OBAMA'S BUBBLE CAR

It was a mighty fine day when Obama got inaugurated. Wahoo, we all went! Of course, the size of his task is already growing and growing - along with the dimensions of the new presidential limo. What a horrible vehicle, so very indicative of the grim and bloated condition that its maker, GM, is in. The media quickly dubbed it The Beast.
Apparently able to withstand attacks of the most grievous kind, The Beast shuts Obama off from the world so well that he might as well be in a submarine.
In olden times, emperors rode in open coaches or chariots so that their adoring people could see them. Of course, the downside of that, even in fairly modern times, has been that it's made even well-loved people horribly vulnerable to assassins. Viz Archduke Whatsit of Sarajevo and President Kennedy.
And now, Prez Obama lives in such a perilous world that he must be enclosed as often as possible inside bullet-proof glass. It is so thick, that glass, that during the great presidential parade it all but obscured the First Family. I think I spotted one of the girls, her profile so murky that it was like seeing her through green swamp water.
Apparently the president chafes at the bubble in which he must now live, and so has persuaded his minions that yes he can carry his Blackberry so he can communicate with real people and not just the government.
It all reminds me of Eisenhower. After he left the White House (back in the 50s)he picked up a telephone to make a call and wanted to know what the funny noise was. Because aides had always made his calls he'd never heard a dial tone before.
You get the feeling Obama will resist such isolation and insulation. But oh, that car. Inside The Beast he must feel like an old-time deep-sea diver in heavy helmet and thick face visor, speaking through a tube to the space out there where the sun shines and breezes flow.

A pilot's lament for the way things used to be

Such a strange year’s end we’re living through. There’s lots of bad news out there and, conversely, lots of hopeful talk as well. You hear many ‘experts’ saying things will get worse, and just as many saying things will get better. Who knows which way it’ll go in ‘09.
You also hear lots of grumbling about how everything’s falling apart in the 21st century, and much yearning for the way things were back in the 20th.
For instance, read the following lament by an ageing pilot about the glory days of aviation. An un-named flyer who once commanded Boeing 707s - presumably in the US, given the American references - he vents a heap of rage about a time when pilots were kings, check-in queues were short, security barely mattered and flying was a whole lot more fun.
You might find some of his views dated (even offensive!) but there you go... that’s another of the differences between then and now.
Thanks to local former aviator Len Mills for passing on this anguished piece. It’ll ring bells for you not only on air travel, but also on political correctness, gender relations and social attitudes that have all changed radically in the last decade or three.
That's John Travolta's own 707 in the picture, painted up in old Qantas livery. I reckon that secretly, most men want to be like him. and the guy who wrote the following piece, probably once was like him.
“Those were the good ole days. Pilots back then were men that didn't want to be women or girlymen. Pilots drank coffee and whiskey, smoked cigars and didn't wear digital watches.
“They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn't bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some government agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.
“Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on their cell phone.
“Being an airline captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the stewardesses (a.k.a. flight attendants) were young, attractive, single women who were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution.
“They didn't have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim.
“Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn't speak gibberish or listen to loud 'gangsta rap' on their iPods. They bathed and didn't smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn't travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no mongol hordes asking for a "mu-fuggin" seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.
“If the captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.
“Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there. After all , it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor).
“Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker [a flight-deck warning sound] went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.
“There was very little plastic and no composites in the airplanes or the stewardesses' pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye-pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tattoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows. “Airlines were run by real men like Juan Trippe [the founder of Pan Am] who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves...not these pseudo financiers and bean counters who now flit from one occupation to another for a few extra bucks, a better golden parachute, or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a better class of beings unto themselves.
“And so it was back then....and sadly, will never be again.”

GM splutters and gold glows brighter

On October 10, General Motors shares in America fell to the same price as they were at in 1950. The company once produced the mighty Oldsmobile, such as the hulking 1958
sedan seen here. But now ‒ bogged down its by huge factories, enormous workforce and crippling pension payments to past employees ‒ it is said to be chewing through $1 billion a month and simply not selling enough SUVs to make even a small dent in that river of cash. And they have only $14 or so billion left in the kitty. Which means (unless they, too, get a bailout from Uncle Sam’s resentful taxpayers) it won’t be long before they’re broke.
What, then, would happen to the GM and Holden brands in this part of the world? Interesting thought. Of course, things are little better at Ford - which will lay off 1500 Australian workers just before Christmas.
Out of the Northern Hemisphere we hear cries of ‘carnage’, ‘chaos’ and ‘catastrophe’. Iceland is virtually bankrupt. Governments are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars and euros at the market-collapse problem and still there’s little economic confidence out there. Yet here, if you turned on talkback radio last week, the only concern being expressed was over the government’s plan to reduce the water flow in our showerheads. And the lead story on Thursday's TV1 news was about the retirement of two Olympic-champ rowers. If that was the biggest thing going on in the world, either we're exceptionally calm and resilient in the face of our own recession, or exceptionally passive and thick.
The next day I was in a shop next door to Michael Hill Jewellers, who had a staff member out front with a bullhorn, shouting at customers to come buy glittering stuff. ‘That must be driving you nuts’, I said to the woman who was serving me. ‘Sure is,’ she replied. ‘And you know what? There were people queueing up outside the door at 7am yesterday to get in there for some bling.”
Meanwhile, in the States, women are taking their old gold jewellery to suburban precious-metal parties, having it evaluated and weighed and swapped for cash. The word in these new troubled times is that, once again, gold will be king.
I’m old enough to remember the same eagerness for gold in the late 80s, the last time we fell into a financial crevasse, when an Aucklander called Ray Smith set up the Goldcorp bullion company and lured in thousands of fretful investors who bought his gold certificates. Only trouble was, when they wanted to clap eyes on the actual shiny stuff it turned out that he had no gold bars at all – or nowhere near enough to cover the cash he’d taken in. He’d just sucked up the money instead and had a high old time before fleeing the country with the loot. He was brought back to face the music, did jail time, and put a whole generation off investing in gold for ever.
But now that few remember his name, a new gold rush can’t be far away. Checking your jewellery box, anyone?

Double-edged swords

The world today seems full of swords that can fall both ways (which can even apply to flying pigs). We have, for instance, the impending bail-out vote in Washington that, we're told, is the only way to avoid impending financial catastrophe/armageddon/Pearl Harbour (you name it - some expert has said it). And yet the other side of that sharp blade is the undoubted enormous risk that the bail-out will chew away at the value of the US dollar, thus eroding the economy that everyone is so desperate to save.
My local newspaper reminds me today of fund manager Peter Schiff and how he's been predicting this state of affairs for a very long time. Back in 2006 he appeared on the Fox News Bulls and Bears show and was jeered at by other panellists when he said that America's economy was heading for collapse. You can find that clip at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoB4BS7CGAw
That two-year-old show reveals the sword-aspect of Youtube as well. Every foolish word every politican/celebrity/expert ever says will be there online for decades to come. While Youtube can bestow fame, it can open you to endless ridicule as well.
Or endless kudos, as it turns out, in the Schiff case.
Even harmless imagery can carry potential for differing interpretation these days.
Look at the pig pictures above. The fat and smiling pig (think piggy banks and childish happiness at the jingle of coins therein) is the current 'face' of the Bank of New Zealand - happily smiling beneath buoyant balloons of
prosperity. The other pink pig is a very different beast. He cowers on the cover of Peter Shiff's book, with only a frail umbrella sheltering him from the lightning storm overhead. The book's jolly title is Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse.
It was published a year ago.
Clever Mr Schiff.

Tracing your distant past

Do you ever wonder where you’ve come from? I mean, really wonder? This isn't about musing on who your great-grandparents were. It's not recent genealogy going back to the 1800s. I’m talking big-picture stuff.
I’ve become so intrigued with this question that I decided to take part in the National Geographic society’s Genographic Project. This is an enormous piece of genetic research that aims to figure out where we all came from.
It’s becoming obvious that actually, we’re all Africans. Sure we may be fair or olive-skinned and have red or blonde hair and count Scots, Irish, French, Persian, Fijian, Chinese (or whatever!) people in the ancestry we know about, but gene studies are proving that the whole world’s very first ancestors grew out of African soil.
So I sent off for a kit (it costs $US100) to find out about my own far-distant rellies. You do a couple of inside-cheek swabs with a special brush, pop the resulting DNA samples into little vials that they supply, and send the envelope off to the US. In a few weeks I’ll be able to go to the website, type in my password and get the results – which will tell me the region where my most ancient female ancestor lived and what path her descendants took, maybe 50,000 years ago, to work their nomadic way up into Europe. This is expressed in map form, with dotted lines showing your family’s ancient trail.
As a woman you can only select your female ancestors. Their X chromosomes (we don’t have a Y chromosome) have come in a long, shimmering line down to the person that is you. Men can choose to track either their male (Y) or female (X) side.
My interest in this was sparked by seeing the Lascaux Caves in the south of France – where you can see fabulous paintings of horses, bison, reindeer and all manner of mythical beasties painted on the cave walls some 18,000 years ago. Eighteen thousand years! (That's a bit of Lascaux pictured above.)
The paintings are gorgeous, full of life and vitality. They’re all the more wonderful when you consider they were daubed with basic pigments in the guttering light of primitive lamps. The paintings were hidden there for millennia until some boys stumbled on a cave entrance in 1940, went in, looked up and said “wow” (or whatever French schoolboys would have said back then).
Just before my Lascaux trip I heard about a DNA testing programme in Britain which had discovered that nearly all British people are descended from a small group of people who were bailed up in the south of France and northern Spain by the chill of the last Ice Age. I’m guessing it was some of them who filled those caves with art as they sat out the long, cold centuries.
As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, they gradually migrated further north and crossed the Channel to begin populating what we now think of as UK. Anyhow, modern-day Brits who’d thought about their roots at all had assumed they’d have some familiar label, like Anglo Saxon, Celtic, Norman or Viking. Some were a bit shocked to discover traces of African, Arab and even Mongolian genes in their blood. (That Genghis Khan guy went everywhere!)
Because I'm from basically British stock, it seemed reasonable to assume that a far-distant ancestor of mine might have been one of the artists.
I love this big-picture stuff. In a world where we keep on emphasising our differences, this research surely has to prove that in the end we are all one enormous family. And now that there are so many of us ‒ surging to nine billion by the middle of this century ‒ it’s even more important that we learn to get along together without hitting each other over the head with clubs, not to mention nuclear bombs.
To find out more, go to www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

SUPERMAN THE DREAMER?
It's interesting how it can take just one picture to make you see things in a new light - it's part of the old story about a picture being worth a thousand words. One can debate that now, of course, in this era when you can't trust photos at all, what with Photoshop being so available to everybody.
But recently I was browsing around looking for material for a workshop on authorship that I was running. I wanted to touch on how graphic novels are becoming hot again. If 'graphic novel' means nothing to you, then think 'comic'. Yes, you loved them when you were a kid and they're big again - very clever and sharp. They're also being printed on substantial paper, not at all like the flimsy, throw-away comics of old.
I stumbled across a TIME magazine list of the top 10 graphic novels for last year, and here was this picture of the number three title, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It's Superman, but not as I remember him.
I haven't seen the book, and so don't know how these two have re-engineered the big guy overall, but this image seems to say it all. Who is this guy? He looks like Sensitive New Age Superman, adrift on fluffy clouds, gazing out over Gotham City and waiting for the next runaway train to stop in its tracks. He looks like he's been groomed by the keen guys on Queer Eye team.
He could be Supermetrosexual, or Superpoet, just pondering and dreaming. Sure he's still got the well-toned bod and rippling muscles, but it's like he's, well, gone soft! He even looks a bit drippy.
The cape that should be streaming in his wake as he scorches through the sky is tucked demurely beneath his bum, as if to cushion that super posterior (the clouds not being fluffy enough). The glance he gives us is languid. Should the sirens shriek it's going to take this guy a while to wake up, flex the muscles and go to battle. It doesn't look like he'll be biffing baddies with a 'zap!' or a 'pow!' any time soon.
"Got a problem down there?" he might call out. "Yeah, okay. I'll be there in a bit. Just taking a nana-nap right now."
This picture reminds of America itself. Not seeing what trouble it's in. Not as sharp and shiny as it used to be. Distanced from the rest of the world by being up there in the clouds.
According to recent polls Americans aren't too sure who to vote for. The Republicans might even make it. Especially now that Lois Lane is bustling about and taking all the attention in her high heels and power suit. At the same time the BBC has polled people in 22 countries about who they'd like to see in the White House, and the resulting was an overwhelming vote for Barack Obama. Instead, there's a chance the world is heading for John McCain. Wake up, Superman. You may needed. Soon.

Undone by love

It’s so interesting how time forges and mellows our characters. For evidence look no further than May 17’s Herald on Sunday and the next day’s Sunday Star Times. Paul Holmes writes for the first newspaper; Michael Laws for the other.
Both are radio stars in their Monday-to-Friday lives. Both have long histories as cocky roosters, leaders in their fields, never short of a barbed comment or lofty opinion delivered from on high. They’ve been newsmakers for years – Holmes in television and Laws in politics – both of them adept at batting away criticism and apparently rarely troubled by self-doubt.
But on that May weekend we saw these two men undone by love. Both wrote columns remarkable for the lack of cynicism in guys who’ve been hard men from way back. Of course, the worlds they live in have a habit of breeding cynicism. Politics and broadcasting are not fields in which the “love” word gets bandied around. Love is too cosy, too heart-driven – way too sentimental by far.

Politicians and broadcasters want the facts. Theirs is a world in which analysis matters most. When they talk about truth they’re speaking with an eye on what’s in the news today – about business trends or legal matters or policy detail. Sure, it’s fine to have a sense of humour, to have a laugh, be impish, share a joke. But heart? Oh, let’s not go there. Hearts are too soft and gooey to refer to when you work with people who think it’s normal to scoff at caring politicians (the much-despised “wets”) and for whom the term “do gooder” is one of derision.

At least, that’s the norm when such people are flying high. But none of us can fly high for ever. Life comes along and slaps us in the kisser. For “life” read family. It’s the family woes that really rip into us. Work crises can be irritating and enraging but rarely have the power to undermine us the way personal problems can.

For Holmes, the softening has come in waves that have included the ending of his TV career (even if he’s still tops in radio), plane crashes, a cancer battle and, worst of all, seeing his daughter fall under the spell of the cursed drug, P. He made a magnificent speech in court some weeks ago, vowing to support her through her recovery. And judging from his Sunday column, it sounds like he made another good one in Wellington when he talked to teens about leadership. It seems that most of his speech centred on how important love is.

He told the kids (so he wrote): “Leaders love. You have to love and stay open to love because people are all we have. In the end, it’s about people. If you cease to love your heart, your mind and your world will shrivel. No one will follow a shrivelled spirit. Cease to love and you will not be open to opportunity.”

Over at the Sunday Star Times, Laws was writing most movingly, as he’s been doing for weeks now, about his small daughter Lucy’s fight for life in the face of leukaemia as well as a dire infection. Though Lucy has improved, the struggle goes on, and Michael is overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. More than that, the mayor best known for his feistiness is hugely grateful for people’s prayers and comforted by knowing that people he’s never met have been praying for her. He is not “particularly religious”, he writes – and the rest of us sure can’t recall him ever expressing any glimmer of interest in spirituality. But now, he says, “till my last days, I’ll affirm that those prayers made the difference.”
We don’t much like growing older, but there can be small compensations in the troubles that time may force us to confront. They bend us towards more empathy and compassion. Our caring side waxes as our toughness wanes. We realise the vanity of ambition and the pointlessness of “success”, if all that means is money and fame. We finally know what’s important. Ah, how our hearts soften when we’re battered by love.