Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  ‘Do you know who I mean by the All Blacks?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s the soccer team, right?’

  But even if every Telecom employee worshipped daily at the shrine of All Black memorabilia, it would still be irrelevant. Telecom’s ostensible devotion to the All Blacks is purely commercial, as is my relationship with Telecom. They run a phone company. I need a phone. I am interested only in the service they offer and the price they charge.

  The email is transparently dishonest from start to finish, as hollow as a rotten log. It assumes that I am a thumb-sucking dupe. And yet there is nothing exceptional about its false matiness. Stuff like this bombards us from all sides at all times. Why aren’t we screaming?

  Air New Zealand, for example, has also hitched its wagon to the emotional engine of rugby. It has painted a plane or two black, it has an on-board safety video starring the All Blacks as flight attendants, and it describes itself on posters and the television screen as a ‘fanatical sponsor of the All Blacks’. That phrase implies that the airline is so overwhelmed with its fervour for a rugby team that it signs the sponsorship cheques without even looking at how much of its profits it is casually handing over to the object of its devotion. In other words it’s one of us. It doesn’t just know how we feel, it actually feels it too. The airline is trying to personify itself.

  But Air New Zealand is not fanatical. It can’t be, by definition, because an airline is not a human being. For sure the airline is run by human beings, each of whom is capable of feeling fanatical, or indeed of feeling any emotion to which human beings are subject. But Air New Zealand can’t because it is just the name given to a business entity.

  We tend not to fall in love with business entities. We reserve love for other people and some of the cuddlier species of animal. But business entities would like to be loved, because love doesn’t judge. Love is unconditional. Love overlooks faults. And love, as we all know, opens the wallet. So in a bid for our tender affections businesses try to establish themselves as quasi-human beings.

  A family with all the ingredients for happiness — looks, nice clothes, a couple of winsome kids — is moving house. The daughter lays claim to her new bedroom and is delighted. She hugs her teddy bear. Then she looks up at the camera and says, in a voice that makes your heart melt, ‘Thank you, Mr Hooker.’ An invisible choir chirps up to echo the sentiment.

  The Mr Hooker in question is L.J. Hooker, the Australian real estate magnate. Born Leslie Joseph Tingyou, he changed his name for fear of anti-Chinese sentiment, adopting the name Hooker either because his father worked as a hooker on the railways, or because hooker was his preferred position on the rugby field. He was later knighted for services to real estate (and I am impressed that I managed to avoid ending that phrase with an exclamation mark). But Mr Hooker had very little to do with the girl’s new bedroom because he’s dead. His name endures, however, as a real-estate business with franchises throughout Australasia. And to advertise that business they’ve kept him metaphorically alive to be nauseatingly thanked in person by little girls, because no one thanks a franchise.

  Mrs Mac’s Famous Meat Pies (‘lean meat with a crusty topping’) are sold throughout Australasia. I have just emailed the company that makes them to ask who Mrs Mac is or was. The name suggests a married woman of possibly Scottish heritage, who is known by an affectionate abbreviation of her surname, brought about by the excellence of her baking. There is, as it happens, a stylized bust of her on the wrapper of every pie. She looks suitably sturdy and old-fashioned. You can make out the straps of her apron and her hair appears to be built of sausage rolls.

  Mrs Mac’s pies are made in Perth, Western Australia. According to the company’s website, the factory takes a daily delivery of 14 tons of beef. That’s the usable meat from about seventy cattle. Mrs Mac, in other words, deals to the flesh of some 25,000 cattle a year. She’s some woman.

  (Ah, they’ve replied to my email already. Sadly Mrs Mac’s New Zealand representative is out of office until Friday. If the matter is urgent I can ring him, but I don’t think I could justify that.)

  That Mrs Mac bakes her pies on an industrial scale does not make them bad pies. But it does make them less emotionally appealing to the pie-eater. Though we consume in vast quantities the products of an industrial age, we don’t warm to the notion of industry and industry knows it. So industry does all it can to portray itself as an individual human being, as a sports fan, a home baker, someone fallible and lovable, someone just like us.

  I was once invited to speak to some salespeople who worked for ANZ. The bank’s current slogan is ‘We live in your world’. I didn’t thrill to the idea so I quoted a fee that was precisely double the most I had ever been paid for a speech. ‘Fine,’ said ANZ. The speech went all right and I liked the bankers. Over drinks afterwards I mentioned that I had charged a fee that I considered extortionate and that I was surprised they had agreed to it so readily. ‘Mate,’ said the manager from the bank that lives in our world, ‘we’re awash with money.’

  21

  Oi you

  My schoolmate Dave used to play a trick. On a busy street he would lower his head and shout, ‘Oi you.’ Everyone within earshot would turn to look in our direction. We learned to turn as well, to deflect accusations. When the people turned away, Dave would do it again. Many would turn for a second time, staring with angry suspicion. Dave found it funny. I found it scary. They found it rude and intrusive. And they were right. Yet as citizens we put up with it the whole time.

  I reach for the handful of shiny bumf that landed in my letterbox this morning. (Today is Saturday so as a good citizen I am expected to spend it shopping.)

  ‘We have your new outdoor living range.’

  ‘Just what you need.’

  ‘Take your eReader with you everywhere you go, and enjoy reading up to one month on a single charge.’

  ‘Look for this character inside for your chance to win.’ (The ‘character’ is an animated shopping basket.)

  ‘Your local weekly specials.’

  ‘What will you buy with the $2000 you win?’

  We are all linguistically programmed to respond to the second person. The reason, obviously enough, is that it addresses us. It is literally personal. But when it is used arbitrarily, when it is thrown out without the speaker knowing who, if anyone, it is reaching, it ceases to be personal. It offers no opportunity to reply and it implies a familiarity with the addressee that doesn’t exist. It becomes, in other words, bullshit. The bullshit lies in the illusion of intimacy.

  I buy red wine in bulk from the New Zealand Wine Society. The stuff tastes fine to me, it’s reasonably priced and crucially they deliver. It’s a simple commercial relationship and I am happy with it, but the Wine Society wants us to move on to heavy petting.

  ‘We’d love you to shop with us again,’ says a mass-produced brochure, ‘so we’ll pay the delivery on any wine you buy from the catalogue. We’re not offering just anyone this bonus extra, but you deserve it.’

  Ignoring the tautology of ‘bonus extra’, what are the grounds on which my deserving is based? Precisely. There is none. I exist to the New Zealand Wine Society as an account number, as a source of business. My virtues, multiple though they are, are unknown to them. The chances are good that they’ve sent the same flattering brochure to a serial wife-beater or to a banker from Goldman Sachs.

  It is also possible that the wife-beater or the investment banker buys their broadband access from the same company as I do, which is called, for some reason, Snap!. If so, they will have received a brochure on the front page of which there’s a close-up of a pair of lips painted orange. Orange is the company colour. The lips are bunched as if on the point of delivering a kiss. The only words on the image, except for the name of the company, are ‘We love you’. On the back of the picture, the following text:

  Here at Snap! we’ve been making some big changes. And as a valued customer, we wanted to share them with you
first … we’re nice like that. [Pity the big changes didn’t include some grammar lessons.]

  We’re still the same great company with the same great customer service you’ve come to know and love, but now better than ever! We’re sporting a fresh new look and are introducing some really-quite-exciting, fabulous new stuff.

  And why would we do all this for you … well, because we love you!

  The correct response would be to drive to Snap!’s offices, burst through the door, seize the first employee regardless of sex, thrust three inches of tongue down their throat and say, ‘Right, how about free internet?’ But when I pictured the standard internet whizz — name of Greg, keen on gaming, incipient paunch, bad beard, worse shoes — I gave up.

  Look at it. Flattery (valued customer), hyperbole (great, fabulous), bragging (great company), unjustified assumption (come to know and love), clichéd paradox (the same but better), the mock-conversational irony (really-quite-exciting), and then the fat demeaning lie of ‘We love you’. Where can they have got the idea that we would swallow such transparent bullshit?

  Well, Linwood Avenue would be one possibility.

  I drove along it this morning. An easterly wind harried the few pedestrians. It flapped the hems of coats, mussed the hair, threatened to flick hats from heads and toss them into the traffic. Grit blew.

  While I waited for lights to change I watched a battered woman limp past a billboard. She was an image of endurance. Her ankles were swollen. Her coat and shopping bag looked to date from the 1950s. Wisps of hair had escaped from under her headscarf and whipped around her face. She appeared to be just going on going on, struggling against the wind through a raw urban landscape, bound, I would guess, for some paltry shopping. The huge billboard above her, at which she did not look, said, ‘Jesus loves you.’

  ‘Why not give her a car then, Jesus?’ I said. Then the lights changed and I drove on.

  The billboard is as indiscriminate as the Snap! brochure. It shouts its assertion to all, to passing dogs and cars and shivering nocturnal prostitutes and broken old women battling through the wind to buy a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs.

  We crave intimacy. To be known, to be liked, these things induce a feeling of wellbeing. And to be loved trumps the lot. It stems, no doubt, from Mummy beaming down on us in the cot. Christianity, in all its flavours, and what a lot of them there are, has mined this craving, increasingly so in the last century and a half. It has gradually shifted its sales pitch from promoting a domineering god to a loving one. Less stress on hell (to the point where it is now rarely mentioned) and more on heaven. Less punishment, more personal love. Less dad, more mum. And the second person pronoun is integral to that pitch. It is used to suggest that you are the apple of god’s eye.

  But it can also be used to suggest you’re the prickly pear. Your behaviour can upset god, arouse his wrath. To avoid winding him up you must follow the rules. And the rules begin with ‘Thou shalt not’. The god who pronounces ‘Thou shalt not’ isn’t watching over you. He’s watching you, with all the sinister connotations of the word. He’s the moral policeman. He is the ubiquitous CCTV camera. Not a sparrow falls without your father knowing.

  Which is one of the several points where traditional religions and political control coincide. The problem with people is their autonomy. They will tend to do things on their own account, to disobey, to rebel. And it’s hard to keep a constant eye over all of them all the time. Secret police are good, but even they can’t be everywhere. A fictional rule-enforcer, however, ubiquitous, seeing not only your actions but even into your heart, into your intentions, is the policeman you don’t have to pay. Drum him into the mind early and the job is done.

  Orwell’s ‘Big Brother is watching you’ is merely a rephrasing of the principle that lies behind all religions, that you cannot escape the all-seeing eye. And it’s the second person pronoun that gives the phrase its dread-inducing, boot-in-the-gut quality.

  Today that pronoun is forever assailing our eyes and our ears. And if the person addressing us in the second person doesn’t know that he or she is addressing us as specific people, is just biffing the word out in the hope that we might take it to mean what it ought to mean, then it is bullshit. The bullshit of the tempter or the bully or the conman, the seeker after power or money.

  ‘Vote National’ barked a billboard further down Linwood Avenue, a command in the second person, addressing us in the manner of a sergeant major addressing a squaddie on the parade ground. Like the squaddie we are not expected to bark back, but unlike the squaddie we have entered into no contract where we agree to be barked at, bullied and generally buggered about in exchange for the security and employment of the army. We are autonomous adult human beings going about our private business, yet we are barked at. And the barker doesn’t care or know who he or she is barking at. He just barks, perpetually, at anyone, at no one, in the hope that we’ll be mugs.

  22

  Riding the seesaw of meaning

  People like having money. Money in the bank is a buffer against the nasties. It fends them off, or some of them at least, for a while. Money in the bank also represents the potential to buy stuff. And people like buying stuff. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be so many shops. Buying stuff, however, entails parting with money. So the decision to buy is difficult. We want to spend our money, but we also want to keep it and we can’t do both.

  The bullshitter seeks to persuade us that we can. He wants our money and the power it enshrines so to overcome our understandable reluctance to part with it, he implies that we’re not parting with it. He suggests that it is possible to both eat our cake and keep a full cake tin. ‘Buy now and save,’ he says. He is playing on two meanings of the word save. He is equivocating.

  Saving, in the sense of stashing money away, is prudent. It chooses long-term reward over short-term gratification. It is a mature thing to do, the behaviour of a rational adult rather than an impulsive child. So it rightly carries connotations of wisdom and prudence. When the bullshitter uses the word, however, it means something else. It means to fork out less money than you might hypothetically have forked out. But you still conclude the deal with less money than you had before. You have done the precise opposite of saving. The bullshitter relies on the positive connotations of the conventional meaning of the word (prudence, wisdom and gain) being transferred unconsciously onto his radically different meaning of the word.

  Equivocation is sleight of tongue. It is comparable to the magician’s sleight of hand or the theatre director’s use of lighting to manipulate your attention. You can look at only one thing at a time, so magicians and directors draw your attention to the thing they want you to see and away from the thing they don’t want you to see. The bullshitter doesn’t want you to see the money you will spend. He wants you to see the hypothetical money that you will avoid spending. This hypothetical money is made to feel like a gain. The actual money changes hands off stage. It can be ignored until the bank statement arrives, by which time it is too late.

  During the most recent general election campaign the Green Party erected a billboard at the bottom of my street. It featured a boy aged about eight or nine who wasn’t quite Maori and who wasn’t quite Pakeha, standing in a stream and grinning. (Astonishingly this kid grew a lush moustache within twenty-four hours. Perhaps there was something in the water. Whatever it was also blackened two of his front teeth.) Above the kid’s head ran a Green election slogan. ‘For a richer New Zealand’, it said.

  The Greens did not win the election. Few of us voters studied their policies, or indeed the policies of any of the parties, but if asked, most of us would have said that the Greens are idealistic. It would be nice to live sustainably and all that, but economically impractical. Greens, we vaguely believe, would close coal mines, issue no licences to drill for oil, burden farmers and motorists with pollution taxes, and care rather too much for the lumbering whale and rather too little for the sources of wealth. In other words, if the Greens got
into power we would be financially worse off. That, regardless of its accuracy, is the perception that kept the Greens vote to 13 per cent or so. It also explains the slogan.

  We all know what richer means. It means having more money. And we all know what New Zealand means. It means the people who live here, the voting public. So the self-evident, immediate primary meaning of the slogan is that if you vote Green you’ll have more money.

  That noise we can both hear right now is the Green party screaming. ‘No,’ they scream, ‘that’s not what we mean at all. We’re inviting voters to question their values, to ponder the true meaning of richness. Is it richer to have money in the bank or rivers you can swim in? Is it richer to be a nation where everyone has an iPhone or a nation where kids can play safely in asbestos-free meadows, et organically cetera?’

  All very clever, but also disingenuous. Had the Greens wanted to say that on their poster, had they wanted to question our enthusiasm for wealth and consumption, they could have done so nice and clearly. But they didn’t. They chose to have it both ways. They equivocated.

  For us greedy rapists of the environment, richer is about as favourably loaded as it is possible for a word to be. It induces the warmest of feelings in the back pocket. The Greens may say that they mean something different by richer but they are fully aware what it most commonly means. And that primary meaning, the money one, is the one they want to register in voters’ skulls in the hope that it will subconsciously do something to invert the perception, the sentiment, that Green policies are more likely to shrink our bank accounts than to swell them.

  Equivocation comes in various shades, but all deliberately exploit the ambiguity of words and their emotional connotations. Equivocation abounds in the rhetoric of politics.

  For example, we all know what poverty means. The mental image it evokes is Dickensian: kids in rags, workhouse gruel and profound despair. Poverty is nasty. Over the last century or so developed nations have wisely decided that there’s enough money to go around and so there’s no need for any citizen to suffer Dickensian-style poverty. Hence the welfare state. It decrees a line beyond which no one need fall.