Grim Fairy Tales

The Brothers Grimm fairy tales are a master class in horror. Evil and terrible outcomes emerge in every page turn from the original tales. I read them for the first time when Leiney was a baby and I bought an old hardback edition at Goodwill. I had no idea how truly discombobulating they were, how shitty it would have been to live in a world where monsters and many of the heroes alike were murderous. I read stories like Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red,

Rumpelstiltskin, The Fisherman and his wife, to the kids. Was that child abuse? Or was it, more likely, setting them up to better understand the world we live in today? 

As a kid, I was so grateful not to have lived through the atrocities committed by the Nazis, to have missed Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the annihilation of indigenous peoples, naked imperialism and colonialism, the second-class status that women had been relegated to, DDT and the draft, among other things.

Then, I grew up. I watched Reagan and the country ascribe to the most racist tropes, attack affirmative

Abby and Willow, 2026

action, attack women's autonomy over their bodies, attack, dominate and extract wealth the global south all the while blaming the victims for their plight. I watched the birth of the intifada in the late 1980s, the refusal of the US government to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, the assault on democratic institutions such as unions, etc. I naively believed things couldn't get worse. I also had this belief that, unlike in the Grimm Brothers tales, we could fight and win for change we could believe in. 

I could write a tome about the events that have occurred since the 1980s, but that would be frolic and detour, I won't digress. The hope for change, for a better world, in my estimation started with the election of Bill Clinton as president--who set about tearing down the New Deal and the idea that there was any institution that would bring more than change around the margins at best. More likely, as

The fierce jackalope. Wall Drug, 2024.

with tearing down Glass-Steagall, the racist welfare "reform" act," the atrociously racist "Clinton crime bill," the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and on and on and on. I was disillusioned. When the 1994 "angry white male" Republican Revolution arrived, Newt Gingrich paved the way (along with Limbaugh, Liddy and other right-wing assholes) for spreading the big lie--bigger than Reagan's welfare queens.

The norms were being dismantled. The total institutionalization of this hit in 2000. Already, truth was not a factor that had to be met to make political claims at the White House or in Congress, but the Court threw any remnants of a functional democracy vis-a-vis truth with Bush v. Gore, where they weighed into a state matter which was not in their purview, and issued a decision that was clearly designed to steal the election outcome. Next were lies about yellow cake, bullshit wars, renditions and torture. We haven't gone back to any of the earlier norms. 

Trump, then, is the logical outcome of this post-modern progression of bullshit until nothing matters but naked power. It really is the case that the truth is out of style.