Our prime minister was quick to telephone president-elect Trump to congratulate The Donald on his triumph. But what if during the call our PM had quizzed Trump to find out if the president-elect had the foggiest idea where Australia is?
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"Mr President-elect which hemisphere do you think Australia lies in? The north one? No, I'm sorry sir, that's not quite correct. Close, though. Which nations do you think may be our closest neighbours? Switzerland, North Korea and Tonga? No, sir, although with Tonga you're definitely getting warm. Now can you have a go at naming our national capital? Saskatoon? No, I believe that's a city in a nation to your north. No, that nation's not Peru, Mr President-elect. I was thinking more of Canada."
Americans are famously geographically illiterate and so, even as he reportedly reassured Mr Turnbull of his deep affection for Australia it may be that Trump didn't know where his nation's most faithful, most poodle-like ally actually is. Perhaps he was confusing us with Austria, with Azerbaijan, with Asparagus, with almost everything on earth that he has heard of that begins with the letter A.
Not that geographical illiteracy is unique to Americans (although the surveys that show so many Americans unable to find Canada on a map are quite startling. As a Scandinavia geek (and only recently home from jaunts to Sweden and to Denmark) I am used to supposedly well-educated Canberrans asking me about my travels and then showing that they think Scandinavia is one single reindeer-infested country sited somewhere vaguely to the north of Belgium.
Once upon a time I would correct them but now, to save time and to respect Oscar Wilde's famous defence of ignorance ("I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone") I go along with their error. I make things up. I say we stayed in Scandinavia's capital city ABBAholm (Scandinavian for home of ABBA) where Scandinavia's monarch King Ragnar and his consort our very own Princess Mary live in a fabulous floating palace constructed in the shape of a grandly enlarged Viking warship. On the streets of ABBAholm one often meets the approachable Ragnar and Mary out riding on the backs of their pet polar bears.
"No kidding?" credulous Canberrans gasp at my holiday sagas, these Nordic fibs that leave the delicate exotic fruit of their ignorance unspoiled.
But my serious point (for this is a serious-minded column of ideas) is to wonder if the horror so many of us are feeling about Trump's election, about the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, about the UK's Trump-like Brexitness, may be a phobic fear of the ignorant and the unpolished.
Since Trump's election commentators are diagnosing that this is a wake-up call for those democracies that have been ignoring the poorly-articulated but strongly-felt feelings of the working classes. One of Australia's most discerning political analysts, Waleed Aly, is sure that the US election result shows the US divided along lines of "class". His analysis (you can hear it by podcasting the recent The Meaning of Trump episode of Radio National's The Minefield) has the ring of truth about it.
Perhaps those of us who have had our minds polished by higher education, by lifelong habits of reading and learning, have a prejudice (let us call it igoranceism) against ignorant and inarticulate people like Trump. And, too, against his devotee and adviser the Brexit architect Nigel Farage.
Farage didn't go to university, but book-learning isn't everything and he has already shown his priceless usefulness to the Trump presidency. He has advised Trump, a serial groper, never to grope UK prime minster Theresa May when he, Trump, gets her alone. Sage advice, that.
Shamefully, I have often been been guilty of this ignoranceism. When someone doesn't know that Scandinavia is made up of several swish and progressive nations, that the Tradescantia family of plants is named after the botanist John Tradescant (1608-1662), that the word smidgin is not spelled smidgeon, that in the Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration Gilbert wrote the words and Sullivan the music, etc. etc. (all things that perhaps do not matter at all) I have hitherto tended to write him or her off.
But in my alarmed dreams, now, I am taking part in a TV quiz show, competing with Pauline Hanson. Tony Barber is our quizmaster. Egghead Ian has nominated The Operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan and The Political Geography of Contemporary Scandinavia as his effete Special Subjects. As her Special Subject Pauline has chosen The Fish and Chip Trade, her honourable calling before she was called to politics.
Here on the quiz show the earthy politician is running rings round scholarly but useless Ian BA (Hons). Her knowledge of the real world of small business, of blue-collar folk and their preferred cuisines is valid and useful and actually counts for something in these exciting times whereas my effete and pansy special interests count for nothing. Pauline trounces me and Tony bounces me from his show, ushering in a new and far more competitive contestant whose Special Interest subject is The Tattoos and Piercings of the Kardashians.
