If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. – Khalil Gibran
Don’t be scared; I’m not scared. “Just be sure to shake your boots out in the morning before you pull them on.” That’s old cowboy wisdom.
A scorpion is on the rise in America. I don’t mean an arachnid, but a man.
Dear bard, please, forgive me; Shall I compare thee to a Vaejovis janssi, a type of scorpion found in Baja California?
Donald J. Trump is a scorpion.
He settled a lawsuit over a Baja California condo resort that went bust...the lawsuit filed by more than 100 would-be condo buyers who lost millions of dollars when the Trump-branded luxury condominium project failed.
One evening watching a news commentator, with schadenfreude dripping from his tongue, say that, “the GOP created this monster…” I turned to my wife and quipped, “Guess all those Trump voters never heard the one about the frog and the scorpion.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” This is her most common retort. I never mention her P-stranding; what kind of man do you think I am?
“It’s a fable, Aesop or something. A scorpion asks a frog for a ride across a river. The frog is, like, ‘No way dude, you’ll sting me.’ The scorpion says, ‘No, if I did that I’d drown, too.” Makes sense, thinks the frog, so he says ok. Halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog. As the frog is dying, he asks, ‘Why did you do that now we’ll both die?’ The scorpion replies, ‘Because I’m a scorpion.’ Get it?”
She stared at me incredulously.
“The Republican ‘establishment’ is the frog. And Trump is the scorpion,” I tried to clarify.
“Are you drunk?” her second most common retort.
A few weeks later I felt incredibly vindicated while reading Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper. I wasn’t sitting in a café in Jerusalem, so don’t be jealous; I was hunched over my phone like usual falling down a twitter-hole. Chemi Shalev wrote, “The appropriate fable would seem to be the one about the scorpion who stings the frog that is carrying him across the river…”
Ha, wait until I show the article to my wife, I thought. “See, honey, others agree with my assessment.” I imagine she will look at me sideways and claim, “You never said any such thing to me.” She either gaslights me terribly, or suffered a blow to the head and no one told me. Or she’ll say she doesn’t remember. But, at least, I will know.
That’s where I should have left it, but Chemi’s article goes on, “But there’s an earlier version of the tale that appears in the Babylonian Talmud in the Nedarim Tractate. In that tale the scorpion doesn’t sting the frog but rather the man who is on the other bank of the river. The Talmudic lesson is that nothing will stand in the way of God’s will or in the execution of his divine punishment; in Trump’s case, however, God’s will hasn’t manifested itself yet, and it’s not clear who is going to get punished in the end.”
I was worried Donald will think this is a puff piece comparing him-scorpion, to ‘God’s will’-scorpion. Just remember Donald, sometime before Two Corinthians, ‘God’s will’ was also a mass extinction, you know, the flood that killed everyone. No one votes for a flood, right?
I sat and thought about that Talmudic version of the tale. Could the frog be prosecuted as an accomplice to the scorpion’s murder of the man? Certainly, if the scorpion is elected then the frogs that vote for him are to blame. Or the frogs that created him, monster, scorpion.
I am now obsessed with scorpions. Some species are as much as nine inches long, yikes. Scorpions have been around for more than four hundred million years; older than dinosaurs. Twenty five different species of scorpions have venom strong enough to kill a full grown man.
“Tell me more about scorpions,” requests my six-year old son. I google ‘scorpion’ on my phone and read from the Wikipedia page, “Scorpion stings are painful but are usually harmless.”
“Not to their prey,” he says.
I laugh. But then I read on, ‘For stings from species found in the United States, no treatment is normally needed…’ These are most assuredly are not ‘normal’ circumstances.
Oh yea, and they eat fried scorpions in China. The allegory is really coming together.
Trump got schooled by Hong Kong's Henry Cheng. Cheng bought a $300 million mortgage for $82 million, and then a decade later, sold it for $1.8 billion in the largest residential real estate transaction in New York City history. So Donald sued him...
It turns out, this version of the fable, the frog and the scorpion with the inevitable ending, is only a very modern version. Earliest mention is by Orson Wells in the 50’s.
In addition to the version from the Talmud, there is a Sufi version in which with God’s will, a scorpion crossed the Nile on a frog's back to save a man from being bitten by a snake. I like that one. I just prefer my god’s will to be for saving people instead of killing them; I guess I am more of a New Testament guy.
This is the version of the fable I like best and it comes from Bidpai’s Panchatantra, collated from older Buddhistic sources.
Tortoise and Scorpion lived on an island together, became friends, and vowed to never separate. It began to rain. It rained so much the island began to shrink. The scorpion was now greatly troubled.
“Tortoise, my friend,” Scorpion said, “you can easily swim, but how can a poor scorpion like me ever survive in the sea?"
"No worries," answered Tortoise; "hop onto my back and I will carry you safely across the sea."
Scorpion climbed on as Tortoise crawled into the water and swam away. After swimming for a while, Tortoise was disturbed by a strange rapping on his back He asked Scorpion what was happening.
"What’s happening?" answered Scorpion. "I am whetting my barb testing if it can pierce your shell."
"Ingrate. Frenemy," responded Tortoise, "Good thing I can save myself and punish you as you deserve." Tortoise sank below the surface and shook off the scorpion off his shell.
Get it? We, the voters, are the tortoise. By voting against the scorpion, we can save ourselves and punish Trump.
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