Joe Bennett: Humans an infestation on the planet

We are the ones that call us homo sapiens sapiens. It's us patting ourselves on our own dumb backs, like Trump calling himself the best president ever, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

A DOG'S LIFE

Human beings. Honestly. You wouldn't keep one as a pet.

Last week it was announced, exactly as predicted, that there had been a resurgence of the coronavirus in this country. And what did people do? They went shopping. Immediately and in force they descended on the supermarkets like so many locusts.

They queued around the block to sweep the shelves of toilet rolls and rice and pasta, though half of them I guarantee had yet to get through all the toilet rolls and rice and pasta that they panic-shopped the first time.

They even panic-shopped in Christchurch where the virus wasn't and then they formed a break-off swarm and came to Lyttelton intent on cleaning out our supermarket - a small thing but our own. We saw them off, of course, with mutterings and veiled looks, but still.

By going out to shop they multiplied the risk of the very thing they dreaded, a further spread of the virus. And they did it in the sure and certain knowledge from experience just months ago that supermarkets and supply chains would not close, regardless of coronavirus, and in the even surer and more certain knowledge that the only cause of shortages of toilet roll and rice and pasta first time, the single cause, the only thing to blame, was, yes you guessed it, panic-shopping.

Ye gods. Ye gods and little fishes. And yet they call us homo sapiens sapiens, with sapiens meaning wise. Ha.

Shoppers cleaned out supermarket shelves following the announcement on August 11 that Auckland would go into lockdown alert level 3 at noon the following day, the rest of NZ on level 2. Photo / File

Except, of course, they don't call us homo sapiens sapiens. We are the ones who call us homo sapiens sapiens. It's us patting ourselves on our own dumb backs, like Trump calling himself the best president ever. Sapiens doesn't come into it. Any glimmerings of sapientia are overwhelmed by tidal waves of what the Spanish call estupidez, or sometimes tonterias.

("Ningunas tonterias," my team mates used to cry when we of the Zaragoza Veterinaria, playing in the Barcelona league in the late1970s, were hard-pressed in defence, "ningunas tonterias" meaning no dickheaderies, no silly heroics. It was a forlorn cry, of course. Tonterias were a speciality of the house, which is what made the Veterinaria such a cracking team to play for, but that is by the by.

Also by the by but interesting is the root of tonterias which, as linguists will have spotted, is tonto. In other words the Lone Ranger - white and oh so obviously sapiens - referred to his native sidekick by the affectionate name of Stupid.

Of course, had I known that as a juvenile devotee of the Lone Ranger, I wouldn't have cared in the least, having already soaked up every prejudice available in my time and place of rearing, prejudices reinforced at every opportunity and for financial gain by television and the media. (I gather, by the way, that the title Kemosabe, with which Tonto answered the Lone Ranger, translates as Soggy Shrub, but I'm not sure I believe it and anyway as far as I'm concerned that's neither of those antithetical locations here nor there. So now I choose to close assorted brackets thus.)

Where were we? Ah yes the estupidez of human beings and not keeping one as a pet. But that brings us to a paradox, one crystallised by dear old Jonathan Swift 300 years ago in a letter to the dwarfish poet Alexander Pope. "Principally," wrote Swift, "I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth."

And there you have it. This creature you wouldn't give house room to, this infestation on the planet, this festering bag of prejudice, greed and selfishness and lust, includes, among its number, specimens for whom you don't just hold a candle of affection but for whom you would quite willingly lay down your life.

My goddaughter, for example, 15 years old, unfailingly polite, able at will to call the little birds down from the trees to perch upon her fingers and peck cake-crumbs from her palm, a girl who dances like a distillate of angels and who considers me to be both better-informed and wiser than the internet or God, she is of their number.

And so is Mariel of blessed memory whom I've not seen for 40 years and who played on the wing for Veterinaria, ran like a wild gazelle, and who was kind to me and taught me Spanish songs and made me laugh.

He was at university and kept on taking extra medical papers in the hope of never having to do military service, which was still compulsory in Spain back then and where they made a point of taking lovely men like Mariel and crushing them like ants. Why? Because they could, the bastards.