Francisco Sosa Wagner, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, enjoys a modest fame as a doctor of law, university professor, historian, and prize-winning writer. His columns on European political, legal and other topics appear regularly in the Spanish press, and he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Saint Raymond of Peñafort for his outstanding contributions to the field of justice and the law.
His European Parliament profile shows him to be a conscientious attendee of the plenary sessions (103 out of a possible 109 days); he has asked 28 parliamentary questions, delivered 15 plenary speeches, contributed to the amendment of 13 reports and given two opinions.
A fit-looking 65, stylishly bow-tied and coiffed, dignified but with the trace of an impish smile, Wagner might not bestride the European Parliament like a colossus, but he is clearly not to be taken lightly or in any way disrespectfully. All of which makes the most famous and recent photograph of him initially puzzling and certainly surprising.
Wearing one of his trademark colourful bow ties, Francisco Sosa Wagner, MEP, is standing at his parliamentary desk holding at head height a long green cucumber. His message: 'We need to restore the honour of the cucumber!'
It may not have been one of his more telling or resonant speeches — though it was surely his briefest — but it was topical because the cucumber had, of course, been grievously besmirched when identified — wrongly — as the cause of the recent deadly E.coli outbreak in Germany.
It's fairly difficult to look dignified and serious while brandishing a cucumber. Cucumbers are themselves vaguely comic and are central to innumerable phallic jokes and claims. Waving one of these priapic evocations above your head is bound to have a deflating and distracting effect on your spoken message no matter how passionate, powerful and apposite your words might be.
But it is a measure of Wagner's dedication to the cause that he was prepared to risk ridicule and, perhaps, deliberate misinterpretation both of his motives and his imagery, to rescue the innocent vegetable. Anyway, it worked. His dramatic fist-full of penile cucumis sativus prompted further investigations which exonerated the inoffensive cowcumber, as it was once called, and pointed the finger at fenugreek sprouts imported from Egypt.
The Spanish MEP's willingness to risk his dignity and credibility in an apparently eccentric cause reminded me of Vyacheslav Ilyin, whose story I came across in a dentist waiting room copy of New Scientist a few years ago.
Vyacheslav Ilyin is pretty much like you and me, allowing for some cultural differences. He turns an honest rouble at Moscow's Institute for Biological and Medical Problems, trails to and from his office in all weathers protected by his ushanka (one of those Russian fur hats), loves his family, despairs at the indifferent form of his team, Lokomotiv Moscow, and wouldn't give you a bent kopeck for politicians.
According to the article, Vyacheslav's government-backed and classified research interest is how the astronauts in the space station cope with their dirty laundry.
It seems that, after the small matter of ensuring that a spacecraft actually stays in space and sticks to the game plan, the biggest problem in orbit is waste disposal. As a result, Vyacheslav Ilyin is obsessed with underpants. It turns out that astronauts must wear the same underpants for up to a week at a time. In short, the biggest problem up there is down there.
At the drop of a ushanka, Vyacheslav will tell you that each astronaut generates about 2.5 kg of uncompressed waste every day. Lateral thinker that he is, Vyacheslav scorns such remedies as squeezing the spacecraft full of whitegoods. What he's working on is a mixture of bacteria that will digest the astronauts' underpants and in the process produce methane to power the space craft.
Astronautical underpants are Vyacheslav Ilyin's equivalent of Francisco Sosa Wagner's phallic cucumber. Both are difficult propositions to promote with dignity but both men had the passion and the courage to do so publicly and unflinchingly and both made a significant contribution.
This is in contrast to Christopher Monckton, variously referred to as Lord and Viscount, who has called Ross Garnaut a fascist (for which he was forced to apologise), has delivered a speech in front of a large Nazi swastika, compares climate change consensus to Nazi eugenics and who glibly wondered what has happened to the Australian 'fair go' — a concept so dear to English Viscounts and Lords — when a succession of venues cancelled his bookings.
There are easily enough crackpots around — believing everything from the moon landings to the twin towers attack is a 'put-up job' — to ensure that conspiracy theorists and professional deniers like Monckton will always get an audience. It would all be laughable if it wasn't done with such a veneer of phony class (lords and viscounts) and insufferable superiority (the insulting dismissal of genuine intellectuals like Garnaut) and if it didn't call upon obscenities in the past for its validation.
Brian Matthews is the award winning author of A Fine and Private Place and The Temple Down the Road. He was awarded the 2010 National Biography Award for Manning Clark — A Life.