Monday, October 15, 2007

Tame Iti: colourful activist pays for plays.


Now I can recall, as a student, attending Nga Tamatoa meetings with a tattoo-less 'not at all tame' Tame Iti and his Australian wife and kids ... and this prior to that infamous South African rugby tour. Talk at the time was of the indiscriminate shooting of the palangi ... and the local civil liberties groups came and commisserated with their feelings and empathised with their intended excess ... and their palangi partners and quarterised or less palangi progeny looked on, quietly acquiescing, for to do otherwise could be to 'court the bash.' And after all, in those days a blonde sheila was acclaimed as taonga, a coveted item.



Now, perhaps thirty years afar and asunder, I remain a student and my old mate Tame has been arrested as a 'potential terrorist (?)' presumably for coming out with the same stuff as he did years ago ... somewhat fatter, covered in tats, relying on the media for any continuing sense of self ... bit of a sad comic character really, well and truly knocked off his aluminium ladder by the continuing need to inflate his ego ... and quite possibly by the need of a few in positions of power to create a compelling distraction and appearance of strength.



For quite some time now Tame has been the 'illustrated, comic book, maori eunuch' ... Tuhoe, once were warriors, child of the mist? No, just a sad old isolated 'drama queen,' ripe for the pickings ... not even an olde refurbished AK47 at hand could possibly engender stature in or fear of such a decrepid figure.


Tame, With his heavily tattooed face and a tendency toward the melodramatic ...
His cv really reads a little like a 'not so long ago' deregistered barrister who constantly sought acclaim, although I think Tame lasted a little longer and tried a little Harder ... and I think Doug Graham's silence concerning 'his mate' is both resoundingly noticeable and somewhat self-preservatively weak - dis-assocaition at times like this is pretty gutless stuff.

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