by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmith@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com
NZ (among other nations) has an affliction much worse than The Black Plague.
It is a persistent ‘built in’ shyness.
A built in reclusiveness that is robust to attack.
As a ‘liker of ideas’ this my friends and enemies – this is no good.
I want to be able to share ideas freely.
Here in NZ everyone is too afraid of sharing intellectual ideas.
And if they do it is often corrupted by cultish like political tribalism.
This is why I saw a ‘open night poetry’ advertisement that had a warning:
(& to summarise it via paraphrase)
“We want it to be safe so no ‘hate speech’ is allowed”.
This is what I am talking about.
Even poetry – which is supposed to be the (last) bastion of any and everyone’s ‘Truth’ –
Is now casually conscripted into quasi-national-socialist-literary-Brownshirt-ism.
People who haven’t seen either a mirror or their own shadow do condemn so drop-hat-ingly.
I see it as a total fear of having your mind changed by someone different and original.
And until NZ allows its artists and writers to ‘do art’ and ‘write words’,
We will continue to wallow in backward socio-cultural-mediocrity-land,
Where you dare not question the censorship laced tired dull unoriginal tribal company line.
One day people will wake up to all this.
My optimistic guess is sometime in the year 3036.
Where it will be safe to go to an open poetry night,
And share your mind freely with a wild array of formerly unacceptable conjectures,
And neither be applauded roundly or chastised drably.
You will simply be listened to and then a fantastic member of the audience,
Will be interested to purely and intellectually talk of their ideas and yours over a giant pint.
Of course this still sporadically happens even now,
But only as rarely as a inordinately cheap classic at the second hand bookstore is found.
But we controversial conjectorial thinker types cannot be beaten easily.
Like the virus that survived the traumatic trip to outer space under on a phillips-head screw,
We will too will survive to cough out (spontaneous emit) our acerbic & strangely colored lines.
(Much to their chagrin).
This was my ode to that priceless currently invisible concept: ‘intellectual honesty’.
Anton Martin Smith Writer 