Some Eloquent Anecdotes

Winston Churchill

Cary Grant, a famous romantic Hollywood actor, was at his prime in the sixties, known as a time stretch for angry and emancipated generation given to mood swings. Cary, being a man of arrogant reserve, personal magnetism and a few words, the movie journalists would seek him out for a good, breaking news copy. Approaching the actor, caught up in one of his reticent moody plays with a forbidding diffidence, an exasperated scribe ruefully asked,”Who do you think, you are? “

An unruffled Cary Grant retorted, “I know who I am but I do not know who you are!” The actor got even with the paparazzi with a devastating quick-witted riposte.

Values have changed. Now-a-days trading insult can lead to a demand for apology from either side with bursts of self-righteous indignation to outscore one another before the public eye. An ensuing altercation might even trigger coming to blows or drumming up support and mobilising for clannish warfare bringing adjoining traffic to a halt. Car bashing would be a part of the trade-mark fall-out.

Of the political exchanges and ranting, the least said, the better. The light – hearted raillery or battle of wits that used to be the hallmark of political idiom has been consigned to archives. This has been replaced by spewing of venom, wrath and rancour between politicians. The more personalised the slanderous attack against an opponent, the greater is the perverse revelry in a party camp. In terms of sleaze and obscenity, the original is invariably surpassed by the retaliatory swipe.

Charles de Gaulle

Even in non-political circles, debate is debased by mudslinging and exchange of epithets in utter bad taste, the stuff of lowly subculture, an upshot of ghettoisation, so to speak.

What a contrast this is when you recall a battle of words between giants of men. Some encounters between great leaders last in memory as insights into their legendary persona. Winston Churchill, the Wartime British Prime Minister once said to Charles de Gaulle, then in exile in England as the chief of the French resistance army, something like this , seeing his unbending nature: “I bow in and bow out ; why don't you …?” To that De Gaulle replied, “You have a country, you head a government, you have an army but I have nothing, I am too poor to bow down”.

General de Gaulle regarded himself as a man of destiny for France; he used to say,” Je suis la France”-I am France. Interestingly, he generously regarded Jean Paul –Sartre very highly. Left-leaning Satre was having trouble with a reigning government; and there was a talk of his arrest. de Gaulle intervened saying, “You cannot arrest Voltaire.”He even identified France with Sartre, an appellation he himself laid a claim to.

But he had attention to finer existential details. As president of his country once he told a close confidante,”No great man is great in the eye of his valet because the latter knew too much about the man he served.”

On a mundane level, the Titan of a French post –war leader's insightful remark is interestingly borne out when you consider how much detectives or small –time sleuths rely on domestic helper, darwan or chauffer to dig information about their master suspected of having committed a crime.

To echo Napolean, “There is one step between the sublime to the ridicule.”So, beware.

The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.