EYE OF KNUT

We wish we could pretend to be immune to cute things. Fawning over baby animals does nothing to buttress our image as a bare-knuckle truth-teller of the obscure and unpalatable, but there are powers in this cosmos, loathe as we are to admit it, that cannot be contested.

Some of you might have heard by now of the tiny polar bear named Knut, who was rejected by his mother at the Berlin Zoo and, against the protests of animal rights activists, not allowed to die but instead raised by a lowly zookeeper under the fawning eyes of the masses. Exciting and heart-pummelling as this story is, however, it is not the first time a baby polar bear has attracted international attention and controversy.

During the right of Queen Elizabeth I, rivalry was fierce between England and Spain. The Spanish started the whole thing by giving the royal court the world’s largest wheel of manchego cheese – a wheel that was intentionally laced with bubonic plague. Considered a harmless joke by the Spaniards – who it turns out were genetically immune to the disease except in that it turned their tongues black like gag ice cubes – the English were not at all pleased. (They disposed of the offending wheel by in turn giving it to the Irish.)

As a retaliation, Sir Francis Drake, recently returned from his world-spanning tour, came up with a clever plan. While searching for the Northwest Passage, his crew picked up a female polar bear as a gift for the Queen, a gift that, unbeknownst to them at the time, was pregnant. The mother died soon after being installed as one of Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting, but not before giving birth to a tiny cub affectionately named Beowulf by the Queen. It was Drake’s idea to train this adorable creature to be a deadly assassin.

Months passed, and Beowulf was offered to the Spaniards as a conciliatory gift to mend relations after the manchego incident. The bear was trained to use a knife, the plan being to kill Spain’s King Philip II in the deep of the night. The plot was foiled, however, when Beowulf – to whom all Spaniards looked the same – accidentally killed playwright Lope de Vega (creator of the famous windmill-tilter Don Juan) at a court masque. This event prompted the ill-fated Spanish Armada, about which William Shakespeare wrote so skillfully in The Spanish Play (aka Hamlet). Beowulf, meanwhile, was turned into a rug, and can still be viewed at Madrid’s Prada museum.

We hope that tiny Knut’s fate will prove less controversial than that of his foreBEAR. (Yes, we wrote that.) Unless he is an agent of German Neo-Nazis hoping to restore the Third Reich, in which case, look out world!