By Roger Childs
The Stuffer papers have many flaws which Waikanae Watch often points out, but they do have one gem with Joe Bennett’s weekly column. Joe lives in Lyttelton and has been a writer and journalist for decades. His wit, wisdom and humour is currently on display each week as he reflects on a topical issue.
Last week his subject was the current president of the United States although he is never named in the article.
He’s an old man who lives in fear of being found out.
‘A psychopathic black hole of vanity and delusion’
His article was interspersed with appropriate verses from W.H. Auden’s poem As I Walked Out One Evening, Joe looked at the POTUS’s
- hundred thousand dollar teeth – teenager bright …gleaming in the mouth of an octogenarian
- hair – a strong wind lifts the woven thatch to reveal the bald truth
- The skin on his face – he slathers it in in heavy-duty bronzer, something close to paint
Joe observes it’s all an attempt to suggest rude health and youth. Auden sums up the reality.
But all the bells of the city
Began to whirr and chime
‘Let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.’
Joe has a two word answer: They don’t. His words bear precisely the same relationship to meaning as his hair does to actual hair, his teeth to actual teeth, his skin colour to the colour of his skin. Bennett further observes that although he speaks with conviction, the words are a mask and have no sequential thought or reasoning. One thing that is true is that behind his words is a seething pit of appetites and grievances.
The words will keep changing and will continue to reconfigure reality to a shape that suits him. Fundamentally he’s in desperate need of praise and validation for the talents he knows he does not have.
Joe Bennett has tons of literary talent and long may it feature in Legacy Media papers.