March 19th, 2023Kyle’s Rant
THE world has gone and gotten into a “woke” tangle of unpicking history and
misunderstanding around every corner.
If I rewind the clock 34 years or so, I remember having two good mates who I knew from my early
days at school through to my early 20s. We all ended up in the fishing industry where you worked
hard and played harder.
We weren’t exactly blue-collar workers, as we earned a lot of money for the time and wasted it as
quick as Old Macca, the pub owner, would cash our cheques. Every day that ends in Y except Sunday (due to laws at the time) you would find us rolling up to the Tutukaka Hotel for a feed, fight and a fornication (I changed the last F-word for the sub-editors, but you get the picture).
One of my mates, George, was known as the “lean mean fighting machine” and
the best fella to have in your corner, but his story didn’t end well. He is currently
doing time after getting heavily involved in drugs and eventually, as it turns out, murder.
My other mate was Gary. Picture the band Flock of Seagulls and you will have a
visual. He was a lot like me, an affable bloke born into a world of tough fisherman
fathers. We didn’t know about the world of LGBTIQA+ in those days and when Gary
“came out” into our world, there was not much in the way of any support – except for
me and I wasn’t much help.
Hard times in those days.
Fast forward to today and I get that things had to improve, however we should
never unpick history such as the Roald Dahl rewrites and over-censorship. We need
to certainly acknowledge how things were done in the past and how wrong it was so
as we don’t revisit it, but what’s next?
Rod Stewart wrote a song about sleeping with Maggie May, an older woman
(most straight young guys’ fantasy) and he sang: “It’s late September and I really
should be back at school.” Which, for me, means he was underage and a magistrate
should have thrown the book at old Maggie for an age of consent violation.
Should we remove this song from the vaults? Or what about the lyrics from in The
Summertime song by Mungo Jerry who disrespected poor women by saying: “If her
daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal, If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.”
And then went on to break the speed limit by singing: “Speed along the lane,
do a ton or a ton and twenty-five.” That’s 125 miles per hour in a built-up zone
followed by “Have a drink, have a drive, Go out and see what you can find”.
That’s an immediate suspension of license and probably a stretch of hard time in today’s world.
Should we throw all the Mungo recordings from the highest building in the land?
The world I grew up in and the world now are at juxtaposition and I have changed
and moved with the times, but let’s not lose sight of the times.
To do this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to forget about how
people used to think not that long ago about racism, sexism and now ableism.
We need to remember how it was so as we can never go back there again, but a
way of remembering is to not destroy and unpick the past.
I once did a ton and twenty-five, rant over…
