More Tales from the Riverbank
(Being a follow up from “Muskrat and the Trumpeter Swan” published January 15th, 2025)
The river which had flowed so purely for hundreds of years was suffering a change. Since time immemorial, animals had found their way to the pure, cool waters to drink and bathe and recreate. The lilies had floated on the surface, the reeds had rooted beneath and had bent gently to the flow in the summer and had flattened on the surface when the annual thaw made the waters burst forth . For eons the waters had flowed yet stayed the same. But now there were things stirring both on the surface and beneath. The animals were beginning to notice, starting to be alarmed and wishing for the constant that was now inconstant. Trumpeter Swan and his friend, Elon the Muskrat, had somehow slipped into power, elongating their importance on a long piece of elastic which was starting to fray. Trotsky the turbulent turtle had warned with a pithy saying,
“You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you.”
But then Trotsky was slow moving, He always arrived at Trumpeter rallies later than everybody else. And then he would drone on about the proletariat and the Mensheviks . Nobody listened to him because he stunned and bored with jaw yawning tediousness. His logic was irrefutable but bound for the wilderness of distanced glazed eyesight.
By this time the swans were in a fervour of nodding agreement as the orange revolution pulled them along with unreasoned inanity. The frogs croaked in support from their lily pads, the fish came close to the surface to be a part of the whole. And Trumpeter talked and talked with passionate antagonism. Well established as leader of the river now, he believed that it did not matter what he said but that if he said it, it was true and if, at least it sounded nonsensical, it kept him as the centre of attention which, of course, was the all important point.
Elon the Muskrat realised early on that the Trumpeter was not very bright but that he was extremely cunning. He could be flattered, he could be manipulated, he could be a source to add to the Muskrat’s wealth and power. The early signs of Trumpeter’s cunning came front and centre when he realised that he could not possibly fulfil his promises to make the river great again. For years he had dismissed the idea of global warming but now the Spring floods were excessive and, worse, the river looked like drying up every summer. The trumpeter and the muskrat were living in a climate of extremes. Hmm, there’s a surprise. Trumpeter needed a distraction and he found many abroad. He played the blame game extremely well. It quickly became the fault of the riverbank that things were not right in the river. No residents of the river were ever at fault, instead the rest of the world was out to get them. They must be punished and punished they would be. The rest of the world, in its innocence, did not know that ‘they were out to get them’. But parallel universes, they were coming to realise, were like that! Trumpeter loved the fact that the Muskrat had somehow slipped in a Nazi salute into one of his smiling moments. He had used that to label the good of the world as bad and the bad of the world as good.
On the river the animals had started to notice that the circle and balance of nature was changing. The frogs became alive to the fact that there were not the flies available for nourishment. The swans noted that the vegetation for nest building was not as prevalent as it once was. The fish, who used to rest in slow moving pools near the riverbank, were finding that they were no longer there. The residents of the riverbank, Muskrat’s real domain, found themselves as pariahs, no longer welcome on the river. The natural world was being exploited and controlled and changed and driven towards destruction. The deer and raccoons who occasionally appeared on the side of the river and had long warned against electing the trumpeter, no longer muttered “I told you so” sotto voce. They now smiled cynically and looked down their noses with growing disdain when gobblydygook floated its way to the surface, a muddy morass of slime and sludge where once had poured the clear waters of truth, honesty and good intentions. The river was slipping away from its natural purity and suffocating in trumpeter’s triumphalism. Like all symptoms he fed on himself. The green sludge was becoming stinking slime, the estuary was settling into a barren waste.
The Trumpeter did not like animals that were weak. He despised the frolicking frivolity of the otters; he sneered at the jumping joy of the salmon; he chuckled at the lumbering aloofness of the grizzly bears; he saw the eagles as errand boys but had jealous envy at their filmstar looks. Meanwhile he occasionally had the muskrat speak to the masses even though he looked uneasily on from his nest, not because he disagreed with what he was saying, but because more and more he was stealing the show.
In the far north in the high arctic strange things were happening. An ice floe was noted floating towards Hudson’s Bay on the Beaufort Sea. A polar bear was sat on his back on the ice and next to him was a seal. Prey and predator seemed to be conversing in a manner unbecoming to their hunter and hunted instincts.
“Soooo, let’s get this straight Muskrat and Trumpeter are calling us the 51st state. They are calling our prime minister the ‘governor’. You and I need to set aside our differences and unite for the fight.”
The seal nodded wisely at the words of the polar bear.
“What shall you eat?” The seal said sympathetically.
The polar bear scratched his head.
“Hmm. Good point. I’ll find a way. “
Further south a female moose stood in the shallows of a lake. She munched peacefully on the greenery and her chewing was a mellifluous mulling. She knew that she was so ugly that Trumpeter and the Muskrat would have nothing to do with her. They would not listen to what she had to say because they only respected the façade. Deep seated interiors, niches of noteworthy knowledge had no interest to them because these qualities were not ‘good television’. As she chewed she resolved to embrace the difficulty. She mulled silently, ruminated ruefully. She would act but not yet.
Rumours had started to circulate that a force from the east was starting to make its presence felt. Putin the putrid panther had arrived off the coast and somehow floated ashore with his rich cronies. Areas of the riverbank previously innocuous now boasted a host of minatory morons who looked on the river with envy and malice aforethought. Putin with padding putrefaction was starting to encourage his off-siders to encroach; beginning to suggest that the long established inhabitants of the river were responsible for all the ills and wrongs of his own land. He arranged to talk to Trumpeter. When they finally met, Trumpeter came out of the meeting pale and subdued, an incredible achievement considering his overall orangeness.
Putin slowly edged his many followers off the riverbank and into the river. At first the river dwellers said and did nothing. They went about their business as they always had done; they walked their neighbourhoods as they always had; their young played in the pools and on the little islands as was their wont. Then one day the panther ordered his cubs to move into the lairs of the cygnets and to ship the cygnets onto the riverbank without telling their parents where they were going. The local swans were now told that they could not swim near the bank unless they agreed to swear to the panther creed. One of the swans would not do this and somehow disappeared. Trumpeter Swan meanwhile did nothing to help his friends who were losing their homes and their food supply. Indeed he was openly siding with the panther pantheon. 20% of his land had disappeared behind a dam that was proving difficult to breech. Trumpeter was now promoting the message that Putin was correct; that the areas of the river that were being colonised were not worth fighting for; that the animals who lived there were disloyal to him anyway; he was better off without them. He breathed a sigh of relief when small islands at the east end of the river were now in the hands of his new ally, Putin. He reasoned that the islands and peninsulas called New York, Boston, Nantucket, New Jersey, Atlantic City were nothing but a thorn in his side. He and his movement were better off without freedom of the press, contrary ideas and intelligent individualism. Putin could have his 20% and he would hang onto the 80% where his following was greatest.
Meanwhile in the north, differences were being set aside. The moose was sharpening her antlers, the beavers were busy building dams; those creatures famed for their solitary outlooks such as the loons were haunting the lakes with their many messages. The geese were venturing south over the border and defecating with effluential glee on Trumpeter’s swans. The wolves were mustering and howling their resistance and wandering over the border and frightening the sheep. Barriers were being broken down, utopian ideals were being set aside and realpolitik realised. Every Canadian sunrise brought a dawn of new activity, complacency was dead throughout the land, post-nationalism as an ideal was little more than a smoking ember on a fire that the Trumpeter had lit.
The trumpeter and the muskrat became closer and closer. They fed off each other. They set themselves adrift on a mythical sea of ‘truths’; they fed on the troubles of others making them worse with malicious intent; they found the lowest common denominators of society and embraced them as their own. They loved gaudiness and gold and god. But as they floated on their fantastical flotsam, it suddenly became clear that the rest of the world was passing them by. The attention which was all that they really desired was being diverted elsewhere. Sense, worth and goodness were starting to reassert themselves. The waters of the river urged them out to sea and it was there that they found themselves alone, unwanted, useless. The other animals had recognised their foolish rush of blood and learned that the best way to absolve themselves was to let the river wash their sins and embarrassment out to sea.
Dear Reader, this rather clumsy attempt at a parody does little to mitigate and ameliorate the anger and irritation that many of us feel towards the governor of the United States and his rich oligarchs and sycophantic acolytes. You will note that I have not dragged President Zelensky into this ditty. This is deliberate. It is not within me to tease a man of his courage, his patriotism, his morality, his humility and his grit and determination, I am not worthy of such a task. To write about him in almost the same breath as I write about the boorish, the genocidal, the paranoid, the psychopathic, the brazen selfish egotism, the terrible manners, the gangsterish manipulation, the nonsensical stupidity, the utter lies and the blatant extortion emanating from trump and his weasels, is to add insult to injury. To write about Volodymyr Zelensky in the same context as that inhumanity is to insult a human being who is the bravest of the brave.
Slava Ukraine.
