LA MORT DE KERMIT
There are days I think we are all becoming frogs in a slowly simmering pot
LA MORT DE KERMIT 1 Sure, it was never easy being green. But try being brown, and blending in. That's what, Kermit, the world’s foremost frog did by bathing in a stove-top hot tub and turning brown as a hot dog as his life ebbed in boiling water. Aren't their safer ways to change one's colors? 2 At first, it felt as advertised: Like a sauna where you could relax, drowse, even fall asleep. Makers of kitchenware call fatal slumbers in these poppy-fields of dreams the “jacuzzi effect“ and assure the public whirlpool deaths like Kermit's are rare but, if they occur, painless. Runnners and hikers who are baked alive on quickly warming California mornings might beg to disagree. Their drop-dry canteens are a sign of sudden unquenchable thirst in an unforeseen climate shift. 3 A Mennonite explained to me that Kermit’s death by boiling was God’s will. He told me he lost an unvaccinated daughter to measles by the same inexplicably random mandate. “Why didn’t you get her a shot?“ I asked. "For the same reason that frog went too far into the tropics,'' he answered. “Look, we’re all born into a lottery whose prize is like an ancient virign sacrifice to a volcano. It's just one in a thousand who win the loss of life. I've never seen any of the myriad losers feel themselves a weeper." 4 My rightwing brother keeps warning me that the next flu or Covid needle prick will make me a sitting duck for dementia or some other illness he dreads. I tell him I like being a target in some hospital’s or drug store’s shooting gallery. 5 The heat that killed Kermit is everywhere these days as the earth itself becomes a self-cleaning oven. There’s no home on a range that does not chance engulfment in fire and blanketing with smoke that chokes any hope of seeing deer and antelope play. 6 My best friend's self-driving Tesla caught on fatal fire. He couldn't unlock the electronic door. The company sent condolences and a refund, then excused the freak accident as "a side effect of progress." —David Federman, 3/11/25