Professor Bruce of the Philosophy Department at the University of Wallamalloo (Queensland), most famous for his theories on the drinking habits of Aristotle, would have succinctly described conditions in Athens last weekend, as the games came to a close, as: ‘It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum.”
However, after the events of this week, I must hasten to point out that Prof Bruce (along with colleagues Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, and Michael) is a fiction, co-authored by John Cleese, Michael Palin et al and published by Python, Monty, some 40 years ago. There is no evidence to suggest that Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle nor that René Descartes was a drunken fart. In fact, although it was very hot in Athens last week, it is probable that most monkeys attending the Games came away with scalded, rather than boiled, bums.
Not that any South Africans would have been able to keep an eye on those simmering simians: they were all too busy phoning me.
Readers of this column might recall that last week’s offering began by mistakenly attributing Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am” to Socrates. It then went on to make a great many further mistakes. To explain them — which I have been doing all week — is to re-enter the nightmare world of German joke-telling: ze following choke is full of humour. Vonce I heff finished telling it, I vill explain it to you point by point—
Suffice it to say, a great many readers of this newspaper know their Greeks from their Frenchmen (which is more than Chinese gymnastics judges can manage, handing out a 6.3 to anything not in a red leotard). Most of those who called or e-mailed were jovial and slightly ashamed of their erudition. But some seemed genuinely disturbed.
One professor of philosophy (a real one, whose university shall go unnamed) told me that he regularly urged his students to read my column, and that they would now be sadly misinformed. One was tempted to suggest that if his students are getting their education from the sports pages of newspapers, they’ve got bigger problems than misattributions; but so earnest was his concern, so laborious his delivery, and so profound his failure to grasp irony, that an apology was hastily issued before the temptation to scream hysterically into the phone became too great to resist.
I should have been reassured by the outpouring of feedback: any society so well versed in Cartesian sound bites can only be of sound mind. But as the e-mails and telephone calls stacked up, disturbing questions began to surface.
Why, in this charitable tutorial, was no one pointing out the dwarfish deviance of Gnome Chomsky’s new name? Why had I not been made to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged unfortunates over Hamlet’s ‘solenoid”? And most disconcertingly, if these readers considered the column an honest if bombastic declaration, why was I being allowed to saunter away, like Br’er Rabbit from a briar patch, after an outpouring of racist vitriol that would make a Grand Dragon blush?
To escape the Greeks, the French, the lingering doubt that the volume of comments indicated a failure of the writer rather than his readers, I sought solace elsewhere and, like so many other refugees from the cultural maelstroms of Europe, I found it by a televised pond somewhere in the American south-east.
God bless America, and I don’t mean that facetiously. As the world’s broadcasters scrambled for space in the smoky Olympic stadium and the closing ceremony degenerated into Greek Eurovision song contest auditions, as millions of people craned for one last flicker of the muted rush that has been these games, a regional bird-dog championship wound gently to a climax.
It was a tranquil pronouncement of independence and the rights of the individual, in this case the right to guide a fat Labrador through reeds in pursuit of a rubber duck. As Nike swooped back to Olympus, Nike the bitch was having trouble spotting the last decoy, and her owner was fretting in the meadow above.
Finally, with disappointment no less intense than that of an athlete tripping on a hurdle, the man resigned himself to what the commentators called a ‘vocal go-around” and the dog sheepishly found its quarry. The man soothed her and played with her ears, but Nike couldn’t bring herself to look at anything other than her wet paws.
Looking at this calm, ignored corner of the world, one couldn’t help wondering what Descartes would have thought: I think differently, therefore I am?