Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation’s grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.

  Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.

  This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.

  God bless you all, and God bless America.

  There are various forms of bullshit at work here, but for the moment note the effect of conflation. By implication rather than assertion, George becomes Jefferson reincarnate, an almost disembodied figure in the grand pageant of history, sanctified by the past, driven by lofty principles, an emblem of all that is good about the USA, a vessel crammed with virtues and with no interest whatsoever in oil companies.

  George W. chose not to conflate himself with his father George H.W. This is unsurprising. Father, however, did choose to conflate himself with his son. He did it at birth by saddling him with the same name, thus performing the most ancient act of conflation, the dynastic one. Like father, like son. It is a conflation with more hope of being justified than any other. Son does, after all, get Dad’s DNA, so genetically he’s a chip off the old block. But that chip is not only contaminated by Mum, it is further buggered around by nurture.

  Let’s say Dad was raised in the traditional log cabin of hardship. He will often credit the virtues he learned in the log cabin for his subsequent rise to power, and to some degree he may be right. But because of Dad’s success his son will never see the inside of a log cabin. He will know only the detached house of prosperity. And however earnestly Dad may try to instil the log-cabin virtues, he’ll struggle because his son will have it easy. And there is a long tradition of sons who have it easy becoming wastrels.

  If you look, say, at the sweep of Chinese history a wave pattern emerges. Every dynasty began with an energetic rebel warlord who seized power. The next son or two enlarged and consolidated the empire. But then came sons who had a taste for corruption and self-indulgence. At which point there arose a new energetic rebel warlord, and a new dynastic wave began.

  Nevertheless the conflation of son with father is a staple of despotic bullshit, stimulated partly by the dynastic urge but also, one suspects, by Dad’s fear that anyone outside the family is more likely to be disloyal. So Gaddafi’s sons were groomed for succession and given sinecures like Head of Torture. Ditto Saddam Hussein’s. Most blatant of all is the chubby chops who has assumed the throne of North Korea, in succession to his father and grandfather. The business of conflating the new dear leader with the former dear leaders has already begun.

  Drive anywhere in Dubai and you will see spectacular car crashes. But if you can take your eyes off the exploits of those drivers who have yet to crash, you will see billboards the size of houses, featuring an image of Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. He is standing in the desert wearing the whitest of dishdashas and a headcloth affixed with a camel halter, as has become the uniform of top Arabs. He is staring nobly beyond the horizon in a manner that even the earliest Hollywood promoters would have found a bit overdone, and on either side of him are his two sons doing the same thing. The words across the top, ‘Our Visionary Leaders’.

  Sheik Mohammed is a popular and by and large successful ruler. It could even be argued that he has been visionary. But by conflating the sons with the father before those sons have had a chance to prove their worth or lack of it, the ruling family is doing all it can to establish a self-perpetuating dynasty.

  New Zealand is neither a tyranny nor an autocracy. Yet the unwarranted propaganda of conflation goes on here as it does everywhere. Through the winter of 2011, for example, it must have been tough being All Black captain Richie McCaw. Every time he turned round who should he find clapping a hand on his shoulder and smiling for the camera but Prime Minister John Key. The Rugby World Cup was held in New Zealand and Mr Key did all he could to conflate himself with the national team and with Richie McCaw in particular. Yet Mr Key’s contribution to the team was precisely the same as yours or mine. His association with the All Blacks differed little from Lewis Hamilton’s with the Bank of Santander.

  In his defence, John Key was only maintaining a tradition. His predecessor, Helen Clark, did not at first glance seem a likely rugby fan. Yet on one occasion during her reign she whipped her motorcade to speeds in excess of 160 kph in a bid to reach a test match on time.

  Mr Key staked a lot on the Rugby World Cup. It proved a good bet. The All Blacks won the cup by a narrow margin. And a month later Mr Key won a general election by a rather larger one.

  (As I write the New Zealand cricket team is being thrashed by South Africa. The prime minister has not, as far as I am aware, attended.)

  3

  Kings and the big boy

  So, rulers conflate themselves with animals, dead people, offspring and World Cup-winning rugby teams for the purpose of cementing power. But by far the commonest and most effective conflationary partner of rulers throughout the history of human civilization has been god.

  Gods come in various forms but certain qualities are common to pretty well all of them: they are immortal; they are to be feared and revered; they are unknowable and unpredictable; they are powerful beyond the scope of mere mortals to resist; and they are liable to do spectacularly nasty things to you if you cross them, not only in this life but also, and this is particularly useful from the bullshitter’s point of view, when you are dead. The nub of the matter is that it is seriously unwise to vex gods and suicidal to rebel against them. Which is why kings of all varieties have made every effort to conflate themselves with gods since human society began.

  Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese emperors, Inca over-lords, indeed just about all bosses everywhere, have striven to make themselves indistinguishable from, or at the least a very close associate of, him upstairs. Quite a lot of them, I’d imagine, have even come to believe their own bullshit. ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George.’ Church, state and king, conflated into a single entity.

  Nor is the conflation of monarchs with gods a quaint relic of a superstitious past. The Japanese, for example, were probably the most committed troops fighting the Second World War. Some of them famously kept at it for decades. Their cause was the emperor, Hirohito, whom ritual and tradition had rendered a demigod.

  Several twentieth-century regimes claimed to have abolished god and established a secular society. They did no such thing. Rather they took conflation to its maximal and logical conclusion, whereby ruler and god became the same thing. And that thing was the ruler. He was god on earth.

  Images of that leader — Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung — became as ubiquitous as god is meant to be. The leader watched over all people at all times and he knew all things. His little book of sayings became the new scripture. He required utter devotion. The flattery he received was indistinguishable, at least in form, from religious worship. Stalin, who is among the top flight of mass murderers in human history, was called ‘the great gardener of human happiness’, whose ‘unlimited love for his people’ made him the ‘standard bearer of universal peace’. You’ll find similar lines in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

  When Rick Santorum, who is a Catholic, was still in the race to become the Republican candidate for the American presidency, he stated that a speech given by President Kennedy stressing the need to separate church and state made him, Santorum, ‘want to throw up’. You could hear the Vatican cheering.

  I am not accusing Santorum of conflating himself with god — not yet at any rate. But if he had become president, and if he had somehow achieved his aim of returning church and state to the same fold, it would have been a retreat for our species. Back we’d have gone to the days of conflating policy with god’s will. God’s will is incontrovertible. To go against it is to blaspheme. Blasphemy is a crime. Hel
lo, dictatorship.

  (If Santorum, by the way, had done a straw poll around the world he would have found many who would share his point of view. They would include, to take just two examples, the Taleban in Afghanistan, where the Americans have long been waging a war, and the clerics in charge of Iran, where the Americans look likely to wage one soon.)

  Church and state is the oldest and most effective power combo in the history of human affairs. It is our default setting. Chief and juju man, monarch and priest, royalty and mumbo jumbo, awe and reverence, god and king. It’s easy to see what the chief gets out of it: god on his side. And it’s equally easy to see what the juju man gets out of it: the chief on his side. The relationship is symbiotic. Each party is bolstered by the other in a self-contained reflexive arrangement that, over the centuries, has proved the most effective way of keeping the mob quiet. Fear, reverence and obedience — and unlimited sums of money — all of it achieved through conflation.

  I recently watched black and white footage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The event took place in god’s house. Bishops in tall hats flocked around the princess like an elderly chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The most vital bit of the ceremony was obscured from the television cameras by a little gazebo, because it was simply too sacred. Everything was explained in reverential whispers by an early Dimbleby, who cooed over sacred artefacts and chunks of ritual that had been sanctified by centuries of tradition.

  Only they weren’t sacred. They may have been old but age doesn’t confer divine provenance. Trace any item used in the service back far enough, any word spoken or any gesture made, and it will be found to have originated with some king, priest or courtier deciding to use it for the first time, probably as a means of wowing the peasants. None of it was ordained. All of it was deliberately conceived to conflate the monarch with the big cheese. And, simultaneously, to conflate the big cheese’s church with the monarchy.

  A coronation ceremony may fulfil a tribal need. It clearly tugs at a string in the credulous human heart. But that does not stop it at the same time being riddled to its core with deliberate and manipulative conflationary bullshit.

  4

  The slither of expertise

  Hong Kong airport, like all international airports, abounds in posh shops. Single, duckling-coloured sweaters are folded and lit for display like museum exhibits. Prices are indicated by blocks of movable type on little Scrabble racks. Most of the blocks say zero. The shop assistants are all young Hong Kongese, slim, polite, bilingual at the least, impeccably groomed and smooth of skin. Their customers are, by and large, past it.

  The past-it customers, especially the female ones, would like to be young, slim and smooth of skin. So the shops offer them tiny bottles of anti-aging cream at enormous prices. Or bottles of liquor to help them forget.

  The men, meanwhile, are offered accoutrements — most prominently, watches. One shop is fronted by a huge ad, showing George Clooney at the helm of a motorboat. He is steering it across a Mediterranean harbour suggestive of wealth and exclusivity — Antibes, perhaps, or Monaco. His hair is unruffled, his clothes are casual and his forearms bare to the blessing of the sun except for a watch that looks to weigh about a pound and a half. ‘George Clooney’, it says, ‘chooses Rolex.’

  The obvious conflationary process that the ad tries to exploit can be expressed more or less as follows:

  George Clooney is suave, rich and irritatingly sexually successful.

  George Clooney chooses Rolex.

  Therefore if I choose Rolex, I too will be suave, rich and irritatingly sexually successful.

  Which doesn’t, when put that baldly, seem too likely. And it seems even less likely when you consider that the following sequence has the same logical pattern:

  My neighbour is a gay chartered accountant.

  My neighbour wears brown shoes.

  Therefore if I wear brown shoes I will become a gay chartered accountant.

  The word ‘chooses’ is curious. One suspects that it was Rolex rather than Mr Clooney that did the choosing. They thought that Mr Clooney would make a nice mascot for Rolex so they went to see his agent bearing gifts, including a watch or two, no doubt, and perhaps a little cheque to compensate for the inconvenience of flying to Antibes for a photo shoot. Choosing did not come into it.

  But even if it did, even if Mr Clooney does choose Rolex, and even if he is so fond of his watch that he sent the company of his own free will the photograph of himself in his boat and told them they were welcome to use it as promotion in any way they wished and without cost as a token of his gratitude for their having made such an excellent and reliable timepiece, it still doesn’t explain why Mr Clooney’s choice of Rolex should matter to us. For George Clooney is an actor. He is not an horologist.

  If The Suave and Sexy Acting School of New York were to post an advertisement saying ‘George Clooney reckons we’re good’, it would be reasonable to take notice because George knows a thing or two about acting. But there is no evidence that he knows anything about watches. The ad merely depends on us subconsciously transferring his expertise in one field to another entirely unrelated field. Which is like taking Lewis Hamilton’s advice on banking because he drives well, or Albert Einstein’s on personal grooming because he’s good at physics.

  Of course the ad does not explicitly transfer the expertise. It merely opens the door for the consumer to do so. And should the consumer walk through that door and buy a watch in the vague hope that it will bring him fame, good looks, a motorboat and ineffable sexual charm, then that is his decision. Caveat, in other words, emptor. And at the least he’ll end up owning a nice watch. The ad may have encouraged a minor self-deception but there is no great harm done. Such a happy outcome, however, does not always stem from this form of bullshit. Sometimes the emptor walks through the door and is ruined.

  Colin Meads captained the All Blacks in the days of amateur heroism. He’s getting on a bit now but he still embodies certain qualities that are part of New Zealand’s image of itself — hard-working, unquestionably masculine, uncomplaining, rural, and terrifyingly good at rugby. So he’s a popular bloke.

  A few years ago he appeared on television promoting a finance company. Finance companies are risky banks. They charge higher rates of interest to borrowers because they tend to lend on ventures that the banks have turned down. And they pay correspondingly higher rates of interest to depositors.

  Meads expressed the opinion that an outfit called Provincial Finance was ‘solid as’, which is rural Kiwi-speak for ‘you can’t go wrong’. But you could go wrong. In the credit crisis a few years later Provincial Finance went as wrong as it is possible to go. It went bust. Depositors lost millions. And those who’d put money in because Colin Meads said it was solid as, were victims of the bullshit of transferred expertise. For although Colin Meads in his day was an expert at rucking, mauling, snaffling line-outs and flinging opponents aside, all of which added greatly to the joy of a nation, none of those things qualified him to read a balance sheet, assess risk or offer financial advice. Some people lost their life savings.

  Rugby league in New Zealand is the poor cousin of rugby union. It’s a famously tough game played by big men who bang into each other with scary ferocity. It is most popular in the impoverished urban quarters where there are heavy concentrations of Pacific Islanders and Maori, the perpetual underclass of this country.

  If you aspired to become a hero of rugby league you probably wouldn’t choose to be called Stacey. Nor would you choose to be 5 foot 5. But Stacey Jones overcame the apparent handicap of his name and the actual handicap of his size to become one of New Zealand’s best league players. In the process he showed himself to be, as far as it is possible to tell from media coverage, a modest and delightful man, unaffected by fame and adulation. He retired a while back to glowing acclamation from all who knew him and even greater incandescence from those who didn’t.

  A few months later Stacey Jones popped up on billboards, smiling in f
ront of an improbably clean and modern office. Behind him stood a Pacific Island girl who was also smiling. Stacey was plugging Instant Finance, an outfit whose slogan is ‘Helping Kiwis get ahead’. It specializes in small personal loans to the hard-up, the sort of people with large families and low-wage jobs who run out of cash before pay day, the sort of people, in other words, who are likely to follow rugby league. Lending money to the poor has rarely been seen as an heroic or virtuous business, so it is understandable that Instant Finance should wish to conflate itself with someone perceived as a virtuous hero. But, once again, anyone who borrows money from Instant Finance on Stacey’s say-so, is transferring expertise. The borrower is implicitly assuming that a good footballer is therefore a good budgetary adviser. He may be or he may not be. The error lies in the word therefore.

  About the same time that Colin Meads was promoting Provincial Finance, another company, Hanover Finance, was using Richard Long, a former television newsreader. In doing so they were exploiting, or at least encouraging people to commit, a remarkable double transference of expertise.

  The two qualities required of a television newsreader are an appearance that isn’t actively repellent and the ability to read out loud nicely. He or she is just a messenger. It is recognized as bad practice to shoot a messenger. But it is equally bad practice to revere one. Yet it happens all the time.

  Because news stories are, at least in theory, authoritative, impartial and trustworthy, those qualities tend to rub off on the person who reads them out. In other words, the news gatherer’s expertise is transferred onto the news presenter. So when Mr Long retired he took with him a conflationary aura of detached, almost Solomonic wisdom. It was this transferred expertise that Hanover Finance bought, in the hope that potential investors would transfer it for a second time, and see the Solomon of journalism as the Solomon, therefore, of financial analysis. They did. The ads ran for a long time, which presumably indicates that they sucked the money in. Then Hanover Finance, like Provincial Finance, went bung and most of the money vanished.