Five Ways To Use the "Bears Eat Monkey" Story as a Metaphor:
Some days, you've just gotta sit back on your sofa and softly whistle in appreciation when nature offers us a metaphor of such depth, breadth, and outright hilarity. To wit: At a zoo in Amsterdam yesterday, a group of sloth bears chased down a macaque, a vaguely baboonish monkey. The bears and the monkeys lived in the same area of the zoo. The monkey ran onto a wooden frame that one supposes the monkey used in charmingly buffoonish monkey play. One ambitious sloth bear shook the structure and, when that failed, just climbed on up, grabbed the cute little monkey in its teeth, killed it, and dragged it back to the bear cave where the monkey was eaten by three sloth bears. Who then made a rug out of its fur. No, not really, but the whole thing happened in front of horrified zoo goers, who, one can assume, were not horrified enough to walk away, even as monkey head was torn from monkey body because, you know, the monkey brains are the best part.

There's so many ways we can pick up this little parable of the ongoing wars between monkeys and bears, which go back millenia (the Rude Pundit can say this: if history teaches us anything, there's gonna be hell to pay among the sloth bear population of the Netherlands once the mandrills get word of this). So let's run with this fucker for a while. Whither bears? Whother monkey? Howther mauling?

Let's try this one: George Bush is the macaque. The bears aligned against him are the poll numbers. The attempted escape is Bush's little (very little) immigration speech Monday night. You see where this is going: he ain't gettin' away. The poll numbers have got him in their teeth, shaking him limp, taking him back to the cave, which, hey, could be the midterm elections, to eat him up. Yum, yum, good. Oh, and the people watching aghast who are mesmerized by the violence they can do nothing to stop? That'd be Republicans in Congress.

So, like, now what if we say the Constitution is the monkey. Then the bears would have to be the White House and the Republicans in Congress (and Joe Lieberman), gleefully dining on it, tearing it limb from limb, article from amendment. Hell, in this version, the bears would fuck the monkey's corpse, defiling it with their barbed bear dicks. So then, like, we're all the ones watching on the sidelines, simply thinking, "Damn, glad there's this fence here so we don't get raped and eaten by bears. How strong's this thing, anyway?"

Or, wait, wait, how about this one: the American public is the monkey. And, like, the media's the bears, and the cave is our living room, where, every night, we're mauled and torn apart by the likes of Brit Hume and Chris Matthews. Shit, the Dutch zoo monkey was eaten in its own home. It was just a damn shame that the zoo had let the bears live there, too.

Still, you could go with Arlen Specter as the monkey, or any Republican Senator who pretends that he or she's gonna take a big ol' brave stand against the White House, the bears. Then it's just kinda sad to watch the monkey turned into a pile of bloody fur on the cave floor, but it ain't unexpected. What chance did a monkey have against the bears?

And, one more: the monkey's the Republican party. The bears are the rabid right wingers who have made their bed with the Republicans, only to see those goddamn monkeys shit where the bears sleep again and again. And finally the bears are sick and tired of trying to live with the monkeys. It's time for some ursine payback. Time to show just how much the bears shouldn't be fucked with. Outside the fence is all of us, nodding, thinking, Stupid fuckin' zookeepers should've known better than to mix monkeys and bears. And that little boy who's pointing and laughing at the stupid monkey? That'd be the Rude Pundit.

What fun, huh? Come up with your own use of the metaphor. E-mail it on over. Later this week, the Rude Pundit'll post the best couple of 'em.