The bad boy syndrome

Cat got our tongue, you ask? Would that anything that exciting actually have happened in Wanga-vague-as this past week. With Council on hiatus and new CEO Dr Warburton seemingly intent on keeping Mad Mickey sedated (elephant tranquiliser? GHB? Ecstacy? A rubber mallet?) Watchers have been making forays out of the Cave to stock up on winter firewood and catching up on our crocheting.

You mean to tell us Mr Maslin's limpid organ hasn't been keeping you fully and completely informed of every angle of every issue facing Wanganui? Now there's a surprise. An increasingly irritable editor seems to have started the year somewhat out of sorts, making mischief with photo captions during the buy-election, overlooking the need for solid information on which people could base their decisions on referendumb issues, and testily telling his own journalists that the Chronic won't be expanding on its recent foray into examining political accountability.

Watchers got quite excited when the paper asked its readers whether they thought list MP Jill Pettis ought to be accountable to Wanganui (the town) and Whanganui (the electorate) even though she theoretically no longer represents either.

A fair question to ask about any list MP who, as the Diva proved beyond doubt a decade ago, stand or fall solely on their ability to curry favour with the powerbrokers within their own party. Mrs Pettis seems no better nor worse than the bulk of them (though not every list MP's voice makes Watchers' ears bleed if heard within 100 metres) but, we naively thought, if political accountability is suddenly on the Chronic's agenda, can a look at the accountability of certain other elected figures be far behind.

Well no, it can't. Mr Maslin curtly explained to a quavering un-bylined journo (or indeed, perhaps he told his own word processor) that even Chester Borrows wouldn't come in for the same level of scrutiny applied to Mrs Pettis, because he "was elected by the Whanganui electorate, to which he is clearly accountable".

Really? How? How is any elected person - list MP, electorate MP, councillor or Mayor - held accountable during their term of office? Not at all, sadly. They're "accountable" once every three years -- after they've been hand picked by a few insiders to represent one party or the other. If we don't like their performance we're faced with the choice of voting for someone representing a party we may not like, or abstaining and using only our party vote. And if we don't like a list MP, the only way we can affect their chances is to use our party vote aganist their entire line-up. Not nearly as effective, accountability-wise, as, say, a recall election.

Whether they ought to be accountable during their term, and -- assuming it's thought to be desirable -- how it might be implemented is, we would have thought, a very worthy question for debate in the local newspaper. Unless the intention was to just pick on someone who's annoyed the new boy power structure, of course. But we're sure that wasn't the intention, given that the Chronic is a serious newspaper.

Perhaps when his own newsroom started asking "Who's next for the accountability exam?" Mr Maslin realised that he'd opened the way for such questions to be asked of Guyton Street. And we can't have that, now can we?

Meanwhile, between the foraging and the crocheting, Watchers have been pondering the evident attractions of the Diva for at least a portion of the Wanganui population. Indeed, there seems to be a perverse percentage whose support for the Mayor rises in inverse proportion to the standard of his behaviour.

Of course this isn't the first time that a leadership figure who's behaved somewhat poorly has been idolised by a section of the population that might reasonably be expected to oppose them -- Margaret Thatcher kept getting re-elected by many of the same people whose livelihoods she was destroying and whose homes she was ruthlessly poll-taxing. And on the other side of the spectrum, crowds still turn out to cheer Fidel despite the Cuban version of Manolo Blahniks being jandals made from worn out car tyres.

Latest to join the "ruthless but revered (by some)" stakes is US VP Dick Cheney, who as you all know by now shot his friend in the face while quail hunting. (The friend later apologised to the VP for getting in the way of his buckshot). This is the same Dick Cheney who told Senator Patrick Leahey to go f**k himself on the floor of the Senate, and then said he "felt better after I had done it". Who has two DUIs under his belt. Whose former Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been indicted by a Grand Jury and charged with several felonies (Libby reportedly said that his superiors, including Dick Cheney, had authorised him to disclose highly classified information to the press regarding Iraq's weapons intelligence).

The same Dick Cheney who's been charged with fraudluent accounting. Whose oil company, Halliburton, is regularly embroiled in charges of bribery and corruption dating back to when he was in charge -- and who made $36 million from selling his shares in said company. Who's widely regarded as the architect of much that's happened in Iraq and who has a long history of misbehaviour dating back to the Iran-Contra scandal. And so on...

But the latest effort by Deadeye Dick hasn't affected his popularity much, slipping from 32 to just 29 after the hunting incident.

Perhaps Wonkette comes closest to offering a coherent explanation of this phenomenon. Comparing Cheney to that other renowned US VP Spiro Agenew, they ask:

Did [Agnew] ever say 'go f**k yourself' on the floor of the Senate? Did he ever dress like he was shoveling his suburban driveway to a memorial service at Auschwitz? Did he ever shoot a man in cold blood? No. We didn’t think so. Agnew’s a pussy and you know it. Dick Cheney is a badass, and we love him.

He’s like America’s abusive father — we’re terrified of him, we hide under our beds when we smell whiskey on his breath, but we crave his attention. We need him to tell us we’ve been good.

We have a sick admiration for him that we’ll be describing to our therapists for years.

Do Vice Presidents have term limits? Can he please be our Vice President-for-life?

Mickey, Mayor for Life? We're sure there's some who'd put up their hands. Let's just hope for their sakes the Diva doesn't own a shotgun.

Comments on this post are now closed.