On Greta, the Wonder-Child of Global Warming and Gaza

One of the biggest stars of the Romanian popular music Manele is known as Adrian Copilul Minune, “Adrian, the Boy Wonder”, so-named because, like a gypsy Mozart, his musical abilities were so incommensurate with his tender age when he first started out in the music business decades ago. Adrian Copilul Minune – or Adrian Simionescu per his Christian name – can be seen performing, for instance, in the below clip from French director Tony Gatlif’s remarkable film on Romanian gypsy music and life Gadjo Dilo.

But the secret to Adrian Copilul Minune’s success – apart from some real musical talent – was that he was not in fact a child but just a midget that looked like one: when the above scene was filmed, the “boy wonder” was in his early twenties.

Looking at recent photos of her voyage to Gaza, it occurred to me that much the same could be said of the reportedly 1.49 meter or 4-foot-10 Greta Thunberg.

Who can forget how Thunberg, her face contorted by emotion or the effort to contrive it, famously screamed “How dare you?” at world leaders gathered at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019.

Thunberg’s Wikipedia page describes the occasion as follows:

On 23 September 2019, Thunberg attended the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City. On the same day, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) hosted a press conference where Thunberg joined 15 other children, including Ayakha Melithafa, Alexandria Villaseñor, Catarina Lorenzo, Ridhima Pandey and Carl Smith.

But in September 2019, Greta Thunberg was just a few months short of her 17^th birthday! Since when are 16-year-olds children? That’s drinking age in some countries.

The fact of the matter is that when Greta Thunberg was busily participating in the “child protests” against climate change that made her famous, she was not a child. She was an unusually small teenager playing one: not a child actor, but a teenage actor who was able to play a child thanks to her diminutive physique.

This was the secret to her success. A real child could not have read the script from which Greta Thunberg was obviously reading at the Climate Action Summit – she has the paper in her hand – nor carried out the stage directions that she had obviously been given.

The only difference between Adrian Simionescu and Greta Thunberg is that Greta has no obvious talent and certainly not any relevant knowledge or expertise: she is not a physicist or meteorologist, no more than she is an expert on Middle East politics. She is just an unusually small young woman who once upon a time was cast in the role of the “child conscience” of humanity in a highly-produced morality play about allegedly impending climate disaster – and now apparently we are stuck with her forever.