Stateside: Alien views

It’s not like I never make mistakes that I don’t cringe over, but landsakes! newspapers have copy editors on staff! So “the capital city of Auckland” was a tad much in the Travel section of this Sunday’s Oakland Tribune. The first comment on the online version was already posted at 3:28am by someone called LoveNZ. The second comment added insult to injury by saying “But maybe well let you off cause as you seem to have noticed the South Island is far more important than either [Wellington or Auckland].” Ferg, are you a Mainlander by any chance?

Mustn’t grumble, I suppose. At least the Olde Home Sodde got above-the-fold coverage. Last Sunday’s paper had a full page color ad for Qantas featuring John Travolta in his pilot’s uniform, giving the impression that you’d be flown to Oz by a celebrity. Which, of course, his friend Oprah Winfrey is actually doing in a different sense. She is flying all the members of a recent audience to the Land Down Under as a special treat.

I’m guessing the correspondent who wrote the Grand New Zealand article—a reference to the Grand Teton-like photo—had his trip paid for by the tour operators he mentions. You’d have to rob a bank otherwise to afford to do the stuff he did. And he is so dismissive of the North Island, dealing with it in a single sentence. Oops, sorry. There’s a second sentence: “It just doesn’t compare to the South Island’s natural beauty.” Harrumph!

Coincidentally, I happened to switch over to a local PBS station last night near the end of Roadtrip Nation, in which a group of US college kids were touring New Zealand back in 2008. It was the episode featuring an interview with Darryl Thomson (DLT), aka the Godfather of Kiwi Hip-Hop. He explains how inner city US culture found its way to NZ. (Speaking of genre icons, Ice Cube played a small club in Oakland last night, and my neighbor—an early NY rap artist—went along to give him his recent book, which he hopes the Cube will make into a movie. If he does, remember you read it here first!)

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed theme of this post—how New Zealand is perceived by Americans—I just wanted to appear modern despite not knowing what a “height man” is. So I’ll leave you with a link to a 1965 Time magazine article about Days Gone By. Sundays were “one wide yawn”; pubs closed at 6pm; the Glenbrook Steel Mill was yet to be built; and Sir Robert Kerridge was planning to turn Pakatoa Island, near Auckland, into a tourist trap to take advantage of the soon-to-be-opened Mangere Airport and Air New Zealand’s first flights to North America.

“Cradled in the arms of a welfare state, [NZers] have practically no unemployment, easily buy houses on government loans and are cared for with ‘womb-to-tomb’ government benefits. The Maori word apopo, the equivalent of Latin America's mañana, symbolizes the New Zealander's belief that much, and perhaps all, can best be left till tomorrow.”

Aaaah, what a paradise I grew up in! And I don’t mean just a natural one.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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