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Wednesday
I concluded Monday’s post about Joe Biden with a reference to Aesop’s fable “The Frogs That Wanted a King” and am now thinking I could have done more with it. First of all, I could have noted that, if Trump is the predatory stork, then Joe Biden would be the log. Aesop, who wrote in the 6th century BCE, also anticipates a very interesting point that Atlantic writer and former Republican Tom Nichols makes about modern-day America.
In the fable, Aesop says that the frogs were tired of governing themselves:
They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty, and rule them in a way to make them know they were being ruled. No milk and water government for them, they declared. So they sent a petition to Jupiter asking for a king.
“To keep them quiet and make them think they had a king,” Aesop writes, Jupiter throws down a huge log. As first the frogs, thinking the log to be a fearful giant, hide themselves, but eventually they discover “how tame and peaceable King Log was.” After that, the younger frogs use him for a diving platform while the older frogs “made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Jupiter about the government.”
Be careful what you wish for. Jupiter next sends a crane to be their king, who proves to be far different from King Log:
He gobbled up the poor Frogs right and left and they soon saw what fools they had been. In mournful croaks they begged Jupiter to take away the cruel tyrant before they should all be destroyed.
“How now!” cried Jupiter “Are you not yet content? You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes.”
Then comes the moral: “Be sure you can better your condition before you seek to change.”
There are certainly Republicans who see Biden as a senile old log. After the president got Republicans to agree to raise the debt ceiling, South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace tweeted, “Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.” Others contend that he is suffering from dementia and should step down. They want their crane back.
A number of Biden’s defenders, on the other hand, say that his low-key approach is his secret power. He doesn’t have to hog the spotlight or create constant drama; it’s enough to be doing the people’s work. While he may appear to be a log, he is a log that gets things done.
Biden embraces the ethos that Nichols advocates in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. If we are seeing the rise “of illiberal and anti-democratic movements in the United States,” Nichols says, the problem—as in Aesop’s fable—lies within ourselves. Here’s Amazon’s book description:
Nichols traces the illiberalism of the 21st century to the growth of unchecked narcissism, rising standards of living, global peace, and a resistance to change. Ordinary citizens, laden with grievances, have joined forces with political entrepreneurs who thrive on the creation of rage rather than on the encouragement of civic virtue and democratic cooperation. While it will be difficult, Nichols argues that we need to defend democracy by resurrecting the virtues of altruism, compromise, stoicism, and cooperation–and by recognizing how good we’ve actually had it in the modern world.
To quote again from the opening of the fable, “They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them.”
Donald Trump certainly entertained us as millions of Americans, supporters and foes alike, were glued to cable television during his presidency. He, meanwhile, was crane-like in his management of the pandemic: tens of thousands died of Covid that wouldn’t have had to.
We also have his crane-like declaration about what he will do if he is re-elected president: he promises he will visit “retribution” on his enemies.
Unlike Aesop’s frogs, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.
