His successful lobbying that a committee recognise his right to have babies, notwithstanding the fact he was sans womb, was an omen of the lunacy to come.
Then there was the The Meaning of Life (1983), the opening scene of which featured the miracle of birth. “Is it a boy or a girl”, the young mother eagerly asks. “I think it’s a bit early to start imposing roles on it, don’t you,” replies an officious obstetrician.
Talk about proto-woke, even though it was a send-up.
Now yet another old Monty Python film can be revealed as a forerunner, and this time the subject is the inanity of following a modern enchantress. Consider this excerpt:
WOMAN: Well, ‘ow did you become king then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen — strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they’d put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
The scene of a recalcitrant medieval peasant telling King Arthur a few home truths is from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
I was reminded of it this week with the announcement Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, 16, would be sailing in a yacht this August across the Atlantic to attend UN climate summits in New York and Santiago.
Greta finds a ship to bear her
Not just a yacht, mind you, an 18-metre racing yacht, Malizia II, which competed in the 2016-2017 round-the-world Vendée Globe race, and generates electricity through solar panels and underwater turbines. Thunberg had earlier despaired about her chances of travelling to the Americas, as her insistence on climate doctrinal piety precludes her from flying, as well as taking the trip by cruise ship.
Among those accompanying her are a grandson of Monaco’s late Prince Rainier III and a filmmaker.
Apart from all that it sounds like a very modest and low-key affair. At the risk of sounding impertinent I would have opted for a less boutique version of eco-activism transport to look the part, perhaps a dugout canoe or even better a papyrus reed boat.
And of course it would be churlish to point out the irony of Thunberg’s travelling on a vessel provided by a multi-millionaire property developer and her bemoaning last year “Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury” in a speech at a UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland.
Her trip is sponsored by Yacht Club de Monaco, which we can safely assume does not rely on chook raffles or a lamington run to keep the organisation afloat.
The pig-tailed soothsayer
Thunberg, who despite her obsessions is highly intelligent, knows her voyage will attract the world’s media. Multitudes of paparazzi in privately chartered helicopters, boats, and aircraft will follow her, all vying for the chance to capture the adolescent pig-tailed soothsayer fulfilling her destiny. Even King Kong on a baked beans and cabbage-eating binge could not leave a carbon footprint this big. To quote Monty Python and The Holy Grail, this palaver is a “farcical aquatic ceremony”.
The resultant excess emissions could be avoided simply by her addressing the two summits via video teleconferencing, but, hey, there is no substitute for being seen to walk on the red carpet and hobnob it with world leaders.
According to Thunberg, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, and selective mutism — although my admittedly unqualified self has not seen any evidence of the last — the year 2030 is climate’s tipping point.
“We will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it,” she says.
I suppose it would be cynical to muse that the reason for the filmmaker’s accompanying Thunberg on her journey is pursuant to a lucrative commercial arrangement, and that whoever negotiated this contract is, unlike Thunberg’s public utterances, most optimistic about humanity’s chances of survival post-2030.
An inconvenient truth, you might quip.
Greta-mania is all the rage. She has met Pope Francis, she has addressed the European Parliament and this year Time Magazine named her as one of the world’s most influential people.
Last year she was a panellist alongside UN secretary general António Guterres. At this rate she will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (she has already been nominated). All this for a girl who believes autism has given her a unique insight. “It makes me see things from outside the box,” she told BBC. “I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”
If this indulgence is unchecked, she will soon be identifying as the Norse goddess Frigg, who had the gifts of divination and wisdom.
Before Greta there was Gracie
Think back a decade to the Copenhagen climate change conference, swap Greta for Gracie, and you have another case of political leaders using children to tug our emotions. “I fear we are on the verge of letting down little Gracie and every child of the world,’’ then prime minister Kevin Rudd told 140 world leaders in 2009, referring to a letter he had received from a six-year-old Canberra schoolgirl imploring him to remain strong in the talks.
That same month the Senate rejected Rudd’s emissions trading scheme for the second time, but unfortunately for him he choked at the prospect of a double dissolution, promptly abandoning little Gracie.
Not surprisingly, the world’s media seem more focused on heralding a climate savant than evaluating the veracity of her beliefs. Thunberg’s father, Svante, an actor, is named after Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish scientist who in 1896 linked increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide with the greenhouse effect. Her mother Malena Ernman, an opera singer — make that three divas in the family — is indifferent about her daughter’s frequent absences from a much sought-after special needs school. As Paulina Neuding of Quillette wryly noted, Ernman claims the system is based on “patriarchal structures” that prioritise boys’ neuropsychiatric disorders over girls’.
As Time reported this year, Thunberg’s parents had given up meat, installed solar panels and given up flying as a result of their daughter’s incessant hectoring. “Once she realised the consequences of that lifestyle, she was easy to convince,” Thunberg noted of her mother, the journalist noting she sounded “more like a parent than a child”.
Undoubtedly Thunberg’s autism is largely responsible for her rigid beliefs and manner, but one wonders to what extent this condition has been exacerbated by a case of two parents abrogating their responsibilities to their little poppet.
This ludicrous saga brings to mind another stage production, although unlike Monty Python, it is not one associated with humour. It is The Crucible by Arthur Miller, based on the seventeenth century Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts which resulted in 19 men and women being hanged on charges of witchcraft — many through the testimony of a 12-year-old girl, Abigail Williams.
“The town’s gone wild, I think,” confides a dismayed Elizabeth Proctor to her husband as she reflects on the behaviour of a female servant. “She speak of Abigail, and I thought she were a saint, to hear her. Abigail brings the other girls into the court, and where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel. And folks are brought before them, and if they scream and howl and fall to the floor — the person’s clapped in the jail for bewitchin’ them.”
Perhaps those analogies are a bit of a stretch. After all, we no longer have Puritan control freaks obsessed with controlling our speech, beliefs and behaviour. Nor do we have neo-theocratic types yelling accusations of denialism or demands we publicly recant when we question sacred truths.
And in this age of rationalism there is no possibility of world leaders deferring to a child prophet who wields the sword of righteousness as if she were the Paris Agreement’s Joan of Arc.
How fortunate we are not to live in an era where superstition, fundamentalism, and slavish groupthink prevail.
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Remember when we used to laugh at Monty Python films, believing they were just comedy? That naive misconception was dispelled years later when we reflected on the skit of Stan in Life of Brian (1979).