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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 13. 1966.

Poet's plan for an art-loving NZ

Poet's plan for an art-loving NZ

James K. Baxter At Arts Festival

Beer

Bullfights

Sex

Education

Crime

Immigration

"A Genuine Paradise for the paranoid temperament"—that's what poet James K. Baxter thinks New Zealand is.

"There's Always a war on somewhere," he told students at the Massey opening of Arts Festival.

"Any person who has a paranoid temperament can join a commando force, and exercise his talent for cutting men's throats from behind, and give free expression, let us say, to a homicidal hatred of Asian people.

"The Kiwi hero emerges from the ground just this side of death, without companions, perhaps understanding better than anyone else our deeply death-centred society.

"He has nowhere to go except, further into the mountains or deeper into the booze mill. Education would only ball up his reflexes and give him a bladder of peas to rattle."

Baxter said he began to consider what he would do if, instead of being a poet read by a few people, he were an art-loving politician with great persuasive powers.

"The main idea would be to break the vicious circle of reflex public thinking, and to take the control of life, wherever possible, out of the hands of Government or business organisations."

His proposals—"not intended to be dogmatic"—included:

• To abolish universal compulsory education. It may help a writer to be able to put down words on paper, but it doesn't seem to help other artists much-sculpters, painters, and so on. I wouldn't refuse to educate those who wanted it. But any child from the Primers up would be able to leave school for good if he or she wanted to. Of course it would need some provisions against the exploitation of child labour by unscrupulous farmers or manufacturers. But we would eventually be blessed with a large illiterate population, able to supply our artists with original vigorous ideas any day of the week, instead of second-hand dehydrated opinions In a generation or two we might have our own songs, folklore and art forms, and regenerate the mythopoetic power which our present civilisation has all but stamped out. The teachers also would be much happier.

• To make it no longer a criminal offence for anyone to be penniless or unemployed. As things stand, one can be arrested and convicted for having no job, no money, or no lodging. Many artists (Gorki, Rimbaud, Utrillo, I'm sure you could think of others) work and think best in a state of economic insecurity; and others need spells of it to refresh their intuitions.

• To get rid of all censorship of the arts.

• To forbid advertising by business firms, whether by radio, newspaper, tv, skywriting or subliminal devices, except for brief bare statements of goods and prices and the places where things can be bought. This would freshen everybody's mind and free many artists from bitter slavery.

• To reduce the age of female consent from 16 to 14, as a practical recognition that our girls have won their guerilla battle to be regarded as women from puberty onwards.

• To wipe out our present barbarous laws against homosexuals. A great many good interpretative artists come from this 10 per cent of the population. They would have a better chance to develop their talents if they were free of police interference in their private lives. Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating fornication, adultery or sodomy; I recognise that problems of sexual ethics are enormously complex. What I say is that the police are the least people to have a clear view of the matter—their idea of reforming a call-girl I knew in Auckland was to take her to the station and carry out a mass rape. And I remember a policeman in Wellington, popularly known as Aunt Emma, who used to haunt the public lavatories to get a kick out of arresting homosexuals. This kind of thing is grotesque and useless. But I think there should be an age of consent for males as for females.

• To abolish boarding schools. This would be a counter-measure to ensure that the young heterosexual population would not be forced, as they now frequently are, to become homosexual.

• To encourage immigration, especially from Africa and Asia. This would lower our national income but improve our genes and our outlook.

• To abolish the control of the breweries over the pubs and encourage home-brewing and the establishment of small private grog-shops with no set hours of opening or closing. To prevent the sale of drugs except from pharmacies; but to have no penalty for anyone who liked to grow marijuana in his own backyard and smoke it or offer it to others.

• To replace our dreary Flower Festivals with public bullfights. It might seem hard on the bulls; but the present situation inflicts a slow death by boredom on human beings. Bullfights would be a lesser evil.