KEY POINTS:
It's easy to blame the politicians. So we do. Bagging them's become a national sport. One we all love to play. And that's understandable.
They're an easy target, always visible - and often risible. Our news organisations ensure that. Their Political Editors - poor, blighted creatures trapped halfway between ambition and inability - shadow the pollies just about everywhere except in bed (and sometimes even there) waiting, gimlet-eyed, for a slip or blunder because they know such gaffes are the quickest route to a lead story.
Unless, of course, some errant sports star - queasy Ryder or maudlin Masoe - goes troppo in a bar at 5am.
Sadly, those are rare distractions. Generally speaking, it's our politicians who dominate the news. They're the bread in our circuses. And it's all good fun and it's all good theatre and, to be fair, the silly duffers often deserve what they get.
They are preposterous and populist. And dodgy and devious too. They do feather their own nests whilst plundering ours. They do connive and conspire. They do say one thing and mean another. All that is true.
But what's also true is that their faults are merely ours writ large. Amplified by the opportunities of power, for sure, but still a mirror for the electorate's foibles.
Perhaps we should spend a little less time hooting at their antics and a little more time looking into that mirror. If we did, we may discover that we've actually been laughing at ourselves all along.
Winston Churchill once said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." And there's truth in that.
We are the jokers but we're also the joke. This whole daft business about who should own Auckland Airport is a classic example. The reason Cullen has swooped - and Key is squirming - is that both of them know what our xenophobic prejudices are.
For some inexplicable reason, we, the people - who'll fly Emirates or Virgin or Jetstar or anyone else who'll sell us a cheap seat; we, the people, who'll swamp a radio station with calls in order to win a foreign-made ultra-thin laptop; we, the people, who'll happily drive a foreign car and whiz down to the deli in it to buy some foreign food.
We, the people, who crave iPods and Nokias and X-Boxes and the adulation of foreign visitors like Jack Nicholson and Bill Gates - apparently consider it absolutely essential that those who own the airport live in Taumarunui, not Toronto.
As if it matters. It doesn't. It doesn't matter a tinker's cuss who owns the flaming airport. Not that the furtive foreign Canadians were going to own it anyway. Unless the New Maths has made 40 per cent a majority.
Which, for all we know, it has; in a bi-cultural context, of course. But the real question we should ask is not who should own the airport but why anyone would actually bother.
Let's be honest. Airports are awful. They're bus depots on steroids, sprawling bureaucratic warehouses, monuments to the rituals of humiliation.
They're places we have to go through before we get the the places we want to go to. Everything about airports is an affront. Everything we do in them violates our modern affection for independence, control and autonomy.
We have to queue for our tickets - cordoned and concertinaed in maddening zig-zags of the sort you'd imagine in an abattoir.
We have to queue to get our passports checked. We have to queue to have our luggage X-rayed. And those card things stamped.
We have to queue for food. And drink. And queue to pee. And just when we thought we were done with minding our pees in queues, we have to queue to get on the b@#$#y plane!!!!
And, yes, okay, the business analysts will tell us fiscally illiterate yobbos that it's precisely those frustrations, humiliations and inertia which make an airport such a spiffing investment. You should buy shares in your own degradation, they will say.
Because, while there may be money in muck, there's even more cash in queues and nothing, nothing on God's good earth beats an airport for queues.
Decent folk would eschew this opportunity to benefit from others' misfortune.
"Leave it to the grasping foreigners," is what a dinkum Kiwi would say. "Let the lesser breeds outside our lawns profit from human misery. We are above such things."
Alas, we're not. Having seen off the Arabs - and despite the fact that they threatened to improve the airport much as they've improved that oft-photographed island in the Middle East, we now cheer - or those of us without shares now cheer - when the gummint gives the Canucks the flick.
Four million people, overtaxed, unable to fund a decent health system, and here we are, fretting about a transit lounge. Oh well, as we fade into oblivion, at least we can say we're locally owned!
