Beam us up

In his latest Sunday Star column, Michael Laws has confirmed one thing beyond a doubt.

He's a Klingon.

Now to the best of our knowledge, no one amongst the Watchers has ever climbed into a lycra suit and attended a Star Trek convention. But there are a few Watchers who might be found in the science fiction aisle of the local video rental, and who thus know more about Klingon culture than is probably healthy for normally adjusted adults.

But that can be a positive advantage when scrutinising a Mayor who's far from normally adjusted, and thus certain Watchers have formulated the theory that Mickey may in fact eat the odd bowl of Gagh.

In fact it's as good an explanation as any for the bizarre philosophy with which he's been regaling readers of his Sunday Star Times columns of late. According to this guide to Klingon culture:

Klingons are pragmatists to the extreme. Good and Evil are not absolutes but means to an end... the strong grow at the expense of the weak... Other races in the universe have their own paths to follow... The third classification is Thar'vule similar to a paid or compensated worker, something of a scavenger or beggar...

Members of this third racial classification are viewed as either to stupid (to know it's place) or to cowardly (to fight for it). Since they may have some desirable skill or talent they would be tolerated (barely), as long as they were useful. They have not the place in the grand design of the universe...

And indeed it was those on benefits who were Mickey's target this past Sunday, along with taking another shot at parents who have the audacity to ask that their children be protected from the possibility of anaphylactic shock and perhaps death from exposure to foods to which they're allergic.

Despite the lack of empirical evidence that a problem exists. When did the last child at a New Zealand school die from an allergy to a peanut? Never.

...Mickey asks. And so, carefully crafting yet another nonsensical syllogism (hasn't happened, so never gonna happen) he dismisses parents who're concerned for their children as "petty fascists" no less.

No doubt busy saluting the Swastika as you read this are the parents of 13 year old Hamidur Rahman. The Melbourne student died in 2002 after he was dared to eat a spoonful of peanut butter at a school camp, despite his classmates knowing he was allergic. They had the temerity to question why their son was exposed to the potential danger in the first place, when the school knew he was allergic. But then the "right" of the other children to peanut butter sandwiches - as opposed to jam, honey, Marmite, Nutella, cheese or a hundred other choices - obviously outweighs the need to keep kids safe.

Unless they're Maori kids, that is. In that case, he's been subtly implying for weeks, they need to be separated from their parents at birth.

Born to no-hoper mums in often dysfunctional whanau, the kids' lives possess an abject inevitability. They're behavioural problems long before any school entertains them. They're also dumb. And nothing can properly insulate an individual against a lack of intelligence... Their genetic stock virtually guarantees failure... they are destined to shuffle from one misery to the next... Their kids are completely stuffed the moment that they are conceived.

Not so long ago, Mickey opined that he and his diVisionites had been born too late. Again, he's right. At the beginning of the last century, colonialists would simply have kidnapped the children of black families and shipped them off for a "better" life. And we all know how well that worked out for the Aboriginals.

Whew. Parents of allergic kids - weak, whinging petty fascists. Check. Maori parents - no-hopers, dysfunctional, disproportionately beneficiaries, highly likely to abuse their children and/or spouse. Check.

Two groups sweepingly dismissed and still several hundred words short of the required limit. Let's see, who's left? Ahhh... let's have a go at the disabled:

And those figures exclude the mentally handicapped. Sorry, I meant to write "disabled". No, even that illustrates my lack of political correctness. "Challenged" is the word. We must be sensitive about such things.

There are those parents who insist that no matter how disabled or dangerous their kid, the local school must provide. Even when it can't.

On the one hand, such advocacy is laudable. On the other, it is what it is. Petty fascism: the foisting of minority demands upon the majority. The contravention of liberty, so that the few might feel satisfied and safe.

Satisifed? Oh of course... they're only doing it to annoy the likes of Mickey. We bet those petty fascist parents of the disabled kids sit round cackling with glee about what an inconvenience those damn wheelchair ramps are to the "normal" kids. Or it could just be that parents who, unlike Michael Laws and the several mothers of his children, haven't been fortunate enough to be delivered of happy, healthy, intelligent children might want the best life they can for them, within reason.

Meanwhile, the great oppression continues. The oppression of the normal Kiwi.

Welcome to Mickey's world - a society with no room for those who are different, who need more help or assistance than most, who don't measure up to an arbitrary standard - set, of course, by him. And you, you lucky Wanganuites, get to be the first people to inhabit this utopia. You're welcome to it - beam us up.

We suggest readers who are equally appalled at this petty fascism (his, not that of the people he accuses with no sense of irony) let him know - after having first consulted our handy guide to Klingon cursing, of course.

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