HAIL COLUMBIA!

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 25, 21 February 1920, Page 2

HAIL COLUMBIA!

And the Amateur Eagles.

YOU can calculate that the United States won the war. You can guess that she is about to build a navy that will etarnally pulverise any goldarned collection of floating ironmongery that ever churned the sea—but you sure do not know why Noo Zilland should be Americanised. *. * • There have lately descended on this hunk of lava plenty of people with their jaws hung on ball-bear-ins, chattering to us in a variation of the English language. There is no reason why we should listen to a travesty of the English language; or why British subjects should abase themselves before the screaming eagle; or any just cause why our innocent youngsters should be stimulated to applaud the Stars and Stripes on a picture screen. * * * The United States is showing distinct Germanic enmity to "the fool Britisher," and there isn't .any reason under heaven why Britain in general and New Zealand in particular should bow the knee to Washington. * * * Every New Zealand newspaper office has bales of American trade propaganda, but never a line of British trade propaganda. As far as Mr. J. Bull is concerned it "is not done." New Zealand children are taken in shoals to see American "pictures." May one analyse American pictures? The leading type is of the uniquitous millionaire criminal maniac. That is the prevailing type of picture in New Zealand today. Another type is the excessively sensational crime drama (always phallic). Another type preposterously assumes superhuman characteristics in every American person, and teaches New Zealand children to talk the execrable- travesty of English, which decent Americans do NOT speak. The dreadful pictures fed to New Zealand children by , American propagandists would be howled off the screen in Boston. ' m * * Here conies along an Australian organisation which feeds to an Auckland audience sordid stage tales of American sin. What do we want to know about American social problems,, or criminal assaults, or murdering gunmen? We don't want to "guess" or "calculate," or to be anything but British citizens of a British country- We don't even want to hear naval patter in New Zealand music halls. * * * It doesn't matter to us what's happening in the "Bowery" or the underworld of "N. Yark," or in "Millionaire Row," or in "SingSing," but it matters a whole heap what is happening to John Bull, who is silent as to propaganda, and still knows his job quite as efficiently as our dear but exceedingly vocative creditor, Uncle Sam. It seems

almost impossible that the whole people of the United States can scream in unison about themselves, but they appear united in their endeavour to proselytise New Zealarid.

The point for New Zealand to take is that America is antagonistic —gravely antagonistic—to the people who colonised America, and won it for hybrid millionaires. And if one could see into the hearts of New Zealand people one would find that there will ultimately be no place here for the kind of mental dope Uncle Sam serves out to our simple selves in nauseous doses.