Two Bulls And A Frog

Submitted by mouselander on Tue, 05/17/2016 - 4:41pm

The following was written by the brilliant French poet Jean de La Fontaine in the late 1600's, during the reign of King Louis the 14th. As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

Two Bulls and a Frog

A pair of amorous bulls stood vying
Over a heifer both would woo and service.
"Misery me!" a frog sat sighing,
Eyeing their combat--timorous, nervous;
Whereat one of her croaking kin
Queried: "Good gracious! Why the fuss?"
"Why?" cried the frog. "For us, that's why, for us!
One of those two is sure to win;
And when he drives his rival out,
Far from their green and flowering fields, what then?...
Then he'll come stomping over swamp and fen,
Trampling our reeds! And us as well, no doubt!
Tomorrow we'll be dead! And why? Because here, now,
Two bulls are fighting for some silly cow!"
Frog's dread predictions come to pass.
When the bull, defeated, seeks their dank morass,
Twenty compatriots an hour croak
Their final croak: a crushing fate!

Alas, 'twas ever thus. The little folk
Have always paid for follies of the great.

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Two Bulls And A Frog

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Submitted by Bollox Ref on Tue, 05/17/2016 - 6:11pm

The Third Estate takes the hit.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

Submitted by Alison Wunderland on Wed, 05/18/2016 - 3:13am

Misattributed

Misattributed

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin on the internet, sometimes without the second sentence, it is not found in any of his known writings, and the word "lunch" is not known to have appeared anywhere in english literature until the 1820s, decades after his death. The phrasing itself has a very modern tone and the second sentence especially might not even be as old as the internet. Some of these observations are made in response to a query at Google Answers.
The quote can be traced to an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 25, 1990[2]. “Democracy has been described as four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch”
In 1992, Marvin Simkin wrote in Los Angeles Times,

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.[3]

A far rarer but somewhat more credible variation also occurs: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner." Web searches on these lines uncovers the earliest definite citations for such a statement credit libertarian author James Bovard with a similar one in the Sacramento Bee (1994):
Historian Shelby Foote also used the term "Democracy is like two wolves and a lamb deciding on what they want for dinner" in Ken Burns 1990 Civil War documentary.

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
This statement also definitely occurs in the "Conclusion" (p. 333) of his book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994) ISBN 0312123337

Variants of this statement include that by Larry Flynt, as quoted in "Flynt's revenge" by Carol Lloyd in Salon (23 February 1999):

Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper.

"Nasty, brutish, and short" is another way to put it. And any attempt to improve the lot in life of the Third Estate will be fought tooth and nail by the psychopaths who rule the world.

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