On Foxes and Orioles: The Newer Worries of Europe

Extract

In one of James Thurber's tales, “The Birds and the Foxes,” the shrewd foxes (for the highest of ethical motives, of course) finally succeed in having torn down the cages that protected the Baltimore orioles. The fox leader gives a memorable speech about how those poor but juicy birds, though eaten, are now “liberated” from their unjust confinement. Thurber's moral parodies Lincoln: “Government of the orioles, by the foxes, and for the foxes, must perish from the earth,“ His reinterpretations of Lincoln—another being “You can fool too many people too much of the time”—are perhaps too severe. But they come closer to what politics deals with than we usually care to admit.

I begin thus because the general prognosis for the Western world is decidedly not cheery. I should like to think that the spate of unrestrained self-criticism Americans are now undergoing is a sign of strength.