Concerning Co-Governance

In tonight's post I wish to steer away from my usual concerns and discuss an issue very prominent in the New Zealand news at the moment, a controversy that has been brewing since not longer after we relaxed Covid restrictions – co-governance between Maori and Pakeha. I suspect that many of my readers are not New Zealanders but I will attempt to describe this very significant and interesting development in New Zealand's race relations in a way that should be clear even to people in the United States or Germany (to pick two countries at random). Even if you know very little about New Zealand, you might, through some kind of analogical thinking, be able to relate it to race relations in your own country and to 'political correctness', 'identity politics' and 'wokeism' in general. It also has consequences for 'democracy'. I won't set out my conclusions immediately but rather simply present my personal perspective on this potentially extraordinary seismic shift in the cultural and political landscape. Consider me a field journalist reporting on the culture wars here in Aotearoa. 

According to the last census in 2018 (I am here citing Wikipedia), New Zealand's population comprises four main ethnic groups: 70.2% European, 16.5% Maori, 15.1% Asian and 8.1% Pacific Islander. The reason these percentages add up to more than 100% is because it is possible for New Zealand citizens to identify with more than one ethnic group. In the introduction I used the word 'Pakeha'. This word is ambiguous. 'Pakeha' is a Maori word which simply means non-Maori but is often used to describe ethnically European New Zealanders. (Of course, when the word 'Pakeha' was first coined, the only non-Maori in New Zealand were the European colonisers.) Maori are, of course, the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, the 'tangata whenua' (people of the land). I shall attempt, perhaps imprecisely, to say something about the Maori. Maori society was and still is tribal – for instance, the largest tribe (or 'iwi') in New Zealand is Ngapuhi.  My foreign readers may jump to the conclusion that Maori are somehow 'uncivilised', that they live in flax huts and spend their time fishing, gathering shellfish, and growing sweet potatoes (kumara). In fact, they enjoy the benefits of Western 'civilisation' (I hope I am not using this word injudiciously) while still keeping alive many of the cultural traditions that predated Abel Tasman first setting foot on New Zealand soil in 1642, traditions that have experienced a renaissance over the last thirty or forty years after essentially being squashed for over a century by government policies that favoured assimilation. Central to Maori culture is the 'marae' a meeting house that serves as focal point for Maori communities. I have been on maraes a number of times in my life. For example, when I undertook my abortive experiment in teacher training in 2006, my teachers, fellow students, and I all spent the night sleeping in a marae as a kind of bonding or spiritual experience – it is not uncommon for many organisations or professions in New Zealand to recommend or even require this rite of passage for prospective initiates. Perhaps spending the night on a marae at least once in one's life is seen as a way of confirming one's status as a New Zealander. More recently I attended the funeral service, more properly called the 'tangi', of the mother of my sister-in-law, Colleen Urlich, a celebrated Maori artist who had specialised in pottery, at her marae near Dargaville. 

Most marae tend to be in rural parts of New Zealand but most Maori, like most New Zealanders, live in the cities. Although I said above that Maori enjoy the benefits of European civilisation, Maori are far more likely to be poor and disproportionately make up the prison population. Some people on the right use this as an excuse for racism – Michael Laws, the former mayor of Whanganui, used to talk darkly of a 'feral underclass'. Many people on the Left blame colonisation for the deep seated inequities in New Zealand society. In 1994, a very well received and reasonably successful film was made about sexual and physical abuse in a Maori family living in South Auckland, Once Were Warriors. This film, based on a book by a Maori author, Alan Duff, and directed by a Maori director, Lee Tamahori, essentially argued that the cause of Maori social ills was the circumstance that many modern Maori are disconnected from their cultural roots. (Once Were Warriors provided the springboard for the Hollywood careers of actors Temuera Morrison and Cliff Curtis.) This film may still be taught in high schools but I suspect that it probably couldn't be made today in 2022 given our current political environment.

We arrive now at one of the central things complicating race relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Although I have been talking about Pakeha/Maori relations as though it is an us and them situation, in fact there has been so much intermarriage between Pakeha and Maori over the last two centuries that it is almost impossible to draw a line between the two groups. For instance, David Seymour, the leader of the right libertarian Act Party, who has called for abolishing two agencies expressly designed to further Maori interests (the Ministry of Māori Development and the Office of Māori Crown Relations), is part Maori himself (his iwi is Ngapuhi). This led the Maori minister for the former agency, Willie Jackson, to say, "He's just a useless Maori that's all [...] (He’s) absolutely Māori, but just maybe the most useless advocate for Māori we’ve ever seen.” Closer to home, my sister-in-law has Maori, Dalmatian and I think English heritage as I've intimated above and, obviously of course, so do my nephew and niece. In fact, my lovely and almost preternaturally good niece won an award a year or two ago for top Maori law scholar at Victoria University. By way of contrast, I'll mention another relation (although not one I am related to by blood), an Irish immigrant now in his eighties, who likes to bang on about the Maoris and says, whenever the subject comes up, "There's no such thing as a full blooded Maori!" (a common plaint among Pakeha of his generation). This relation is a staunch Labour supporter and a socialist. It is even possible that I have a little Maori blood in me – I had a great grandmother who was dusky and used to say that she had Spanish blood. All this gives some indication of how complicated it is, a complication compounded by the fact that at least some Maori put their tribal affiliation ahead of their membership in the wider Maori population, something I shall come back to later. Maori are not a homogenous group. Legally, according to the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974, a Māori is defined as "a person of the Māori race of New Zealand; and includes any descendant of such a person". Thus David Seymour and my niece, although they are perhaps only an eighth or less genetically Maori, can claim to be Maori. I heard from a right-wing source that the Government is considering changing the definition so that any person can claim to be Maori if he or she chooses to identify as such but, although I spent a little time poring through the Internet last night, I was unable to find anything to confirm this potentially scurrilous rumour. It could be just more bullshit cooked up by the Right.

The media, government, schools, judiciary, and other agencies are constantly seeking to promote Maori culture and language ('te reo') and I shall give a couple of case studies that illustrate this phenomenon, the first relating to place names, the second relating to the teaching of Maori knowledge in science classes, and the third relating to common law. As my readers will have picked up, some place names in New Zealand are of British origin, such as the major cities Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. Others are Maori such as Kaitaia, Waikato, Oamaru, and Timaru. We have a Mount Cook and and Mount Ruapehu. This is not to say that things cannot change – on the nightly news Auckland is often referred to as Tamaki Makaurau and people often refer to New Zealand, as I have done above, as Aotearoa. Importantly, in te reo, the 'wh' transcription is (usually) pronounced closer to a 'f' sound than a 'w' sound. In the early days of settlement, or colonisation, many Maori place names were, effectively, mistranscribed and for some decades government agencies, such as the New Zealand Geographic Board, have been putting the letter 'h' back in place names. Towards the end of the first decade of this century, iwi groups in what was then Wanganui applied to the New Zealand Geographic Board for the spelling of the small city's name to be changed to 'Whanganui'. In 2006 and 2009, two referenda were held on whether the city should have its name changed. Then mayor Michael Laws, who I mentioned above, campaigned strongly against the change. Both times the Wanganui citizens voted, by a slim majority, to retain the status quo. Despite these referenda, the New Zealand Geographic Board recommended that the name be changed and in all official Crown documents 'Whanganui' was chosen as the preferred spelling. Wanganui, effectively, officially, became Whanganui in 2015. Personally, I was against the change – but I had a good reason. In the local Maori dialect in the region, the name Whanganui is pronounced with a hard 'w' sound rather than an 'f' sound and I worried that people would start pronouncing the name of the city and region in a way quite different to the way the original iwi who lived there had pronounced it. More generally, this example illustrates the problem I shall come back to later, a tension in this country between the interests of Maori and democracy. (Before my New Zealand readers leap to the conclusion that I am a right wing hack, remember that the name change occurred under a National government.)

I wish to digress for a moment to mention my friend Jess (a girl I haven't seen since 2015). Jess, I suspect, has no Maori blood in her but she is fascinated by Maori mythology and once wrote a poem about the Maori goddess of Death, Hine-nui-te-po. In 2009, she cut out a whole lot of 'h's from newspapers and magazines, put them in an envelope, and mailed them to Michael Laws.

A more recent controversy surrounds the teaching of Maori knowledge, known as matauranga Maori, in universities and schools. Halfway through last year a group of prominent academics from the University of Auckland wrote an open letter to The Listener, New Zealand's most popular and widely read magazine, saying that matauranga Maori was "not science" and protesting being forced to teach it. The letter provoked a backlash from Maori and Maori-sympathetic academics and even from the University's Vice-Chancellor. Subsequently Richard Dawkins weighed in on the controversy from his base in Oxford, penning a very well written open letter to The Listener supporting the original protest. Recently I saw Richard Dawkins interviewed on New Zealand TV by Patrick Gower – he dismissed matauranga Maori as 'mythology'. The issue, as I see it, is this. If, as the original letter suggested, matauranga Maori is being promoted as an alternative to Western science, if Western science is viewed as a Eurocentric tool of colonisation and oppression, this is clearly nonsense. It resembles the claim that was apparently made (perhaps only once by a very silly Feminist) that the equation E=mc squared is sexist. Science is both a method of generating knowledge and the knowledge itself and at least seeks to be objective. Perhaps more importantly it is subject to revision. Einstein overturned Newton, the theory that schizophrenia is genetic has been debunked as has the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, the theory that Alzheimers is caused by plaques in the brain has been shown to be based on fraudulent research, and so on. In my view even the idea that evolution is caused by natural selection acting on random mutations may one day be rejected. If science is ultimately subjective, we would never be able to falsify or disprove a theory – the fact that science seems to progress is what makes it different from knowledge systems based on tradition. It is an historical accident that what we generally call science arose in Europe (algebra, apparently, originated with the ancient Babylonians) and so can be regarded as something universal. If, however, we view matauranga Maori as contributing to science, there is no longer a problem. Some Maori knowledge may not be science but some is – to dismiss all matauranga Maori as 'mythology', as Dawkins did, is to overlook the possibility that some Maori ideas may advance science. I cannot be certain which of these two views is the predominant one among Maori academics and the New Zealand academy as a whole. There are also moves to teach matauranga Maori in high schools – I am worried about this. When I was in high school, way back in the 'nineties, we studied New Zealand history. We learned about the Treaty of Waitangi and the land wars of the nineteenth century. In English, back then and today, students study Maori authors such as Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme. When I was on placement at a school in 2006, I voluntarily taught the poet Hone Tuwhare. But I am very skeptical about the idea that matauranga Maori should be taught in chemistry and physics classes.

A third way in which Maori culture and concepts are creeping into the mainstream is through the courts. In    October this year the Supreme Court in New Zealand posthumously quashed the convictions of Peter Ellis, a former creche worker who had been found of guilty of a number of sexual offences against children in 1993 and had served seven years in prison. I won't go into the details of this bizarre and terrible case in this post but I recommend readers have a look at the Wikipedia article about it. I will only say about it that, in my opinion, Ellis was the victim of a kind of mass hysteria reminiscent of the insane paranoid suspicion currently held by some Republicans in the US that the Democrat party is deliberately trying to sexualise and groom children. What is relevant here is that the Supreme Court, when posthumously overturning Elis's convictions, relied on the Maori concept of tikanga Maori, a concept that, now that it has been introduced into New Zealand common law, enables the 'mana' (a word which loosely means reputation or prestige) of a defendant to be restored through the courts even if the defendant has died. What do I think about this? In this particular case, I think it is a good thing – I believe, as many people do (including a number of political party leaders and former Prime Ministers such as Don Brash, David Lange, and Mike Moore) that Ellis was the victim of a major miscarriage of justice. However there remains the serious issue of whether such a significant change to New Zealand jurisprudence should have been effected by the courts rather than by Parliament. In America, the Right used to talk ominously about 'activist judges' (until they had their own activist judges in power). It seems that we can justifiably use the same term about many judges here.

I have given three examples of the promotion of Maori culture in New Zealand and now I will adduce perhaps the most obvious, striking exemplar. On the nightly news these days, a lot of te reo is used. Not only is Auckland often referred to as Tamaki Makaurau but Maori phrases are often used (such as, for instance, 'ka kite ano' which loosely means 'see you tomorrow). If I was an American tourist visiting New Zealand who happened to watch the news, I might assume that all New Zealanders speak Maori. This is not the case. Most Pakeha and even some Maori do not speak te reo, at least not as their first language. I myself do not speak Maori although, like most New Zealanders, I know a smattering of Maori words. Even though Maori tend to constitute a kind of underclass in New Zealand (except in Parliament where they are perhaps overrepresented), there is a way in which Maori culture and language is being introduced from the top down. What do I feel about this? I suspect that I am becoming more conservative as I get older but I can't really see a downside to the increased use of the Maori language. I would, for instance, support changing New Zealand's name officially to Aotearoa. The Maori culture and language is something that makes New Zealand unique and the use of Maori words provides a way for immigrants, including those whose ancestors immigrated here over two hundred years ago, to declare their membership in the New Zealand community. For instance, earlier this year, I was at the birthday party of a (female) friend, an immigrant from Ireland. Her girlfriend, an Indian immigrant, used the word 'whanau', a Maori word which means family, during the celebratory speech in honour of my friend.

New Zealand identity, for some time, has been going through a momentous change. In the mid-twentieth century many Pakeha would refer to Britain as 'home'. In 1941, Allen Curnow, perhaps one of the two greatest New Zealand poets (the other being James K Baxter), wrote a poem called "House and Land" which gives some sense of how New Zealand identity has shifted since then. I have been unable to find a full transcription of this poem on the Internet but it contains the lines "The spirit of exile, wrote the historian, /Is strong in the people still" and ends by talking about "Awareness of what great gloom / Stands in a land of settlers / With never a soul at home". (This poem, of course, conveniently forgets Maori.) Curnow was instrumental in guiding New Zealand poets towards a poetry rooted in New Zealand rather than a poetry that simply echoed English verse. As the twentieth century progressed, Pakeha New Zealanders found other tropes through which to express their group identity, such as comic book character Wal Footrot, the black t-shirted sheep farmer who lives in a provincial town and loves rugby, or Fred Dagg, memorably played by John Clarke. Pakeha did not seek to incorporate Maori culture into their identities and Pakeha and Maori identities remained distinct. Over the last several decades, however, as I've already suggested in this essay, Pakeha and Maori identities have begun to overlap or coalesce. I am unsure when this process began.

The point of this post is to discuss co-governance and I am getting there gradually but first I need to say a little about Maori-Pakeha relations from a political perspective. The founding document of New Zealand is the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, a document as important to New Zealand as the Declaration of Independence is to Americans.  I will not describe fully the Treaty of Waitangi here but point readers to the Wikipedia article on it if they are interested. What is important here is that the Treaty was an agreement between the (British) Crown and Maori iwi in which the Maori gained the privileges of British citizens and were guaranteed rights over their land, villages, and other treasures ('taonga'). The Maori version of the Treaty, signed by around 530 chiefs (including thirteen women), was imperfectly translated from English – in the English version, the Maori ceded 'sovereignty' to the Crown while in the Maori version the word used was 'kawanatanga' (governance) while 'rangatiratanga' (chiefly rule) was also guaranteed. Not long after the signing, the British colonisers, and it is important to remember that they made up a much smaller proportion of the population in those days, pretty much ignored it, resulting in wars between the Brits and the Maori between 1845 and 1862. Starting in the 1970s, however, the importance of the Treaty was recognised by the government, and more gradually by the general population. Compensation began to awarded to iwi for the loss of lands and other taonga and, in 1974, Waitangi Day was made a public holiday. What is essential to note here is that the Treaty and the spirit of the Treaty assumes two separate groups, the English and the Maori, and, as it is generally interpreted today, treats the governance of New Zealand as a kind of partnership between the English and the Maori. (In fact, many Maori oppose making New Zealand a republic because to do so might effectively nullify the Treaty.)

Finally, before turning to co-governance, I wish to say something about the Maori seats. The New Zealand Parliament has 120 seats of which seven of the sixty electorate seats are Maori seats. New Zealanders who identify as Maori can choose to be either on the Maori roll or the general roll. The Maori seats were set up to ensure Maori representation in Parliament but, as I've suggested, quite a number of Members of Parliament today are Maori although I cannot be certain how many.

All these issues have come to a head recently. Along with an upsurge in crime and serious inflation (inflation that is, however, lower than in the US and UK), the major issue that may cost the Labour-led government the next election is the 3 Waters project. My foreign readers may find this part of the essay somewhat dull but for New Zealanders this strikes at the heart of two basic concerns – what it means to be a New Zealander and what our form of government should be. The proposed scheme provokes very strong emotional reactions from both supporters and opponents and can even make some quite upset. In a nutshell, the 3 Waters reform is this. Currently, stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water are administered by 67 regional councils. It is proposed to amalgamate the water services of these councils into four publicly owned entities. These entities will have boards selected, as one site I read says, "based on competence". In fact, what will happen is some kind of governing body, 50% made of council representatives (with each council getting one vote per 50,000 ratepayers) and 50% made of up representatives of iwi that fall under the jurisdiction of a particular entity, will choose the board members. The entities will "have highly skilled, competency-based boards to govern the entities professionally and independently. This will include a collective requirement for the board to have competence in the delivery of infrastructure and have an understanding of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, and te ao Māori." Furthermore they will "have joint, and equal, local government and mana whenua strategic influence and oversight of the entities and their operation." The need for reform is clear – the water infrastructure in New Zealand is substandard and set to get worse without significant investment. I believe even the opposition National Party recognises the need for reform. What people disagree about is the co-governance of these entities by councils and iwi.

Democracy is generally considered a Good Thing. I recall that when George W. Bush thought he'd won the war in Iraq he said (in 2005) "It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq -- but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower; it is a healthy, sturdy tree." Policy wonks in Washington like to say that no two democracies have gone to war against each other. The recent American midterms were pitched by Democrats as a referendum on democracy itself – they warned that democracy itself was in peril. My foreign readers probably assume that New Zealand is a democracy (and they would be mostly right) – but the co-governance envisaged by the 3 Waters project is, basically by definition, antidemocratic. For one thing, Maori will have 50% influence and oversight even though Maori make up less than 17% of the population. Second, discrimination based on race is built into the structure of these entities. Third, it treats Maori as monolithic. Most importantly, we might ask the question, "Who chooses the Maori representatives?" I admit that the internal workings of iwi are murky to me. Iwi were once ruled by rangatira, chiefs, a hereditary office, but this is no longer the case. Today tribes are effectively led by 'kaumatua' (respected elders), a person becoming a kaumatua through seniority and the respect of his or her peers. I believe kaumatua assemble on marae and, through a process of discussion, deliberation, and consensus arrive at decisions for their iwi or hapu (a process known as a 'hui'). The question then is – is the internal power structure of an iwi democratic and non-democratic? If we accept the Western idea of democracy, that it consists of elections in which each constituent has one vote, iwi are not democratic. If we also then accept that democracy is a Good Thing, than co-governance must be considered a Bad Thing. If we regard the Maori way of administering their own communities as simply a different kind of democracy, the issue is not so clear cut.

Of course, this assumes that democracy is a Good Thing. Some political philosophers don't agree. Last semester, for a Philosophy paper on politics, I studied the book Against Democracy by Jason Brennan. In this disquisition, or polemic, Brennan, an American, argues that most American citizens are so stupid they shouldn't be allowed to vote and suggests that people should only be grated suffrage if they can pass an exam on civics and basic economic theory. If we accept Brennan's argument, we could possibly argue that Maori society is better governed than Western democracies.

There is another aspect of the 3 Waters debate that is seldom covered by the media here. Not only is Maori society tribal, it used to be very bellicose. Iwi often fought vicious wars against other iwi and victors sometime enslaved and sometimes even ate their vanquished foes. In the early 19th century, the Musket Wars were fought during which tribes took advantage of newly acquired guns to dramatically alter tribal borders and decimate other tribes, a conflict led at first by Ngapuhi chief Hongi Hika. Although iwi no longer fight wars against each other, there is still a great deal of intertribal rivalry. It has been suggested to me that a part of the politics of 3 Waters stems from this intertribal rivalry. The Minister of Local Government, Nanaia Mahuta, a strong proponent of 3 Waters, although, according to the Internet, tracing her heritage to three iwi, is mostly closely aligned with Tainui; it is possible that disagreement about 3 Waters may partly be result from animosity between different tribes. In the Herald today (it has taken me about a week to write this post) Shane Jones, a former MP for New Zealand First, suggests that 3 Waters could lead to litigation between different iwi and cites as an example "current infighting between Hauraki iwi and Ngati Whatua in Auckland." Jones, like the New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters, court conservative 'mainstream' New Zealand – Peters, for instance, strongly opposes changing New Zealand's name to Aoteaoroa. However, both, by the definition advanced above, are Maori. According to what I can find, Jones is of Te Aupouri and Ngati Takota descent and Peters is of Ngati Wai descent (his Scottish clan being MacInnes). It is not impossible that disagreement about 3 Waters partly reflects hostility between Northland tribes and Tainui, an iwi based in the Waikato – Jones has criticised Tainui in the past. (I might note here that is not easy to find accurate facts about tribal affiliation of individuals on the Internet.)

This essay shows just how complex Maori-Pakeha relations are here in New Zealand. In a recent post, "A Reaction to Netflix's Adaptation of The Sandman", I discussed how, in America and the UK, there is a tension today between two different conceptions of racial identity. On the one hand, there is a desire to believe that race no longer matters, that western civilisation has moved beyond race. On the other hand, there is the desire to cleave to one's own racial or ethnic group, a disposition encompassed by the term "Identity Politics". This tension is manifest in New Zealand today. On the one hand, New Zealanders, regardless of their genealogy (their 'whakapapa'), embrace Maori culture and language and associate national identity with Maori tradition. This first attitude is inclusive of all New Zealanders. On the other hand, there is a move to divide New Zealanders, separate them into two groups, Pakeha and Maori, and grant disproportionate power to the minority. The first conception is something with which I am very sympathetic but the second conception is something with which I am uncomfortable. Some opponents of co-governance even use the word 'apartheid'. Fundamentally, the problem in New Zealand is that there is a basic contradiction between the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and the principles of democracy. Because the Treaty is New Zealand's founding document, this is no easy problem to fix. It is also worth noting that, in a sense, the Treaty predated democracy – in 1840 (and only as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill) only 18% of the total adult male population in England and Wales could vote. Presumably British colonists in New Zealand in 1840 had no say over the government at all. Although democratic theorists like to trace the history of democracy back to ancient Athens, in a sense modern democracy, the doctrine that every citizen of voting age has an equal right to participate in elections, is a recent invention – it did not come into existence until the early twentieth century. Moreover, a part of Identity Politics is the idea that one's own identity depends on the history of the group to which one belongs – this is what drives talk in the US about awarding reparations to the descendants of slaves. The precept that societies should correct historical injustices against minority groups is what partly motivates the proponents of co-governance. I would like to say, as Stephen Daedalus does in Ulysses, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." 

It might seem that I have been arguing against co-governance but there are always arguments to be made on both sides. Much of the criticism of co-governance comes from the Right, from people who support laissez-faire capitalism. I would like to say here that if these critics oppose co-governance on the grounds that it is undemocratic, they should also, for the sake of consistency, support the nationalisation of New Zealand's two supermarket chains. Capitalism, like co-governance, is also antidemocratic.

This post, as the reader may have noticed, exhibits a certain amount of ambivalence. Even within my own family, there is sharp and sometimes passionate disagreement about co-governance. My father, a King's Counsel, is currently with a group of concerned citizens planning to take the government to court over co-governance. I believe this is public knowledge – he wrote a piece for the National Business Review earlier this year attacking the 3 Waters scheme. In this post, I have tried, as objectively as a I can, to get to the philosophic roots of the problem.

My American readers, who may be familiar with New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern only through her appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, may be surprised to learn how much hostility there is towards her here in New Zealand, particularly among the Right. Some think that because she has identified as a Socialist, she is aligning herself with Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. I think this is quite wrong. I wrote a post about Jacinda a couple of years ago, when she enjoyed more popular support, in which I argued that she could be described as both a democrat and a technocrat. I would like to say here that I truly believe she is a good person trying to do the right thing. It might be that she is being bullied by the sizeable Maori contingent in the Labour caucus; it might be that she truly believes co-governance is the best way to honour the spirit of the Treaty. If I could, I would suggest she consider the position taken by Helen Clark in 2004 when the then Labour government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act that prevented iwi from seeking customary title of the coastline. If the current government does not back down, it will probably lose the next election. And a National government will certainly repeal 3 Waters or at least that part of the legislation that grants iwi 50% control. It isn't a battle worth fighting.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'll summarise the arguments I have made. In New Zealand at the moment, there is a push to change the national identity by promoting Maori culture and concepts from the top down. This unofficial policy involves, for instance, changing place names, making much more use of te reo in the media, and introducing concepts like matauranga Maori to education and tikanga Maori to common law. This can be considered a type of 'political correctness' or 'wokeism', a form of social engineering analogous to practices in the US known as 'affirmative action' or 'reverse discrimination'. I will reserve judgment about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Alongside this, paradoxically, there is a political move to separate New Zealanders into two distinct groups, Maori and Pakeha, and award disproportionate power to the former group – this is occurring even though Maori and Pakeha identities, culturally and in terms of heritage or ancestry, are becoming increasingly blurred. This tension, operating both to bring New Zealand together and to pull it apart, has part of its roots in the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand's founding document, a document that predated modern democracy.

I'll finish this post by describing a couple of experiences I've had that bear on the topics I have discussed. In early 2014, immediately after I was put under the Act, my mother and I visited the coastal town of Kawhia – I felt like some kind of spirit or presence associated with the place didn't want me to be there and was trying to push me out. Kawhia was the birthplace of a particularly blood-thirsty Maori chief, Te Rauparaha, who fought during the Musket Wars. I learned just now that for a period during the nineteenth century Kawhia was closed to Europeans. More recently, I think in 2016, when I was still hearing voices sometimes, I was lying in bed and heard a voice chanting in te reo in the back of my mind. As I've said, I don't speak Maori, but I had the sense somehow of a 'karakia' being performed. A karakia is a ritual chant or incantation used to invoke spiritual guidance or protection. In this blog, I have very often indeed discussed mental illness, and mental illness, like crime and poverty, disproportionately affects Maori. Perhaps, by discussing my own mental illness publicly, I have helped the Maori community a little. This sounds grandiose but that doesn't make me wrong.

Wokeism and What The Shrinks Knew

Do people read blogs? I have to confess that I don't myself. Instead I watch Youtube a lot and read the Guardian and other news sites online. For a long time I've felt, with little evidence, that maybe, despite my awareness that people don't read blogs, this one was making a difference, that perhaps, among other things, I was presenting the human face of 'mental illness' or 'schizophrenia' (whatever that word means), that I might somehow de-stigmatise this condition. I thought this blog would improve people's understanding of it and bring about some changes not only in public perceptions but in psychiatric discourse. This activist motivation entered into the reasons I wrote the screenplay The Hounds of Heaven in 2012, a film I have talked about in other posts. One problem, as I've become aware, is that every person diagnosed 'schizophrenic' is different from every other person diagnosed 'schizophrenic'; my life story might only to a limited degree be generalisable. Furthermore popular prejudices and stereotypes associated with mental illness are very hard to shift, even among commentators I like, such as Jon Stewart. Yet another problem is that I believe I have recovered, that I recovered many years ago, and so it is strange to at once say that this is condition I understand because I have it and say that I no longer do. The general public and psychiatric profession does not believe recovery is possible. This year I have been studying postgraduate Philosophy part time – this is why I have not posted for a long while. (Later this week I will publish an essay I wrote concerning fictions for a Philosophy of Language paper.) But I still want to keep this blog going. There is still more I can say about my life, even though perhaps I have said all I need to. In this post I want to discuss some problems with Woke ideology, as it pertains to fiction and to my other concerns, and then talk a little more about the Mental Health System. I have described a great deal of my life in this blog – in this post I wish to talk about what the shrinks and other mental health workers knew about it and when they knew it.

As I've said, I spend a lot of time watching clips from smart people on Youtube, sites such as Munecat, Mathologer, Veritassium, Cosmic Skeptic, and Lawrence Krauss's site The Origins Podcast. Sometimes I watch Unbelievable? or talks by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. I like Rupert Sheldrake. I also like Sam Harris. I used to watch Bret Weinstein before he went down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole. I religiously view clips from American late night talk shows like The Late Show, The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers. I always watch Bill Maher, enjoy The Majority Report, John Oliver, and Jon Stewart. As this reading list suggests, I have Catholic tastes. The algorithm can't work out if I'm gay or straight, a moderate or progressive left-winger, or if I'm a Christian or an atheist. I admit that I was drawn to the anti-Woke left but in recent months have returned to the Progressive wing of the Democrat party. But this does not mean that I can't criticise Woke ideology when it goes wrong.

I have discussed the inspirations of authors before in this blog. I have argued that authors sometimes draw from their own life experience, sometimes draw on what they surmise about other people (any good author is a kind of amateur psychologist), and sometime make stuff up. The problem with Woke ideology, as it pertains to fiction (and to other forms of story telling such as documentary making), is that the current dogma has it that one should only write about one's own experience and the experiences of the group to which one belongs– or else simply invent stuff with no relation to reality at all. For instance, the novel American Dirt, a novel about illegal immigration from Mexico to the US by Jeannine Cummins, became the subject of sometimes vitriolic controversy because Cummins is white. She was accused of putting on 'brown face'. More recently the documentary Jihad Rehab was pulled from Sundance because a number of Muslim documentary makers, most of whom hadn't seen it, mounted a ferocious campaign against it partly because it was made by a white non-Muslim American woman. The only documentary film festivals in the world that have screened it were here in New Zealand and in Zurich. I recommend readers watch Harris's interview with the documentary maker Meg Smaker (on Youtube) although, for balance, you should also read the Guardian article about the controversy. There is another problem with this political orthodoxy. Suppose we say that only Maori authors can tell stories about Maori – are we then supposed to believe that a particular Maori author speaks for all Maori? If we say 'no', it would follow from this way of thinking that the only permissible form of story telling is autobiography. If this idea, that authors should only write about their own experience or invent fantasies, becomes the new orthodoxy, all stories will either be memoirs or chimeras such as are found in the Marvel cinematic universe or in the fantasy section of the bookshop. (No one can accuse Tolkien of appropriating the cultures of elves and dwarves because elves and dwarves can't mount Twitter campaigns for more representation and social justice.) It would destroy literature. I am not saying that misrepresentation can't be a problem. I have a published a couple of (badly-written) posts about how terribly the film A Beautiful Mind represents the life of John Nash and schizophrenia generally. But I don't think Ron Howard should be cancelled. Edward St Aubyn, in Double Blind, and Salman Rushdie, in East West, depict schizophrenic characters that I think are completely inaccurate but I don't think either book should be burnt because of that. It is important that writers be able to write about whatever interests them. A reader might disagree with a particular representation but he or she shouldn't go on Twitter calling for the author to be cancelled because the author has hurt his or her feelings.

There are some other problems with Woke ideology. These problems pertains to my own life – these are the problems that probably led me to embrace the anti-Woke left. Perhaps most importantly, I get the impression that for a man or woman to say he or she is straight is considered somehow homophobic. This is part of the reason Tom Cruise received such opprobrium starting in the 'nineties. Because he had sued a British newspaper that had said he was gay for defamation, a civil suit he won, it split much of the public evenly between those who thought he was a closet homosexual and those who thought he was a homophobe. I think this public perception was partly why he has appeared on Graham Norton's show several times. This Woke dogma might also be why George Clooney, after a gay magazine in the UK called him "gay, gay, gay", released a statement saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I'm not gay but the third 'gay' seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay.' (To state the obvious, Clooney is straight.) I might be wrong about this impression. On his show, Seth Meyers sometimes runs a segment called "Jokes Seth can't tell" in which a lesbian writer and a black writer tell jokes that a straight white man couldn't tell – in fact, Seth usually introduces this segment by saying that these are jokes that he as a straight white man can't tell. It seems that a man or woman with impeccable leftist credentials can get away with saying he or she is straight but that some of us can't.

This double-bind, a double-bind that affects those of us who may perhaps be the subject of mostly unfounded rumours, is part of the reason I was 'ill' for so long. A couple of years ago a dear female friend, a friend I hadn't seen for many years, sent me an email. She had read this blog. She said, "Why do you mind if people think you're gay?" She added, "Of course, I'm not under the Mental Health Act." To put it bluntly, one reason I don't like people thinking I'm gay is because gay men have sex with each other, a practice that simply repels me. Another reason is that because many people think gay men and women are born gay, this would mean that people might come to the conclusion that my love for the three women in my life that I've fallen for (one of whom was the friend who had sent me the email) was somehow fake. It is possible for a man to accept homosexuality in others while still finding the idea of sodomising other men himself abhorrent. I know this makes me sound homophobic. In 2014, the clinical psychologist I saw that year said something like, "There is so much hate in you." As I've suggested in other posts, he was putting me in the double bind I have just described, putting me in a position where my only possible options were homophobia or homosexuality. This is why I nearly hanged myself at the very beginning of 2015.

The generally accepted definition of 'homosexuality' is "sexual attraction towards members of the same sex". 'Heterosexuality' is defined as "sexual attraction towards members of the opposite sex". Presumably 'bisexuality' should be defined as "sexual attraction towards members of both sexes." It seems to me that most people, including most psychiatrists, don't understand these definitions because they don't understand what the term 'sexual attraction' means. I'm different. Even back in 2007, when I first became 'unwell', I had a fairly good understanding of sexuality. In particular, I knew that I was heterosexual because I knew that I was only sexually attracted to women. Starting in 2013, however, after I first started to consistently say that I'm straight, I've had to deal with psychiatrists and other mental health workers who either think I'm dishonest or stupid. Immediately before being put under the Act in early 2014, I saw a psychiatrist who took the risk of defining the word 'homosexual' for me as though I didn't know the definition. I felt as though something evil had looked at me from behind her eyes. She was treating me as though I was retarded. At my first appointment with the clinical psychologist I saw in 2014, I said I was straight but this didn't stop him from asking me, after some eight months of seeing him, "Aren't you attracted to men?" Two or three years ago, I saw a different psychiatrist once for a second opinion. I told him that the people at bFM had thought I was gay. He expressed surprise, saying that he thought bFM would be quite a progressive place. I said, "They weren't homophobic – they just thought I was gay." A little later, my regular psychiatrist asked me, "Why do you mind people thinking you're gay?" I replied, simply, "Because it's not true." The point I'm getting at here is that the people who think it homophobic for someone to say he or she is straight obviously don't understand the definition of homosexuality.

In this blog, perhaps not consistently, I have not only been claiming that I am straight but also trying to prove it by talking about my sexual attraction to women. (I am setting aside that terrible part of my life from 2013 until the end of 2015.) Once again this causes me to run afoul of Woke ideology. We live in an age where many strident Feminists see all men as potential rapists. I am not going to excuse someone like Harvey Weinstein but I have heard stories about university professors who have been disciplined for looking at female students the wrong way. For a discussion of this issue, from a female perspective, I recommend the Lawrence Krauss podcast in which he interviews Janice Flamengo. I am aware that in discussing my sexual attraction to women some women on the fringe left may regard me as something like a male chauvinist. I have played around with the term InCel because, although I have been celibate since 2011, this does not mean that I have become a Buddhist Monk who has sworn of sex. I still want to be in a relationship with a woman but because I am no longer particularly handsome, am unemployed, and am diagnosed schizophrenic, I am not particularly attractive to women. I don't blame women for my celibacy, I blame myself and my situation. I have considered writing a blogpost describing my relationships with women in the past to show that I have mainly had perfectly respectful attitudes to women. I was in a serious relationship from the age of 17 until the age of 21 (with a girl called Danielle) and was sort of in a relationship from the age of 23 or 24 until the age of 29 (this particular relationship was, admittedly, complicated). I never slept with the girl I call Jess although I wanted to and I believe she knew that I did. I made an advance on her early on in 2011 but, from hanging out with her in 2013, I get the feeling that she either didn't mind or had forgiven me. (Our relationship was complicated by the Christchurch earthquake.) Very occasionally in my life, the last time being in 2012, I have made an advance on a woman but never, I believe, in a crude or coercive way. For instance, when I was much younger I made an advance on a girl called Sara, one of the three women I've loved in my life, after we had seen a movie together and while we were watching the video Lost Highway. She rebuffed me but we remained friends. In fact, it was Sara who sent me the email I described earlier in this post.

The main point of this post is to describe not my life, which I've talked about at length, but what the people in the Mental Health Service knew about it. I have realised that some of my readers may not understand how the Mental Health System in New Zealand works and so I shall give a brief description. A patient sees his or her psychiatrist for an hour perhaps once a month or perhaps more infrequently. (The last time I saw my present psychiatrist was over six months ago.) A patient also has a Key Worker, a nurse or occupational therapist or social worker, who he or she sees more often. In my early days, in 2007 until 2009, I saw my Key Worker, a woman called Kate Whelan, at least once a week. We would usually go out for coffee to a cafe. At the beginning of 2010, Kate organised a weekly coffee group for youngish patients to meet and socialise which I attended. Since Kate, I've had five Key Workers; currently I don't seem to have a Key Worker at all. My only contact with the Taylor Centre is my monthly injection. After the injection I have to remain at the Taylor Centre for two hours, just in case I suffer post-injection syndrome, during which I talk to other patients or to the workers observing me. Apart from a very nice woman called Teri, I don't always remember the names of the workers because new ones appear fairly regularly. After every interaction between a patient and a worker or workers, they write up notes about the interaction. In my case this means that I now have a dossier of notes bigger than the Bible. As I've said in a recent post, I don't believe that when I get a new psychiatrist, they pore through my notes. At my last injection, I asked a worker about this, about how the psychiatrists come to an appointment with some understanding of the patient, and she said that after an appointment with the doctor, the doctor makes a short summary of the last several months. This might not be a sufficient explanation. Perhaps the doctors do write up some kind of short summation, a summation which, as I argued in that recent post, might in my case be full of serious inaccuracies.

A legal right I have as someone under the Mental Heath Act is that I can ask to see my notes. As I said in that recent post, in 2015 I requested a copy of my notes and, after some time, was given an enormous sheaf of papers. Supposedly notes about every interaction I'd ever had were in it. I only read the very beginning of it because it was so dispiriting. What I noticed, however, was that there seemed to be some omissions. The record didn't include any notes about my first appointment with my first psychiatrist, Antony Fernando; nor was there any mention of what I had said when I had first made landfall at the Taylor Centre. I didn't kick up a fuss about this at the time because, back then, I had a kind of fatalistic sense that I had no options or recourse, that there was nothing I could do. If they did carry out redactions on my notes, the Taylor Centre may have broken the law. In the rest of this post, I shall, therefore, rely on my memory. I know memory is fallible. However everything I shall say I feel confident about.

I have talked about my first psychotic episode in a number of posts, "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Theory of Mind and the Big House" and elsewhere. It occurred in 2007 when I was twenty-seven. Although this may be an oversimplification, it seems justifiable to say that the cause of this first episode was that a rumour went around some of my acquaintances that I was gay. Of course, there had been rumours about me (among some people) starting in 2001 because of the short film script I had written that year, the gay spy film that I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". The episode I suffered, which really kicked into gear perhaps a fortnight after I left bFM, was acute. I decided that there were listening devices in the fire alarms, started dividing my flatmates, of which I had twenty, into angels and demons, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals, and formed the paranoid conspiracy theory that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I decided that Jesus was straight and all the disciples were gay and considered the possibility that I might be Jesus. The episode reached its climax when I considered drowning myself, decided against it, returned to the flat, and told some of my flatmates, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" What is important to note here is that, after I said this, much of my psychosis went away. I recall telling some of my flatmates the next night, immediately before my brother arrived to remove me from the Big House, that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. I still thought that my father was gay and that bFM was full of closet homosexuals but the more bizarre delusions, such as the delusion that I was under surveillance, had evaporated (although I was still agitated and emotionally distressed).

The next day my father drove me to the Taylor Centre. It is hard to remember this exactly but both my father and mother were there. I went into an office and spoke with a psychiatrist called Trish van der Krellen and Kate Whelan without either parent present. I thought I had made some kind of important breakthrough. I had always tried to be friendly with gay people, had supported gay rights, and, even though I am straight, been interested in homosexuality. I thought that my father being gay might explain this. I thought that my father's homosexuality might account for why I had got myself into such a terrible mess. I recall that I was quite voluble, saying among other things that I had been friends with gay students at High School. I said, and this is exactly what I said, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay, and I want to come out as straight!" What I meant by this was that I had always been straight and wanted people to know it. I can remember Kate Whelan sitting there smiling; I immediately got a bad vibe off her. My parents were invited into the office – I recall my father was very red in the face. I wasn't sure at the time if they knew what I told Kate Whelan and Trish van der Krellen. My lovely mother said something like, "He was hit on the head by a night cracker when he was a kid. Perhaps that's the cause." (This is slightly inaccurate but close enough.)

Shortly after this first contact, I had my first real appointment with the psychiatrist who would be the one to treat me until the beginning of 2012, Antony Fernando. At the time I believed that the Mental Health Service would offer psychological treatment. I thought that I would lie on a couch, talk about my family, come to terms with my father's homosexuality, and then be let go. What I didn't realise then is that psychiatrists are doctors who consider psychological distress a symptom of a neurological disease, a neurotransmitter imbalance. I didn't realise then that basically the only form of treatment they offer is medication. I remember the moment I walked into the Fernando's office deciding, from the way he looked at me, that he was yet another closet homosexual. My parents were both present at the consultation– I couldn't tell Fernando that my father was gay with my father in the room and I couldn't say this to a man who I had immediately concluded was homosexual. Furthermore, I sensed immediately that this was a medical consultation and decided to treat it as such. I described my symptoms without mentioning anything to do with homosexuality at all. For instance, I told him that I had formed the delusion that there were listening devices in the fire alarms of the flat in which I lived and that the horoscope had been talking to me. Fernando asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "No". I very much wanted him to ask me if I was gay or straight but he didn't and never did. I recall telling him that I lived in a vegetarian flat. He asked me, "Are you a vegetarian?" I said, "No, I'm a carnivore." I was talking in code. I was trying to tell him that not only was I straight, I had a sex drive. When I said this, he smirked.

I believe it was at that first consultation that Fernando told me to "Stop avoiding". He also sarcastically referred to my "breakthrough". I immediately concluded that he had decided to diagnose me as a latent or closet homosexual. It was terrible. There was no way I could tell him he was wrong. I should say something about those early days. Because I had suffered an acute psychotic episode and because I was new to the Mental Health Service, I was put under the Early Intervention Team. I saw Kate Whelan or other workers every day. I can remember, in particular, going for drives or walks sometimes with a chap called Jurgen and sometimes a chap called Maurice. Although this didn't begin immediately, I would sometimes divide the people treating me into angels and demons, as I had my flatmates at the Big House. Sometimes I thought they might be, in a way, witches and vampires. I can remember immediately forming a bad impression of Maurice, sensing a kind of darkness around him, although I worked out later that he was a very good man. Not only was I still dealing with psychosis, suddenly becoming a patient of the Mental Health Service made me feel that my life had ended, that the world had ended. I sensed that I had become a patient permanently. Later in the year, there were times when I literally believed the Apocalypse had occurred, that we were living in the End Days. I sensed all this immediately. I had been uprooted from my previous life and put in new one, one in which I was subject to an institution. I recall, just a couple of weeks after becoming a patient, I attended an art group at an establishment called Toi Ora, a charity that caters to mental health patients by providing creative workshops. I drew a picture of whole lot of bric-a-brac and people being blown away by a terrible wind.

The point I am trying to make here is that the people treating me should have realised that my illness was a temporary reaction to stressful circumstances rather than something I was born with and would suffer from for the rest of my life. A couple of months ago a worker asked me about my 'illness', saying, "When was it picked up?" I replied, "It wasn't 'picked up'. I had a very sudden and severe psychotic episode." The worker's question is more evidence of the idiocy of the Mental Health System generally.

The other important point I wish to make, something I think about a lot, is that there was a window in those early days when everything could have turned out differently. I did very occasionally use the words 'gay' and 'straight' for the first couple of weeks although I didn't say I was straight again, or talk about bFM or the Big House. I told the people treating me about the gay spy film I had written when I was twenty-one – I know this because a worker asked me how long ago I had written it. I replied, "Ten years" although of course it was only six. (I hadn't then started making sense of my life.) During one of the first times I went out for coffee with Kate Whelan, in Remuera, I told her a story that I have also told in this blog before, in the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition". In 1998, when I was living at Knox College in Dunedin, I had bought a Cleo magazine because my girlfriend living in Auckland liked Cleo. My best friend at the time had teased me about it. I told him that I was confident enough in my sexuality that I could buy a woman's magazine without it worrying me. Being a philosophy student, he said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." Viewing this as challenge, I borrowed a dress, wig and high-heels from our lesbian friend down the corridor and dressed in drag for an evening – our lesbian friend took photos. It was a fun night. The reason I told Kate this story was because I sensed that Fernando had decided to diagnose me a closet or latent homosexual and this was my way of saying that I was totally straight, that his diagnosis was absurd. I suspect that Kate simply put something like 'has transvestite tendencies' in my notes. I know this from circumstantial evidence. When you get down to brass tacks, the cause of my illness was simple. The people treating me should have worked out that I was straight and that I had become unwell as a result of false gossip. And they could have worked this out if they'd asked me some fucking questions.

The window passed quickly. I remember the feeling that I was under surveillance came back. I was walking with my mother and she asked me how they could be monitoring me. I decided that there must be a microphone in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world, came back. I stopped using the words 'gay' and 'straight' entirely. These delusions went away at the end of 2007 but I still avoided using either word. I didn't say the word 'gay' to Kate again until 2013. When I became a patient of the Taylor Centre again that year, just before Easter, I had a consultation with a different psychiatrist and was assigned a new key worker, Josh Brasil. Josh was the first and only Mental Health worker to ask me how I identified. (I replied "Straight" of course.) A little later we went out for coffee. We discussed Charles Bukowski. Now, Bukowski is an author that straight bookish men like to talk about to prove that they are straight, the same way straight music fans like to talk about Jim Morrison and steer clear of Morrissey in conversation. I didn't like this conversation; it felt fake. I was also under a great deal of stress at the time. I saw Kate briefly and burst out to her that I didn't like "being flirted with by a gay man". Her reaction is hard to describe – the way I would put it is perhaps that she became incredibly uncomfortable. My saying this caused her considerable cognitive dissonance. Shortly after this, I changed my mind about Josh and decided that he actually was straight but I never corrected the error that I had made, although perhaps a year and half later, just before he moved to a different DHB and ceased being my Key Worker, I apologised for the bad start we'd had, saying that I had been under a great deal of stress at the time. Yet it probably had gone on my record as another black mark against me.

This post is a little clumsily written. I am probably repeating things readers already know. I can't go through all of the last fifteen years describing when people knew what, but there are two items in the list that are perhaps significant, that I'll mention. At my first Independent Review in 2015, a review I'd requested, my then psychiatrist put in the report that I was ill in 2008 and well for the first eight months of 2009 prior to going off the Rispiridone. The opposite is true. As I've pointed out a number of times, I was close to well in 2008 and didn't start hearing voices until January 2009, after I'd been on antipsychotics for over a year and half. I have described what triggered this episode most clearly in the post "The Illusion of Authorship and Other Matters." The important point here is that when I started hearing voices I told people. Very shortly after I started hearing voices, I was lying in bed and heard a voice say very loudly, "I love you." I thought it was God. I told the Scottish nurse Avril I had been seeing for 'therapy' about this.  So they must have known that the 'treatment' I was receiving had made me worse. The only conclusion I can draw is that the people treating me are either incompetent or dishonest. The second item concerns a long essay that I wrote about my life and my treatment shortly after I was put under the Act in early 2014. I had a copy of it put in my psychiatrist's pigeon hole and gave another to my lawyer. I know my lawyer read it; I can remember, for instance, in late 2017 just before my last Independent Review, he said to me, "It's been four years. Perhaps that's long enough." (What he meant by this is that I'd been consistently saying I was straight since early 2013.) However I don't think the psychiatrist I was seeing, Jennifer Murphy, ever read it although I told her repeatedly that she should. I don't believe the Key Worker I had at the time, Josh, ever read it. I suspect that the Clinical Psychologist I saw in 2014, Simon Judkins, read it but because he's a fucking imbecile he didn't understand it. If they'd read it and realised I was telling the truth, the truth that my sociopathic former psychiatrist Antony Fernando must have lied about me, they would have been forced to let me go years ago.

Not only does the psychiatric profession not understand what the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" mean, I have come to the conclusion that they don't understand what the term "schizophrenia" means. In 2013, having been discharged from the Taylor Centre for a year, only being on 5mgs of Olanzapine for that period, and having been totally well since early 2010, I became somewhat psychotic again. I thought, rightly or wrongly, that there was still uncertainty in the Fourth Estate about my sexuality; I though that if I reengaged with the Taylor Centre and got it on my record that I'm straight and always have been that this fact would somehow disseminate into the public domain. I told the first psychiatrist I saw that year about the three women I'd loved in life. Just before I saw Jennifer Murphy for the first time, I heard a voice in my head saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex" and so, at my first appointment with her, I told her, truthfully, that the first time I'd had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. It was almost immediately after that that she told me that I was schizophrenic. (Prior to 2013, my official diagnosis had been Psychosis Not Otherwise Specified.) She diagnosed me schizophrenic because she thought I was lying. Now, if you look up the definition of schizophrenia on Wikipedia for instance, you'll find that officially the positive symptoms are delusion and hallucinations. Dishonesty is not supposedly a symptom. Nevertheless, I believe this is why she diagnosed me schizophrenic. If dishonesty is considered the criterion by which we diagnose schizophrenia we would also have to consider Donald Trump and Hershel Walker schizophrenic. She diagnosed me schizophrenic, I have to assume, because she thought I was a virgin and was lying about having had sex with women. Presumably this lie originated with Antony Fernando. I wish to say something briefly about the psychiatric profession. The public tends to assume that psychiatrists are very clever people. They aren't. They spend some ten years learning about neurotransmitters and parts of the brain and nothing about real people. And of course most psychiatric discourse about schizophrenia is just fucking wrong. Jennifer Murphy is evidence for the claim that most psychiatrists are fucking corrupt and stupid.

When I write a post about my life, it is tempting to put everything in but I can't. I have to assume readers have read the other posts I've written. I will say one last thing however. In other posts, I have claimed that Antony Fernando is a closet homosexual. Having thought about this some more, I would like to refine this diagnosis. I believe that, at my first appointment with him, he experienced a Same Sex Attraction and then projected his own homosexuality onto me. This is why I decided he was a member of the Homosexual Conspiracy. If I'd been treated by a heterosexual psychiatrist, I would have recovered in a couple of months. Furthermore I believe Fernando has misdiagnosed patients before – I refer the reader to another post I've written concerning a patient called Yves who was also treated by Antony Fernando and was also, I believe, raped by the Mental Health System. Patients deserve better than a psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.

A Reaction to Netflix's adaptation of "The Sandman"

Recently I binge watched the whole first series of The Sandman, a dark fantasy-horror with tinges of psychological drama, actually quite a hard television program to generically classify, and in this post I wish to compare it to the source material, the comic book that was published between 1989 and 1996. I love the comic book and have written about it before in four posts – in my critique of it I shall be comparing the adaption to the original comics. However, first I wish to discuss my life and clear up some small errors in the previous post. In actuality some of the things I wish to say about my life are quite important to the life story I have been revealing in bis and pieces. Those readers who are interested in The Sandman should skim the first part of this essay; those who are interested in my life should focus on the first part. It is doubtful whether the various parts of this essay will at all cohere.

As people who read my blog will know, I am diagnosed schizophrenic and have been under a Compulsory Treatment Order since early 2014. If I were to tell people that I am under the Mental Health Act (I don't usually), they might assume that I was put under the Act because I was a danger to myself or to others, one of the two limbs legally required for being put under the Act. In fact, the main reason I was put under the Act was because I refused to take antipsychotic medication. There are possibly other reasons which I shall come back to in a moment. It is important to state, for the record, that I wasn't a danger to anyone in 2014 or at any time before or after. As someone subject to the Mental Health Act, I have certain rights. One right is that I am entitled to Independent Reviews, a process in which a solicitor, layperson, and psychiatrist from another DHB, in the presence of the patient, his or her psychiatrist, key worker, lawyer, and other family members (if they wish to attend) assess if the patient is 'fit to be released from the Mental Health Act'. The assessment is made based on a report written by the psychiatrist and on the testimony of the patient and the others who are present. I have had four Independent Reviews, the last being in 2018; after that last review and after my dosage was increased from (I believe) 300mgs a month to 300mgs a fortnight I gave up on requesting Independent Reviews because, rather than improving my situation, they just seemed to be getting me deeper into the hole, forcing the shrinks to double down on their diagnosis. Independent Reviews, rather than providing protection for the patient, seem to me to be just window dressing – the panelists are usually reluctant to admit that the other psychiatrists have made a mistake. Another right I have is that I am entitled to see a copy of my record. In 2015, I requested a copy and, after some time, was given a stack of paper about the size of the Bible. Notes about every interaction I'd ever had with my psychiatrist and key worker were included in the record. I only read the very beginning of the record because it was too dispiriting to read the whole thing, although I looked up and used the notes about a particular consultation, the consultation in early 2012 in which my dosage of Olanzapine was decreased from 10mgs a day to 7.5mgs a day, at the review I had later in 2015.

I have seen seven different psychiatrists since 2007. What I have come to realise is the obvious fact that they lack the time or motivation to read all my notes. Presumably there is a short summary of my life or personality or situation which they read before they see me, a summary that I myself have never seen. I recall a worker at the Taylor Centre talking about 'citations' last year– presumably when an interaction is considered significant enough, it goes in this summary, is 'cited'. Back in 2009, I remember mentioning to my then Key Worker that I thought my stepmother didn't like me; she said something about it being common for people to dislike their stepparents. What I realise now, and sensed inchoately at the time, is that Kate had decided that it was not important to record the fact that I had a bad relationship with my stepmother in my notes, even though it should have gone not just in my notes but in the summary that I conjecture existed. If the important information about me was contained in this short summary, it should have been the summary that I was given in 2015, not the enormous tome of notes. The Taylor Centre might have broken the law.

I cannot be sure what is contained in this summary but I can speculate with some confidence. First, I suspect that the summary contained the 'fact' that I am supposedly gay but don't want people such as my family to know. I don't know whether Fernando wrote down that I had 'come out' to him, perhaps at the beginning of 2009, or if he had some other supposed evidence. Second, I suspect that the summary contained the supposed 'fact' that I dislike my mother. (In the previous post I described when and how this error was made.) Third, I think it contained the 'fact' that I am a drug user. All of these supposed 'facts' are incorrect. Finally, it must contain details about how much medication I was on, when I was 'ill' and when I wasn't, and my attitude towards medication at various times, details that I also believe must have been wrong. I suspect that the main reason I was put under the Mental Health Act is because the way I presented myself to the psychiatrist I started seeing in 2013, Jennifer Murphy, did not conform with the picture she had of me from the summary. I was put under the Act because I said I was straight. I have said in previous posts that I believe I was somehow 'outed' in 2013; I conjecture now that it was this brief summary that was somehow leaked. There is one last anecdote I will share because it may be relevant. Over the summer of 2017 ad 2018, I undertook a research paper through the University of Auckland on narrative theory with Professor Brian Boyd (for which I received a B). At this time, my Key Worker was a woman called Debbie Smith. Debbie expressed an interest in reading the essay I had written but, mainly because I didn't think she would particularly enjoy a fairly abstruse discussion of the book The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh, I never gave it to her. Somehow my failure to show her a copy of this essay went into my notes as another mark against me. My feeling is that because of the summary, or perhaps as a result of the general attitude psychiatrists have towards their patients, I was regarded as stupid. Now, I'm not a genius but I'm certainly not stupid.

I have felt for a long time as if I was under a curse, a curse cast on me by the psychiatrists and by the Mental Health System generally. One effect of this 'curse' is that I sometimes make small errors in this blog, errors I sometimes only notice later. I recently reread the previous post and noticed some mistakes; one solution would be to go back to this previous post and correct them but I feel that the previous post has already been presented to the world and so I need to correct them in the next. There is one grammatical mistake that I picked up on. More importantly I implied some things that are not true. I implied that George W. Bush was one of my imaginary friends but, in truth I only conversed with him twice, once in January 2009 and once in January 2010. I do not want people to think I support Bush. I consider myself a leftist: for many election cycles I have voted Green and, if I was American, would be in the progressive wing of the Democrat Party (although I now disagree with some ideas pushed by the LGBT community). I may also have implied that I believe in God. In truth I have gone backwards and forwards about God, mainly because I thought that my soul was in danger and thought that perhaps converting to some denomination of Christianity might somehow magically save me. However, today, although I believe that there is a mystical dimension to the world, I do not subscribe to any kind of Christianity. Another error is that the synopsis of the film I presented is perhaps ever so slightly distorted, ironically because I'm the writer; there were other events in the film that I perhaps should have mentioned but didn't. Of course, the screenplay is available on the Internet so you can read the film rather than rely on the synopsis. Incidentally, it has occurred to me that a simpler explanation for why the film failed is that Jess lacked a character arc. I realised this weakness in the film when I wrote it but simply had no idea how, in a film about a young woman who suffers a psychotic episode and then recovers, I could provide such a character arc. People don't follow neat character arcs in real life. This thought, that The Hounds of Heaven failed because its protagonist lacked a character arc, was inspired by watching the most recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

There is one last error in the previous post that I wish to correct. In October or November 2009 I had a conversation with Jon Stewart in my head, a conversation I described in the previous post. The conversation ran as follows. I was walking home from somewhere when I heard a voice say, "You're long-sighted" I replied, "No, I'm short-sighted". The voice said again, "You're long-sighted". I repeated myself saying, "No, I'm short-sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised that I was talking to Jon. He said, "There's no hope for you." In the previous post I somehow put down "help" instead of "hope". The point of the exchange was that Jon was making a joke, being ironic. He was saying that there was hope for me, that I wasn't gay, never had been gay, and never would be gay. Perhaps this small error I made in the previous post of accidentally substituting "help" for "hope" is trivial but it seems important to get these things right. 

At this point in the post I wish to change topics. I wish to compare the television adaptation of The Sandman with its source material.

As I said, I binge watched the whole series a couple of nights ago. Since then I have been obsessively combing the internet for reviews and reactions. Some reviewers have thought it was wonderful while others have hated it. The best reviews are the mixed reviews that can be found on Youtube. Some reviewers are familiar with the source material and some are not; there is no clear preference to be found among either group as to whether the TV series is good or bad. I myself am very familiar with the source material and know the comics inside-out. When I watched the series, I was mainly looking to see how well the adaption followed the plots, details, and themes of the original – when it didn't I phased out a little. I intend to discuss this first season. The series adapts the main story-lines of the first two collections, Preludes and Nocturnes and The Dolls' House. I have neither collection here with me in my apartment but believe I can remember them well enough to make some remarks comparing the adaption with the original series. In the following discussion, I shall assume the reader has seen the TV series but is unfamiliar with the comic.

It is necessary first to point out the obvious fact that the original stories were comic books, and comic books can depict characters, events, settings, and atmospheres in a way that only a very high budget film, like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaption, can. Although Netflex invested a lot of money in The Sandman, and although many reviewers praised its design with words like 'beautiful' and 'lavish', the TV series simply can't do as good a job. By adapting the comic book for TV, the focus has naturally shifted from fantastical visuals to character interactions and development, an example being the reimagining of John D, played brilliantly by David Thewliss, who in the original was simply evil embodied, as befits a TV program that is in most respects an episodic TV drama. A second important difference between the source material and the TV series is that there is far more horror in the original comic books. Neil Gaiman has always been good at writing creepy stories and is still writing them today. This claim, that the original comic book had more of a horror vibe than the TV series, may surprise viewers who were on the edge of their seats during the episode "24/7" but I shall back up this assertion in a moment. Another important thing to remember is that the comic books were released monthly between 1989 and 1996 and Neil Gaiman was basically making it up as he went along. For instance, I suspect that the fact that Morpheus claims Lyta Hall's child as his by right (an event that occurs in both the TV series and comic book) was thrown into the mix by Gaiman without him knowing precisely where it would lead in the future. Eventually, it becomes vitally important. The TV adaptation has both the advantage and disadvantage of knowing the conclusion that the comic book will eventually reach.

I turn now to the character of Morpheus himself. In the TV series, Morpheus is played, brilliantly, by Tom Sturridge, an actor who has both the voice and the presence to play the Dreamking. In the comics Dream always has an otherworldly quality (he sometimes has stars for eyes) but Gaiman and the other creators of the TV series realised early on that if they incorporated Dream's otherworldly quality into the program, his interactions with humans in the waking world would seem unbelievable. I can understand why it was necessary to make this change to how Dream was depicted. However, there are other real problems with the depiction of Morpheus, problems that do not arise from Sturridge's performance but from the writing itself, that I think are unfortunate. I shall single out two errors of aesthetic judgement. The first is that in the original comic book Morpheus is often scary. For instance, at the end of the first issue Dream condemns Alex Burgess, to "eternal waking" – the form this curse takes is that Alex is plunged into nightmares, awaking from each nightmare briefly believing that he has escaped only to find he is in another nightmare. In the comic, this "eternal waking" lasts some seven years. When I was watching the first episode, I was anticipating this moment and was disappointed when Morpheus condemns Alex instead to "eternal sleep", a punishment not nearly so nasty. Another example of Dream's vindictiveness  (an example that does somehow make it into the TV series) is that thousands of years ago he had condemned a lover who had rejected him, Nada, to eternal hell. A third example that shows Dream's sinister side is the scene in which Morpheus confronts Lyta, the only scene in which they are both present, telling her that because her child was conceived in the Dreaming, it is his and one day he will come to claim it; if I recall correctly, Lyta calls him "a monster". The fact that Lyta both hates and fears Morpheus becomes very important later – I might be wrong about this but I didn't think the TV series at all conveys Lyta's antipathy towards Dream even though it is a vital ingredient of the final collection, The Kindly Ones. So why did the creators of the TV series downplay the dark side of Dream? It is possible that they didn't include the sequence of Alex's "eternal waking" because of budgetary constraints. However, I think the main reason that they didn't include Dream's more terrifying side is because they kowtowed to the conventional wisdom that TV show protagonists should be sympathetic and felt that if they included Dream's more monstrous actions and behaviours, audiences wouldn't like and identify with him. I think this decision condescends to audiences. We might consider Tony Soprano as an example of a morally dubious character that audiences like, or Dexter. After all, The Sandman TV show is R18 and so it has the latitude to present evil, whether that evil be in the form of horror scenes or in the characterisation of a show's protagonist.

The second major error related to Dream's character is that the creators of the show fail to emphasise Dream's most important quality – his inflexibility. Dream is absolutely committed to the duties and responsibilities associated with his realm. The overarching theme of the whole comic is that sometimes people have to either change or die – this is the main theme in a nutshell. A closely related error is that in the comic Dream is absolute monarch of his domain but, presumably to up the emotional stakes, the drama, in the TV series Lucien is presented as Dream's lieutenant and sometimes argues with him or partly arrogates his power. The humanising of Dream in the TV series, the weakening of both his power and obduracy, creates a little confusion about his personality. In a ferociously negative review in USA Today, a critic said that in the series Morpheus lacks any kind of character arc. This reviewer obviously hadn't read the comic book because Morpheus does have a character arc – it just takes seven years to play out. Some reviewers have asked why spending (in the TV series) over a century in captivity hasn't changed him. In the comic the trauma has changed him, slightly, and the comic presents, usually in a subtle and nuanced way, the trajectory that leads him at last to his final conversation with Death. In the TV series the issue of presenting his inflexibility and the slight changes that have occurred as the result of his imprisonment are handled poorly – some reviewers have accused the writers of inconsistency. Sometimes Morpheus is good and sometimes he is bad and there seems neither rhyme nor reason as to why he is sometimes compassionate and at other times malevolently unforgiving. This, to reiterate, is not Sturridge's fault but the fault of the writers.

The first Sandman collection I bought was The Dolls' House, a book I read and reread obsessively when I was about fifteen. In the TV series, this storyline plays out over the second half of the season. Most reviewers I have read or viewed regard the second half of the season as weaker than the first. In the next couple of paragraphs I wish to compare The Dolls' House as it is presented in the TV series and as it presented in the comic and suggest some reasons why the adaption didn't work. I will first consider the plot line concerning Jeb, Lyta Hall and Hector Hall. In the comic Hector is a dead superhero, who calls himself the Sandman, who lives with Lyta (who is alive) in Jeb's subconscious mind, assisted by two renegade nightmares called Brute and Glob. In his real life Jeb spends his time in the basement to which he has been confined by his venal foster parents. Unfortunately I can't remember this plot-line perfectly and do not trust the Wikipedia summary enough to use it as a source but I will make an attempt at a summary. Somehow Morpheus tracks down Brute and Glob, who are returned to the Dreaming; he disincorporates Hector and tells Lyta that the child she has carried for many years in Jeb's dreams is his. In the TV series, however, the plot-line involving Hector and Lyta is separated from the plot-line involving Jeb, the only connection being that Lyta is a friend of Rose Walker, who is searching for Jeb. Hector is not a superhero but only the ghost of her former husband. The plot line involving Lyta, Hector and their unborn child in the TV series is very weak. Lyta is uninteresting and flat, and her dream life is different from the waking world only in that it contains a very nice modernist house. Lyta seems unsurprised that a god of dreams exists and seems pretty much unfazed when she becomes pregnant in real life. In the comics, in a world of superheroes, the problem of how real people react to magic or the supernatural, how they react to beings and things that are not of this world, is somehow evaded, but the TV series can't escape this dilemma. Lyta doesn't work and her reaction to the supernatural doesn't work. The plotline involving Jeb also doesn't work. In the TV series, in his dreams, Jeb imagines himself to be the Sandman, an illusion created by a nightmare called Gault who is protecting Jeb from the brutal reality of his life. Gault is trying to reform, to be a good dream rather than a nightmare; nevertheless she too is disincorporated by Morpheus. Obviously the writers of the series are trying to anticipate the most important theme in The Sandman, the possibility of change. But Gault strikes me as a clumsy sentimental addition to the story, another way in which the writers are condescending to their audience by oversimplifying things, by imposing on the story pathetic (in the old sense of that word) simplistic narrative arcs because that is what they imagine audiences want. Rather than present pure evil, the TV series gives all its characters understandable rationales for their actions. In the TV series, Gault is redeemed, as John D is redeemed. Even the Corinthian is somewhat redeemed as I shall discuss in the next paragraph. 

In the comic books, the Corinthian is introduced in the third issue of The Dolls' House. In the TV series, he is introduced in the first episode. I don't have a problem with this early introduction: Preludes and Nocturnes was aways the weakest volume in the Sandman library, the issues where Gaiman was still searching for his theme and voice. The importance of the Corinthian to the TV series is that Morpheus needs an adversary, an arch-nemesis, to give the whole first season some coherent shape. In the comic book, there is no way that the Corinthian can beat Morpheus but in the TV series he actively assists Roderick Burgess in keeping Dream confined and then later actively seeks out Rose Walker because he thinks that, because she is a vortex, he can somehow use her to destroy Dream. This means that in the episode "The Collectors" and in the immediately preceding episode we know that Dream wants to kill Rose while the Corinthian wants to keep her alive. This muddies the waters about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. One of the reviewers I saw, for instance, said that she could sympathise with the Corinthian. If the TV series presents the Corinthian as being at all sympathetic it has well and truly failed to capture the character presented in the comic book because, in the comic book, he is the essence of evil. In the comic, the Corinthian has no idea that Rose is a vortex and he comes across Jeb more or less by chance. (Of course, because Rose is a vortex she attracts dreams to her willy-nilly.) There is also no question, in the comic book, that the Corinthian would kill Rose if he could. These subtle changes alter the complexion of the story.

One of my favourite issues of the Sandman is "The Collectors", the issue set at a convention of serial killers. Again the TV series gets it wrong. This issue of the comic is dark and menacing whereas the episode is, as one reviewer put it, twee. One reason for this, as I've mentioned, is the medium: the comic was able to create a frightening atmosphere, an atmosphere evoked by the illustrations, that the brightly lit convention centre in the TV episode couldn't replicate. Another reason is the fact that we're in 2022 and the original comic book would have been released in 1990: back then serial killers were a fixture of the collective imagination whereas today and for many years, we never hear about serial killers. The archetype of the serial killer was salient then as it isn't today. This is why Gilbert says, in the TV series, that the Corinthian has created a cult-like following; in the original comic the Corinthian is just one serial killer among many, although an especially respected one. In the comic, the various serial killers ask each other, "What's your score?" and receive answers like, "Forty-two". This is absent from the TV episode, as far as I can recall. Other moments in the episode also fall flat, such as the monologue by the serial killer explaining how he found his vocation. In the comic, this serial killer is a young man with whom we can identify, creating an uncomfortable feeling of sympathy with a monster. In the episode, the performance is such that we regard him as just a fucked up individual; the scene feels unnecessary, tacked on. In the comic, Gilbert tells Rose the original version of the Red Riding Hood story, which deepens the menacing atmosphere: I wish they had left this scene in. Also, in the comic Funland, after he tries to attack Rose, I believe, is rendered unconscious by Morpheus and given a dream by Morpheus that directly quotes "The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde. In the episode, Funland is killed by the Corinthian. I wish that Stephen Fry, who plays Gilbert, had pushed for the original version. It is well known that Oscar Wilde is a pivotal figure in Fry's life.

Perhaps the most important way in which the adaptation fails is in its presentation of dreams. In The Dolls' House, in I think the final issue, we are shown the dreams of the various residents of the house in which Rose is living. Each dream is stylistically very different from the others and each dream is also very different from the dreamer's real life. For instance, we have the couple Barbie and Ken who are so simpatico in real life that they can finish each other's sentences. Ken's dream is a maelstrom of sex, money and power whereas, in Barbie's dream, she is a princess in a magical land embarked upon a quest. As Rose's influence expands, the barriers break down between the different dreams, leading to havoc. All of this is much easer to represent though comic book illustrations than through a live-action drama. This is not to say that the makers of the TV series didn't try: the depiction of Barbie's dream contain a CGI version of the creature Martin Ten-Bones that is very similar to the way it was drawn in the comic. But, on a whole, this portion of the TV series fails and this is simply the result of the difficulty in translating a story from one medium to another. Even if Netflix had thrown a lot more money into the production, they couldn't have represented Ken's dream on a TV screen.

There are two other ways in which the adaption fails: it often lacks the surprise factor of the original comic and often lacks the humour of the original comic. To take two examples – in the original comic, it comes as a surprise when we find out that the Sandman has to kill Rose. In the TV series, this is well telegraphed in advance. Similarly, in the comic, we don't find out that Gilbert is Fiddler's Green until the final issue when Rose is in the Dreaming. In the TV series, Gilbert voluntarily returns to the Dreaming to tell Morpheus about the Corinthian before then. Surprise is an important rhetorical device in story telling and Gaiman, who is a master of story telling and was involved in the production, should have remembered this, the devices that made the original work so original and compelling. Additionally the TV adaption lacks the black comedy of the original. In "The Collectors" there is a scene in which a panel of female serial killers discuss the politics of women who have their particular pastime. I can't remember this bit exactly and so will make up something roughly approximate to the original. A female serial killer with a name like Nightjay says, "I'm sick of women in our profession being typecast as either black widows or killer nurses." Sitting to her left is a woman who is quite clearly a black widow and, to her right, a woman who is quite clearly a killer nurse. This little scene is at once a Feminist statement and a satire on Feminism and is quite funny. In the TV episode, however, this scene becomes a woman giving a short diatribe on Feminism that could come directly out of an essay by a first-year student of Women's Studies, a spiel that has, in my view, no relation to where women are at today, at least in the Western world. The satire is excised.

In this essay I have been quite critical of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. However it is still very good in many ways and I shall watch future seasons– I have been critical of it mainly because it doesn't measure up to the original. Of course, no TV adaptation could match the comic books which were masterpieces. 

I shall now summarise what I have said so far. There are three major weaknesses in the adaptation when compared to the original. First, it often does not go far enough in the horror direction, particularly in its depiction of Dream and in the episode "The Collectors". Second, a TV series simply cannot capture the striking visuals of a comic book or its method of story telling, unless it has Peter Jackson's budget. The Sandman was a groundbreaking work that pushed the boundaries of what comic books could do and no pretty-much live action TV series could reproduce the original. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the creators of the TV series have made narrative and dramatic decisions based on cliches and conventions of TV drama, cliches and conventions I presume they think will make the work more appealing and easily digestible for the 'average' viewer. One example is their decision to iron out the problematic aspects of Dream's personality. Another is their decision to give the Corinthian the motivation of wanting to destroy Dream. I'll give one last example of this, an example that really bothered me at the time. In the comic, Rose is walking home and is suddenly beset by a group of men; Gilbert appears and saves her. This is the first time we meet Gilbert. In the TV adaptation, when she is attacked, Rose successfully fights off a number of the men with Gilbert's assistance and Steven Fry says something like, "It seems you didn't need my help!" The implication is that Rose is a feisty independent self-sufficient women who can single-handedly fight off a number of men much bigger than she is; a further implication is that audiences wouldn't identify with Rose unless she was capable of single-handedly fighting off a group of men much bigger than she is. But for me, the TV version of the scene simply didn't ring true, the original was better. For one thing, it said something important about Gilbert. I don't know whether the creators of the TV series are condescending to their audience or if they simply don't know how to tell a good story. This is all the more perplexing when we remember that Gaiman himself was involved in the production.

I'll turn now to another aspect of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman – its politics. Much has been made of the fact that a number of black actors have been cast to play characters who were white in the original comic. A number of characters who were male in the original are played by females in the TV series. And, although the original comic already contained a lot of gay and transexual characters, the TV show has upped the ante by, for instance, making the Corinthian gay; the Corinthian's sexuality never comes up in the comic book. I'll discuss the issue of race first. When I was watching the TV series, the first character I noticed who'd had her race changed was Unity Kinkaid. The second was Lucien. In the original Lucien was a very tall white man. In the adaptation Lucien is a black woman shorter than Morpheus. When I watched the scene in which Lucien was introduced, I thought, "They'll probably make Death black as well." Sure enough, in the episode "The Sound of Her Wings" in which they introduce Death, she was played by Kirby-Howell Baptiste. Baptiste is a fine actor and, when I watched this episode, an episode partly based on perhaps the single most important issue in the whole run, I just accepted it because I knew that it was inevitable that changes would be made, that the TV series couldn't be completely faithful to the original. But then, lying in bed the night after I watched it, I asked myself, "Does it bother me that they made Death black? And, if so, does that make me racist?" And then I decided, "No". The character Death, like the character Delirium, really appealed to me when I was a teenager, and it was not because she was white but because she was a foxy teenage Goth girl in a black t-shirt with an ankh around her neck. I guess, when I heard that they were finally adapting The Sandman for TV, I worried that the adaption would replace or spoil the original. But even though the TV version is different I believe now that the original is untouched.

The casting of black actors to play characters who were originally white in The Sandman touches on a wider issue. Race swapping, casting black actors to play characters we would expect to be white, is common these days – examples of shows that do this include Bridgerton and Hamilton. However, there seems to be a tension in our culture today, a conflict between two different ways of looking at race. I enjoy watching Roy Wood Jr and one of the subjects he often tackles is the nature of black identity. Identity politics is very important these days and it seems to me that many black people are strongly attached to their black identities. The prominence of identity politics in modern Hollywood was tackled by Bill Maher a fortnight ago: in his piece, he talks about how actors now feel that they must 'stay in their lanes', that is, gay characters should be played by gay actors, transgender characters should be played by transgender actors, black characters should be played by black actors, latino characters should be played by latino actors, and so on. All this raises the question: is race (and more generally group identity) unimportant now as The Sandman adaptation seems to suggest? Or is race and group identity everything? It is this issue that Paul Beatty tackled in The Sellout. It seems that the only way we can attempt to reconcile the colour-blind ethics of a show like The Sandman and identity politics is to have a world in which it is acceptable and even encouraged for black actors to play white characters and unacceptable and even racist for white characters to play black characters. In film and other fictions, a kind of reverse-racism would be at work. (In arguing this way, I am aware that I sound like Douglas Murray.) For instance, a film like Tropic Thunder, released as recently as 2008, a film in which Robert Downey Jr dyes his skin so he can more realistically play a black man, would be unacceptable today, even though this was intended to be comedic.

The issue of gender is very important both to the original comic and to the adaptation. I have little to say about the gender swapping in the TV series. The substitution of Joanna Constantine for John Constantine does not bother me much: he only appeared in one issue right near the beginning. Gwendoline Christie, who plays Lucifer, is a fine actor but bears little resemblance to the character Lucifer in the comics, either in appearance or behaviour. Apparently Gaiman has said that he imagined Lucifer as resembling David Bowie but, in the comics, Lucifer is definitely a man and might have stepped out of a Renaissance era Italian fresco. Other fans of the comic may have more articulate criticisms of the portrayal of Lucifer in the comics and TV show but all I want to say here is that, once again, the comic was better.

I turn now to the issue of homosexuality and transsexuality. Although the comics often feature gay and trans people, the series, as I said, ups the ante. I want to start this discussion by considering the dream Hal, Rose's gay drag-performing landlord, a character in both the comic and TV series, has toward the end of The Dolls' House. Once again, I do not remember these couple of frames exactly and so shall provide an approximation. In the comic book Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ rips off her face to reveal a man; this man then rips of his face to reveal the Wicked Witch of the West; the Witch then rips of her face to reveal Dorothy again. At the end of this brief sequence, Dorothy asks Hal if he can hold some of the faces for her because she is running out of hands. This nightmare can be interpreted as concerning a crisis or disintegration of personal identity, or, perhaps more accurately, as being a nightmare about the impossibility of maintaining multiple personalities simultaneously or concurrently. I suspect Gaiman and the artists who co-created the work in 1990 saw homosexuality and transsexuality in terms of a split or schism in personal identity; they did not as we do today regard the homosexual or transsexual identity as something complete and unified in its own right and as being present from birth. The short scene in the TV episode plays out rather differently. Hal, as a drag queen, rips off his face to reveal Hal as he normally is, and then rips off his face again to reveal his bones and subcutaneous tissue. Perhaps we could interpret the scene as also concerning the nature of personal identity but, if this is what the creators intended, they are far from successful  – this scene seems rather to be a generic, cliched, and ultimately unsuccessful stab at the macabre. Another obvious difference between the comic and TV show versions of this scene is that the former references The Wizard of Oz while the latter does not.  In the same way that in 1990 serial killers were a fixture in the popular imagination but no longer are today, in 1990 gay men were all stereotypically supposed to love The Wizard of Oz but no longer are today in 2022. This discussion leads to two provisional conclusions. First The Sandman deals in stereotypes, archetypes, myths, and tropes found in the collective imagination or unconscious and some of these stereotypes and tropes, particularly those surrounding homosexuality and transsexuality, have changed dramatically in the last thirty years. The TV series finds nothing adequate to replace them with. Second, for Gaiman, homosexuality and transsexuality present a problem, a problem requiring a solution.

We now must deal with one of the greatest ambiguities in The Sandman, its general attitude towards gender and sexuality. Gaiman is certainly not a male chauvinist, nor does he believe in the idea of gender complementarity, but there is a feeling in the comic that the men are men and the women women. The Sandman in part deals with archetypes of masculinity and femininity; characters who are ambiguous in gender or sexuality often tend to be coded as either villains or victims. The obvious example of this is Dream's transsexual sister Desire who is constantly conspiring to destroy Dream. I have discussed this aspect of The Sandman before, in 2017, in the posts "A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman" and in three posts interpreting the collection "A Game of You", each interpretation being better than the last. In "A Game of You" Gaiman seems to be suggesting that the foundations of sexual and gender identity are laid during childhood through the stories we tell ourselves; because in the world of The Sandman dreams and stories are as real as the waking world, this is an idea that Gaiman at once presents and rejects. One of the foundational ambiguities in this collection is the apparent opposition between fantasy and reality. Another concerns politics. In the end, as I argued in those posts, the conservative right-wing ideology prevails – and this is what makes the story a tragedy. Gaiman's message in this collection seems to be that homosexuality and transsexuality are not innate or congenital and because of this he received some pushback from his LGBT and progressive fans – this is why, I think, in the later collection "The Time of Your Life", a collection starring Death, Gaiman has the character Foxglove, a successful pop star who is keeping her homosexuality secret from the public, say, "I'm a dyke. I've always been a dyke." Nevertheless, if "The Sound of Her Wings" should be regarded as the single most important issue in the whole run, "A Game of You" should be regarded as the most important storyline, a story that should be read and studied even by those who are not inclined to read the other collections. It is precisely Gaiman's ambivalence towards homosexuality and transsexuality that makes the comic, at least for me, so invaluable.

Is this ambivalence retained in the TV adaptation? I'm not sure. My feeling is that the TV show has gone Woke on this issue as it has on race. But it would be impossible today, in 2022, for a TV show to present homosexuality and transsexuality in the way Gaiman and his artists did in the 'nineties. With respect to this thematic, as with other thematics, the TV adaptation seems to vitiate the original, to take something subtle, evocative, and occasionally profound, and sap it of its complexity. This is not to say that the TV adaptation does not have its merits but, as I said above, it does not touch the original.

In the introduction to this post, I said that the various parts of this post might not cohere. There is though a possible common thread. People may wonder if there is a connection between my love of The Sandman when I was a teenager and my becoming 'mentally ill' at the age of twenty-seven. When I was young I knew adults who thought playing too much Dungeons and Dragons would cause kids to go nuts and kill people. Obviously this is ridiculous. But the reader may wonder if the recurring theme of homosexuality in the comic book may have partly led to me later deciding that the world was full of closet homosexuals. However I believe that my stumbling upon The Sandman when I was about fifteen helped me. David Foster Wallace once said that "Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable," although he may not have been the first to say this. Perhaps I wasn't disturbed but neither was I happy. The Sandman has always been one of the truly positive things in my life.