Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Pregnant pause
I’ve been studying a video clip of the pregnant woman who almost fainted during a speech of president Obama. She was standing right behind him, tottering like a skittle, before Obama sensed what was going on. Not wanting her to collapse at his feet like a devotee of Guru Baba Ramdev, he turned round and patted her. As every American knows, a pat from the president is like sniffing a bottle of smelling salts. She steadied on her feet and was led away to the White House gynaecology room.
The president’s detractors are now saying that the incident was a stage-managed hoax, to make Obama look like a messianic figure whose mere presence gives ladies the vapours. I personally doubt he would need to resort to such fakery. Women were always fainting on me in my circus days – something about being spoken to by a gorilla made them weak at the knees. Obama is no gorilla, but his voice is deep and the woman was pregnant. I can’t really blame her for feeling giddy in the circumstances.
The woman has since been interviewed and denied she was a stooge or shop dummy (as many have alleged). I hope this silences the president’s accusers, because the man has enough on his plate, what with Angela Merkel accusing him of listening in on her phonecalls. She’s making a big fuss about it, but you have to wonder whether she’s secretly flattered that Obama is so interested in her private affairs. He denied it when she called him, but maybe it would have been better for German-American relations if he’d confessed.
“Angela, I admit it all,” he might have said. “I just love hearing you chatter away in your sexy Oberschwester voice, especially when you use words like Wirtschaftlichen and Strumpfhosen. How about sending me a tape of you singing in the bath?”
I hope no one will say that Frau Merkel is incapable of such emotions because she’s German. For one thing, it would be an unpleasant example of national stereotyping. For another thing, a 24-year-old student called Niklaus Knecht has proved that Germans can be as romantic as Troy Tempest, the submariner who fell in love with a mute girl with gills.
What happened to young Knecht was this: Someone stole his mobile phone and sold it to a girl living in Morocco. This girl took pictures of herself with the phone, which somehow got sent to Knecht’s mailbox. The besotted boy then announced on his Facebook page that he’d let her keep the phone if she agreed to have a date with him. The girl has yet to respond to the offer and is no doubt weighing up her options as we speak.
If I were Angela Merkel, I would give Knecht an award for proving that Germans can be as goofy and love-struck as men from Moldova and Azerbaijan. I’ve just noticed that Knecht is Swiss rather than German. What of it? With a name like Knecht he must have German ancestry, right? Let’s not get hung up over nuances.
Labels: Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Germans, love at first sight, phone-tapping, pregnancy
