WAATEA NEWS COLUMN: Open Letter to Bill Maher from a New Zealand fan regarding his appalling attack on Māori
Bill Maher is an incredibly influential critical voice in America. He hosts ‘Real Time with Bill Maher‘ one of the few TV shows where live debate on contentious issues can occur in America.
He is a comedian, a satirist, a thinker and a critical broadcaster whose show has been a lighthouse for 22 years inside a pretty dim mainstream media landscape.
He has a huge range of guests on and they debate without fear at a time when debate is feared.
I am a fan of his and have been for decades.
However, his most recent show that screened here in New Zealand over the weekend contained an appalling attack on Māori that demands a response.
Here is that response:
Dear Bill Maher.
Martyn Bradbury here from New Zealand.
I’m a 51 year old white writer and broadcaster who is a huge fan of your remarkable body of work.
You have been a light in dark times.
However.
Your most recent new rules segment ‘Guilt by Civilization’ where you criticised one of our mountains gaining ‘personhood’ as some type of cultural sop to indigenous people fuelled by white guilt hippies who are desperate for some spiritual connection beyond their next cannabis joint wasn’t your usual wit and it certainly wasn’t your usual intellectual insight.
Māori have cultural memory of the first wave of white settler capitalist exploitation resource taking, they have the flax roots knowledge of what sustainability and environmental protection looks like, it is no wonder that international right wing think tanks always aim to attack indigenous rights first to enable the next generation of exploitative resource stripping.
By giving our Mountain personhood builds in a respect and protections for the Mountain so that it isn’t exploited.
On a burning planet you have seen first hand the impacts of climate change in your recent California fires, climate change being driven by Corporations who in America have been granted the power of ‘personhood’.
I think granting our Mountain ‘personhood’ is far more rational than America allowing sociopathic Corporations the legal rights of a human being, especially when those Corporations are so instrumental in producing the pollution that is strangling off our environment.
I am, like you, an atheist and I appreciate you have a disdain for anything spiritual and I understand the point you were attempting to make, but you had a terrible argument that ended up being offensive to indigenous people.
There is an oblix on top of one of our volcanos in Auckland that commemorates the Māori race because at the turn of the 1900s, the impact of the ‘modernity’ you were so proudly boasting almost wiped the entire race of Māori out.
For them to be told by a foreigner that they should be grateful for almost being exterminated by the consequences of colnislaim – from disease, sickness and sudden technology is a very privileged position to be in Bill.
Indigenous people are not asking to go back to the point of civilization contact, they are asking for the space to be authentically themselves. They aren’t asking to dump electricity and medicine.
As I acknowledged earlier, I don’t believe in a God, but I did believe my daughter had the right to learn the mother tongue of her birth country and despite being white, she has been in a Māori immersion class all her life and speaks Māori fluently. I’m not a religious person Bill, but when my daughter speaks a prayer in Māori at my own table before we eat, it connects me more deeply to being a New Zealander than anything else.
I don’t need to believe in Māori cosmology to appreciate it any more than I need to be Muslim to appreciate the poetry of the Quran or Christian to appreciate the art of the Sistine Chapel.
Your portrayal of Māori values and criticism of our giving our Mountain personhood is misplaced, ignorant and mean spirited.
You are better than this.
Thank you for the amazing insight and oversight you provide on many, many issues, but this one failed.
In solidarity
Well said and Bill needs to look in his own back yard before complaining about what we are doing in ours .We may have a hateful government like his own but at least our Maori are leading the way in caring for the motu .
He wasn’t complaining – he was taking the piss. Deservedly so IMO
As for “Maori are leading the way in caring for the motu” how exactly? By letting Maori land run into gorse? Sure, some Maori are doing a grand job but I doubt any more so than anyone else.
Why bother Andrew? Tthe guideline of ‘If you can’t say anything of value, or positive, then don’t say anything at all’. We don’t need to know that Maori aren’t perfect according to you. Who is according to anybody ready to criticise? Feel free to have a go at me, Maori are girding themselves to save themselves and NZAO, and likely we will all benefit in the long run.
Letting land run to gorse is the first step in restoring native forests. Over my lifetime I have seen that in action on the Remutaka Hill. Gorse acts as a great nursery for manuka. Manuka grows up, and acts as a great nursery for ponga. Ponga acts as a great nursery for native forest. Far more of the hills of this country should be shut up and allowed to grow gorse or manuka. Restoring native forest would be far better than monocultures of Pinus radiata. If the tangata whenua are letting land run to gorse, good on them!
so how did the gorse blackberry rabbits stoats possums ferrits and other non native flora and fauna come from idiot .Yes that right they all came with the greedy white colonists who should pack them all up and fuck off back to where they came from ,And the Maori did not farm pines either .
And have you noticed how well pakeha have managed water over the last 100 years .Farmers are now having to buy in water because they have drained the rivers and wells for irrigation so now there is none left to water stock ,
I really do not understand why the Yanks cannot just mind their own business. We give a sacred mountain a special status they cannot understand – but that is our business.
They elect an orange headed, pathological liar, self confessed sexual predator with incestuous desires towards his daughter, proven felon, fascist, self declared dictator, delusional racist and bully as leader of their nation( I suppose that is their business).
I blame Rousseau and his ‘Myth of the noble savage’
There was never a “myth of the noble savage”.
The idea that there is a “myth of the noble savage” was invented as a slur in response to quite cogent criticisms made by indigenous Americans of western cultural practices in the late 18th century.
This slur was made because those criticisms were a threat to something that really did exist – The Myth of the Stupid Savage. And The Myth of the Stupid Savage suffuses this nauseating comments section. (Graeber and Wengrow are good on this history.)
As for Rousseau – he was making up a hypothetical past in response to Hobbes in the 17th century who also invented a hypothetical past, but one in which everyone was at war with everyone else all the time unless there was a sovereign with absolute powers. They had much the same reason for doing so – they were trying to make a point about contemporary political conditions without getting imprisoned or killed for it.
Modern anthropology and ethnology simply did not exist at that time, so both of them should be seen as staking out a political theory rather than describing any real human society.
Thanks AB good to read someone who can supply a reasoned background to a comment rather than the certainty that leads to belabouring others over the head as with a stale loaf of bread set into concrete form that used to be handed to concentration camp denizens according to tracts I have read.
I can see that this looks odd to foreigners. Best not to get offended really.
Maybe not Frank. But Maori and others are canny enough to use this ploy to ensure that Mountains and Rivers do not become the play things of people like Dr Pork and his rich donors.
If they had their way Mountains would be desicrated by mining and the Rivers would become polluted cess pits. All in the name of what. Exporting money into the bank accounts of the Atlas group promoters.
There are plenty of Maori haters around the Motu.
Apparently if Aotearoa were invaded tomorrow, they would simply fall in to line and speak the language of the invader and adopts their customs and culture…… Yeah right!
I puzzle to understand why people listen to Mike Hosking and Plunket, much of what they say is lies and this has been proved numerous times. Perhaps they just like the repartee on talk back bullshit.
Obvious hole in his perfect understanding! Just think that in law giant corporations have gained the advantage of special treatment in law, giving them extra heft on top of their awful majesty, by being ordained with simple personhood by the priests of financial finagling.
Ennius MYOB – there are times one should get offended from smarts from afar. How far off are you mate?
Maher thinks that mountains can’t be persons. So what? There’s worse than being thought anthropologically curious sorts of people living down the bottom of the world. It’s not like Bill Maher said that the Emperor Has No Clothes, when everybody knows that Chris issues pictures of himself posturing in pyjamas every Christmas.
Thing is, in a country where the people are utilised as expendables and are described as whiners and bottom-feeders by the Marmite Man who leads them, there may be more dignity in a mountain mountain remaining a mountain.
Poor judgment to be a fan of Maher – a boring, lazy hack from what little I’ve seen of him.
Bill Maher is an Islamophobic Zionazi.
Sacred cows and sacred mountains – you’re getting into the abstruse side of human thinking Fthe T. Good on you, doesn’t do to let your brain get cemented into one materialistic line.