Silence better than nonsense from politicians

After a lifetime of blurting out things better left unsaid, I feel for American presidential hopeful Rick Perry's disastrous brain freeze.

I'm not sure whether it's worse to shoot off at the mouth and beat yourself up later, or just go blank, which I often also do when trying to recall the names of people I've known all my life. Just as well I'm not a politician, then.

Laugh as the world may at Mr Perry, I guess I prefer silences like his to the nonsense that so often spouts from politicians' mouths.

But then, the elections would bore me totally if it weren't for the utterances of ACT's new leader, Don Brash, who can always be relied on to make me angry. The thought that he'd get into Parliament on the back of a John Banks victory in Epsom is almost enough to make me reject MMP.

Dr Brash has a special place in my black book, not just for being a silly old codger, but because of his unstinting, crass insensitivity on racial and cultural issues. If you don't respect or understand another culture, surely the very least you should do is shut up about it. In his case the ignorance is wilful, and his colonialist attitude is the last thing we need as a nation, which we're slowly becoming. Whatever silly old pink men may imagine, it will only work if brown-skinned and pink-skinned people respect each other's differentness. Bowing to the superiority of the pink-skinned is just not a goer any more, and why should it be?

Dr Brash is a fine example of the drawbacks in taking up a narrow academic discipline. Just because you're a dab hand with the calculator doesn't make you competent to debate complex social and cultural issues.

I'm thinking, too, of his hard line on welfare, which he'd bring to an alliance with National. After walking out on two families, he's in a tricky position to point at other people's failings. Or does it boil down to it being OK to abandon marriages if you're rich enough to clean up the mess?

That's my gripe of the week. I realise others are more excited by All Black Zac Guildford, who has once again embarrassed himself while drunk.

The 22-year-old has told his coach that he can't remember anything about his naked, drunken dash into a bar in Rarotonga last Friday night, where he punched some patrons, apologised, then ran off to join five women waiting for him outside.

If he was a 22-year-old Dunedin student this would all amount to a mere Saturday night excursion, of admittedly legendary proportions.

It's Guildford's bad luck to be a poster boy for addiction; he has reportedly had to in the past deal with addictive and compulsive tendencies, involving alcohol and gambling. To contend with these in public can't be easy, and goodness knows they're widespread enough in sport and celebrity culture. They even make reality TV shows about it.

On one hand we're a willing audience for trash television that exploits people like him, but on the other we condemn trashy behaviour when it's close to home. Surely we need to acknowledge that it's genuinely hard for people with such compulsions to change, and to wonder, therefore, why services dedicated to helping them lose funding. Perhaps Dr Brash could explain the logic of that.

Guildford's memory lapse reminds me of the Winebox Inquiry, when so many prominent New Zealanders claimed memory lapses, even while stony sober. But in his case it's the five waiting women that grip the imagination. Were they holding on to his missing pants? When did he take them off, and why?

We may not know the answers to these intriguing questions, but the scenario suggests that if rugby isn't going to be Guildford's career, he can always fall back on something of a more theatrical nature.