon seemed to equate criticism with censorship, an awkward posture for someone who clearly sees himself as making a stand for freedom of expression.
The criticism might have been unfair and ill-informed, but as every writer finds out sooner or later, it goes with the territory.
Shortly after her tirade against the commission, Albrechtsen penned a hero-gram about John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin. The next day the New York Times revealed that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin sought to have books she considered morally or socially objectionable removed from the town library.
When the librarian resisted, Palin sacked her.
On YouTube you can hear Palin chortling as a cancer-surviving political rival is described as a bitch and a cancer.
But when her qualifications for being a heartbeat away from the presidency were questioned, supporters screamed sexism.
This, presumably, is the brave new world in which robust debate flourishes and free speech is cherished and that Albrechtsen looks forward to when "we shut these places (commissions) down".
We should be wary of those who cry wolf about threats to our civil liberties to promote personal agendas. A test is whether or not they accept Voltaire's formula: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
