The Weekly Screed (#890)

Gregor Samsa for president?

by David Benjamin

“… Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy… on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience…”

                                                 — Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

PARIS — Based on the available record, we don’t really know if Gregor Samsa, before his transformation, was young, handsome and charismatic. Franz Kafka, whose imagination gave us Samsa, doesn’t say. But poor Gregor might have been all those things until the morning he awoke and discovered he had turned into a gigantic insect.

 

We do know that French president Emmanuel Macron — who only discovered a few weeks ago, by popular acclaim, that he, too, is a gigantic insect — is (or was) young, handsome and charismatic.

 

Kafka’s tragic protagonist was astounded at his metamorphosis, as was Macron — who shouldn’t have been surprised in the least. Gregor Samsa was new to being a cockroach but Macron — by his own choosing — had been a cockroach for at least six years.

That is, he’s a politician.

 

In healthy democracies, like France and the United States, there are few creatures whom the people hold in deeper disgust than the men and women they willingly elect to govern their democracies. Voters as a rule regard career politicians, especially the ones in office and doing their jobs, as little more socially appetizing than a nest of cockroaches lurking and copulating beneath the toilet tiles. Most of us would hesitate to allow a politician into our home and, if we found one there, we’d chase it into a corner, step on it and grind it into the linoleum.

 

At least that’s what we say.

However, inexplicably, every few years, we hold an election, during which — thoughtfully and respectfully — we examine a roster of these hairy, sticky, multi-legged household pests. We argue earnestly about which of these bugs we’d most like to adopt as our national, or state, or district-wide pet cockroach. We’re abetted in this paradox by politicians who often insist that no, no! I’m not a cockroach! I’m  a businessman, a financier, a farmer, an oilman, a former B-movie actor, a mom, a dad, a son of Greek immigrants, etcetera.

Once we’ve cast our votes and recovered from the excitement of our periodic bug race, we are doubly appalled at what we’ve done — again! — partly because we’ve been fooled by the latest in a long line of blatant cockroaches, and mostly because we’ve fooled ourselves.

 

A few years later, typically, we repent. Chastened voters flock to the polls to choose a vast slate of fresh faces, none of which look like gigantic insects until the dawn of the day after the election, when the sudden burst of harsh light sends them all scurrying out of sight beneath the stove and behind the baseboards.

In America, we’ve just completed one of these bug-hunts. It was less than complete and it left behind, towering above us like a Samsa colossus in discolored bronze, the biggest cockroach in the history of American politics.

Macron, as revealed by his televised speech this week, is a cockroach of a slightly different, less repugnant species. His regime fell into crisis not because of what he had failed or refused to achieve, nor because of promises not kept. He was denounced and assailed by hordes of “yellow vest” protesters who took to the streets to burn and pillage because Macron was doing in office pretty much what he said, during his campaign, that he was gonna do.

Empowered by a legislative supermajority bestowed on him by a resounding public mandate, Macron has enacted swift and transformative reforms in France’s labor, social welfare and taxation structures. He pulled this off, in classic cockroach style, while simultaneously overlooking the immediate effects of his acts and decrees on the lives of the ordinary folks who’d voted for him.

Who have now risen up to remind him that he’s a gigantic insect.

On Monday, finally, a bewildered Macron apologized and announced measures to soften the hardships he has fostered. Under the scrutiny of his TV audience, he struggled — like Gregor Samsa going through a doorway — to transcend his shiny wings, spiky legs and creepy feelers. But there they were for all to see on the tube, and for all to say (in the French version): “Ew! Gross!”

Macron’s mea culpa wasn’t all that effective. Remember that when Samsa tried to speak to his family, his cockroach voice came out as a sort of rasping gurgle that frightened his sister and gave his mom a permanent case of the willies.

 

Regardless of what the French people heard from Macron on Monday, they saw on television what Gregor Samsa saw when he woke up, scuttled laboriously into the john and looked into the mirror. Expecting — or hoping — to see the usual young, handsome and charismatic salesman, he encountered instead a goggle-eyed monster, stripped of any direction in life, haunted by a subservient, irresolute past and terrified of its future, on six legs, underneath the refrigerator.

 

Like Pogo, he had met the enemy, and he is us.

Which is what Kafka has been trying to explain all along.