Pompeii: When debates deserve rebates

Doing absurd with excellence

Shakespeare gave us A Comedy of Errors and it was bettered with the Absurdity of Farce yet to be scripted into a play today.

There is a place where when they do absurd they excel beyond compare and the incredulity of it all left us gobsmacked and the world found the laughing stock of the evening either to make the headlines or to be ignored as a non-event.

He followed each time someone who won the spoils and later stepped in twice the accidental leader of the pack never having faced the count himself for what he could do.

Endowed with absence

Regaled in the emperor’s robes, he sways and swaggers with pomp and pageantry bringing along the highest honours of the logic of the zoo, putting primates in their place in what someone inferred was a tome so thick and grandly titled Strategies for backing out of an silverback tussle.

For when the cages shook and they beat their chests in the jungle climbing to the highest branch and balancing on a twig without falling with a crash to earth he sat in a tub of faux-bananas so endowed each bite expelled air that showed the trick of balloons filled with helium.

The rumble continued and one, maybe two could not be counted in the colony, the bush giving covering to the timid of sorts. The juveniles came and made sounds to our amusement one needed a didgeridoo for the North of the reserve left him bereft of the calls of the common.

Empty plinths are three

The day came and I felt like I have visited a heritage site with 4 plinths and on one was placed the statue like a plan for a great park that floundered because the patron ran out of money.

The curator attempted to make the visitors pay to view 4 amazing works of art when only one was hung for all to see – absurd, they cried, livid with rage, this we will not debate on, we want a rebate.

We moved as if from plinth to plinth though everything was about the only mounted plinth, the guide attempted to talk about all whilst addressing only one.

The boredom of heard again

The work was nothing of the art we expected but the multitude of words flowed as each aspect of its production was explained and we never fully got the detail before another stage was talked about.

Interminable verbosity had bored the audience to death but an undistinguished work of art exhibited by someone who pretends to genius will attract fools masquerading as aficionados knowledgeable with all faults.

The matters that really mattered never became the matter as the obsequious tamed genuflecting deliveries of softballs – a monologue, one said; a soliloquy did another and if one competes against oneself the winner might just be the very hard choice of oneself.

With that came a prize and so the farce for the record became a page of history.

The seriously unfunny Kiwi parliament

Kiwis have lost flight

It is a bird and it cannot fly, no, it does not have a big backside and it is not extinct like the dodo. It belongs to a distant group of islands that are fast losing their sense of humour that is if they ever had any humour at all. It is the land of the kiwi and the humanoid Kiwis are beginning to look like birds that cannot fly.

All that feet stamping and making funny faces when the players of their most popular sport meet with other nations leaves me almost ready to laugh but I am not impressed at all, the haka is no more a challenge and hardly a dare anymore.

Can't say this of politicians

Why are the kiwis at this end of a mild vituperation? Because their representatives, politicians who have become too much of themselves to be spoken about have promulgated a law that bans political satire - or rather politicians in parliament can no more be butts of jokes or elements in a satirical commentary.

As it stands, broadcasters or anyone else to cannot use footage of the chamber for "satire, ridicule or denigration", rather than get creative with satirising parliament, we must now watch a live feed on television of Kiwi members of parliament in ridiculous states of debate and appearance doing everything to denigrate themselves and abrogate whole free enterprise of democracy.

Democratic death throes

For a once lively democracy to arrogate to themselves the equivalent of lèse majesté laws beggars belief and it would definitely encourage despotic rulers pretending to lead democracies to enact even worse laws of sedition and stifle the freedom of the press. A democracy without satire might as well be an autocracy.

When men have lost the ability to laugh at themselves or cannot abide the occasional snigger and would be offended by a guffaw at their expense, they have definitely lost the will to enjoy life, if not the will to live.

Bad news from NZ

But New Zealand is now in the news and this new law is an excellent way of designating it a backwater in the middle of nowhere which probably is in the Southern Hemisphere.

Americans might know New Zealand for being the land where the Lord of the Rings was filmed, it is definitely now below middle-earth and the orcs have laid siege on parliament with tyranny - what can one say than for God to save the sheep from murderous laws.