Trumpery Is the Last Thing We Need
The US matters to us. If we must have a global super-power, we’d rather it was the US than anyone else. That is why, observing from the sidelines, we have a growing sense of incredulity and consternation as the battle for what is often touted as the leadership of the free world unfolds.
We are of course accustomed to the excesses that, in our terms, often characterise American public life. But, even then, it is hard to comprehend that a figure as bizarre and extreme as Donald Trump could be taken seriously by American voters.
It is at least of some comfort to know that there are many Americans who share that distress. Nicholas Kristof, writing this week in the New York Times, reports that he invited his followers on Twitter for words beginning with “p” to describe Donald Trump and was rewarded with a deluge, ranging from “petulant” to “pompous” and on to “pernicious”.
It is not as though there is anything special about “p”. Choose any letter you like. “B”? What about “bombastic”, “blustering”, and “bigoted”?
The odd thing is, however, that we do not need to scour the dictionary for a word that accurately captures the essence of Donald Trump. There is a perfectly good English word, with a respectable provenance, that pithily says it all and is just waiting for its moment in the sun. That word is “trumpery” – and it could, I suppose, be spelt with a capital T, if one wished.
The dictionary definition tells us that “trumpery” means “foolish talk or actions”, with a secondary meaning as “useless or worthless”. How extraordinary that here is a word that has existed for centuries and has innocently waited all this time – unsung and unheralded – for a Donald Trump to come along and embody its meaning as though it was his sole purpose in life.
There must, surely, be a small possibility that Donald Trump has been aware of the word from an early age and perhaps developed an irrational fixation and affinity for it. That would explain why his name is now Trump – so that even his name is “trumped up” – and it may even suggest that he has deliberately tailored all his actions and speeches since then so as to fit the word that so appeals to him.
These are possible explanations for Donald Trump’s extraordinary behaviour during the primary campaigns. But none of then goes all the way to explain how the foolishness of “trumpery” has become something darker and more worrying.
Trump is, after all, the classic demagogue. He has learnt how to amplify and exploit the prejudices of his supporters. He recognises no responsibility to take on the true tasks of leadership, to explain and educate; indeed, he glorifies ignorance, trumpeting that “I love the poorly educated”.
He offers no solutions to difficult issues, other than the bombastic and egocentric assurance that he is himself the solution. He has learnt that, in the age of celebrity, the greatest risk is to stay out of the headlines. He cares little for the damage he may do to social integrity and the interests of women, or those of different ethnicities and religions, still less to America’s standing in the world; that is just another sacrifice required of the American people in order to secure the greater good – the election of Donald J. Trump. He knows that there is little or no downside in being outrageous, as long as the television cameras are there to record it – and no one does “outrageous” better.
So confident is he in his ability to capture the headlines – any headline – that he does not bother even to try to conceal what he is really about. “If I were to pull out a gun and shoot someone,” he boasts, “people would still vote for me.” It is that combination of apparent frankness and readiness to shock on the one hand and calculation and cunning on the other that makes him so dangerous. “Trumpery”, sadly, is only the half of it.
Bryan Gould
7 March 2016
People Power at Awaroa
Most people will feel a warm glow of pleasure that a campaign to save a beautiful beach for public use and access has been successful. That sense that “people power” has prevailed will be felt well beyond the 39,000 who pledged their contributions.
The great majority of those contributors will probably, along with the rest of the population, never get to walk or swim or sail at Awaroa beach. What is inspiring, however, about what has been achieved is that, for once, personal aggrandisement has taken a back seat. The pleasure that people feel is because the community has spoken and a public good has been secured.
We are, sadly, all too well used to seeing private property rights taking precedence over community interests. The organisers of the campaign deserve great credit, not only for their organisational and campaigning abilities, but for their understanding that this was an issue that wasn’t to be decided by a handful of wealthy landowners but was one where ordinary people felt that they could make a difference and could preserve something of the New Zealand we all love.
It is for these reasons that the offer of financial support from Gareth Morgan aroused such controversy. At first sight, his offer was a generous one and seemed designed to guarantee that the target of $2 million dollars would be met. But, whether he understood the implications or otherwise, he could not resist attaching to his offer a requirement that he should derive a personal and exclusive benefit in terms of the use of the property.
There can be no clearer demonstration of the prevailing mentality of those with substantial financial resources – that, in the midst of a crowd-funded community enterprise, the ability and willingness to contribute more than anybody else should not be treated simply as a generous gesture, but should legitimately be accompanied by a requirement that a preferential and exclusive advantage for the donor should be gained.
There was the authentic voice of those who had come to believe that money, in the form of personal wealth, would always trump all other considerations.
We understand from Gareth Morgan, after the event, that his intention had been all along to arouse such indignation at this requirement as to encourage more people to donate and therefore to frustrate the personal and exclusive benefit that he appeared to seek.
Whatever the truth of that, there can be no starker example of how the public good and the private interest can collide.
The episode will no doubt pass quickly from the public memory. That would be a pity. That generous impulse, focused on delivering a public good rather than a private property right, is very much worth holding on to.
It is surely a salutary and encouraging lesson to learn – that the community interest can be brought to bear and can prevail over the conviction that money will buy you anything. That lesson can be applied well beyond the sands of Awaroa. Our society will be stronger and healthier, as well as more agreeable for everyone to live in, if we see more of that community spirit expressed and applied in other parts of our national life as well.
Bryan Gould
24 February 2016
A Sign of Strength or Weakness?
In 1995, a year after my return to New Zealand to take up the Vice-Chancellorship of Waikato University, I was invited to lead a delegation from the university to visit universities in China – the first such invitation to be issued.
Seventeen years earlier, in 1978, I had been a member of a British parliamentary delegation which had been the first westerners to visit China since the fall of the Gang of Four. It was, I believe, that earlier contact that led to my invitation in 1995.
The contrast in what I saw on the two visits was startling. On the earlier visit, the only shops had been Friendship Stores, reserved for foreigners, the only transport for ordinary Chinese was by cart and bicycle, and the only colour –amongst a sea of Mao tunics – was the red of Party banners. But by 1995, China was clearly a country on the move.
My 1995 visit was the first of many such visits I paid to China over the coming years. My association with that wonderful country and civilisation led to the first institution-to-institution arrangements between New Zealand and Chinese universities, and ushered in a huge expansion in the numbers of Chinese students studying at New Zealand tertiary institutions.
Since those days, providing tertiary education to students from overseas – not just China, but India, the Americas, the Middle East and may others – has become big business for New Zealand. In terms of foreign exchange earnings – at over $3 billion each year – export education is more than twice as valuable to our economy as the wine industry. There is scarcely a single tertiary education institution in this country that does not rely to a large extent on the income from foreign students to allow them to balance their books.
Foreign students bring not only valuable funding, but also a range of benefits to this country, not least a greater understanding for our own students of other cultures and a wider range of contacts, both personal and institutional, with students who are potential leaders in their own countries.
The positive net inflow to this country of people from overseas is substantially accounted for by the numbers of foreign students who now come to us for their education. This success is rightly a cause for self-congratulation. Our ability to compete with other western providers for the custom of foreign students is testament to the quality of our education. So, what is there to cavil at?
The answer is that it is all a matter of balance. Each institution will have some idea of what is an optimal proportion of foreign students in any given class or course, although opinions as to what that might be will often vary considerably. And the calculation is not made any easier by the strong tendency of overseas students to focus on courses in particular disciplines, such as business management, so that what might seem to be an acceptable proportion for the institution as a whole might conceal a concentration of foreign students in just a few areas.
A class that has a high proportion of students from overseas, particularly those for whom English is a second language, may not serve the interests of domestic students as well as it should – and even the overseas students themselves may feel that it is not quite the New Zealand education they had bargained for.
And the institutions themselves may find that there is a downside. There are considerable and additional costs involved in attracting foreign students and in looking after them properly while they are here. The costs of marketing overseas, paying commissions to agents, providing appropriate facilities, accommodation, support and counselling in respect of both academic and personal matters, will all mean that the fee income earned will often be substantially offset by those outlays.
There is also a world of difference between treating overseas fee income as a useful supplement that can be applied to discretionary purposes that might not otherwise be afforded, and the situation that most tertiary institutions now find themselves in – that is, an increasing reliance on that income to keep their heads above water.
The truth is that our tertiary institutions have, by international standards, been underfunded for many years – and the sinking lid is still being applied year after year. In typically Kiwi fashion, we expect outcomes of international standard to be produced from funding that is only two-thirds or – in some cases – only half of that provided overseas. That disparity is bound to tell eventually – and once it becomes apparent, it will inevitably reduce the attraction of a New Zealand education in overseas markets.
Looked at in that light, our income from foreign students is better regarded as a sticking plaster or as a life belt – a cry for help, rather than a badge of success. It represents another casualty in the drive to cut public spending at any cost – requiring our tertiary institutions to see themselves as commercial and trading operations, with a year-to year time horizon, rather than as focusing primarily on providing the best possible education for the communities they serve.
Bryan Gould
24 November 2015