Monday 21 August 2017

The Outside of the Asylum

The Spinoff's syndication of The Outside of the Asylum started on Saturday, with Joe Bennett's foreword, and the introduction.

A snippet:
On arriving in Christchurch for my job interview with the Economics Department at the University of Canterbury, Associate Professor Jeremy Clark took me for a drive around Port Hills. Driving on roads that would have sent council lawyers in America into apoplexies over the lack of guardrails (and over the sheep occupying the roads), I started to have a feeling that I had stumbled on something substantial.

But I knew it for sure when Jeremy took me to Cave Stream.

In the middle of Arthur’s Pass, a river had carved an underground channel through the limestone. At the head of the trail by the Department of Conservation’s parking lot was a sign.

The sign had instructions that were the opposite of the ones on John Watson’s packet of toothpicks. The instructions were a sign of a sane civilisation, a society I yearned to join.

The sign read, essentially, as follows. I wish I had taken a picture of the sign; this is just my paraphrase.
“Welcome to Cave Stream. The cave is dark and cold. We do not provide any lights. The ladder at the end is very slippery. If you enter the cave in winter without proper clothing, you may die of hypothermia. Have fun.”
We had fun.

Confronted with the reality of the world, Douglas Adams’ John Watson did the only sensible thing. He changed his name to Wonko the Sane, built a wall around his beachfront property, decorated the outside of the wall, and put a sign welcoming visitors to his Outside of the Asylum.

Adams’s book was published only in 1984, so for Wonko the Sane escape to New Zealand was not an option. New Zealand was only just coming out of the Asylum. It would soon show its brilliance to the world, but it was still too late to be able to help poor Wonko.

I was far luckier. The University of Canterbury offered me the lectureship, and I moved to New Zealand. The sign at Customs when I arrived might have said, “Welcome to New Zealand.” What it really meant was, “Welcome to the Outside of the Asylum.”

This isn’t an essay on the madness of Canada. Or, not just on the madness of Canada, or America, or even the rest of the world.

It is an essay about the sanity of New Zealand – and the importance of keeping it that way.

A pessimist might say New Zealand is only going mad far less quickly than the rest of the world. But it is still just about the only sane place left.

We don’t know how lucky we are in this country.
Wednesday's instalment will cover the beauty of New Zealand's tax system and GST, and necessary warnings about places that have been daft enough to try doing this kind of thing:
Stay tuned.

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