Paul Thomas: Let's not forget the difference between pathetic and sinister

The lead story on last Monday night's One News was that five Auckland Grammar pupils had made absolute tits of themselves.

This in itself didn't surprise me - in my experience, which goes back 40-odd years, Grammar has always produced its share of absolute tits. But the treatment of it did.

The difference this time was that the tittishness involved Nazi iconography.

Even so, one had to ask: what did TV One think was going on here?

Was it a bunch of young clowns trying to be funny but getting it horribly wrong, whether out of ignorance or immaturity, or were they knowingly pushing the envelope of bad taste and offensiveness in the manner of fringe comedians and editors of student magazines? Or is the Hitler Youth movement alive and well and recruiting at Auckland Grammar?

If it was, in fact, the last, you could understand TV One going overboard, but they produced no evidence to support that possibility.

It seems with Western culture having - rightly - distinguished Nazism from all other examples of organised evil and the Holocaust from all other crimes against humanity, we are now programmed to be outraged by any association with them without pausing to differentiate between the tangential and the direct, the pathetic and the sinister.

Witness the instant pariah status of motorsport boss Max Mosley when he was accused - falsely - of introducing a concentration camp theme to his romps with prostitutes.

Formula One's movers and shakers had no problem with Mosley's sado-masochism or yen for paid group sex, but the suggestion of a Nazi fetish placed him beyond the pale.

Witness the 2004 banning from New Zealand of Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, as if even one lunatic fringe pipsqueak was too much for our delicate social fabric.

There's an anomaly here. Although we tut-tut over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's outbursts, Holocaust denial is routine in state-controlled media throughout the Arab world.

The interesting question is why we expect better of our schoolchildren than we do of the ruling elites of countries we happily do business with?

* * *

Americans are often derided for their wilful ignorance of the rest of the world, but with the silly and embarrassing decision to give Barack Obama the Nobel Peace prize, the boot's on the other foot.

Since Obama has barely got his brogues under the Oval Office desk, the suggestion is he won the award for not being George W. Bush. John McCain isn't Bush either, but I doubt anyone seriously believes that he would have been awarded the prize had he won the 2008 election. The obvious conclusion is that in the eyes of the Nobel Committee, Obama's great contribution to world peace was to spearhead the ousting from power of the Republican Party.

That being the case, it's highly likely the award will only strengthen US conservatives' conviction Obama is an internationalist first and an American second and their resolve to thwart him whenever possible and by whatever means necessary.

In other words, it will almost certainly make it harder for Obama to achieve his agenda and may diminish him in the eyes of those who really matter - the American electorate. That presumably would be the exact opposite of what the committee intended, but its members can't say they weren't warned. When candidate Obama made 200,000 Berliners go weak at the knees at the Brandenburg Gate, he promptly fell behind McCain in the polls.

* * *

Recently, in the course of calling for an end to free stuff on the internet, Times columnist Libby Purves lamented the rise of unofficial amateur news sources at the expense of the established, mainstream media.

Those who applaud this development, she snarled, want to free us "from the tyranny of accuracy, professional research, training, care and, presumably, legality into a gossipy twilight of twittered, undigested rumour, half-baked plagiarism and urban myth".

In the lead-up to last Sunday's naming of the All Black touring team the nation's rugby writers, having worked their contacts, listened at keyholes, and plied Graham Henry with pinot noir, were to a man telling us it would be boringly predictable and devoid of their beloved bolters.

However, on the Friday night before the announcement a poster on the excellent rugby website thesilverfern.com wrote that he'd been told "by a bloke in the pub" that Mike Delany and Zac Guildford were in, Joe Rokocoko wasn't, and there'd be only two hookers, neither of whom would be Aled de Malmanche.

That's what you call a scoop.

I don't entirely disagree with Purves, but in this instance the amateur news source left the professionals for dead.