I SEE that Dick Morris, the White House adviser who fell from grace after masterminding President Clinton's re election campaign, has been comparing himself to the characters of Greek tragedy.
Dick was sacked as Clinton's chief political strategist last August when, as a result of what he called the "sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism", his year long relationship with a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands, came to light.
Incidentally, Dick said at the time that he would not "dignify the accusations" with a reply. He has now signed a $2.8m contract with Random House to write a book about them. Well actually, about his part in the political campaign, but no doubt the tale of his downfall will be included, too.
Anyway, Dick thinks every man who turns 40 should read the Greek tragedies: "They all have within them the same idea - the thing that may have helped you move up then destroys you. I'm a living example of that."
It is a harmless if commonplace consolation for disgraced person ages to imagine their lives are reflected in Greek, tragedy, but, quite often there are many more similarities to be found in Greek comedy. This is certainly the case with Dick Morris.
For a start, Dick is prone to the sort of portentous declaration which in the heyday of Aristophanes instantly revealed to the audience a pompous self deluding fool. "While I served", Dick informed us in his farewell peroration, "I sought to avoid the limelight because I did not want to become the message. Now I resign so that I will not become the issue."
Similarly, the scene wherein Dick allowed the gorgeous Ms Rowland to listen in to one of his phone calls to Bill Clinton is interchangeable with almost any of the burlesque and licentious scenes satirising self importance in Aristophanes' Frogs or Clouds.
I look forward to Dick's book. Who knows when it comes to the tale of Dick, Bill and the sadistic journalist, it may well feature a scene similar to that in Aristophanes' Knights, wherein Cleon, depicted as the favourite slave of the stupid and irascible Demos, is finally ousted from his position of influence by Agoracritus, a sausage seller who is even more of scoundrel than Cleon.
. There was a complaint in our letters page (there usually is) the other day regarding the Pretty Polly tights advertisement on Dublin poster sites. The writer found the posters very disturbing and frighteningly sexist and asks: "Is [a] woman simply to be seen as a pair of legs? Has she no other attributes?"
No one else has replied at the point of writing, so as usual the task falls by default to myself.
(I have to say that) I do not find these posters disturbing, though they are certainly striking and may well constitute a traffic hazard in the manner of certain recent lingerie advertisements. Nor do I find them in the least sexist.
When I see the poster in question, I do not see merely a pair of legs. I see, or visualise, the rest of the model, and every time she is different. Depending on the time or day or night I come across the poster, and what humour I am in, I assign all kinds of attributes to the woman in question, though I have no idea who she is.
Clearly she has excellent legs, but she may well be otherwise plain, perhaps a petite home loving non super model, an inframodel for all I know, though maybe with an outstanding IQ and a close knit family and a passion for reading Catullus in bed.
That is the power of clever advertising and I am always impressed by it.
Right now I have in front of me (to one side, actually) the latest issue of the TV Times. On the back is an advertisement for "The Chickenest Casserole" to be made with Campbells' Soup. The picture shows a pot of chicken thighs immersed in soup.
Now, somebody may well ask if (a) chicken is simply to be seen as a pair of thighs, but it will not be me. Just as with the Pretty Polly legs poster, I am well aware that chickens have other attributes, but I do not see the need for an entire chicken to be pictured in order to visualise chickenness in all its diversity. Hosiery advertisements cry out for legs, and this particular chicken casserole recipe for thighs, so legs and thighs it will have to be.
There is no reason at all why synecdoche, the suggestion of the whole by the part (or vice versa), should be confined to the spoken or written language: it has visual applications, too.