Everybody knows the scorpion-and-frog story: The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river, promising the skeptical frog that he would not sting him since that would kill both of them. The scorpion’s reasoning convinces the frog, who agrees to take the scorpion across the river and starts swimming. But in the deep of the river, the scorpion stings the frog and both drown. Just as he was dying from the sting, the frog asks the scorpion why he did that, saying “You killed yourself, too.” The scorpion gasped and said, “It’s my nature!”
Today, we find the moral of the story repeated as we live under capitalism and Trumpism, both of which, contrary to their promises, are slowly killing us, their consumers and voters. But when the Ship of America captained by both capitalists and Trumpsters sinks, we all drown together. Capitalists can own all the money they want, but who would buy their products when consumers are too poor to buy anything? Without intelligent voters in a stable democratic America, what would Trumpsters claim as their ultimate prize if they destroy everything — voters, society and ideas — and control America that is empty of any semblance of humanity and community? If you ask capitalists busily corrupting American consumers and workers, and ask Trumpsters destroying its citizens and voters, “Why are you corrupting and destroying America, which is the very foundation of your own money and power? What’s left there for you to own and control when the nation itself is empty without happy consumer-workers and intelligent citizens?” Confounded themselves, capitalists and Trumpsters will shout: “We can’t help it. It’s our nature!”
Yes, it’s in their nature: The very rope they are selling will be around their own necks. We, who welcomed capitalists and Trumpsters as our economic and political overlords, only realize this too late. The Ship of Capitalism and Trumpism, broken into two pieces like the Titanic, is already sinking and each side is pointing to the other: “Your end of the ship is sinking!”
Indeed, capitalists have betrayed us. They promised us that we would all be rich and happy in capitalism, but only created terrible inequality between rich and poor: The food they feed us makes us sick and die young. They invent fantasies of the most addictive kind that we cannot resist. Gradually, we become destitute, ill and stupid and start flailing in our drowning debt and poverty. For the first time in our national history, we live in greater despair and die younger than our parents. Everywhere we turn, capitalists are trying to steal something from us with smiles and lies, sowing distrust and fear about everyone and everything.
Then, in our consumer den of opium, along comes Donald Trump, who adds to the corruption of capitalism the savagery of political power. He sweetly promised his Strongman’s utopia and we gave him our votes and merrily began our journey of cruelty, violence and stupidity with him. Ten years later, we are so addicted to his showmanship that we cannot have enough of his hourly circuses. Some of us realize he is an emperor without clothes, nothing but an empty shell of a leader who has never had plans or visions about anything except what’s good for his own coffers and those of his rich friends. But it’s too late: He and his cohorts have already turned America into lifeless civic ruins.
Under capitalism and Trumpism, it’s difficult to live as civilized human beings and neighbors: America has become a nation of thieves and liars, top to bottom, legal or criminal, corporations amassing their fortunes and Trumpsters aggrandizing their powers without shame or law. Their, and our, America is deeply corrupt, defrauding the poor and shaking down the powerless. Together, capitalists and Trumpsters enrich the oligarchs and plunder wage-earning Americans.
But the capitalists and Trumpsters are also digging their own graves — like the scorpion which cannot change its self-destructive nature: Capitalist America is dying with corruption of the soul and sickness of the body; so is Trumpsters’ America. They made their own nation so corrupt, immoral and stupid that their capitalist-Trumpist utopia cannot continue through the next generations. Under their rule, America has become unlivable for any decent human being who believes in honest bread from an honest day’s work: In it, we cannot tell reality from manufactured fakes, and truth from lies. Their deceptive techniques get better in daily perfection, and our own intelligence declines accordingly.
Neither capitalism nor Trumpism can take itself to a good ending: Just take away money and power from them, and no humanity is left of them. Their very nature is, inevitably and logically, self-destructive, and we sink along with them. We are the innocent (now stupid and gullible) frogs who trusted them to be our stewards and leaders, and we find ourselves slowly boiling in the pot, all on the sinking ship named the USA.
This is the American Scorpion Story retold for our time.
Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.