Hollywood occupies New Zealand

Warner Brothers comes swinging its massive male member (yes, a vulgar metaphor, but nothing else quite does it) into New Zealand, growling, “Hey, wankers, suck this.” New Zealand falls to its knees, goes, “Okay, sir. What else can we do for you?” “Give us $25 million, and we’ll call it even.” So the kiwis do that, too.

Can it be? Hollywood is now calling the legislation in New Zealand? Labor laws have changed to accommodate Peter Jackson who did not want to negotiate with a union? And some of the business community is approving?

New Zealand is not an especially obvious consumer society. Close beneath the veneer of their friendly surface roils that surliness characteristic of a massive national inferiority complex. People and cultures with inferiority complexes are dangerous. So they sort of pretend to value your business until you ask them for something and suddenly they flip out, as if you have somehow questioned their manhood. They can’t quite figure out how to do sales. They never caught on to the idea that it shouldn’t cost you MORE to buy the large economy size than two of the small sizes. They consistently screw up at the cash register. No, this is not a society that values consumers. Modern life is not quite under control in New Zealand.

If you deplore the creation of the consumer, the society seems more authentic, more serious, at first, than flagrantly client-oriented societies. But then you start to recognize that the only difference between New Zealand and the civilized world is that these people are poorer. Their income is about half of what it is in Australia, western Europe, and North America. If they could figure out how to be consumers on the scale of the rest of the western world they WOULD do it. There is no virtue in their lack of possession or inability to sell things. They just don’t know how to be otherwise.

This is why the sight of John Keyes forcing legislation through the Parliament at the demand of Hollywood is so appalling. It lays bare the myth that New Zealand is a nice little place where people are poor but happy and genuine. For a few dollars they are ready to prostrate themselves before the Hollywood icon, which is something you aren’t going to see, even in the US. Especially in the US. Is this democracy?? The US is screwed up, but at least directors don’t decide the law.

There just isn’t any safe place in the whole world. The universe if run by business, and the desires of business are by definition good. No questioning of that basic premise. This is Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil, part 2. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'." New Zealand sometimes pretends to disdain the vile exploitation, moral and physical, perpetrated by the masters of the universe, but it has shown once and for all that it wants to play. When the little guy stands up to the big guy it is touching. But when it trails the big guy around asking for a couple of scattered crumbs, it is just pathetic.