Print the legend

David Farrar at Kiwiblog has been seeking to ascertain whether Michael Cullen ever actually said:-

We won, you lost, eat that.

It appears that he did not.

What he is reported as saying – Hansard 9 August 2000, Vol. 21, p 4570, by a commentator is:-

During a debate on 9 August 2000 over the repeal of the Employment Contracts Act (and its replacement with the Employment Relations Act), Cullen made the following comment:

“Eat that! You lost, we won, it [the ECA] goes! It is as simple as that!”

I suspect the later aside was a joking reference to how this earlier statement was mis-remembered (as “we won, you lost, eat that!”).

Adam thought this was rather interesting. He remembered that Cullen was a history lecturer, which caused him to wonder, as he noted in a comment at Kiwiblog:-

I suspect that he, Cullen, was channeling Hartley Shawcross

“We are the masters now.” — Hartley Shawcross

* Actual quotation: “We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time.” In a 1945 debate to repeal the Conservatives’ “Trade Disputes Act” of 1927 this followed a quotation from Through the Looking-Glass in which Humpty-Dumpty observed that the question of definitions of words depended upon who was master.

It fits with the circumstances I think, and the mis-quotation element follows beautifully.

In fact the comparison and parallel is, to Adam, so close as not to be co-incidental.

This then caused Adam to wonder whether Cullen, like many regarded as parliamentary performers, planned elements of his wit and repartee, so that apparently spontaneous one -liners were in fact conjured up in advance.

In any event as this cartoon from the NBR of 14 November illustrates, with a humourous reinterpretation of the ‘original’:-

NBR -14 November

the misquote has become the reality.

This situation thus validates the quotation from the cowboy film, Who Shot Liberty Valence, when two characters remark in respect of the fact that the Jimmy Stewart character built his career on the legend that he shot Liberty Valence, when in fact the John Wayne character did:-

Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

There we have it – Print the legend

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