Light the fuse

Chapter 2

Recruiting an irresistible face

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240712

Irredeemably Decent Norman Kirk: Failing utterly to understand why the nation was so comprehensively devasted by his death, in 1974, the New Zealand Labour Party has serially failed since to anoint a leader with anything approaching Kirk’s irresistible combination of decency and charisma—neoliberal-enablers Lange and Ardern not excepted. photographer unknown

…there are four things that matter to people:
…somewhere to live,
…food to eat,
…clothing to wear, and
…something to hope for.
Norman Kirk, 1969

Gifted his first chapter by Hutchins, Cimino suddenly realises he’s been gifted his second, by Biden. The previous day, on their way home from visiting a 92-year-old friend whose face and faculties would easily render him fitter than the incumbent, for office, Cimino had quipped to his wife of 50 years:

Anybody can become president, as long as they’re George Clooney !

Sarah, from the driver’s seat, had instantly entreated:

You should tell him.

Sarah was serious. Cimino loved her for it, and agreed to. Their long-held belief was that political leaders must, first and foremost, be people who voters yearn to see and listen to. For Cimino, it goes back to the pitiful spectacle of Bill Rowling imagining he could fill the void left by Norman Kirk, in the hearts of a bereaved nation. The ache endures, only months shy of the 50th anniversary of the great man’s death, aged just 51.

Cimino had pursued a number of heroic local projects in partnership with an arch-strategist and innovator. In regard to the 2023 moonshot alluded to, he’d convinced Cimino that the prerequisite was to attract a compelling, household name to tell the story. Aware as he is of this fundamental, Cimino is also aware it is more easily said than done. He has been lucky, thrice, with his promotion of the Mahurangi Coastal Path. Cimino had learnt, however, that by time a person has become a household name, they’ve long since learned to be extremely circumspect in responding to such requests.

To attract the services of a compelling, household-name story teller, however, requires the mission to be of epic proportions. For a while, the previous year, most of the key dominoes for such a project were potentially to hand. In the event, the critical storyteller piece eluded the plotters. Had all the pieces been secured, and perfectly positioned, Aucklanders might, by now, be luxuriating in the first of their brand-new Waiwera hot pools.

Buying Waiwera, or at least all of the former hot pools and hotel site, was plan sufficiently audacious to have worked. It involved building a campaigning machine powerful enough to have ended child poverty in Aotearoa. Cimino, in very good company, is continually incredulous that people, with the tools now at their disposal for the first time in the history of civilisation, have not seized power from the global oligarchy and built a world-wide democracy. The Democratic Recession, Cimino is certain, can  be ended, but it cannot be ended incrementally.

Fortunately, the very act of ending child poverty—squarely addressing Norman Kirk’s,

they have emphasis added to have food to eat

—would simultaneously build real-world democracy. The cynical might doubt the utility of any sort of democracy in addressing climate and hunger, but that, Cimino is certain, is because democracy is invariably equated with the poor, representative-democracy specimen that masquerades as the real thing.

Building Cimino’s democracy-builder would be no mean feat. Having built a system himself that was used entirely successfully for more than a decade, but by one, sympathetic user, he’d long since disabused himself of the magnitude of developing anything that resembled what all too many employers are prone to describing as:

just a simple system.

…to which the developer might fairly respond, rhetorically:

You mean a simple system, like the human brain?

Having been once, tantalisingly been offered the services of an ace systems developer, however, Cimino could not forsake the notion that, with right project, with the right face to front it, something as preposterous as ending child poverty in Aotearoa could be accomplished, leaving one nation in the world having reclaimed its democracy.

As for Biden endorsing Clooney, it is, of course, what a still-great man would have the cognisance and humility to do.

Footnote Regarding the above-mentioned 92-year-old’s superior suitability for the role of president, his country of birth rules him out, as it does just the merely 77-year-old, American son Arnold Schwarzenegger, who devastatingly demonstrated fitness for office. In discriminating against those born in either Australia or Austria—or anywhere other than their United States—the founding fathers displayed appalling anti-immigrant bias, handing Birther Trump his first brutish bludgeon, 220 years later.

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