Misadventures in the Land of Fables #55

This was not how it started, a frog assuring the public there’s nothing to worry about, the snake doesn’t mean them any harm. No, it started with something else: the patterns on the snake’s skin.

Studying these patterns one day, they seemed as if they might be intelligible, a kind of scaly pixellated script, that would tell use something about the nature of the beast and might provide the key to vanquishing it. I imagined the intellectual types who claim to know how political systems work as if that were enough to transform them. But fascism—I’m thinking a lot about fascism these days, for some reason —isn’t ‘vanquished’ by being properly understood, more direct and more concerted opposition is require. I began to imagine a frog studying the skin of the snake while the snake devoured its kin. That’s where it began.

But I wasn’t really angry about this—it barely deserves a mention in current circumstances; there are greater delusions, worse derelictions. The refusal by access journalists and complacent ‘centrist’ pundits to see what is in front of them, to challenge it, call it out, raise the alarm; the insistence on neutrality and the practice of politics as a spectator sport, without real world consequences. This craven click-chasing accommodation of a corrupt truth-mangling brutality, erm, yes, it is this that makes me angry, this is beneath contempt.

The story shed its origins; the target changed from the dry intellectual to the compliant journalist, to a frog who saves itself by climbing onto the snake’s back, who rides the snake and reports on the threat from this privileged position. An echo of The Frogs Who Rode Snakeback from the Panchatantra, a story I responded to earlier in the Misadventures.

You can read the new fable here: The Snake Rider.