Garth George's Head Is A Weird Place

I always love reading Garth George’s columns. He’s infuriating and bewildering at the same time.

He can be on the money sometimes, like this week when he criticises the casual racism of men like Andy Haden.

He came across as an unreconstructed 1980s redneck racist and that alone, in view of the multi-racial event he was supposedly to represent, should have had him fired. Although it has to be said that he is simply one among tens of thousands of middle-aged Pakeha males and females who think and talk privately the same way, and whose attitude to our brown brothers and sisters is incorrigible and will go with them to the grave.

I see and hear a lot of that in my neck of the woods, where the percentage of the population that is Maori is higher than anywhere else in the nation.

Just the other day I was talking fishing with such a middle-aged Pakeha male, canvassing the various lakes and the best spots on and around them to cast a line, when he launched into a tirade about "those effing Maori" who "now own the effing lakes" and "want to screw every effing dollar out of us fishermen".

Is Garth getting soft in his old age? Is this a new sensitive Garth George? Wait, what’s this?

Not that those who indulge in it are wholly to blame, for there are far too many Maori whose words, behaviour and body language display a supercilious arrogance and an unmistakable contempt for Pakeha and folk of other ethnicity.

You see it almost every day, for instance, at pedestrian crossings where some Maori deliberately saunter slowly across and you can almost hear them saying to themselves, "Ha, ha whitey, you have to wait for me". There are worse examples, particularly among snooty staff at tourist attractions.

Whether this is just another product of the victim mentality which many Maori seem to absorb at the breast, or whether it's simply evidence of a massive inferiority complex, it certainly grates once you've been confronted by it for the umpteenth time.

In the good old days Maori knew their place and did what they were told by us white people. How dare some of them swagger about like self-confident people!

It’s like two different Garths wrote two different articles, and then stuck them together. He has a crack at anti-Maori sentiment, then engages in exactly the behaviour he has just condemned.

And what was he on when he wrote this?

Not only was [Haden’s “darkies” outburst] stupid because it was patently wrong, but one wonders at his use of a peculiarly American racial epithet when there are several home-grown ones available.

Exactly. If we’re going to racially vilify people, let’s at least Buy Kiwi-made.

The rest of his column is standard reactionary stuff, and not worthy of comment, because it’s exactly what you’d expect from a tired old man who thinks the world has gone to the dogs and young people are out to get him.

But if you can look beyond that a journey to Garth’s world can be a rewarding and amusing experience