Under the influence.

Diary of the last 12 hours

6.05 am

Do not wake up screaming but also, after a couple of minutes of being awake and reading today's instalments of America Falls Apart, wonder: should I be?

Seriously, the deep utter weirdness of the Republican  convention in which almost every speaker was a Trump, or sleeping with one, has been a dystopian trip.

I'm thinking in particular of Kimberly Guilfoyle, girlfriend of Trump Jr and her address, the strangest thing humankind may have ever seen, bellowed to an imaginary stadium of 200,000 NASCAR fans, a bringing to life of Munch’s scream in makeup and a cocktail dress.

And then the cold blooded horror of a teenager with an automatic weapon casually taking himself into the middle of peaceful protesters and killing them.

A message arrives from a friend in America. She’s in her 30s, studied a lot, travelled a lot, knows a lot, she’s struggling to make sense of it.

I need to speak to someone from the outside

What are y’all hearing about the US ... we are hearing your numbers are increasing ...

I truly believe we are on the brink of civil war

I really do

I look for something to help, say: maybe it might help to talk to someone who lived through the riots of 1968 - such a tinderbox then, but the country held together. As much as people get inflamed, maybe the reassurance is a solid core of people who crave peace above all else? 

And meanwhile Wisconsin, curfew and national guard and shootings and just what is it? Some time soon, does the screaming stop?

7.10am

We cross to Christchurch. 

Raf Manji is describing the immense catharsis people have felt giving testimony. He says: Pain leaves the body through the speaking of the words, the most hopeful and gladdening thing you could hear.

7.40am 

We are hearing about the extremely odd case of the money being spent on a private school by a government that's supposed to be just not into it.

Maybe this is one of those black cat, white cat, don't matter as long as it catches mice things, just money going into building work. You could make that case. 

But Diane Khan makes a better one.

TeacherLife @Dianne_Khan

Here's a "shovel ready" project that would help those most hit my unemployment and underemployment due to Covid-19 - women and kids: Immediately authorise the hiring of a teacher aide for every NZ public school classroom for the rest of the year. #ShovelReadyNZ

The whole thing’s mighty, but here are the highlights

• Immediately authorise the hiring of a teacher aide for every NZ public school classroom for the rest of the year.

• Hire a counsellor for every school or community of schools for the rest of the year

• Roll out the free school meals to another 2 deciles for the rest of the year.

• Fund the refurbishment of every school pool in NZ so that they are safe to use for another decade

• Urgently take asbestos roofs out of every classroom that has them?

• Fit schools with solar panels 

If you're a government wanting to create jobs for women who have been demonstrably left out of the shovel-ready calculations, do by all means go back up the last half dozen bullet points.

11.25am

When life gets bleak and unimaginable and women in party frocks are screaming into a Republican void, the best thing you can do is gather up the latest cheese puff photos. I’m loving this.

Wendy Smith @wendlesnz

When I left home, the first recipe I called my mother for was for Cheese Puffs as she used to make them when we were kids. @DavidSlack reminded me of that, so here's my batch of them made today.

Midday

What’s the difference between Marie Antoinette and Judith Collins? Marie Antoinette's position was you should let them eat. Yeah, yeah I know she got misquoted but, you know.

Judith Collins has interrupted people’s lunch to let them know you can forget about that sort of indulged nonsense when she’s running the show. Eating is something you can do when you get home, buddy, you're making it hard for Kiwi Mum and Dad Small Kiwi Businesses to just get on with it.

Yesterday she was saying the new rules to protect water quality would be gone by  lunchtime. That got hosed down like the mess in the milking shed over the next 24 hours - yes, said the help, we do know Fonterra supports the new rules and no, we wouldn’t just chuck it out, we’d review it - but the pop-up leader knows what her base likes to hear.

She’s forever praising farmers as backbone of the nation, the people who make food. Insinuation: unlike all the rest of you shiftless wasters.

Fair enough, really what do we do, just make books and TV shows and be lawyers and run cafes and who wants to watch TV or read books or eat a nice meal? The virtuous life is one on the land, just getting on with it, anyone can see that.

You just get up, be a producer of food, bring some home and roast the shit out of it, wash the dishes and go to bed. That should be enough for any hard working Mum and Dad.

Her affectionate words of praise - the only other people who appear to get that treatment are other lawyers who are very intelligent and Dr Shane - seem to be some kind of act of filial devotion, but I don't know, I’d only be guessing, I never went anywhere near Harvard.  

Where I grew up, there were absolute truths that everyone understood: farming was the backbone  of the country. If you were a middle aged white man and a farmer and maybe had an RSA badge, your word ruled.

One day at the lunch table, a farming friend visiting from Canterbury turned to me to ask what I was planning to do when I left school. I said I was thinking of studying law. He said, addressing no one in particular I think, just fulfilling his role as the senior Man in the room: problem with this country these days, too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

Those men, they got their way, got it so well that the country was more or less broke by 1984 from years of propping up with ever more subsidies. In one Roger Douglas lunchtime that was all gone; carnage followed.

But you won’t find a farmer today who doesn’t agree it had become unsustainable. 

A lesson I learned on the farm:  if you give a pig and a boy everything they want, you get a good pig and a bad boy. Blind  devotion and imbalance of influence can leave you in a terrible mess.

1.45pm

Look what's in the inbox from my old mate Jackson in Melbourne. If people think it's all lopsided how I jump all over the leader of the opposition, and don't get stuck into the prime minister, boy will their  face be red in a minute. Get a load of me absolutely tearing into the Prime Minister of NZ back back in 2011. 

My face looks like that because I had come off my bike after emptying half  a bottle of whisky into me. You can make bad choices under the wrong sort of  influence.

2.00pm

Life without  parole. Probably something we can all more or less agree sounds good.

I do wonder what the arrangements will be made for his contact with other prisoners  Unless he's learned a lot from what he heard this week, he may not be a great influence.