Pundits who were left gasping by the announcements of Colin (‘Cry me a river’) Barnett, leader of the West Australian parliamentary opposition until the recent election, would have been less surprised if they’d read the June 2004 (and, sadly, last) issue of the Okotsk Institute Journal of Research into Inexplicable Public Behaviours. On pages 721–954 of the OIJRIPB, Dr Ilyitch Blok and Professor Natasha Takl describe their uncovering of an obscure, essentially benign, but inconvenient condition they call ‘The de Lesseps Incongruence’, or dLI.
Blok and Takl suggest that dLI occurs almost exclusively in males, although they cite former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and someone they call Paulinovka Hanchik as examples of possible feminine outbreaks. Symptoms can be activated by intense anticipatory excitement (such as is associated in male vernacular with ‘being on a promise’—to translate loosely from the Russian), or by general stress, or, sometimes, as a result of cerebral surges induced by simple mathematical tasks such as addition and subtraction.
Following one or all of these symptoms, the lineaments of the condition become recognisable by the sufferer’s desire to engender and carry out massive schemes that require large-scale reorganisation of natural features or forces or socio-political relationships. So entrenched does this obsession become that it cannot apparently be mitigated by even the most logical demonstrations of its impracticality. Hence Thatcher’s Falklands War; hence Paulinovka Hanchik’s One Nation Party—if that’s the babushka they have in mind. And hence Colin Barnett’s Grand Canal in the west and his dysfunctional finances. Each scheme involves the hubristic aspiration to alter the course of events or nature or historical legacy with a minimum understanding of the forces and ramifications involved.
The career of Vicomte Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps (1805–94) is, of course, the example on which the Russian researchers have based their nomenclature. Though well launched as a successful diplomat, de Lesseps—like his 21st-century antipodean counterpart—became obsessed with great big canals. Out from the diplomatic bag would come his portable silver shovel at the first sight of an isthmus, and he’d be carving histh way acrossth it before you could say ‘Jack Robinsthon’. This worked fine in Egypt but, with the egotism characteristic of the condition to which he would give his name, de Lesseps attacked the Isthmus of Panama and brought upon himself an intensity of social, political and financial opprobrium that would only be equalled 150 years later in the strange case