Warning: this article has instances of deliberate bad spelling
First, a warning. Just as ABC television news readers reel off a warning to Indigenous viewers that the impending report contains images of now-deceased Indigenous people, and as almost all TV news services sound an alert of “graphic scenes” when reporting murders or road carnage of an especially bloody nature, your socially concerned correspondent raises the
red flag.
Beware! In this post the dauntless old Curmudgeon intends to write about Boris Johnson, Boris Yeltsin, Donald Trump, Israel Folau , Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano and Cecily Black.
You might wonder how anyone could link these personalities together in one report, even in a report written by one who is known in his dotage to meander. Your trepidation will only intensify when I tell you the subject for today’s sermon is Greatness.
No, we won’t start with the obvious; we’ll leave Ali floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee for the moment. His time will come.
Let’s kick off with Cecily Black. Cecily is a dear friend who in her very productive time on Earth has turned her hand to many tasks, among them art, as both brush woman and model, lollipop lady (guarding kids from menacing traffic as they come and go to school), seniors’ long-distance ocean swimming in competition with such notables as Murray Rose, invigilating (supervising people at exams), electoral officer (supervising voters at polling booths),
dog-minding (minding dogs) … She is a wise woman, a woman for all seasons. And she sometimes goes public with one of her many insights into human behaviour.
The crown of Cecily’s wisdom that we treasure most is her decision to turn Boris — the name Boris — into an intransitive verb without capitalisation. Cecily held that Boris Yeltsin, the Russian leader of years gone by, was so pissed, so publicly, so often and so shamelessly that his moniker would describe the inebriate’s behaviour more colourfully than commonly used words such as shickered, wasted, full, blotto, and many others. It was much more stylish, she said, for a person to announce, red-eyed and stumbling
next morning, “I was a bit borised last night” than to declare “I was drunk
as a skunk.”
I know that Cecily has initiated other advances in the English language and would be happy to recount them; alas, I’m too borised at the moment to bring them to mind.
And I realise that some smartarse will chip in now, asking what all this borising has to do with greatness. That is the whole point of the exercise. Boris the Benevolent was great in the negative sense. He was a happy boriser and that disposition saved the world from a heap of trouble. Boris the bloke was so busy getting merrily borised that he didn’t have time for pressing the launch button on his nuclear arsenal. And I think Cecily has been great in recognising that he borised his way to great mediocrity.
So, onward and downward. One Boris leads naturally to the other prominent Boris, and we’ll drink to that without labouring the Yeltsin connection.
Boris Johnson is a worry. Any man who speaks seriously and unprompted of greatness needs to be watched very, very carefully.
Friends and enemies in Britain have spent the past week trying to fit a handle to Johnson, now that he has claimed the keys to No 10 Downing Street and announced that he plans to make Britain the greatest place on Earth — “the greatest place to be, the greatest place to live, to raise a family, the greatest place to send your kids to school, the greatest place to breathe clean air”.
His prognostication has been greeted with limited joy in Britain and abroad.
“Even as a first-year student at Balliol College, Oxford, aged 18, he was weirdly conspicuous,” wrote Lloyd Evans in The Spectator: “The ruddy jowls, the stooped bullish stance, the booming Duke of Wellington voice and the freakish white bob crowning his head like a heavenly spotlight. He was always one to watch.
“It’s curious that most of the British public believe they know Boris already. Many probably think of him as a brash, self-centred wag who dominates every conversation with a string of anecdotes and routines — like an albino Oscar Wilde. Not at all. He’s modest and even shy at the dinner table. He restricts himself to his immediate neighbours and he never turns a social event into a solo performance. He’s a great listener.”
A double-bleep on Curmudgeon’s personal anti-bullshit device sounds when he is confronted by this type of over-the-top approval. The person writing this gush is a working journalist, we tell ourselves. Could it be possible it’s a softener to grease up the new PM?
Evans goes on to say that the new PM’s predilection for pranks, jokes and inventive ideas — “wheezes”, as he calls them — might give him a crucial advantage in Brexit negotiations with the Europeans.
Oh yeah, like being able to play the fiddle might help in a confrontation with
a saltwater croc.
The Pommy writer wound up the hagiography with: “Most of the people
who loathe him have never met him. Everyone who enters his orbit finds themselves smitten by his curious, cat-like, giggling presence. He likes
people. And people like him back. In that respect he’s more of a Reagan than
a Trump.”
That’s Trump; now let’s see, that’s Boris Johnson, Boris Yeltsin, Donald Trump and Cecily Black accounted for. We could close it out now with a mention of the two great boxers, but hold on a bit. The Trump-Johnson relationship is crucial to the health and security of the world; we should dig a little deeper.
Childe Donald, who makes no bones about wanting to dominate the world, rushed in with a plan for a trade deal with Britain immediately after Johnson’s moving into No 10. Here’s some gratuitous advice for the new Prime Minister: Boris, you’d havetabe borised, borised up to the eyeballs, if you even consider considering any deal with Trump.
The Tory path to bigger breasts
Another view of the man: “He greets old friends by speaking to them in Latin; he used to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets as a student; his high intelligence elevates and, indeed, isolates him from the struggles of mere mortals; he lives by Homeric codes and inhabits a pagan world of fickle gods; he has few close friends; he is the first classicist intellectual to become prime minister since Gladstone; he married the most beautiful girl at Oxford.” And so it goes on
His critics cannot deny he beat the odds by serving two terms as London’s mayor, the only Conservative ever to win in Britain’s capital. London successfully hosted the 2012 Olympics while he was in charge.
He flirts with misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia, apparently with impunity. He has called gay men “tank-topped bumboys” — a barb that Israel Folau, the Australian Rugby star and religious zealot, might tell him would get him thrown off the team, any team, if he lived in Australia. Boris has also described women wearing the burqa as letterboxes and has impishly claimed “voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts”.
Undoubtedly, Israel, in his role as earth-bound keeper of the pearly gates, would stamp the burqa comments offensive and bundle Boris up with gays and drunks for a long time in the fiery dead letter office. Curmudgeon is not in the position to comment on Boris’s method of breast enhancement or Israel’s likely response to it.
Also, we are loath to pour scorn on Boris Johnson. He often sounds like any other Tory twerp. Yet he is also in the great tradition of English eccentrics — sadly a dying breed in this technological age. English rapper Stormzy led the crowd in chanting “Fuck Boris” during his headline set at the Glastonbury festival in June. Johnson sounded like a run-of-mill politician when he claimed the performer was actually singing “Back Boris”. He can’t explain why T-shirts carrying the “F” version are selling like hot cakes.
Lara Spirit, co-president of Our Future Our Choice, an organisation of young Britons, says: “This is a prime minister whose cause is neither Brexit nor Britain. It’s Boris.”
Oh yes, who was the greatest? Was Muhammad Ali really what he claimed to be? Like everything, it depends how you frame the question. Curmudgeon believes Rocky Marciano would have done him in the ring. Yes, we know Rocky was a light-heavy fighting in a division above his weight. But he had 52 fights, he won 52 times. He was a brawler. He was frequently trailing on points towards the end when he’d nail his opponent with that murderous right hand.
But Ali was more than a boxer. In the ring he did float like a butterfly; and he stung more like a hornet than a bee. He was a great human being who stood up for what he believed in and suffered because of it. He was the greatest.
