arleeshar's picture
Fri, 14/09/2007 - 10:43am — arleeshar

Never ever try to tell me that The Greens are light on real solutions.

Apparently, last Sunday while the rest of us were at church or passed out on a sticky floor or what have you, intrepid Greens MLC Ian Cohen was hard at work delivering a cryptic yet potent message via the medium of surfboard.

In an action directed at APEC spouses to withhold sex until their husbands stop all war and commit to binding greenhouse targets, Ian Cohen MLC paddled amongst jet skiing police and a 5 foot break today at Bondi Beach to reveal a novel but historically proven message…

In keeping with the universal concept of survival - ‘Make Love Not War’ - Ian Cohen painted one word onto his surfboard and paddled through the waves.
Spouses of APEC heads of state lunching at the Icebergs were invited to consider this simple but potent word, displayed by Ian from the water:

‘LYSISTRATA’

Let us pause for a moment here to consider the strange sight of hairy Ian Cohen flashing his surfboard bravely from among the peaking waves while surrounded by pasty be-wetsuited cops, giving the lunching spouses pause in a discussion of the size of their partners’ warheads.

Thinking it through, though, I wonder how many of the APEC spouses are classically educated in the British tradition? Many of the APEC spouses had neither Classical Greek nor English as their first language, so this would seem to me to be a little far-fetched, but I shouldn’t like to rule it out. Difficult then to know whether the message would have got across even if one was able to read a surfboard from a distance of 100 metres.

I would like to point out, however, that Lysistrata is an oft-cited source for academic discussions about women’s grooming customs in ancient Greece, most particularly the singing off of pubic hair by sitting on a brazier containing hot coals. As such, were the spouses to be a) classically educated, b) looking out the window, and c) posessed of superhuman eyesight, they may find it a confusing message.