Shock! Horror! P addiction!

There was some relief at the weekend for Sunday Star-Times readers suffering their regular bout of Diva Dyspepsia as columnist Laws hit on the Hooters non-debate and the editors pulled out a suitably salacious photo to try to attract readers to this desperate piece of populist pap.

Turn the page and there’s Dennis Dutton quoting writer John Lukacs on populism:

A loathsome marriage of mass culture and mass democracy, consummated by demagogues, has corroded public virtue, weakened belief in absolute truth, and sparked a steady increase in carnality, vulgarity and brutality.

And Lukacs, author of newly published "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred", hasn’t even been to Divaville on the Whanganui.

Anyone at Monday’s strategy committee meeting (well, those with an IQ more than a little over 10) would have been thinking along those lines as Splash Czar John Unsworth reminded councillors of the glory days when Referendumb Fever gripped the populace and everyone, even Unsworth himself, hallucinated that they’d be whizzing down the water slide at the new $4.5 million-plus swimming pool by lunchtime.

Despite the Diva's best efforts to keep the populace, or at least those round the Council table, high on P (for populism, with a chaser of pools) it began to wear off and the Diva moved on to other headline-grabbing causes. Post-high depression set in among Unsworth and his splashers [we’ve been in a vacuum since …] to the extent that they hadn’t even managed to convince any possible funders to open their wallets.

Barbara Bullock, who has shown a laudable reluctance to smoke the P pipe pointed out that by doping the population by way of referenda and jumping the usual procedural steps for such a project, the council had brought its problems on itself.

Then, as if by magic, the next agenda item involved plans for the next big R party, scheduled for February 11 2006 in conjunction with the Big By-election party. The Diva’s shopping list was lit up and he invited all councilors to join him in getting off their faces on the prospect of citizens once again ticking boxes in an R-fuelled frenzy. Come with me on the big P trip, the Diva inveigled, pulling little packs from his pockets and waving them around enticingly: Soften the water? Fluoridate the water? Slash council numbers? Euthanise the rural ward? Let the people decide whether we want a Maori ward? Oh, and settle once and for all the H in Wanganui question.

But this time at least some of Michael’s party people (and of course Barbara) had some qualms about what might be in those little packs. They were, one could say, a bit picky about the substances to be offered to the people.

Sue Pepperell pointed out that putting questions about the H and the Maori ward to the overwhelmingly Pakeha voters at a city-wide R party would be a mockery, and would unnecessarily “fuel race-based feelings”. She even had misgivings about how much useful information voters could be given about fluoride at an R party.

Don McGregor and the rural dwellers had similar misgivings about handing the rural ward question to a bunch a R-addled urban dwellers to decide, and the Diva graciously agreed, after Nicky Higgie joined the rural doubters, that there could be a separate count of rural/urban votes to send to the Representation Commission.

The Diva even backed down on his plan to put the Maori ward to the vote, after Nicky pointed out that it just didn’t make sense to do it now, given the deadlines for decision-making required by legislation.

What followed was an apt reminder of the way dumbocracy works around a council table with Diva Devotees like Marty Lindsay present. The Diva won every item that went to the vote, often with the casting vote of his mate GK.

A working party will now go off and have little get-togethers to hear how its charwoman, Michael Laws, wants to run the R party. The Diva has invited Deputy Dotty, Muzza Hughes, Randhir Dahya and Don McGregor to come along to these gatherings. Notably left off the Diva’s invite list was Sue Westwood, absent for yesterday’s meeting, who was allowed into the 2005 R-party planning to help keep the buggers honest.

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