Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
Say what you like about the European Parliament (no, really, say what you like), but it does shine a light on sub-sections of the continent that may not otherwise have received much attention.
This week in Strasbourg, for example, there was a workshop in which you could paint your own garden gnome in what was perhaps the best thing to have happened in the Parliament since a group of interpretive dancers helped celebrate the end of discussions on the Conference on the Future of Europe (whatever happened to that? Answers on a postcard), or that time two UKIP MEPs had a fight, presumably over who had done the least work.
The gnome-painting was part of a celebration of new EU protection of quality labels, one of which has been given to handcrafted gnomes from the German village of Gräfenroda, now officially protected as “Original Thuringian Garden Gnomes.” Alas, this column’s application for a protection of quality label was rejected on the grounds of, er, quality.
Incidentally, this writer’s favorite gnome available from the shop of the company behind the painting workshop is Johannes der “Ruhende–Holzhacker” (the resting woodcutter), who is adopting a vaguely sexual pose (are you sure about that? — ed) while smoking a pipe and holding an ax (neither of which are euphemisms). Yours for just €850.
The idea of putting small stone figures in the garden is a very old one. Ancient Romans often placed statues of Priapus, the god of fertility (who, thanks to a curse by Hera, was given a massive, er, parliamentary majority), in their gardens to protect the crops.
Gnomes can also be political. There are statues of gnomes dotted around Wrocław in Poland, a nod to the Orange Alternative, which was an anti-Soviet resistance movement and not people who don’t like Donald Trump.
Then there’s the phrase “Gnomes of Zurich,” a derogatory term used to describe Swiss bankers. It was coined in 1964 by U.K. Labour politician George Brown when a currency crisis that was hurting the British pound was blamed on Swiss banks, in a classic case of Brit-blames-Europeans-for-own-problems.
And in 2014, some 400 garden gnomes belonging to Austria’s Social Democratic Party went missing. The gnomes were being used in advertising campaigns ahead of regional elections and the finger of blame was pointed at the rival Austrian People’s Party rather than the marketing genius who thought buying hundreds of gnomes was a sound use of party funds.
One politician who has an uneasy relationship with gnomes is former British Prime Minister John Major, whose father, Tom Major-Ball, was a trapeze artist and music hall entertainer. Another part of the family business was making ornaments and urns, which led to suggestions that Major was in the gnome business, as opposed to the being dull business.
You can of course buy a gnome likeness of any politician that you like/dislike — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Valdis Dombrovskis (maybe) are all available for purchase. But in the U.S. National Archive is a very special set given to John F. Kennedy. It features JFK in gnome form along with France’s Charles de Gaulle, the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Willy Brandt. They should be put back in the White House South Lawn, after it plays host to an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, to avoid any damage.
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“Five eyes? What makes you think there’s only five?”
by Raymond Gallon
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