The End is Nigh
By Marni Soupcoff
Okay, so first there are these exploding toads. This may seem of little consequence, given that there are wars being fought, children crying, and people dying. So really, what's a bursting amphibian here and there?
Perhaps hundreds of toads exploding in Germany for reasons that currently elude veterinarians and animal welfare workers means nothing, but I say the bizarre story, which was reported by Australia's ABC News Online, is a sign that something is amiss, and that all is not right with the world. I might not reach such a conclusion if the exploding toads were the only oddity making recent headlines, but they are not.
There is also a growing number of disturbing news stories about how close former presidents George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton have become. That is far from normal.
The friendship may indeed be even weirder than the tales of the German toads' entrails being propelled up to a meter in the air when the animals go to pieces.
The latest article I have come across detailing the unlikely Bush/Clinton paldom is a
New York Daily News piece, which raves, "The emerging warm friendship between the Oscar and Felix of American politics, who now call themselves Bill and George and have even begun telephoning one another for advice, is that rarest of commodities: a good-news story amid the partisan rancor of an increasingly polarized capital city."
Now me, I'm not convinced that this is really so much a piece of good news as it is a sign that the world is ending. When you wake up to find that lily-pads are inexplicably strewn with toad remains and Slick Willy and Bush Sr. are spending hours giggling on the phone with each other for no apparent reason, you have to consider that the
end may be nigh.
Recall that Bush Sr. and Clinton had very different presidencies. One told us to read his lips, promising no new taxes, then proceeded to implement some. The other promised he hadn't had sexual relations with that woman, then proceeded to dominate the news with stories about what he had actually done with that woman's lips.
All right, so maybe there are more similarities than one might think.
However, the connection between the two is still strange. Consider that Clinton cut the elder Bush's presidential career short--something you would think Bush Sr. would be bitter about, unless underneath he never really wanted a second term in office, which come to think of it would explain his '92 campaign performance. And you would think that Bill Clinton would still be sore with the Bush family in general for "stealing" the election from his V.P. Al Gore in 2000, unless Clinton never really wanted Internet pioneer Gore to win in the first place, which, come to think of it, also explains a lot.
But this is getting far too complicated.
The salient point is that there is strangeness afoot: A lake in the Hamburg area of Germany has been dubbed "the pond of death" because the resident toads keep blowing up, and Republican George Bush Sr. and Democrat Bill Clinton are so close (golfing together, plugging each other's presidential libraries) that they're practically poised to star in a bad buddy film.
The only logical conclusion is that the apocalypse is coming and these strange and unnatural occurrences are foretelling the end of days. Well, either that or the toads in Germany have been chowing down on some TNT-spiked flies, and our two previous presidents are not nearly as ideologically different as the members of their respective parties might have expected, or hoped.
Whatever the case, I would not advise anyone, biologist or political scientist, to investigate either phenomenon very closely. The results--toad guts and sappy instant messages like "U R POTUS 2!"--are simply too likely to cause stomach upset and emotional distress.
Marni Soupcoff's column appears on Monday at TAEmag.com.
