Re: [-empyre-] being pakeha liberty now justice is not

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

I have few ideas about the New Zealand state (few ideas at all), except that
many parts of the world find its transparency, proximity and lack of
corruption enviable. New Zealanders are not very good, on a national level,
at making the best of our, political, advantages, the state's
accountability. And I appreciate the bulwark it provides against
transnational capital to the small but not insignificant degree it does.

What I hoped I was saying, rather than assaying an analysis of the state,
was that there exists a subtext to the way New Zealanders comport themselves
discursively with regard to the state which might be eked out - from the
mere clues discarded in this discussion - in the way of a distinctively NZ
false consciousness, ideology: a way of being-in-the-state as the outside
arbiter of the NZ discursive subject. A liberty, then, pragmatically
speaking, in the desublimation (?): because the persistent imago is one
generative of difference, even in the Australasian First World (such that I
baulk at your use of 'settler' to qualify this culture, Danny), but (no pun)
is also one inadequate to the immediacy of intra- and inter-cultural
experience - a persistent tic of recourse back to - what else? - Godzone,
Schlaraffenland, Milk-and-Honey, not just the fruit-bowl of the South
Pacific but home of social equity, exemplified in pop by Big Norm - but
really Jo Savage...

State Highway One is a tour of 1950s shopfronts, the GI's have left their
mark but the Empire hasn't dropped us... There is an unlikelihood about its
persistence - and its optimism - that makes it viable as a national dirty
secret, given all those little factoids leaping to the forefront of this
discussion: our geographic isolation, our cringe, our
anti-appearing-as-Europeans-would-but-artists-are-OK-intellectualism (nobody
has yet, so let me, venture the 'young culture' clichee); and hiding there,
under topics as diverse as race relations (what race? we are beneficiaries
one and all) and new media - someone, pictured, who understands cheeky
little kiwis who want to fly but can't quite grasp cheeky little darkies...

One other insignificance to offer: the relationship of Maori to the
capitalism introduced by Her Majesty's land companies does not quite
resemble the template of other indigenous populations - wasn't it the Ngapui
who first flew the NZ flag on gun-trading missions to Australia? This in
answer to Danny's ..."they survived a century and a bit of radical policies
of assimilation and found out that the racial construction of captialism
meant that they could never really assimilate anyway, or that the costs were
extremely high for little benefit at the end of the day." Need one say that
such forays into capitalism were not isolated or point to Western history
for explanations of why Maori do not resemble Australian Aborigines in terms
of dates of squat, details of reciprocal assimilation?

I would argue that the 'little benefit' that has accrued to Maori  ought to
be dated against later - latest - colonialist practice and cultural
obliquities that have not yet clarified themselves in presenting a globally
differential analysis.

simon