Opinion: This month, I signed up to X (formerly Twitter) for an hour, experimentally, in order to have a look. I browsed gingerly through the famous X vitriol (go off, people!). My favourite insult, which I took away as a souvenir, was: “Grimshaw: absolute woke fool.”
Having imported America’s “war on woke”, some of us really have drunk the Kool-Aid on the argument, previously put about by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, that the media (the free press) is the enemy of the people. It seems extraordinary that you can still convince citizens they should shun news media that’s based on editorial standards and fact checking. It’s strange that it doesn’t occur to people how inconvenient journalism is for politicians. Countries without “mainstream media” are the ones where politicians do what they want, without oversight.
On X, you can see the dynamic playing out: the easiest way to take power away from people is to trick them into disempowering themselves. It’s as if some crafty politician (or tyrant or populist opportunist) had convinced me to spend my time protesting against my own right to vote.
Perhaps it’s a yearning for belonging and faith. You rail against the messengers (the media) and if the messengers won’t be quiet, you shoot them. You don’t want to be informed, you just want to unite and believe. To submit, even. Knowledge is power. This is the heart of it: rejection of informative news media is an act of submission.
In March, I spent an evening at Government House in Auckland, where the Governor-General, Dame Cindy Kiro, was celebrating Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s 80th birthday. The writer Witi Ihimaera was there, looking chic and in philosophical mood. He brandished a canapé and said to me languidly, rhetorically, “Why do we write? Why?” Good question. Could it be because we’re absolute woke fools?
The doors were open and the sun poured into the room. Outside, the enormous garden was crossed by shafts of evening light. Neither woke fool (not quite) nor seething fascist (not tonight, anyway) I wandered among the guests. There was CK Stead, dinner-suited, with his medal, the Order of New Zealand, fastened under his black tie. There were Helen Clark and her husband, Peter Davis, back from somewhere rugged and remote. There was the charming, gracious Governor-General, attended by some kind of good-looking soldier.
Dame Kiri up close has the hard-to-define quality, charisma and star power. Between the tributes, which included a message of congratulations from King Charles and Queen Camilla, a young bass-baritone, Samson Setu, performed.
Setu, a Samoan who grew up singing in his family’s church in Manurewa, has been supported by the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation. While studying music, he nearly dropped out to become a professional rugby player, but was persuaded not to by his mother and Dame Kiri. He moved from the University of Otago to Auckland, where he enjoyed the company of fellow Pasifika students. He went on to the Royal College of Music in London, then won a place at New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious young artist programme, and from there was taken on as a singer at Zürich Opera House.
His singing was beautiful and his interaction with Dame Kiri was charming. Setu has an extraordinary voice and presence. Two stars, the veteran and the younger: it was such a display of talent it created mistiness and delight in the room. Everyone felt happy, moved, proud.
Among all the doom and horror and the grimness of the nightly reports, this was something worth writing about. No need to shoot the messenger on this one: Samson Setu is terrific, one to watch, the real deal, a star.
