There are creatures in this world whose virtues are quiet, whose excellence goes unsung, who labor in the canopy and the underbrush without a single press secretary or merchandising line, and yet who are, by every meaningful measure that a serious person could devise, vastly superior to the current occupant of the Oval Office. The squirrel is one such creature. Not the most exalted. Not the most ancient. Not even the most clever member of its own taxonomic family. And yet: better. Inarguably, demonstrably, biologically better than the man who has lent his name to four bankruptcies, two impeachments, and a mugshot now reproduced on coffee mugs sold at airports.
The squirrel works for its food. This single fact already places it on a moral plane the man has never visited, never glimpsed, never even seen on a postcard. The squirrel digs. The squirrel buries. The squirrel returns, weeks later, with a precision that ought to humiliate every GPS engineer alive, to the exact patch of soil where the acorn waits. It earns its sustenance through labor, through memory, through attention to the world. The man has never earned anything. He inherited a fortune, squandered it spectacularly, was bailed out repeatedly by the same banks he later defaulted on, and then convinced an entire nation that this constituted business acumen. A squirrel could not pull off such a con. A squirrel would be too embarrassed to try.
The squirrel grooms itself. With care. With dedication. With a kind of small-mammalian fastidiousness that suggests a basic respect for the body it has been given. The man grooms himself, too, technically, in the sense that what sits atop his head is the product of something, but no biologist, no stylist, no ornithologist consulted in confidence has been able to determine whether the result qualifies as hair, fur, plumage, or some new fourth category of follicular tragedy. The squirrel’s coat is functional. The squirrel’s coat is honest. The man’s presentation is a forensic mystery that historians will be unraveling long after the species is extinct.
The squirrel knows fear and feels it appropriately. When the hawk’s shadow crosses the lawn, the squirrel freezes, weighs the angles, and runs. This is the rational response of an organism with a working nervous system and a baseline grasp of physics. The man fears nothing real. He fears polls. He fears mockery. He fears women who decline to flatter him. He has no fear of consequence, no fear of judgment, no fear of the long arithmetic of history because he does not understand that history is a thing that happens to him. He believes he is its author. The squirrel knows it is prey. The man does not know what he is, which is, in a different and more terrible sense, also prey.
The squirrel has never lied. Not because it is virtuous, but because it has never needed to. It cannot pretend the acorn is bigger than it is. It cannot inflate its tail and claim a million people came to watch it dig. It cannot stage a press conference to insist the dog it ran from was actually the worst dog, a very sad dog, a loser dog, and that everyone is saying so. The squirrel’s honesty is structural. It is built into the architecture of being a squirrel. The man’s dishonesty is also structural, an unbroken sheet of fabrication so total that researchers who try to find a single verified true statement from his last decade of public life come back haunted, asking for time off, requesting transfers to less harrowing departments.
The squirrel cooperates with other squirrels, more or less, in the loose and squabbling way that small mammals cooperate, sharing trees, tolerating cousins, raising young in collective tolerance of one another’s presence. It has a society, however modest. The man has no friends. He has retainers. He has marks. He has people who have not yet figured out that he will throw them under the nearest available bus the second their utility expires, and people who have figured this out and stay anyway, for reasons that involve money or fear or a personal psychology so warped it would require its own essay. The squirrel’s social bonds are real. The man is transactional in the most degraded sense of the word, hollow performances of loyalty that dissolve the moment loyalty would actually cost him something.
The squirrel takes only what it needs. Surplus acorns, yes, in the sense that it caches more than it can eat in a season, but this is not greed. This is insurance. This is the prudence of a creature that knows winter is coming and has done the math. The man has never done the math. The man has never known winter is coming. The man takes everything he can carry and then takes more, takes things he cannot use, takes things that cannot be used, takes for the sheer transitive joy of removing things from other people, and the resulting hoard is not insurance, it is not prudence, it is a midden, a heap, a monument to the appetite of a creature that does not know how to stop because nothing in its biology ever told it to.
The squirrel will die, eventually, and its body will return to the soil and feed the very oaks whose acorns it once buried, and in this small recursive way, it will have contributed, in the literal physical sense, to the future of the forest. The man’s legacy is a debt. A subtraction. A long ledger of damaged institutions, broken norms, traumatized children separated from their parents at the border, scientists driven out of their fields, women dragged through litigation, contractors stiffed, lawyers disbarred, and a country fractionally less capable, after his passage, of governing itself. He gives nothing back. He has never given anything back. The compost heap of his existence will not feed a single tree.
The squirrel does not seek admiration. It does not need it. It does not understand it. The squirrel’s self-regard, if such a thing exists in a brain that small, is calibrated exactly to the squirrel’s actual worth in the world, which is modest, which is local, which is sufficient. The man requires constant admiration, the way a furnace requires fuel. He cannot go a single waking hour without praise, and when praise is not forthcoming, he generates it himself, in writing, in speech, in those long shambling rallies where he reads his own poll numbers aloud to crowds of people who already agreed to clap. The squirrel’s ego is a thimble. The man is a stadium with no roof, and the rain still gets in, and he still complains about the rain.
And here is the final, the cruelest, the most damning entry in this catalog: the squirrel, when it has lived its small bright life and finally falls from the branch, will not have known shame, but only because shame was never required of it. The man has been required to feel shame, repeatedly, daily, by every available standard of decency, and has refused. Has dodged. Has skated past. The squirrel’s innocence is innocent. He is negligent. And in the end, the squirrel will be missed by other squirrels, briefly, in whatever way squirrels miss one another, and the forest will continue, and the acorns will keep falling.
He will not be missed. Not even by the people who loved him, who will discover, in the strange clarity of his absence, that what they felt was never love. It was exhaustion. It was captivity. It was the dull-held breath of a country that finally, at long last, gets to exhale.
The squirrel wins. The squirrel was always going to win.
Inspiration for this piece came from The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-bizarrely-boasts-he-can-correctly-identify-a-squirrel/
See Also:
A Eulogy for the Worst That Has Ever Drawn Breath
There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them. Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He …
👏👏👏👏 Bravo! Here's to the humble squirrel, hell, here's to HUMILITY. 🥂
"The squirrels ego is a thimble. The man is a stadium with no roof . . ."
There's another kind of poverty that only rich men know, a moral malnutrition that starves their very souls.
ThankQ Tom for the best metaphors ever describing this orange menace.