When the pretty girl in class copies her homework from the nerd

It’s hard not to laugh about the Shashi Naidoo saga. Sure, there are several serious issues that underlie it and there’s very rarely anything funny about politics in the Middle East, but I think we can be forgiven for having a chuckle this time around.

The fact that what a model may or may not know about the Palestinian crisis has suddenly become one of the biggest stories around is, obviously, absurd. But we live in the age of absurdity.

I find it funny on a deeper, more quirky level, because you can read it as grand karmic retribution for anyone who’s had their homework or answers on a test copied by that pretty girl in class.

And I’m speaking here for myself, who can recall many an occasion when ‘Natalie’, ‘Beverly’ or ‘Linda’ whispered ‘pssst’ at me during a maths or history test and asked for the answer on a particular head-scratcher. Of course, mostly the joke was on them because I just looked like a nerd; in most cases I’d studied even less than them and was even more clueless.

But because they were so pretty, I did my best to help out and seem knowledgeable.

To this day it keeps happening to me, since my better half is attractive and uses her female wiles to get me to do whatever the modern equivalent of her ‘homework’ happens to be (and no, by that I don’t mean the dishes and laundry). And of course I still happily oblige.

You don’t need to be a social scientist to know that beautiful people have it easier in life. They not only get ahead in ways linked strongly to their attractiveness, but when they do screw up we’re far more willing to let them get away with murder. Shashi Naidoo will probably soon find herself being hailed as a hero and end up with even more endorsements and sponsorships than before.

Because, as yet another beautiful person put it in a song: “I don’t know why … why … but I love to see you cry.” The tears of the beautiful can wash away all manner of ignorance and sin.

Shashi’s giant blunder wasn’t that she happened to have an opinion about Israel that isn’t popular. After all, Gareth Cliff took a similar position not long ago and there was a huge outcry about that too. The difference was that his opinion happened to be his own, which he had arrived at by looking at whatever information he found at his disposal – and then he made up his own mind.

I don’t agree with Cliff’s take, but I respect that he has a right to it. Within a few days, most people had stopped thinking about Gareth Cliff and moved on to whatever the next thing was that they felt the need to be outraged about.

In Shashi Naidoo’s case, though, she lazily asked a guy she happens to know to tell her why he supports Israel – and then she cut and paste his opinion, presenting it as her own.

When the time came to defend her “views” about Gaza, she was unable to.

I suppose people should have been suspicious that Shashi Naidoo was using phrases such as “Israel is the antithesis of an Apartheid state” and “this has been clearly articulated inter alia in its manifesto” when she’s more known for telling her Instagram followers: “If you have to ask if it’s too early for champagne, you’re an amateur and we can’t be friends.”

At least we can credit her for having been honest and admitting what she did. But this is the thing about some of our “celebs”, who can get away with being childish narcissists because there’s always someone around to do whatever they need done, even if what they need done is some thinking.

Very rarely were the pretty girls at my school caught out for all that hasty copying of the nerd’s homework (rarely mine, of course, since they soon caught on that I was even more blissfully uninformed about geometry than them).

But in this case, Shashi was indeed caught with her brain hanging out and dangling from her pretty little cranium by the thinnest of dendrites.

I’m sorry she apparently got all those death threats. That’s really not cool, and is a sad reflection of how often our debates degenerate into the witless enacting violence on the ignorant.

And now Shashi Naidoo is off for a little adventure to the Holy Land to learn about what’s really going on over there. I’m sure she’ll find it most informative, but I wouldn’t hold my breath about her coming up with that one suggestion to resolve the crisis in the Middle East that Noam Chomsky somehow missed.

Not for one moment, by the way, am I saying that beautiful people can’t be amazingly clever, too. Annoyingly, they often are. Natalie Portman has an IQ of 140 and probably has all her own opinions too.

She probably even did all her own homework, which is way more than I could ever say for myself.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers