Saturday, March 24, 2007
ELDERLY MAN DEPLOYS MUESLI METAPHOR
The Age’s Michael Leunig gets all high and mighty about Iraq:
[T]he rape of Iraq: the most abominable public tragedy and collective moral nightmare I have felt in my lifetime; an atrocity of such fiendish cowardice and cruelty, and of such gargantuan destructive idiocy, in which my dear country and various of my colleagues had been complicit.
Remember, this is the same guy who urged us to pray for Osama following 9/11. Mike apparently wasn’t aware of that day’s “fiendish cowardice and cruelty”. It’s a short step for Leunig to move from profound thoughts on Iraq to deep musings about violins and muesli:
My dear friend Richard Tognetti appeared before me recently one sunny morning by the water in Sydney, his shirt awry, a bag of muesli in one hand and a Del Gesu violin valued at $10 million in the other.
“What do you hear?” he said a little later as he lifted this small, ancient assembly of wood and catgut to offer me a tender moment from the Sibelius violin concerto. When finished, he repeated the question with a child’s face of intense curiosity.
“What do you hear?”
Spellbound, thoughtless and still resonating, I at once proclaimed, “It’s exquisitely primal ... and raw in the divine sense. I felt it more than I heard it - it’s utterly truthful. It’s like muesli!”
“That’s it,” cried Richard excitedly. “You’ve got it!”
This is beyond parody.