But… there are standards. I support the Whale in exposing rorts of credit cards for private meals, flowers, underpants and other things.

Like McCrystal, I have been at times scathing about my employers. I have had confrontations with the suits. I have advocated for staff. That is part of my job. However, if a reporter was present… I would turn into a jargon spouting eunuch. It’s called survival.

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances…

In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important. These days, the inner soap opera is the most discussed and the most fraught arena of political life.

And into this world walks Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

via Op-Ed Columnist – General McChrystal and the Culture of Exposure – NYTimes.com.

It may be that McCrystal has more honour that I, or any other Kiwi, has.

Chris is a Dunedinite. He believes that wealth and philanthropy is not part of the NZ way of life: as he said on his comments page

You raise an interesting point about the status of philanthropy in New Zealand. And you’re right – New Zealanders are not philanthropists in the same way that the British and Americans are philanthropists.

The reason for this is, I believe, related to my statement about the sort of people who settled in New Zealand.

A great many of them – the Highland Scots, for example – had no reason to love the wealthy landowners and businessmen responsible for clearing them off their ancestral lands. The same could be said for the Irish and many of the English working class emigrants who sailed for New Zealand.

In the decade before the colonisation of New Zealand there had been a fundamental shift in the way the poor were treated in the United kingdom. The old Poor Law (which had its roots in the communitarian traditions of the Middle Ages) had been replaced by the “New Poor Law” of 1834.

The new legislation introduced the infamous workhouses (a sort of super-work-for-the-dole scheme) made famous in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”. The whole system was administered by boards of middle class “guardians” and was heartily detested by its principal victims – the rural and urban poor.

When these folk came to New Zealand they moved swiftly to establish a system that took the responsibility for “looking after” the poor out of the hands of the wealthy and placed it instead in the hands of a democratically controlled state.

From “cold as charity” to “from the cradle to the grave” you might say. Or, from private philanthropy to collective welfare.

I’m not sure if Chris is right. Logan Campbell gave most of his land to Auckland for public parks. The Sey Hoys and the “Tartan Mafia” of Dunedin have built halls and kirks, funded research: the same groups are helping fund the Dunedin Stadium. Chris is tapping into a thread of conservative wowserism that has run through the chapel, union hall and ratepayer’s association: that is not the only thread that makes up the cloth of New Zealand. He also forgets that the same unions, before socail welfare, collectively provided for their dependents through freindly societies.

I find Chris’ suggestion that the state should be the provider somewhat neive. This decade, the state has had more strikes than most private employers. When the whale (who is not a social democrat) calls the unions because he sees a boss abuse workers… the need for collective advocacy is accepted in NZ. The state, however, is not that collective, and when the government controls a large percentage of the economy… they are too large and too blunt a force to act to make changes. Besides, the old unionists argued for self reliance, (intra) community support (the two are not contradictory) and self improvement.

This “labour” government is trying to make most people passive, dependant, and indoctrinated. “Old” labour, like Regain Democrats will (and should) vote National this election: there is no future in passivity and poverty.