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Sports stars should prove they are not airheads
BOO hiss. My plea to return the Olympics to their original state of glorious, proud, ratings-boosting nudity has fallen on deaf ears. But there is another aspect of the ancient games worth reviving: the competition for the position "champion of rhetoric" - which is Greek for "smartypants."
In the old days, competitors had to be incredibly brainy. The Greeks had no respect for people who had great physical accomplishments but were idiots. Compare that to today, when people who are physically beautiful but obviously airheaded (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, the present writer) are undeservedly celebrated.
You may not know exactly what spouting rhetoric entails, but most people have heard the term "rhetorical question." Well, that can be defined as a question asked by someone who is so intelligent that he asks the question not because he seeks an answer but because he has a condition which makes him physically incapable of shutting up at any time of night or day. Here's an example.
TVvo nights ago, I said, "What time is it?" and my wife answered: "Two am, go to sleep, cretin."
But last night I asked, "What time is it?" rhetorically (as indicated by a certain intellectual tone in my voice), and she replied "TWo am, go to sleep, cretin, and stop talking in that dorky voice."
A more correct response would have been reflective silence. Most of my co-workers ignore everything I say, so clearly some people recognize that I often employ classical Greek speaking techniques.
Rhetorical speeches have the wonderful advantage of not needing an audience. One can do them by oneself miles from anyone else -- indeed, many
people have enthusiastically recommended that that's exactly where I should do them.
We should have scheduled this for the Beijing Olympics. Asia has always been the place where people have recognized that brain, not brawn, is the most important tool of a person of action. This is the lesson taught by many Asian classics such as the Vedas, the Buddhist scriptures and The Karate Kid.
Anyway, I am not just speculating idly here. The Times of London gave British poet Fanny Walker a whole page last week in which she made an impassioned plea that performance poetry be included in the 2012 London Olympic Games as the nearest equivalent to Greek rhetoric.
"Glorious, tall, lithe, muscled athletes standing on the podium next to greasy four-eyed alcoholics with pot bellies. For the mental picture alone, it's an idea worth getting behind," she wrote.
So how are we going to do it? I propose that the 2008 Beijing Olympics Intellectual Sports Division starts here and now. Send me your finest poems, one-liners, or other displays of worldclass intellectual prowess, and I will print the best of them in this space.
This will have significant and far-reaching results. First, we will demonstrate to the world that being a world-class athlete is not necessarily better than being a typically over-educated Asian wimp. Second, it will fill up this column faster so I can go home to engage in other key intellectual activities such as going to sleep on the sofa.
But most of all, it gives Asians the chance of doing what they do best: we may be puny nerds but we do the whole puny nerd thing so damn well we should be recognized for it.