DECONSTRUCTING HARRY

ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE SO, being a successful royal prince nowadays is a difficult and sometimes tricky business, requiring intelligence, savoir faire and underhand behavior. No one epitomizes this so much as our very own Prince Henry Charles Albert David Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, now known as Harry Wales, or Harry Windsor.

 

“HARRY” IS BOTH A HARD-WORKING member of what is sometimes termed the “most hard-working family in Britain” and also a Captain in the British Army, a position in which he has served in Afghanistan and through which he is responsible for the lives of many men in his regiment, all of whom are in Afghanistan at the moment, somehow managing to muddle on through without the help of their captain, who is, nevertheless, no doubt still thinking about them as he takes a well-earned holiday in our former American colonies, more lately in the rest and relaxation resort of Las Vegas.

 

OF LATE, HOWEVER, UNSCRUPULOUS people have found it to their advantage to publish some grainy, out of focus photographs of Prince Henry that they have taken on their new-fangled telephones which can also capture images.

 

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF THESE EVENTS is well-known. I perfectly understand why a gentleman of leisure would want to play billiards naked in the company of equally naked young ladies (but not snooker, which is a serious game), and I share his enjoyment of watching television naked, particularly in America, and so none of these photographs about which many people in the world of the media are so excited seem in any way offensive to me.

 

YET I CANNOT UNDERSTAND how the third in line to the throne of England could allow himself to be photographed wearing an “angry birds” hat. In case anyone finds this too unlikely to be believed, I am reproducing a photograph of this gauche behavior above. One can only hope that his grandfather has confiscated the offending headgear.

FULL BRAZILIAN

ALL MY FRIENDS WHO ARE SPORTS FANS, which amounts to about three people unless one includes football and/or betting on sports, in which case it includes all of my friends except for one, are already looking forward to the next Olympic Games, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016.

MORE SCEPTICAL PEOPLE ARE WORRIED about the fact that Brazil is sometimes known as a corrupt country run by an extremely small number of ultra-rich, mutually self-appointing politicians with a tendency towards murdering those people who cannot be bribed. Only last week we discovered that the “successful parliamentary technique" used during the period of the “Lula” da Silva administration as President of Brazil was to pay members of the opposition parties to vote for government party proposals.

YET THE FIRST SCANDAL of the next Olympic Games started even before London 2012 was over. This involves the decision to name the main stadium for the games in honour of João Havelange (pictured above), the most corrupt man in sport ever, former head of FIFA and former head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, found to have taken millions of pounds in bribes during his tenure, and – as if this were not enough – the man responsible for appointing the second most corrupt man in sport, Sepp “Bellend” Blatter, as head of FIFA, through a democratic voting process known as “centralized democracy”.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT THE RIO OLYMPICS will see the introduction of new sports, making the traditional games even more successful than ever.

THOSE NEW EVENTS IN FULL:

Complete Body Waxing – Brazil is favourite for this event, with Sónia Massagista Meu Bem tipped for the gold medal.

Police Helicopter Downing – This replaces the somewhat dull clay pigeon shooting, and is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Although other South American countries, as well as the Africans from Somalia, are now in training, Brazil looks a good bet for medals with their specialized team from the slum area of “Morro dos Macacos” (Monkey Hill) having honed their skills over recent years. (My picture shows a recent training session).

Murdering the Homeless – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo will be entering strong teams in this event, although success in training, which will involve “cleaning up the streets”, may mean there will be no need for the event during the games proper.

Dog Shooting – Again likely to be an event completed before the tourists arrive to witness the games, this involves allowing anyone who possesses an illegal firearm an amnesty as long as they shoot the rabid dogs which proliferate the streets of Brazil’s major cities.

Mixed Tourist Scamming Pentathlon – A totally new event, although partially tried out in Athens, this involves five disciplines: enticing Americans or Germans into dark alleys where they are beaten up by thugs, robbed and stripped; straightforward pickpocketing; selling fake merchandising; overpricing in restaurants; and the more spectacular taxi-driver kidnapping, the blue ribbon discipline.

Women’s Combined Robbery/Prostitution/Blackmail Triathlon – This discipline was mainly a Carnival event in the past, but will now be extended to the Olympic Games proper. This involves three stages, and Brazil is by no means the favourite, as experts exist even in the USA, in Miami and San Diego, as well as in almost every South American country. Stage one is “Spiking the Tourist’s Drink”, and there then follows “Dragging him to Your Shanty” and the final “Threatening to Phone His Wife”. Gold medals are awarded for those who convince the fattest, ugliest tourist that he is sexy and/or shake him down for most money.

Drug Smuggling (Class A) – Although not a full Olympic Event strictu sensu, this involves taking advantage of the chaos surrounding the games to shift large amounts of extremely valuable drugs to Western countries. Brazil expects fierce competition from Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and the dark horse, Guinea-Bissau.

Let the games begin.

OLYMPIC JOUSTS

NOT BEING AN ADMIRER OF MOST “OLYMPIC SPORTS”, I had decided to avoid London during the period of these events. Following the wise statements produced by H.D.F. Kitto as to what the Greeks believed was sport, I can see no reason why anything done indoors or in teams can be deemed “Olympic”. Kitto states as to the Greeks’ ideas about athletes: “It was aretê that the games were designed to test – the aretê of the whole man… The usual events were a sprint, the long race, the race in armour, the discus, the javelin, the long jump, wrestling, boxing, and chariot racing. The great event was the pentathlon. If you won this you were a man.”

THE GREEK HERO OF THE ODYSSEY, of course, was required to learn and write poetry, to build and sail a ship, to catch, kill and cook a sheep, and to cry when hearing a sad song.

KITTO MENTIONS THAT INDOOR SPORTS, such as billiards, darts and table tennis, or even some pointless outdoor ones, such as golf, would have been greatly admired by the Greeks – as entertainments for slaves to indulge in, if one had nothing better to do with them.

YET I BECAME INVOLVED IN THE CONTAGION, and given the fact that I needed to go to London to have a pair of shoes re-soled and –heeled, I took advantage of the afternoon to watch one of the sporting events. My picture shows the Great Britain 4 x 100 metres relay team trying not to drop the baton. In my view they should have won the gold medal.

FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA

AS A SOMETIME LECTURER OF GORE VIDAL’S WORKS, many of my former students and other people I do not know have written to me of late, somewhat concerned about how we should remember him now that he has finally succumbed to the death he had more or less been expecting since 2003. I wonder whether among these people are the girls in my class who, when I announced we would be studying “Duluth”, by Gore Vidal, confused him (as did Ali G) with Vidal Sassoon, or the boy who, for some obscure reason, thought I meant Roald Dahl.

MEDIA OUTLETS HAVE BEEN DEBATING what to print about the most successful and controversial American man of letters of all time, more or less choosing what to write according to whom they believe their readership/viewers might be and what they would like to read and hear.

WE THUS HAVE HEADLINES SUCH AS: “Former Senatorial candidate Gore Vidal”; “Eminent Historian Gore Vidal”; “Prolific Novelist…”; “Gay Activist…”, “President of the American Humanist Society…”; “Writer of Ben Hur…”; et caetera. My own “headlines”, as it were, would be slightly different.

GORE VIDAL MAY NOT HAVE BEEN A MARINE in the traditional sense of the term, but, if he is to be believed, he managed to have sex with several hundred of them when he was stationed in the South Pacific in the early years of World War II, “because we had nothing else to do on our aircraft carriers”, as he stated on the BBC’s Hardtalk. If we take into account that he claimed he was not a homosexual because (I am cleaning up his statement) he had never given oral or been buggered, then this means he shagged a good portion of the US Navy.

HOWEVER WHAT I REMEMBER most clearly are two statements: one he made at a conference I attended when some fool asked him his opinion of the hated lawyer and president Abraham Lincoln and one when he was asked about the threat from the Soviet Union on some occasion on TV back in the nineteen eighties.

OF LINCOLN HE SIMPLY SAID “worse than Stalin”. About the possible threat from the Soviets, he said that he had been to Moscow on many occasions and discovered that the Russians still hadn’t managed to make a bottle of Vodka on which one could put the screw-on top back successfully, and that none of the plugs fitted the holes in the washbasins in their best hotels. Thus, he deduced, he could not imagine they could have a successful nuclear programme.