One of the great and enduring excitement of New Zealand life is when someone notices that we exist. We adhere to Rudyard Kipling’s 1891 observation of our most remote archipelago as ‘last and most beautiful’, a distant southern star, two vague, misty islands on the edge of the world – but every now and then distance our way, and says our name aloud.
“New Zealand, you see what’s going on in New Zealand,” Donald Trump said today. The whole country has been sitting and noticing. There is talk of arriving with a whole new set of public holidays to encourage Kiwis to get out and about, and to spend tourist dollars while keeping the borders close. Auckland author Anne Kennedy has suggested that National Poetry Day (August 23) should be a public holiday. Trump said New Zealand not once, but twice in the same sense, is the same good thing to give everyone the day off.
Of all the crazy, random, improbable things that come out of the mouth of the President of the United States, this was the last thing anyone in New Zealand ever expected to hear New Zealand. But there we were, walking along the edge of his tongue, as he tried to establish the notion that nothing extraordinary in the US is covered with the highest recorded case numbers of the coronavirus in the world, because things in New Zealand are also pretty bad.
Trump set up a crowd in Mankato, Minnesota. He said: “The problem is that there is a large establishment in New Zealand.
‘They hit it, they hit, it was like front [news] they beat it. But suddenly a lot of the places … have a big turnout … and now they say ‘whoops’.’
He is not the only president who realizes our existence. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir John Key, once played golf in Hawaii with then-President Barack Obama. They came close. Key invited him to New Zealand. Obama arrived in 2018 in a few days; he played golf with Key and gave a speech at a private event that was reportedly pretty underwhelming.
It cost three sponsors $ 500,000 to bring Obama here. Money well spent, Key said at the time, because Obama would tweet about New Zealand for his 100 million followers. The problem is that Obama does not tweet about New Zealand to his 100 million followers. We got nothing out of his angry visit.
We got more in four or five seconds from Trump. His repeated indications of New Zealand have ranked just above it with the most famous times that one of New Zealand has mentioned.
Like the last scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort asks an audience at the Auckland Events Center to sell him a pen, and people without New Zealand accents fail.
Like the scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK (so many connections between US presidents and New Zealand!), When Donald Sutherland invents the news of Kennedy’s assassination by reading the Christchurch Star.
Like the scene in Point Break, when Patrick Swayze ridiculously says, “Hell, I will not paddle to New Zealand.”
Like the line in Anton Chekhov’s novel The Shooting Party, in which a character unreasonably says, “This is barbaric! This is like New Zealand!”
Trump said much the same thing as Chekhov’s character. The coronavirus is a plague, and almost impossible to control; New Zealand had 102 days of no new cases of community transmission, but it came back last week, and now Auckland is in a strict level of lockdown.
However, it is not entirely accurate or sensible to describe it as “a large stream”. New Zealand now has 90 active cases of Covid-19. The US has recorded more than 5,400,000 active cases, and more than 170,000 people have died.
But still. It was good of him to show us before the eyes of the world. We are always glad that you have every kind of attention. The idea of holding a National Trump Day public holiday every August 18 could really kick off.
• Steve Braunias is a journalist and author living in Auckland, New Zealand
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