I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon
I was grounded
While you filled the skies
I was dumbfounded by truths
You cut through lies
I saw the rain-dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
In the Waterboys 1985 album This is the Sea, lead singer Mike Scott imbued the track The Whole of the Moon, later a hit single, with a clear message to someone with more knowledge and perspective than himself, intimating that we don’t need to blunder around looking for spiritual riches and wisdom; they are there to be found in good time. Probably by not taking ourselves too seriously. Collaboration, trust and lightness of being was in there too.
The song was one of the anthems of our first rather penniless years on Waiheke and pops up usefully from decade to decade at moments when I need to remember to breathe – and trust the universe.
Like now. I have just spent three weeks almost full time on the water and nothing had got any better in the world at large while I was otherwise occupied.
With lavish hypocrisy and concern verging on the moronic, the New Zealand government is going in to bat for a fair deal for our (Aussie-based) banks when it comes to lending to petrol stations and coal companies. Oblivious to the significant cohorts of lost citizens who have already plunged through the cracks of society without access to a bank account, that most ubiquitous of modern-day validations.
School lunches are being kicked around again. The Cook Strait ferry debacle remains a vast fiscal hole. I once lived in Te Atatu and the prospect of women and children pinned in their own library by militant intruders in the name of free speech leaves me reeling.
Overseas, Elon Musk’s techie minions in Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are prancing around waving state secrets and a hangman’s noose for any naysayers.
Trump is now suggesting Israel should scrap the ceasefire and let all “hell break out” in Gaza where parents search for their children’s bodies beneath scorched rubble and an ethnic cleanse is executed in front of our eyes.
The future of Ukraine is likely to be short and brutal, to be decided by Trump and Putin. Europe is to be left to fend for itself and the only leader in sight in that whole, diabolically inhuman mess is Volodymyr Zelensky who is left stating the obvious – that torpid Europe needs to make strong and adequate military preparations and stop appeasing an implacable foe.
Meanwhile Trump flagrantly bullies his country’s friends and sucks up to his country’s enemies. The lessons of Munich and the Second World War might never have existed.
Some of this borders on vaudeville, probably to deflect attention from more sinister legislative mayhem.
At his inauguration, Donald Trump described his country as “history’s greatest civilisation”. Flying high over the erstwhile Gulf of Mexico aboard Air Force One, the man who fancies himself as a modern-day Napoleon – elsewhere described as the most lawless president in US history – can have his celebratory moment, although echoing the 18th century French emperor’s assertion that “he who saves his country does not violate any laws” is probably a stretch.
The essentially benign society espoused for so long by so many liberals has now been formally declared extinct by The Guardian and the sprawling federation that makes up the United States is really a “a brutally competitive, aggressively nationalistic place”, columnist Andy Beckett said last week.
“It’s taken Trump’s unfiltered presidency to finally make that obvious,” he said.
As in other democracies, socially conservative American men remain a powerful electoral force and however delusional Trump’s climate policies are in the face of a country on fire and extreme weather events in real time, any response to the crisis would require his richer voters and donors to make drastic lifestyle changes instead of enjoying all the carbon-intensive privileges of traditional American masculinity while they still can.
Given the electoral numbers, however, that’s maybe not so long, said Beckett, a historian as well as a journalist and academic. Trump did win the popular vote but only by 1.5 percentage votes and his party’s majorities in the Senate and the House are also tiny.
“If he disappoints only a small fraction of his supporters, neither majority may survive the 2026 midterm elections,” he said. “Trump may seem dizzyingly strong now. Yet soon he will be just another incumbent in an anti-incumbent world.”
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
