The BFD | A Holding Pattern of Hopelessness

As New Zealand moved to “Level 3” (the first time around), clutching our shiny new elimination strategy, it was apparent to me, and a disconcertingly small number of others, that this government had made a Faustian bargain. We had gained a temporary reprieve from the virus, sweetened by a large dose of the fawning international media coverage this country has always craved, but we had sacrificed more than we knew. As Liam Neeson’s Ras-al-Guhl warns when Christian Bale thinks he has the upper hand in their icy ninja fight in Batman Begins: “You haven’t beaten me. You have sacrificed sure footing for a killer stroke.” Neeson taps the ice with his sword and Bale plunges into the freezing water.

New Zealand is now in that same icy water, gasping for breath and wondering where it all went wrong. I’ve been genuinely bewildered by how few New Zealanders have realised that our quarantine was really a quagmire. The pledge to stamp out a highly contagious coronavirus was the most ridiculous promise the Ardern government had made since their slapdash 2017 election campaign.

Even 10,000 Kiwibuild homes had at least a back-of-the-envelope, perfect-world plausibility — with fair winds, a following sea and a 10-acre spinnaker. Elimination of SARS-COV-2, on the other hand, was like trying to abolish the wind. Even if it were possible, would the cost be worth it?

The New Zealand public were invited to believe two highly dubious things simultaneously.

That this virus was so slippery and deadly, we should sacrifice the economy and saddle our children with crippling debt before we allow it into the country.
That although we have no pharmaceutical intervention, PM Ardern had discovered that its fatal weakness was teamwork!

A nation that was kind, united and sufficiently alienated from each other — not to mention from the other 99.9% of the world’s population — would be able to welcome in a “new normal”, drunk on borrowed money.

As you’d hope, it didn’t take the few serious journalists long to twig. Radio NZ’s Corin Dann asked Ardern point-blank on May 17 what the plan was in the event there was no vaccine (as of course there has never been for a coronavirus). Ardern chided him for being so pessimistic (an odd thing to say for a hypothetical question) then waffled on for a bit and completely failed to answer the question.

There was no plan then. There is no plan now.

All that awaits New Zealand is indefinite isolation stretching out into an increasingly bleak future. It’s not so much a strategy as a holding pattern, but we don’t know how much fuel the aircraft has. It was semi-tolerable when it seemed to be working. Now we’re starting to hear the long overdue murmurs of a country that’s coming to understand they’ve been sold a giant, flea-ridden pup.

All these problems might be surmountable if the first rule of modern politics wasn’t: Never admit a mistake. So we’re stuck with the wrong goal, and hence, a pointless strategy. We’re forever destined to double down, summarised by the grimly ironic phrase: “We’ve done it before… we can do it again.” The crucial detail in the ellipses – “and it didn’t work” – is casually left out.

It’s for this reason, I’m not jumping on the quarantine breach, “Incompetent Labour” bandwagon, calling for heads to roll over the lack of testing of frontline staff (though this is poor). When your goal (elimination) and strategy (lockdown and isolation) are both wrong, arguing over tactical details serves little purpose. Until the mistakes are owned up to, there is no way out. And with a compliant media and a public in thrall, as well as so many countries making similar mistakes, that will take a lot longer than any vaccine.

Despite everything, in this latest Lockdown: The Sequel press conferences, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for PM Ardern. She’s had a very stressful few months. She still has most of whatever endears her to the public, but she looks more than a little gaunt. Her smile conceals the petrified look of an author who’s scored a $1 million advance for her upcoming novel, but 5 months later, hasn’t written a single word. She is flush for now, but the day of reckoning is slowly approaching.

There is an inevitability to the painfully slow global decline we’re seeing in 2020, not just as a country, but as a planet. The economics have gone wrong since about 1973, but in the last 20-25 years, so has the culture, academia and politics descended into decadence (quite likely as a result of the economics). There is a definite feeling that the Western story has run out, and the only arguments that remain are what happens next.

Apocalypse, terrorism, nuclear war, runaway AI, climate refugees, race wars and pandemics are all popular delusions, but after seeing the technocratic hysteria we’ve got ourselves into over COVID-19, I’m more inclined to side with TS Eliot.

“This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.”