life in New Zealand

Life in New Zealand - a Kiwi blog

zenvirus.com
by Hugh Cook

Context:

Author Hugh Cook is leading a quiet life as an invalid in New Zealand, staying with his parents in the suburb of Devonport, near Auckland, while receiving treatment for cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma of the central nervous system.)

Section 142 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 April 24 Sunday.
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This morning, over breakfast, I was sampling Ian McEwan's recent novel "Saturday" (Jonathan Cape, 2005), which my mother has borrowed from the library. The viewpoint protagonist is a brain surgeon called Henry Perowne, and the novel contains a seam of what is evidently massively researched brain surgery material.

Having personally undergone brain surgery earlier this year (to biopsy my lymphoma), I found the brain surgery content very interesting, particularly the account of a surgical foray into the region of the pituitary gland (on pages 43-45).

Quote:-

To go in right through the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life, without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity. Almost a century of failure and partial success lay behind this one procedure, of other routes tried and rejected, and decades of fresh invention to make it possible, including the microscope and fibre optic lighting.

That certainly resonates with my impression of the historical progress of the medical enterprise as being one involving a certain amount of trial and error, of "failure and partial success" - a certain amount of "gee, that didn't work" roulette mixed in with the science.

However, McEwan's brain surgeon hero seems to be working in a world in which the science has straightened everything out into a set of highly evolved procedures which the maestro can apply with a sure confidence of the results.

That may be true of brain surgery, up to a point, but my own take on oncology, the discipline with which my own life is currently interacting, is that we're still in the pioneering stage, a long way yet from a universe of stainless steel certainties. Not that I'm complaining: this is simply the consequence of living in the year 2005 rather than 2275.

While the medical content of McEwan's novel resonates with me on a very personal level, plugging into my own lode of recent experience, the background of the novel, a world made troubled and uncertain by the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, seems remote, unconnected to my own life.

Here in New Zealand, the only terror threat warnings I've seen this year have been on America's Fox TV, observed dispassionately in the TV room at Auckland Hospital (technically the whanau room, the family room, but it does have a TV) in the small hours of the morning.

Here in New Zealand, as in Japan, the war on terror and the associated clash of cultures are part of a foreign world which seems distant and (at times) almost imaginary. But occasionally something barbs its way through my complacency and makes me sit up and think, most recently a quote from Ridley Scott, director of the movie Kingdom of Heaven, which is about the Crusades.

The quote turned up in an article by Michele Manelis on page 10 of the 23 April 2005 edition of Time Out, a supplement to the New Zealand Herald's Weekend Herald. The quote is about Saladin, who (I had to look this up) was born in Tikrit (hometown of Saddam Hussein, unless I'm mistaken). Saladin (1138-1193) was a Muslim leader who captured Jerusalem in 1187, seizing the city from something called the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a feudal state established by Christians in 1099 to rule over Jerusalem and other conquered territories.

The quote is embedded in the article as follows:-

Interestingly, Scott directs with an even hand. Refreshingly, the Muslims are not depicted as cardboard cutout villains the way Mel Gibson portrayed the Jews in The Passion of Christ. "This film is more about tolerance," Scott says. "The Muslim leader Saladin (played by Ghassan Massoud) was a sympathetic character, historically speaking. I wasn't going to make him a dark fascist."

What's alarming about this, what makes me sit up and think for a moment, is the implication that a very natural approach to dealing with a historical Islamic leader, the default approach, would be to portray him as a "dark fascist".

As a clue to the dynamic of the zeitgeist, that's disquieting.

When I read Scott's comment, my mind went into free play for a couple of seconds, and I had a lunatic vision of a movie in which the freedom-loving young Crusaders, high on party pills, their iPods loaded up with mp3s, come boiling out of their cheerful fast food restaurants to bring the benefits of traditional medieval democracy (torture, witch burning, public execution and so forth) to the benighted denizens of the Islamic world.

In this movie, Democracy Strikes Back Bigtime, (blonde love interest and cute family dog included) there are a lot of historically accurate scenes featuring the reality of the Crusades, e.g. Christians chopping off the limbs of Muslims, Christians committing acts of rape, looting and arson in Islamic cities, and so forth.

Blood flows, then.

However, because this imaginary movie, Democracy Strikes Back Bigtime, has been made by sophisticated and culturally sensitive people who are alert to the social needs of the present moment, we nevertheless emerge from the movie theater feeling uplifted, confident that all the mayhem was done in an appropriate spirit of love and spiritual certainty, that the world was made a better place as a result, and that portraying a certain target population as being fair game for pillage and slaughter is not in any sense indicative of lack of respect or insensitivity.

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