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Tuesday
“But this last privilege I still retain;/ Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain,” writes the abused wife in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.” There’s a lot of complaining going on right now by those who opposed Donald Trump and are now experiencing his wrath.
Others are looking for consolation in schadenfreude. When you yourself are suffering, there’s a temporary satisfaction to be gained in MAGA buyers’ remorse. They “fucked around and found out,” many bruised liberals are saying. Or FAFO, as the acronym goes.
Did Trump-supporting veterans really think that Trump was on their side? How about red-state Medicaid recipients, who are losing benefits, or West Virginia diabetes patients, who are seeing the cost of insulin shoot back up? Kamala Harris must wonder how they did not see this coming.
As someone, quoting from William Carlos Williams’s poem “At Kenneth Burke’s Place,” recently observed in the New Yorker, what we are seeing is “the rare occurrence of the expected.”
A New Yorker cartoon that is quickly becoming legendary has a large campaign sign of a wolf overlooking a field where sheep are grazing. “I am going to eat you,” proclaims the sign, to which a sheep responds admiringly, “He tells it like it is.”
An old Twitter joke is also making the rounds. In 2015 Adrian Bott tweeted, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
With jungle cats on my mind, I turn to my favorite leopard story, which is Rudyard Kipling’s “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” While it doesn’t provide too much insight into our current mess, I use the occasion to revisit Kipling’s Just So Stories, which I loved as a child. I also refashion the leopard story as a modern political parable.
The stories, published in 1902, are wonderfully rhythmic, which makes them great for reading aloud. Kipling frames them as bedtime tales told to his daughter Josephine (“Best Beloved”), and indeed my father read them to us when we were growing up and I read them to my own sons. Applying a Lamarckian approach to biology, Kipling invents fanciful explanations as to how animals and occasionally humans developed their biological traits.
The leopard story originates from the passage in Jeremiah 13:23, “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” Taking Jeremiah’s rhetorical question as a challenge, Kipling imagines a world in which Ethiopians were not always dark and leopards not always spotted. Once they presided over an all-white world.
Well, a sandy world anyway. Here’s Kipling:
IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt …where there was sand and sandy-colored rock and ‘sclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were ‘sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the ‘sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them all—a greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one hair. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of them; for he would lie down by a ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or the Bonte-Buck came by he would surprise them out of their jumpsome lives.
The world changes, however—let’s say it becomes more racially and ethnically diverse—which comes as a blow to those who have been living comfortably atop the food chain:
After a long time—things lived for ever so long in those days—they learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian; and bit by bit—the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest—they went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days and days and days till they came to a great forest, ‘sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk; and so, though you could hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them, and then only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time in the ‘sclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the Leopard and the Ethiopian ran about over the ‘sclusively greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone. At last they were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, the Leopard and the Ethiopian, and then they had the Big Tummy-ache, both together…
In my modern retelling, I must depart from the story here since there’s no way in hell that the GOP is interested in doing what Kipling’s Ethiopian does:
“The long and the little of it is that we don’t match our backgrounds… and as I’ve nothing to change except my skin I’m going to change that.’
‘What to?’ said the Leopard, tremendously excited.
‘To a nice working blackish-brownish colour, with a little purple in it, and touches of slaty-blue. It will be the very thing for hiding in hollows and behind trees.’
After undertaking his own transformation, the Ethiopian then dips his hands in the leftover pigment and, with the tips of his five fingers, imprints spots all over the leopard’s skin.
There was a time when the GOP considered “changing its skin.” George W. Bush prominently exhibited his Spanish skills to appeal to Latino voters, and from 2007-2009 African American Michael Steele served as the chairman of the GOP Action Committee (GOPAC). Since Trump, however, Republicans have doubled down on their identity as a “sclusively sandy-yellowish” party. As Jeremiah would put it, they are not prepared to do good when they are accustomed to doing evil.
But even if he’s not willing to change his kin, Trump—as a consummate salesman—convinced enough of the giraffes, zebras, elands, koodoos, bushbucks and bone bucks that he felt their pain and shared their concerns. In a razor thin election that came down to margins, he received a higher-than-expected portion of the vote from Latinos, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans. Whether because they worried about the price of eggs or because they dreamed of joining America’s racial caste system, enough of them chose not to vote for Kamala Harris to put Trump back in office.
And ever since (so Kipling’s story goes) the Ethiopian and the leopard have been feasting quite happily on the other animals.
Perhaps they even go on to establish a Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
Added note: I recently read Sylvia Garcia-Moreno’s The Daughter of Doctor Monroe, a spinoff of the H.G. Wells novel, where we see South America’s leopard equivalent actually eating someone’s face. The daughter is a woman-jaguar hybrid and, in a revenge fantasy moment, she takes a lethal bite out of the visage of a man bent on raping her.
I am woman, hear me roar. A number of American women are feeling this way these days.
