Monday, June 13, 2022

A Grimm Tale: The King's Depths

Introduction: The following piece I wrote on October 6th, 2020, but after completing it, and just before pressing the "upload" button, it struck me as being in bad taste given what little we knew about U.S. President Donald Trump's overall condition at that time. By December 30th of that year, I decided it was okay to post "The King's Depths" given that he seemed to be over his malady. With Mr Trump now back in the headline news, due to the House select committee's public hearings into the January 6th, 2021, attack on the Capitol, I feel it's time to give the piece another spin....

U.S. President Donald J. Trump was admitted to Walter Reed National Medical Center on Friday, not after already being tested and confirmed as COVID-19 positive, but after feeling unwell throughout the night. He was advised to seek serious medical treatment, immediately. The president has long downplayed the severity of the virus, and has ignored the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans. Deaths but a little inconvenient: for him, and for the people who've died. Yesterday he exited Walter Reed and took a joy ride in his armoured vehicle to show his faithful, who stood outside with their banners of support and reaffirmation, that the king had beaten the unseen and not-real plague.

Later in the day Trump went home triumphantly to the White House and waved with laboured breath to the crowd. All was good again in the Great Kingdom.

If this were a Brothers Grimm story, how might it end? Most of us would not wish something like this on Mr Trump, but, given his mean nature toward his fellow man and woman, one can have fun with a fanciful tale....

"King Trump, while dining late one night on food fit for kings, felt a great disturbance in his belly and breast, a rumbling of which he recalled from days and nights before. He sweated all over, and he gasped for life. His minions rushed him to the town's physicians, who, with armour and tools, battled for him through the night, only to lose the king of kings in the darkness.

His faithful villagers did not fret for long at the sight of their immobile once-proud King. They ate him all up."


Postscript: I understand this tale is even darker in the original German.


1 comment:

Simon St. Laurent said...

Perhaps it is "darker in the original German". I should get someone who's fluent in German to translate it.