Remember, remember

The problem with David Seymour is he's actually really smart.

Guy Fawkes was still a thing when I was a kid.  There were fireworks, of course, and that was fun; but you also made a human effigy to throw onto the fire.  It seemed kind of messed up, but I was too young to question.  I just felt unease as I watched the fake man, a pair of overalls stuffed with straw, be consumed, cracking and hissing like a body might.

My unease grew.  I became old enough to understand that, for all you might debate the rights or wrongs of Guy Fawkes' treason, his persecution was religious. Fawkes, along with his co-conspirators, was Catholic - as I am, still, in some kind of resentful and half-arsed and only cultural sense.

You could say that kind of antipathy, that sectarianism, that celebration of divisiveness, meant nothing as I watched the flames, a little child, four hundred years on. It was just a relic of the past. If that was the case, if it was really in the past, it’s difficult to understand why my neighbours saw no issue with symbolically incinerating folks like me.

My unease grew even more. As an adult, I came to understand what else happened on 5 November: the sacking of Parihaka. Probably, I discovered it through a Tim Finn song on our family’s tinny AM radio. Later, I read about it. I found myself wondering why, with Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi still almost within our living memory - our own heroes, prophets and leaders - we harked back to the pale-skinned butchers of centuries back, on the other half of the globe. I think I knew the answer to my own question.

David Seymour joked today, on Newstalk ZB, that if it were up to him, he’d send Guy Fawkes into the Ministry for Pacific Peoples. By implication, he would blow it up, along with all the people in it. He won’t apologise either. He said it was a joke. Maybe it was a metaphor.

There’s a problem with that metaphor. Guy Fawkes died pretty literally: tortured, viciously, and hanged. It’s an odd sort of culture that delights in this kind of thing. But you can guarantee: some of the dogs heard Seymour’s whistle. They’re the ones for whom the pleasure of a bloody pack maul quickly overtakes the rights or wrongs behind it.

That said, nowadays, people are less likely to even know the story of Guy Fawkes.  It's just about letting off fireworks, waking your neighbours' kids and terrifying their pets, and sticking with it obstinately for no reason you can say, except the government's not going to take your right to mindlessly blow shit up.  Seymour’s whistling to them too.

Because, that’s the problem: Seymour’s smart.

Guy Fawkes is a cultural story. It appeals to the ugliest parts of us, whether we know it or not. And a story’s no less potent because it’s told by a fake man, overalls stuffed with straw.

The End is Naenae is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.