Of frogs we should have expected

’Twas a warm Summer night, just the 

weather for merchants of sentiment 

to stuff our throat with frogs. Not 

merely to agitate the lachrymose, but 

equally the otiose, our hapless Clas-

sics majors bewitched by the comedy 

of Aristophanes to which the amphibi-

ans lent their name, a battle of tra-

gedians. 

Already in everyone’s mind had been 

shades of Franklin Roosevelt and his

leadership of national recovery, re-

form, and resistance to fascism. Who

would muck with this? 

Enter boldly the nominee, citing FDR’s 

crippling by polio - a virus, he alert-

ly recalled - and then, not referencing 

Roosevelt’s self-exemplifying charity 

to others at Warm Springs, segued into 

presenting himself as mentor to a school-

boy who stutters. None dare call it pla-

giarism, but his opponents are what they 

are, and I hold four hopes in escalating 

order of intensity - 

That the campaign is ready for the fire-

storm of exploitation of his fuel; that 

the soul of FDR is slapping his knee with 

glee at this overreach for his image; 

that nobody faults Aristophanes for our

witless memory; and that the boy in ques-

tion will be held as blameless as he is.

This leaves the nominee. I respect the
necessity to project an unanswerable im-
pediment to Trump and Trumpism's penchant
for mocking his speech as a symptom of 
frailty. At the same time one would like
to be able to expect the candidate to ex-
ercise his own strength, without sending
for a child in his place. One would like
him to stop striving for poignancy and be-
gin to enact raw, exposed superiority:

Listen, swine. I have a neurological prob-
lem with my speech. I'll stutter all day,
before I'll emulate your lies.

Polykleitos
5th C BC
Metropolitan Museum